Jim Henson

The Jim Henson Company retains Creature Shop, as well as the rest of its film and television library including Fraggle Rock, Farscape, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. The official story is that he was an 8-month baby conceived just after his parents marriage; several sources suggest that he was born earlier (the date May 14 is the most prevalent), and that his mother was already pregnant at the time of her marriage. On February 17, 2004, it was announced that the Muppets (excluding the Sesame Street characters, which are separately owned by Sesame Workshop) and Bear in the Big Blue House properties had been sold by Henson to The Walt Disney Company. ¹ While June 14, 1928 is Guevara's official date of birth, it may not be the actual date of birth. Steve Whitmire, a veteran member of the muppet puppeteering crew, has assumed the roles of the two most famous characters played by Jim Henson himself, Kermit the Frog and Ernie.
. His son Brian and daughter Lisa are currently the co-chairs and co-CEOs of the Company; his daughter Cheryl is the president of the Foundation. Movies and actors who have portrayed Che Guevara:.

The Jim Henson Company, Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop have continued on after his death. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called Guevara, "the most complete human being of our age." Others believe that he was a hero of the Cuban revolution who was skillfully manipulated by Fidel Castro in order to inspire the masses, all the while being moved into positions where he would represent little or no danger to Fidel himself. A memorial service for him aired on PBS, and drew millions of viewers and dozens of celebrities in reverence for his life and work. Inside the mausoleum is also the original letter Guevara wrote to Castro in which he stated he would leave Cuba to continue to fight abroad for the cause of the revolution and renouncing all posts and his Cuban citizenship. Jim Henson died of bacterial pneumonia on May 16, 1990 at the age of 53. Among the tourists visiting the site were people from Argentina, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, the United States, and Venezuela. Henson also founded Jim Henson's Creature Shop to build creatures for a large number of other films and series (most recently the science fiction production Farscape), and is considered one of the most advanced and well respected creators of film creatures. Some 205,832 persons visited his mausoleum in 2004, of which 127,597 were foreigners.

In 1982, Henson founded the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States. That year, his body was exhumed and brought from Bolivia, where he died in 1967. Henson also continued creating children's programs—Fraggle Rock and the animated Muppet Babies—and new prime-time ventures such as the mythology-oriented The Storyteller. The Jim Henson company continues to produce new series and specials. Guevara's remains, along with those of six of his former compañeros during the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia, have rested at a special mausoleum since 1997 in the Plaza Comandante Ernesto Guevara in Santa Clara, Cuba. To provide a visual style distinct from the Muppets, the puppets in these two movies were based on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud. The narrator role involves creative license, because Guevara's only interaction with Eva Perón was to write her a letter in his youth, asking for a Jeep. Henson was also responsible for two non-Muppet Show-related movies, 1982's high fantasy The Dark Crystal and the 1986 Labyrinth, co-produced by George Lucas. This portrays Guevara as becoming disillusioned with Eva Perón and her husband, President Juan Domingo Perón, because of Perón's increasing corruption and tyranny.

The muppet characters have also appeared in a large number of made-for-TV-movies and television specials. Guevara's reputation even extended into theatre, where he is depicted as the narrator in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Evita. One song from that musical film, The Rainbow Connection, sung by Kermit, was nominated for an Oscar. A dramatic photograph of Guevara taken by photographer Alberto Korda [2] in 1960 (see Che Guevara (photo)) soon became one of the century's most recognizable images, and the portrait was simplified and reproduced on a vast array of merchandise, such as T-shirts, posters, and baseball caps. The Muppet Show ended after a few seasons, but the characters have appeared in a long series of movies, beginning with 1979's The Muppet Movie. Especially in the late 1960s, he became a popular icon for revolution and left-wing political ideals among youngsters in Western and Middle Eastern culture. A vaudeville-style variety show aimed at a family audience, the show was a sensation in the United Kingdom and soon elsewhere in the world. And when he gained power in Cuba, he gave up all the trappings of government office in order to return to the revolutionary battlefield and ultimately, to die.

