He believed, and not without reason, that the United States and its business interests backed rightist dictatorships and political and economic oligarchies and that these, in turn, kept masses of the hemisphere's population in ignorance and poverty. By the time he first came to the attention of U.S. authorities, during the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954, Guevara had reached the conclusion that the only solution to the problems he saw around him lay in violent revolution, overthrowing existing regimes throughout Latin America.
How to do that, of course, was quite another question. Guevara certainly did not have the answer when he left Argentina in 1953 as a young physician, just graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, on a trip of adventure and self-discovery around the hemisphere. In Guatemala, he tried vainly to stimulate popular resistance to the invaders, but as a young, newly arrived immigrant, he found himself too far from levers of power to create any significant effect. He managed only to come to the attention of the police, by then controlled by the victorious invaders and their U.S. backers. He found protection in the Argentine embassy and then fled to Mexico.
In Guatemala, he had met Hilda Gadea, a refugee from Peru's rightwing autocratic government, who not only helped him find work but also honed his revolutionary frame of mind and became his mistress. In Mexico, where she too had fled, they married and had a child. There, Guevara held various jobs, working as a street photographer, a door-to-door book salesman, and eventually a physician. He published at least one medical paper, on the topic of allergies, and meanwhile focused his radical views on the conduct of the profession, which he felt in Mexico as elsewhere catered to the wealthy and gave short shrift to the poor. He did not, however, find means to reform it.
In Mexico, Guevara also met Fidel Castro, and his life took a new course almost at once. Until then, he had been an unsettled young man, a left-wing political radical with no direction to his revolutionary energies. Castro changed that immediately. The two men, both widely read and intellectual, became friends instantly, and Castro pulled the very willing Guevara into his band of revolutionary Cubans. They had already tried to overthrow the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on July 26, 1953, with an attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. ("July 26" henceforth became the name of their organization.) Routed on the battlefield but not in the spirit, they went to Mexico to resuscitate their movement and then go once more into the breach.
After the Moncada Barracks attack failed, Castro was sentenced to a 15-year jail term but released within a year, surely Batista's greatest error. 8 With the enormous revolutionary energy that had characterized him since his student days, Castro upon his release began at once to rebuild his force, raising money wherever he could and training his growing band in Mexico City and its environs. The Mexican government, prodded by Batista, made generally ineffectual efforts to quash its activities, including jailing many of its members for a short period. Indecisive as it was, the government still hastened somewhat the band's departure for Cuba, but not until 16 months after Castro had arrived in Mexico.
Castro with 82 men sailed on November 25, 1956, jammed into one small yacht, the Granma, with Guevara as their medic. Guevara had broken with his wife, who returned to Peru, and now, energized and guided by Castro, he was at the beginning of a revolutionary career in the service, as he saw it, of both Cuba and humanity. It should be noted, however, since frequently it is not, that from that time on, even after the victory over Batista, his revolutionary efforts, including those in the Congo and Bolivia, were linked tightly to Castro's policies.
Guevara came to the attention of the world in general and of U.S. officials at about the same time. Castro's expedition, trying for a degree of strategic sophistication beyond its reach, got off to a disastrous start. It was still at sea while an armed rising by confederates in Santiago de Cuba, timed to distract Batista's forces from resisting the invaders, was thoroughly thrashed since Batista had no invaders to worry about. Next, Castro's band landed in the wrong place, lost many of its supplies, and missed a rendezvous with yet another group of supporters.
Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri: Early Years of Political Activism
