59 Fun Facts About Che Guevara

In the famous 1960 Korda photograph, what is Che Guevara wearing on his head?

A black beret. Korda never earned royalties from the picture, but when a vodka brand put it in an advert in 2000 he sued, then gave his $50,000 settlement to Cuba's health service.

Which chronic condition afflicted Guevara throughout his life?

Asthma. His first attack came at the age of two, and on doctors' advice his parents moved the whole family to the dry hill town of Alta Gracia, where he grew up.

Which sport earned the young Guevara the nickname 'Fuser', for his aggressive play?

Rugby union. 'Fuser' squeezed together Furibundo, 'furious', and Serna, his mother's surname, and he liked the game enough to found and edit a rugby magazine called Tackle.

Which poet, whose love poems the teenage Guevara recited to a girlfriend, remained his favourite?

Pablo Neruda. The habit lasted to the end: as a guerrilla in Bolivia in 1967 he was still copying Neruda's verse into a notebook and quoting it in his diary.

Which agency's 1958 personality report called Guevara 'fairly intellectual for a Latino'?

The CIA. Its file also allowed that he was 'quite well read': as a teenager he had filled notebooks with his own summaries of Freud, Aristotle and Nietzsche.

What did Guevara study at the University of Buenos Aires from 1948?

Medicine. He qualified as a doctor in June 1953, then set off across Latin America within a month instead of opening a practice.

Before his motorcycle trip, Guevara toured northern Argentina on what?

A bicycle with an engine. He had fitted a motor to it for a long loop through the country's poorest provinces, and afterwards the motor company ran his photo and letter as an advertisement.

With which friend did Guevara make his 1952 motorcycle journey across South America?

Alberto Granado. The biochemist owned the old Norton they named La Poderosa, 'the Mighty One'; it died for good in Chile, so most of the motorcycle journey was done by truck, raft and on foot.

Which actor played the young Guevara in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries?

Gael García Bernal. Guevara's travel notes sat unpublished for some forty years; once in print in the 1990s they became a bestseller, and the film followed.

The treatment of which metal's miners at Chile's Chuquicamata pit angered Guevara on his 1952 journey?

Copper. On the road to the mine he met a persecuted communist couple huddled in the desert night without a blanket, gave them one of his, and called it one of the coldest nights of his life.

Before whose portrait did Guevara swear in 1953 to fight on until United Fruit's 'octopuses' were destroyed?

Joseph Stalin's. The Soviet leader had died nine months earlier; Guevara put the oath in a letter meant to shock his aunt Beatriz, and signed a later letter to her 'Stalin II'.

Which country's elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, fell in a US-backed 1954 coup that Guevara lived through?

Guatemala. Árbenz had taken idle land from the United Fruit Company; when the coup came Guevara tried to rally armed resistance, then had to shelter with Argentine diplomats until he could leave.

How did Guevara acquire the nickname 'Che'?

From his frequent use of an Argentine filler word. Cuban exiles he befriended in Central America teased him for peppering his speech with 'che', roughly 'hey' or 'mate', and the tag stuck for life.

Which exiled Peruvian economist became Guevara's first wife in 1955?

Hilda Gadea. She lent him Mao's writings and drew him into her circle of political exiles; they married in 1955 and divorced in 1959, after he had fallen for a fellow rebel.

In which foreign capital, where both were exiles, did Guevara first meet Fidel Castro in 1955?

Mexico City. The two talked through the night at a friend's flat, and by dawn Guevara had signed up for an invasion of Cuba that was still more than a year away.

Which overloaded yacht carried Guevara, Castro and about 80 fellow rebels to Cuba in 1956?

Granma. The leaky cabin cruiser was so crammed that some volunteers were left behind on the riverbank, and Cuba's ruling party later named its daily newspaper after it.

Ambushed days after the 1956 landing and able to carry only one load, what did Guevara grab?

A box of ammunition. Seconds later a bullet struck him in the neck; sure he was dying, he thought of a Jack London hero who waits calmly for death in the snow, until a comrade urged him on and he crawled to cover.

Which American magazine ran a 1960 cover story on Guevara headlined 'Castro's Brain'?

Time. Its cover story cast Fidel Castro as the heart and soul of the new Cuba, his brother Raúl as the fist holding the revolution's dagger, and Guevara as the brain driving the island towards an alliance with Moscow.

How did Guevara deal with the informer Eutimio Guerra, the rebels' guide, in 1957?

Shot him himself. Guerra had helped Batista's forces bomb and ambush the rebels; Guevara's private diary records the shot in clinical detail, and he later rewrote the scene as a parable of redemption.

Which clandestine broadcaster did Guevara help create in February 1958?

Radio Rebelde. It began with one small transmitter at his mountain command post and grew into the rebels' voice across the island, carrying battle news past Batista's censors.