The show featured Kermit as host, and a variety of other memorable characters including Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear. He is singled out from other revolutionaries by many young people in the West because he rejected a comfortable background to fight for global revolution. Starting in 1976, The Muppet Show was occupying Henson's attention in England. Even liberal elements that felt little sympathy with Guevara's Communist ideals during his lifetime expressed admiration for his spirit of self-sacrifice. The failure of the Muppets on SNL might have been a blessing in disguise. Demonstrations in protest against his assassination occurred throughout the world, and articles, tributes, and poems were written about his life and death. The SNL writers never got comfortable writing for the characters. While pictures of Guevara's dead body were being circulated and the circumstances of his death were being debated, Guevara's legend began to spread.

Eleven sketches aired between October 1975 and January 1976, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September. Fidel Castro has denied involvement in this translation. Henson, Oz, and his team targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, set mostly in the Land of Gorch. The Bolivian Diary was quickly and crudely translated by Ramparts magazine and circulated around the world. At first the puppetry was separated from the realistic segments on the street, but after a poor test screening in Philadelphia, the show was revamped to integrate the two and place much greater emphasis on Henson's work. He suffered from asthma, and most of his last offensives were carried out to obtain medicine. Kermit was also included as a roving Television News Reporter; a frill was added around his neck, to make him a frog. As the campaign drew to an unexpected close, Guevara became increasingly ill.

These included Oscar the Grouch, Ernie and Bert, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird. It shows that Guevara had a great deal of difficulty recruiting from the local populace, due mainly to the fact that the guerrilla group had learned Quechua and not the local languages of the Bolivian Amazon, such as Guarani. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on the titular street. It records the split between Guevara and the Bolivian Communist Party that resulted in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers than originally anticipated. In 1968, Joan Ganz Cooney and the team at the Children's Television Workshop began work on Sesame Street, a visionary children's program for public television. The diary tells how the guerrillas were forced to begin operations prematurely due to discovery by the Bolivian Army, the eventual split of the group, and their general failure. The NBC TV movie The Cube from 1969 is another experimental film that Jim Henson had produced. The first entry is on 7 November 1966 shortly after Guevara's arrival at a farm in the Bolivian jungle and the last entry is on 7 October 1967 just before his capture.

His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1966. Also removed was Guevara's diary, which documented events in the guerrilla war being fought in Bolivia. From 1964 to 1968, Henson began exploring film-making, and produced a series of experimental films. On the 12 July 1997 Guevara's remains were buried with full military honours in the city of Santa Clara, in the province of Villa Clara, where he had won the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution. At that time Henson's long-time partner Frank Oz also came on board with the new company. In 1997, the skeletal remains of Guevara's body were exhumed, positively identified by DNA matching and returned to Cuba, where he is revered as a heroic revolutionary leader. Henson devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog, the first Muppet to make a regular appearance on a network show The Jimmy Dean Show. The death of Guevara was regarded as a severe blow to the socialist revolutionary movements throughout Latin America.

would reside for some time. On October 15 Castro admitted that the death had occurred and proclaimed three days of public mourning throughout Cuba. In 1963, Henson and his wife Jane, also a puppeteer, moved to New York City, where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. Also his hands were cut off and sent to Fidel Castro. then turns the cannon directly toward the viewer, and ends the ad with, "Now, how do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?". The former Cuban leader's body was publicly displayed and photographed, and fingerprints were offered as proof of identification. The first muppet says, "How do you feel about Wilkins Coffee?" The second muppet responds gruffly, "Never heard of it!" The first muppet fires the cannon and blows the second muppet away.. As Debray's trial — which had become an international cause célèbre — was beginning in early October, Bolivian authorities on October 11 reported that Guevara had been shot and killed in an engagement with government forces on October 9.

Another muppet is in front of the barrel end of the cannon. Debray claimed that he had merely been acting as a reporter, and that Che, who had mysteriously disappeared several years earlier, was leading the guerrillas. A muppet is poised behind a cannon seen in profile. In April 1967 government forces captured Debray, a young French Marxist theoretician and writer, and accused him of collaborating with the guerrillas. A good example is one of the early coffee ads. A side issue connected with the guerrillas was the arrest and trial of Régis Debray. Being puppets, they have been able to get away with a greater level of slapstick violence than might be acceptable with human actors. Rodriguez had removed Guevara's hands to send to different parts of the world to verify his identity.

