Antes de que Ernesto Che Guevara se convirtiera en el "Che", antes de viajar por América Latina, antes de unirse a Fidel en Cuba, era estudiante de medicina.
Antes de partir para unirse a la expedición guerrillera a Cuba en 1956, Che escribió a su madre: "Mi camino parece desviarse lentamente pero seguramente de la medicina clínica, pero no tanto como para perder la nostalgia de los hospitales. Lo que te dije de la cátedra de fisiología era mentira, pero no muy grande … En fin, eso ya es historia. San Carlos [Karl Marx] ha hecho un nuevo fichaje."
Había empezado a trabajar en una obra sobre el papel del médico en América Latina, un libro que seguía sin completar en el momento de su muerte en Bolivia a la edad de treinta y nueve años, sólo once años después.
Collected in
The Che Guevara Library
ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. While studying for a medical degree in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. During his travels he witnessed the Bolivian revolution in 1953; and, in Guatemala in 1954, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz by US-backed forces. Forced to leave Guatemala, he went to Mexico City, where he linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. Che joined their expedition to Cuba, where the revolutionary war began in the Sierra Maestra mountains. At first Che was the troop doctor, and later became Rebel Army commander in July 1957. Following the rebels’ victory on January 1, 1959, he was a key leader of the new revolutionary government and also of the political organization that in 1965 became the Communist Party of Cuba.