Which city did Guevara's column capture on New Year's Eve 1958, in the decisive victory of the revolution?

Santa Clara. His fighters tore up the track with tractors to derail an armoured train packed with troops and weapons, and within hours of the city's fall Batista had fled the country.

What delayed Castro's arrival in Havana until days after Guevara's in January 1959?

Rallies along the way. Castro set out from Santiago, at the far end of the island, and stopped to address cheering crowds in town after town, while Guevara's column was ordered straight to the capital to occupy a fortress.

Which fortress prison did Castro put Guevara in command of for five months in 1959?

La Cabaña. He had the last word on appeals from the tribunals that tried Batista's officers, and the firing squads there led Cuban exiles to call him 'the butcher of La Cabaña'.

In his 1967 'Message to the Tricontinental', Guevara called on revolutionaries to create 'two, three, many' what?

Vietnams. He argued that several such wars at once would force the United States to scatter its strength, and when the message was published he was already in Bolivia trying to start one.

How did Cuba's new government honour Guevara in February 1959?

Proclaimed him a citizen by birth. The new constitution had a clause written to fit him alone, covering foreigners who had fought Batista for two years and been a comandante for one; he gave the honour back in 1965.

Which Cuban member of the rebel underground became Guevara's second wife in 1959?

Aleida March. She was the underground's main courier to his camp in late 1958; when the police discovered her identity she stayed on with his column, and they married within months of victory.

On his 1959 Asia tour, which Japanese city did Guevara insist on visiting instead of laying a wreath for the war dead?

Hiroshima. He refused to honour an army that had 'killed millions of Asians', went to see the bombed city instead, and wrote home that to fight better for peace one must look at Hiroshima.

What shocked financiers about the way Guevara signed Cuba's banknotes?

He used only his nickname. As president of the National Bank he signed the bills with the single word 'Che', a deliberate show of contempt for money from the man in charge of it.

Korda took his famous Guevara portrait at a 1960 Havana memorial for the victims of what?

A ship explosion. A freighter unloading munitions had blown up in the harbour the day before; Korda's newspaper passed over the frame, which hung on his studio wall for seven years before an Italian publisher made it a poster.

What did a 1961 campaign championed by Guevara send 100,000 young volunteers into rural Cuba to wipe out?

Illiteracy. Most of the volunteers were schoolchildren and students, who left their classes to live among the farm families they taught, and by the end of the year some 700,000 Cubans had learned to read.

What name did Guevara give the selfless citizen, moved by duty rather than pay, that socialism was meant to create?

The New Man. In his 1965 essay 'Socialism and Man in Cuba' he argued that such a person had to be moved by moral rewards, because cash incentives only kept the old self-interest alive.

Which interpreter turned secret agent joined Guevara's Bolivian guerrillas as 'Tania'?

Tamara Bunke. Born in Argentina to communists who had fled Nazi Germany, she met Guevara in East Germany in 1960, moved to Cuba, went undercover in La Paz for him, and was killed in an ambush five weeks before he was.

How was Guevara grazed by a bullet during the Bay of Pigs alert in 1961?

His own pistol went off. It slipped from its holster and nicked his cheek; a feint had drawn his troops to the far west of Cuba, so the accident was the closest he came to a wound in the whole invasion.

Which US president did Guevara thank, through an aide in 1961, for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion?

John F. Kennedy. At a late-night party in Uruguay, Guevara told the White House aide Richard Goodwin that the invasion had been a great political victory, turning Cuba from an aggrieved little country into an equal.

Which Soviet leader did Guevara meet in August 1962 to settle the secret missile deal?

Khrushchev. Guevara argued that the deal should be made public; the Soviet leader insisted on secrecy, and weeks later American spy planes photographed the missile sites anyway.

What did Guevara tell the Daily Worker he would have done had the missiles been under Cuban control?

Fired them. He was still furious that Moscow had pulled the missiles out without consulting Cuba, and from then on he attacked the Soviet Union almost as often as the United States.

Which crop did Guevara, as a government minister, spend his days off cutting by hand as an unpaid volunteer?

Sugarcane. He had started Cuba's volunteer-labour drive himself and meant to be seen doing it, so the minister spent his free days in the fields and once press-ganged a visiting friend into a day of it.

What did anti-Castro exiles fire at the UN building from across the East River during Guevara's 1964 speech?

A bazooka. The shell fell short and burst in the river, rattling the building's windows while he was speaking; told about it afterwards, he coolly shrugged it off.

Which Irish city did Guevara visit one evening in March 1965, when his plane was grounded at Shannon?

Limerick. Stranded by mechanical trouble on the way home to Cuba, he went into town with his companions and came back wearing a sprig of shamrock, four days before St Patrick's Day.

In which city did Che Guevara make his last public international appearance, in February 1965?