The greatly increased exposure led to hundreds of commercial appearances (mostly for Wilkins Coffee) by Henson characters through the 1960s. After the execution, Rodriguez took Guevara's Rolex watch, often proudly showing it to reporters during the ensuing years. Henson himself appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show. After hearing of Guevara's capture Rodriguez relayed the information to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia via CIA stations in various South American nations. To this day, Muppets appear as "guests" on shows such as The Tonight Show and Hollywood Squares, with particularly memorable appearances by Kermit and Miss Piggy on 60 Minutes and Cookie Monster on Martha Stewart Living. A CIA agent and veteran of the US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, Felix Rodriguez headed the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia. The success of Sam and Friends led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man".

Already he was experimenting with the techniques that would change the way puppetry was used on television, notably using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppeteer to work from off-camera. Che Guevara did have some last words before his death; he allegedly said to his executioner, "I know you are here to kill me. Sam and Friends were already recognizably Muppets, and the show included a primitive version of what would become Henson's signature character, Kermit the Frog. Biting his arm to avoid crying out, he was eventually spared his pain and shot in the chest, his lungs filling with blood. The next year he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV, while attending the University of Maryland, College Park. The most widely agreed upon account is that Guevara received multiple shots to the legs, so as to avoid maiming his face for identification purposes and simulate combat wounds to conceal his execution. In 1954, while still in high school, he began working for WTOP-TV creating puppets for a Saturday morning children's show. Others say he was so nervous he refused to look Guevara in the face and shot him in the side and the throat, which was the fatal wound.

in the late 1940s. Some say the executioner was too nervous, left, and was forced back inside. Born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1936, Henson moved with his family to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. Several versions exist about what happened next. . The executioner was a sergeant in the Bolivian army, who had drawn a short straw and had to shoot Guevara. He is also widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, magic, and love which was infused in nearly all of his work. Guevara was taken to an old schoolhouse and executed, bound by his hands to a board.

Creator of The Muppets, and the leading force behind their long creative run, Henson brought an engaging cast of characters, innovative ideas, and a sense of timing and humor to millions of people. Barrientos ordered his execution immediately upon being informed of Guevara's capture. He was also a filmmaker, television producer, and the founder of The Jim Henson Company, the Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. However, this claim is disputed, as some soldiers claim this story was set loose to show Guevara in a more humiliating light. James Maury "Jim" Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990), was one of the most important puppeteers in modern American television history. According to soldiers present at the capture, during the skirmish as soldiers approached Guevara he allegedly shouted, "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead". David McKay, 1993, hardcover, 251 pages, ISBN 0679412034. His surrender was offered after being wounded in the legs and having his rifle destroyed by a bullet.

Jim Henson: The Works: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination. On October 8, the encampment was encircled and Guevara was captured while leading a patrol in the vicinity of La Higuera. Finch and Jim Henson. The Bolivians were notified of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment by a deserter. Finch, Christopher, Charles S. Some were tortured for information. Tom Smith's song "A Boy and His Frog", which won the Pegasus Award for Best Filk Song in 1991. In addition, the CIA also helped anti-Castro Cuban exiles set up interrogation houses for those Bolivians thought to be assisting Guevara and/or his guerrillas.

The ceremony dedicated a life-sized statue of University of Maryland alumnus Jim Henson, conversing with one of his favorite creations, Kermit the Frog, in front of the Adele Stamp Student Union on the College Park campus.[1]. Guevara and his associates found themselves hamstrung in Bolivia by the American aid and military trainers to the Bolivian government and a lack of assistance from his allies. On September 24, 2003, University of Maryland, College Park honored Jim Henson by holding a dedication ceremony. His isolation was further exacerbated by the fact that the shortwave transmitter provided to him by Cuba turned out to be non-operational so that he was unable to send messages to Havana, and some months into the campaign the tape recorder that the guerrillas used to decode shortwave messages sent to them from Havana was lost while crossing a river. Guevara had also not received the expected assistance and cooperation from the local dissidents when he undertook his journey, and Bolivia's Moscow-oriented Communist Party did not aid him in the insurrection. Instead, the Bolivian Army was being trained by US Army Special Forces advisors, including a recently organized elite battalion of Rangers trained in jungle warfare.

He had expected to deal with a poorly trained and equipped national army. After the US government learned of his location, CIA operatives were sent into Bolivia to aid the anti-insurrection effort. However, there was a US presence in Bolivia. He had expected to deal only with the country's military government.

Guevara's hope of fomenting revolution in Bolivia appears to have been predicated upon a number of misconceptions. In September, however, the Army managed to eliminate two guerrilla groups, reportedly killing one of the leaders. Guevara's guerrillas, numbering about 50, were well equipped and scored a number of early successes in difficult terrain in the mountainous Camiri region of the country against Bolivian regulars. He ordered the Bolivian Army to hunt Guevara and his followers down.

On learning of his presence in Bolivia, President René Barrientos is alleged to have expressed the desire to see Guevara's head displayed on a pike in downtown La Paz. Little was accomplished in the way of building a guerrilla army. The evidence suggests that this training was more hazardous than combat to Guevara and the Cubans accompanying him. A parcel of jungle land in Ñancahuazú was purchased by native Bolivian Communists and turned over to him for use as a training area.

The persistent reports that he was assisting the guerrillas in Bolivia were ultimately proven true. Juan Almeida, announced that Guevara was "serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America". In a speech at the May Day rally in Havana, the Acting Minister of the armed forces, Maj. Speculation continued during 1966 as to the whereabouts of the former Minister of Industry and President of the National Bank.

Later that same year, ill and frustrated after seven months of hardship, Guevara left the Congo with the Cuban survivors (six of Guevara's column had died). The incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces are cited by Che in his Congo Diaries as the key reasons for the revolt's failure. Guevara's aim was to export the Cuban Revolution by indoctrinating local Simba fighters in communist ideology and strategies of guerrilla warfare. CIA advisors working with the Congolese army were able to monitor Guevara's communications, arrange to ambush the rebels and the Cubans whenever they attempted to attack, and interdict Guevara's supply lines.

He had the experiences of the Cuban revolution, including his successful march on Santa Clara, which was central to Batista finally being overthrown by Castro's forces. His asthma prevented him from entering military service in Argentina, a fact of which he was proud, given his opposition to the government. Guevara was only 35 at the time and had no formal military training. "Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour," Guevara wrote.[1].

Guevara dismissed Kabila as insignificant. In 1965, Guevara was assisted for a time in the former Belgian Congo by guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who helped Lumumba supporters lead a revolt that was suppressed in November of that same year by the Congolese army and a large group of white mercenaries. He wanted to work with the pro-Lumumba, Marxist Simba movement in the former Belgian Congo (later Zaïre and currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Guevara persuaded Castro to back him in the first covert Cuban involvement in Africa.

Guevara's movements and whereabouts remained a secret for the next two years. During an interview with four foreign correspondents on November 1, Castro remarked that he knew where Guevara was but that he would not disclose the place, and added, denying reports that his former comrade-in-arms was dead, that "he is in the best of health." Despite Castro's assurances the fate of Guevara remained a mystery at the end of 1965. In the letter Guevara announced his resignation from all his positions in the government, in the party, and in the Army, and renounced his Cuban citizenship, which had been granted to him in 1959 in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the revolution. He explained that "other nations are calling for the help of my modest efforts" and that, having "always identified with the world outcome of our Revolution", he had decided to go and fight as a guerrilla in different parts of the world.

On October 3 of that year, Castro revealed an undated letter purportedly written to him by Guevara some months earlier in which Guevara reaffirmed his enduring solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but stated his intention to leave Cuba to fight abroad for the cause of the revolution. Numerous rumors about his disappearance spread both inside and outside Cuba. Pressed by international speculations on Guevara's fate, Castro said on June 16 that the people would be informed about Guevara when Guevara himself wished to let them know. But he strongly supported the Communist side in the Vietnam War, despite North Vietnam's pro-Soviet position, and urged his comrades in South America to create "many Vietnams".

He saw the Northern Hemisphere, led by the US in the West and the Soviets in the East, as the exploiter of the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, by this point Guevara had grown more skeptical of the Soviet Union. According to Western observers of the Cuban situation, the fact that Guevara was opposed to Soviet recommendations that Castro seemed obliged to agree to might have been the reason for his disappearance. Since the early days of the Cuban revolution Guevara had been considered an advocate of Maoist strategy in Latin America and the originator of a plan for the swift industrialization of Cuba.

Guevara's pro-Chinese orientation was increasingly problematic for Cuba as the Cuban economy became more and more dependent on the Soviet Union. Castro's explanations for Che's disappearance have always been suspect (see below) — it is surprising that Che never announced his intentions publicly, but only through an undated letter to Castro. It may also be that Fidel had grown increasingly wary of Che Guevara's popularity and considered him a potential threat. His disappearance was variously attributed to the relative failure of the industrialization scheme he had advocated while minister of industry, to pressure exerted on Castro by Soviet officials disapproving of Guevara's pro-Chinese Communist outlook as the Sino-Soviet split grew more pronounced, and to serious differences between Guevara and the Cuban leadership regarding Cuba's economic development and ideological line.

Guevara's whereabouts were the great mystery of 1965 in Cuba, as he was regarded as second in power to Castro himself. Guevara was not seen in public after his return to Havana on March 14 from a three-month tour of the People's Republic of China, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Dahomey, Congo-Brazzaville and Tanzania. After April 1965 Guevara dropped out of public life and then vanished altogether. To the Russians, Guevara caustically remarked, "Is this how the proletariat live in Russia?".

Once, on a trip to Russia, Guevara was dining with high-ranking officials from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when the group's food was served to them on expensive china. This austerity also manifested itself as a general dislike of luxury. For example, upon becoming a member of the government, he refused an increase in pay, opting to continue drawing the (considerably) lower salary he received as a Comandante (Major), in the Rebel Army. Guevara was also known for his austerity, simple lifestyle and habits.

He believed such sacrifice and dedication on the part of the people was necessary to achieve true Communism through the Socialist society. He regularly devoted his weekends and evenings to volunteer labour, be it working at shipyards, in textile factories or cutting sugarcane. As a government official, Guevara served as an example of the "New Man" (el Hombre Nuevo). All they needed was a vanguard to inspire them.

It worked in Cuba because the people already wanted to get rid of Batista. However, the failure of his "Cuban Style" revolution in Bolivia was thought to have been due to his lack of grassroots support there, and hence this strategy is now thought by some to be ineffective. Guevara believed that a small group (foco) of guerrillas, by violently targeting the government, could actively foment revolutionary feelings among the general populace, so that it was not necessary to build broad organisations and advance the revolutionary struggle in measured steps before launching armed insurrection. Guevara's book, Guerrilla Warfare, was seen for a time as the definitive philosophy for fighting irregular wars.

Jon Lee Anderson reports that after the crisis Guevara told Sam Russell, a British correspondent for the socialist newspaper Daily Worker, that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them. Guevara believed that the installation of Soviet missiles would protect Cuba from any direct military action against it by the United States. Prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara was part of a Cuban delegation to Moscow in early 1962 with Raúl Castro where he endorsed the planned placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. For this a socialist state would first be necessary, a ladder to be ascended and then cast away in a society of equals without states or governments.

The ideal Communist society is not possible unless the people first evolve into a 'new man' (el Hombre Nuevo). El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965) (English: Man and Socialism in Cuba, (1967)) is an examination of Cuba's new brand of Socialism and Communist ideology. His highly influential manual on guerrilla strategy and tactics (English translation, Guerrilla Warfare, 1961) advocated peasant-based revolutionary movements in the developing countries. During this period, he defined Cuba's policies and his own views in many speeches, articles, letters, and essays.

An active participant in the economic and social reforms implemented by Castro's government, he became known in the West for his fiery attacks on US foreign policy in Africa, Asia, and especially Latin America. Guevara helped guide the Castro regime on its socialist, proto-Communist, path. After negotiating a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in 1960, Guevara represented Cuba on many commercial missions and delegations to Soviet-aligned nations in Africa and Asia after the United States imposed an embargo on the nation. In this capacity, Guevara faced the challenge of transforming Cuba's capitalist agrarian economy into a socialist industrial economy.

Later, Guevara became an official at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, President of the National Bank of Cuba, and Minister of Industries. During his term as commander of the fortress from 1959–1963, he oversaw the hasty trials and executions of many former Batista regime officials, including members of the BRAC secret police (some sources say 156 people, others estimate as many as 500). In 1959, he was appointed commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison. Che Guevara became as prominent in the new government as he had been in the revolutionary army.

The couple would have four children together. Later he married a member of Castro's army, Aleida March. Shortly thereafter, Guevara became a Cuban citizen and divorced his Peruvian wife, Hilda Gadea, with whom he had one daughter. After Castro's troops entered the capital of Havana on January 2, 1959, a new socialist government was established.

A newer translation was published in 1996 under the title Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War. The book is composed of a series of articles that originally appeared in Verde Olivo, a weekly publication of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Guevara recorded the two years spent in overthrowing Batista's regime in a detailed account entitled Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria (English translation, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1968), first published in 1963. His march on Santa Clara in late 1958, where his column derailed an armored train filled with Batista's troops and took over the city, was the final straw that forced Batista to flee the country.

Within months, Guevara rose to the highest rank, Comandante (Major), in the revolutionary army. He personally executed Eutimio Guerra, a suspected Batista informant, with a single shot from his .32(7.65mm) caliber pistol. Guevara took responsibility for the execution of informers, insubordinates, deserters and spies in the revolutionary army. Guevara exhibited great courage, skills in combat, and ruthlessness, and soon became one of Castro's ablest and most trusted aides.

The remaining rebels fled to the mountains, where they slowly grew in strength, seizing weapons and winning support and recruits from the local peasants in rural areas and intellectuals and workers in urban areas. Guevara, the group's physician, laid down his knapsack containing medical supplies in order to pick up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, a moment which he later recalled as marking his transition from doctor to combatant. Only 15 rebels survived. Shortly after disembarking in a swampy area near Niquero in southeastern Cuba, the expeditionary unit was attacked by Batista's forces.

(The name was most likely a tribute to the grandmother of the previous owner, an American.) Guevara was the only non-Cuban aboard. Castro, Guevara, and 80 other guerrillas departed from Tuxpan, Veracruz, aboard the cabin cruiser Granma in November 1956. Guevara quickly joined the "26th of July Movement", named in commemoration of the date of the failed attack on the Moncada barracks that was the cause of Castro's exile. The Castro brothers were preparing to return to Cuba with an expeditionary force in an attempt to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista, who had assumed dictatorial powers following a coup d'état during the 1952 presidential elections.

Guevara met Fidel Castro and Fidel's brother Raúl in Mexico City where the two sought refuge after being exiled from Cuba. Following the coup, Guevara volunteered to fight, but Arbenz told his supporters to leave the country, and Guevara briefly took refuge in the Argentine consulate before moving on to Mexico. This helped strengthen his conviction that Marxist socialism was the only true way to remedy such problems. The overthrow of the Arbenz government by a 1954 CIA-backed coup d'état cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an oppressive imperialist power that would consistently oppose governments attempting to address the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing third world countries.

See International Phonetic Alphabet." class="IPA" style="white-space: nowrap; font-family:'Code2000', 'Chrysanthi Unicode', 'Doulos SIL', 'Gentium', 'GentiumAlt', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Bitstream Vera', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'Arial Unicode MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro'; font-family /**/:inherit; text-decoration: none">/ʃeɪ/ are fairly common, probably under French influence. In English, the misspelling "Ché" (with an acute accent) and the mispronunciation

See International Phonetic Alphabet." class="IPA" style="white-space: nowrap; font-family:'Code2000', 'Chrysanthi Unicode', 'Doulos SIL', 'Gentium', 'GentiumAlt', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Bitstream Vera', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'Arial Unicode MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro'; font-family /**/:inherit; text-decoration: none">/tʃe/) is a Spanish interjection used commonly in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, some parts of Bolivia, Costa Rica and in the Portuguese of the south of Brazil. Che (pronounced

Upon his return to Argentina, he completed his medical studies as quickly as he could, in order to continue his travels around South America. He began to develop his concept of a united South America without borders, bound together by a common 'mestizo' culture, an idea which would figure prominently in his later revolutionary activities. His travels also inspired him to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as a single cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy. Through his first-hand observations of the poverty and powerlessness of the masses, he decided that the only remedy for Latin America's economic and social inequities lay in revolution.

Guevara narrated this journey in The Motorcycle Diaries, translated in 1996 (and turned into a motion picture of the same name in 2004). Guevara and the 29-year-old Alberto soon set off from their hometown of Alta Gracia. In 1951, Guevara's older friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist and a political radical, suggested that Guevara take a year off from his medical studies to embark on a trip they had talked of doing for years, traversing South America on a Norton 500 cc motorcycle nicknamed La Poderosa meaning "the mighty one", with the idea of spending a few weeks volunteering at a leper colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River during the trip. He spent many of his holidays traveling around Latin America.

There he also excelled as a scholar and completed his medical studies in March 1953. In 1948, he entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. Though suffering from the crippling bouts of asthma that were to handicap him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete. In this upper-middle class family with strongly left-wing views, Guevara became known for his dynamic and radical perspective even as a boy.

Guevara Lynch married Celia de la Serna y Llosa in 1927 and they had five children. Her son Ernesto Guevara Lynch (Guevara's father) was born in 1900. Francisco Lynch (Guevara's great-grandfather) was born in 1817, and Ana Lynch (his beloved grandmother) in 1861. He left for Bilbao, Spain, and traveled from there to Argentina.

One of Guevara's forebears, Patrick Lynch, was born in Galway, Ireland in 1715. The birth certificate may have been deliberately falsified to help shield the family from a scandal relating to his mother's having been three months pregnant when she was married. The date of birth recorded on his birth certificate was June 14, 1928. Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a family of mixed Spanish and Irish descent.

. He also became a popular icon for revolution and left-wing political ideals in Western culture. After his death, Guevara became a hero of Third World socialist revolutionary movements, as a theorist and tactician of asymmetric warfare. The details of his death are unclear, but many believe the Bolivian government purposefully executed him in order to avoid a public trial and potential martyrization of Che's image.

It is believed by some that the CIA wished to keep Guevara alive for interrogation, but he died at the hands of the Bolivian Army in La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967. After serving in various important posts in the new government, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the hope of fomenting revolutions in other countries, first in the Congo-Kinshasa (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and later in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA-organized military operation. Guevara was a member of Fidel Castro's "26th of July Movement", which seized power in Cuba in 1959. Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928^[1] – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara or el Che, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader.

Dr. Colegio Cesar Chavez. Che-Lives. Guevarism.

Pop culture images of Che Guevara. Luis Carlos Prestes. History of Cuba. Travelling with Che Guevara - The Making of a Revolutionary, Alberto Granado, Pimlico, ISBN 1-8441-3426-1.

June 1985. Davis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Public Relations. Guerrilla Warfare Ernesto Guevara and Thomas M. Guevara, Also Known as Che, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Saint Martin's Press, ISBN 0312206526.

The Che Guevara Reader, Collection of Guevara works edited by David Deutschmann, Ocean Press, ISBN 1876175699. Chapter 1 includes the story of the falsified birth certificate. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson, Bantam Press, ISBN 0553406647 or Grove Press, ISBN 0-8021-1600-0. Socialism and Man in Cuba: Also Fidel Castro on the Twentieth Anniversary of Guevara's Death, Monad, paperback.

Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World, Consortium, paperback. Our America and Theirs, Ocean Press (AU), paperback, ISBN 1876175818. Critical Notes on Political Economy, Ocean Press, paperback. Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Guerrilla Warfare, Politics and History, Ocean Press, paperback.

Che Guevara Talks to Young People, Pathfinder, paperback. Che Guevara Speaks, Pathfinder, paperback. Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Monthly Review Press, paperback, 1998. Guerrilla Warfare, Souvenir Press Ltd, paperback, ISBN 0285636804.

Bolivian Diary, Pimlico, paperback, ISBN 0712664572. The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, Grove Press, paperback. Back on the Road: A Journey to Central America (Harvill Panther S.), The Harvill Press, paperback, ISBN 0802139426. The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey, Perennial Press, ISBN 0007182228.

The Diary of Che Guevara, Amereon Ltd,. Self-Portrait: Che Guevara, