Che Guevara

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary. He was a major figure of the Cuban Revolution.

History
Ernesto Guevara was born to a wealthy Argentine family of mixed Spanish-Irish-Italian ancestry. A failed medical student (popular culture often erroneously portrays him as a doctor), he became a renowned revolutionary in Central America, having played a role in the guerrilla campaign that overthrew the Batista regime in Cuba, 1959. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare. Guevara wrote in opposition of racial discrimination while simultaneously expressing white-supremacist beliefs in person. He also favored the idea of launching a nuclear attack on the United States. Guevara gained a reputation as a harsh, but not especially effective commander in Castro's rebel army fighting the American-backed Batista dictatorship. Though considered charismatic for his writing, his men found him to be decidedly less so in person. He constantly abused his men verbally and was known to execute his own men on suspicion of defeatism or collusion with the enemy, generally without any kind of trial. His martial skill was questionable, and he was described as "showing near-suicidal bravery in one fight, and showing crushing cowardice in the next." Nonetheless, his photogenic looks led him to become a public icon for the communist revolution.

With the defeat of Batista, Fidel Castro established his own Soviet-backed dictatorship in its place, if anything even more repressive than Batista's. Guevara frequently appeared in show trials of high-profile individuals accused of loyalty to Batista, and was soon put in charge of La Cabana Prison. Conditions in the prison under Guevara were nightmarish, with torture and starvation frequently used against prisoners. Few of the prison's inmates had received any kind of trial. Although called "enemies of the revolution," many of the prisoners were adolescent boys who were the sons of other suspected "enemies," while others were imprisoned for "crimes" like homosexuality or listening to American music. Che ordered hundreds of summary executions, frequently pulling the trigger himself. One of the more high-profile executions he performed were of two young brothers, aged 14 and 12, who sang the Cuban national anthem until Guevara killed them both with his pistol. Some say that his conduct during this time was due to his total commitment to the communist revolutionary cause, but many argue (quite convincingly) that it indicates Guevara had a very sadistic side.

Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo. He would later attribute the failure of the communist revolution in Congo to the "racial inferiority" of black Africans (according to his beliefs). He moved on to Bolivia in 1967, where he was soon equally unpopular among the Bolivian communists he had joined and the US-backed Bolivian nationalists they fought against. The Bolivian communist leader, Mario Monje, considered Guevara to be the personification of Soviet and Cuban interference and wanted nothing to do with him, though he grudgingly accepted the arms that Guevara brought. Guevara was even less successful here than in Congo, and information from local residents led, including some communist sympathizers, led CIA-assisted Bolivian forces to Guevara's location after only a few weeks. With his camp overrun, he was captured and summarily executed by Bolivian paratroopers on October 9, 1967. Eyewitness accounts say that his final words were, "Don't shoot! I am Che! I am worth more to you alive than dead!"

With Guevara dead, both the Cuban government and the Eastern Bloc reinvented him as a romantic figure, easy, given that he was already famous and popular among Western counterculture. A revisionist claim suggested that he had defiantly shouted, "Shoot, cowards! You kill only a man!" at his Bolivian executioners, rather than begging for his life, and his racist views, history as a torturer and executioner, and his habit of badly overestimating his own prowess and underestimating his enemies in combat were heavily downplayed. Some have suggested that, given his international fame, Castro viewed Guevara as a potential threat to his power base and sent him abroad with the intention of getting him killed, seeing that the "reinvented" El Che would be worth much more dead than alive.

As a result of his perceived martyrdom, and supposed desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" (Spanish: hombre nuevo) driven by moral rather than material incentives, he has evolved into an icon of various leftist movements, such as the Sandinista National Liberation Front. At the same time, he is reviled as a sadistic mass-murderer by Cuban refugees who fled the Castro dictatorship. He is not fondly remembered in Bolivia or Congo, either.

The Sandinista group exiled to Costa Rica during the Peace Walker Incident in 1974, held Guevara in high regard, accepting the romantic myth as fact, without accepting the possibility that it could be (at least) embellished. Chico's admiration for Guevara (and by extension, Big Boss) bordered on worship. He was also viewed with respect by several members of the mercenary group Militaires Sans Frontières, including its commander Big Boss, who referred to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's description of Guevara as "the century's most complete human being." KGB agent Vladimir Zadornov intended to mold Big Boss into an inspirational figure for the Communist Bloc like Guevara, including gunning him down at age 39, in order to foment more socialist revolutions in Central America.

Big Boss quotes the revisionist version of Guevara's final words to motivate Chico to find the will to live again. Whether Big Boss actually believes the hype is unclear, but given his own connections in the US intelligence community and his personal experience of having been similarly reinvented as an "inspirational hero" for the West at the expense of The Boss (whom he considered to be the true hero), it could be inferred that he knows that the myth of Che is a lie, and that the lie is exactly what Chico needs. If this is the case, it fits well with the game's underlying theme regarding the power of symbols and the dirty secrets that often lie beneath them, as well as Big Boss' overall disillusionment.

Behind the scenes
Che Guevara is frequently mentioned in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and is viewed in a positive light by many of the game's characters, though he remains both a revered and reviled historical figure in real life. Hideo Kojima reportedly stated in an interview that he was inspired to insert Guevara into the game and make him a major plot point in large part due to seeing the first part of the 2008 biopic Che. Some fans found controversy in Kojima's decision to have some of the characters praise Guevara, feeling that it contradicted his anti-nuke message for the series. This was due to statements made by Guevara himself in 1962, that if Soviet missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off, later expounding that the cause of socialist liberation against global "imperialist aggression" would ultimately have been worth the possibility of "millions of atomic war victims."

It is mentioned by FSLN comandante Amanda Valenciano Libre that Guevara suffered from asthma.

Appearances

 * Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (mentioned only)
 * Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (indirect mention; via backstory section)