Algiers. His speech there called the socialist countries 'accomplices of imperialist exploitation' for the terms on which they traded with poor nations, a slap at Cuba's Soviet backers; within weeks he had vanished from public life.

Which Egyptian leader warned Guevara in 1965 that leading the fight in the Congo would make him a 'Tarzan' figure?

Gamal Abdel Nasser. He said a white man leading and protecting Africans could only end badly; Guevara went anyway, and his own account of the campaign opens, 'This is the story of a failure.'

Which Congolese rebel leader and future president did Guevara write off in 1965 as no 'man of the hour'?

Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Guevara complained that he kept away from the fighting and left in disgust; thirty-two years later Kabila overthrew Mobutu and made himself president.

In which hit musical is the narrator a character called Che, played as Guevara in the original stage production?

Evita. Tim Rice wrote Che as a narrator who questions Eva Perón's legend, and the director Harold Prince had him played as her famous countryman, although nothing suggests the two ever met.

How was Guevara disguised when he slipped into Bolivia on a false passport in November 1966?

As a balding businessman. Shaved, greyed and travelling as a Uruguayan named Adolfo Mena, he fooled even his own family: before leaving, he lunched with his small children as 'Uncle Ramón' and they did not know him.

Which language had Guevara's Bolivian guerrillas learned, only to find peasants spoke Tupi-Guarani?

Quechua. They held classes in the main language of the Andes at their jungle camp, but the lowland farmers around them spoke Guaraní, one reason the guerrillas never won the locals over.

Which of Guevara's possessions did the Cuban exile agent Félix Rodríguez take from Bolivia and show off to reporters for years?

His Rolex watch. Rodríguez, who had slipped into Cuba ahead of the Bay of Pigs landing, helped the Bolivian army hunt Guevara down and passed on the order to shoot him.

In what kind of building was Guevara held and shot in the village of La Higuera?

A mud schoolhouse. By the village teacher's own account, he asked to see her on his last morning and told her it was shameful to make children learn in a place that Cuba would call a prison.

Which Bolivian president ordered Guevara's execution on 9 October 1967?

René Barrientos. By the account of the American agent on the scene, Washington wanted the prisoner flown to Panama for questioning, but the order from the president and his generals to shoot him was final.

What did Cuba's 'Operation Miracle' fix for Mario Terán, the sergeant who shot Guevara?

His cataracts. Terán was treated free almost forty years after the shooting; his son thanked the doctors in a Bolivian newspaper, and Cuba's party daily crowed that Che had won another battle.

Which part of Guevara's body was his executioner told to spare?

Face. The army's story was that he had died of wounds from the previous day's battle, so the sergeant was told to aim from the neck down and leave no sign of an execution when the body was shown to the press.

What did a military doctor remove from Guevara's body before it was buried in secret?

His hands. They were cut off and preserved so that Argentine police could match the fingerprints and prove to a doubting world that the dead man really was Che.

Which gift to the captive Guevara, found in a jacket pocket, helped confirm his remains in 1997?

A small bag of pipe tobacco. He had been given it to smoke the night before he was shot; with his dental records it settled the identification, and after thirty years in an unmarked grave he was reburied in Cuba.

Which actor won Best Actor at Cannes in 2008 for playing Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's two-part film?

Benicio del Toro. The film was his own project, and once it became a Spanish-language epic in two parts the American studios backed away, so French and Spanish companies paid for it instead.

Which Argentine city, later also the birthplace of Lionel Messi, was Che Guevara born in?

Rosario. By the family's account it was an accident of travel: his parents were sailing down the Paraná from their maté plantation to Buenos Aires when his mother went into labour and they had to put ashore.

During his 1952 motorcycle journey, Guevara volunteered at which kind of place on the Peruvian Amazon?

A leper colony. When the two travellers moved on, the colony built them a raft, christened the Mambo-Tango, to carry them down the Amazon towards Colombia.

Which board game did Guevara learn from his father and play in tournaments from age 12?

Chess stayed with him for life: in Havana in 1962 he took a board when the grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played a roomful of opponents at once, and their game is recorded as a draw.

Guevara named his eldest son after which close comrade, a fellow commander of the Cuban Revolution?

Camilo Cienfuegos, whose plane vanished on a flight to Havana in October 1959. Guevara also dedicated his manual Guerrilla Warfare to him, the friend who was to have read and corrected it.

After his execution, Guevara's body was flown to which Bolivian town to be photographed on a slab?

Vallegrande. The army then buried him in secret near the town's airstrip, and the grave stayed hidden for thirty years until searchers found it in 1997.

Which Irish actress recalled Guevara knowing 'every battle in Ireland' from talking with him?

Maureen O'Hara was in Havana in 1959 filming Our Man in Havana, months after Batista fell. In her memoir, Guevara told her he had learned it all at his grandmother's knee.