Che Guevara Trivia
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59 free Che Guevara trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Che Guevara trivia quiz covers the Argentine doctor who became the most reproduced face of the twentieth century. The easy questions cover the basics: the country he was born in, what he studied, the famous journey he took with a friend, the revolution he joined, the country he died in and the photograph that ended up on a million T-shirts. From there it moves through the asthma, the rugby nickname, the chess, the leper colony on the Amazon, the coup in Guatemala that turned him into a Marxist, and the night in Mexico City when he signed up with Fidel Castro before dawn. The harder end covers the Granma landing, Radio Rebelde, the Battle of Las Mercedes, Santa Clara, the executions at La Cabaña, the banknotes he signed 'Che', the literacy campaign, the tour of Asia and the visit to Hiroshima, the trip to Moscow to sign the missile deal, the UN speech and the bazooka fired at it from the East River, the Algiers speech, the alias he used in the Congo, the failed year in Bolivia, the schoolhouse at La Higuera, the sergeant who shot him and the tobacco pouch that identified his bones in 1997. Every answer was checked against Guevara's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Fidel Castro and Cuba quizzes are natural companions.
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Q 01In the famous 1960 Korda photograph, what is Che Guevara wearing on his head?
A black beret
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.
Q 02Which chronic condition afflicted Guevara throughout his life?
Asthma
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.
Q 03Which sport earned the young Guevara the nickname 'Fuser', for his aggressive play?
Rugby union
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.
Q 04Which poet, whose love poems the teenage Guevara recited to a girlfriend, remained his favourite?
Pablo Neruda
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.
Q 05Which agency's 1958 personality report called Guevara 'fairly intellectual for a Latino'?
The CIA
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.
Q 06What did Guevara study at the University of Buenos Aires from 1948?
Medicine
Medicine. He qualified as a doctor in June 1953, then set off across Latin America within a month instead of opening a practice.
Q 07Before his motorcycle trip, Guevara toured northern Argentina on what?
A bicycle with an engine
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.
Q 08With which friend did Guevara make his 1952 motorcycle journey across South America?
Alberto Granado
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.
Q 09Which actor played the young Guevara in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries?
Gael García Bernal
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.
Q 10The treatment of which metal's miners at Chile's Chuquicamata pit angered Guevara on his 1952 journey?
Copper
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.
Q 11Before whose portrait did Guevara swear in 1953 to fight on until United Fruit's 'octopuses' were destroyed?
Joseph Stalin's
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'.
Q 12Which country's elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, fell in a US-backed 1954 coup that Guevara lived through?
Guatemala
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.
Q 13How did Guevara acquire the nickname 'Che'?
Q 21Which city did Guevara's column capture on New Year's Eve 1958, in the decisive victory of the revolution?
Santa Clara
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.
Q 22What delayed Castro's arrival in Havana until days after Guevara's in January 1959?
Rallies along the way
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.
Q 23Which fortress prison did Castro put Guevara in command of for five months in 1959?
La Cabaña
From his frequent use of an Argentine filler word
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.
Q 14Which exiled Peruvian economist became Guevara's first wife in 1955?
Hilda Gadea
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.
Q 15In which foreign capital, where both were exiles, did Guevara first meet Fidel Castro in 1955?
Mexico City
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.
Q 16Which overloaded yacht carried Guevara, Castro and about 80 fellow rebels to Cuba in 1956?
Granma
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.
Q 17Ambushed days after the 1956 landing and able to carry only one load, what did Guevara grab?
A box of ammunition
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.
Q 18Which American magazine ran a 1960 cover story on Guevara headlined 'Castro's Brain'?
Time
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.
Q 19How did Guevara deal with the informer Eutimio Guerra, the rebels' guide, in 1957?
Shot him himself
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.
Q 20Which clandestine broadcaster did Guevara help create in February 1958?
Radio Rebelde
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.
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'.
Q 24In his 1967 'Message to the Tricontinental', Guevara called on revolutionaries to create 'two, three, many' what?
Vietnams
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.
Q 25How did Cuba's new government honour Guevara in February 1959?
Proclaimed him a citizen by birth
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.
Q 26Which Cuban member of the rebel underground became Guevara's second wife in 1959?
Aleida March
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.
Q 27On his 1959 Asia tour, which Japanese city did Guevara insist on visiting instead of laying a wreath for the war dead?
Hiroshima
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.
Q 28What shocked financiers about the way Guevara signed Cuba's banknotes?
He used only his nickname
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.
Q 29Korda took his famous Guevara portrait at a 1960 Havana memorial for the victims of what?
A ship explosion
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.
Q 30What did a 1961 campaign championed by Guevara send 100,000 young volunteers into rural Cuba to wipe out?
Illiteracy
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.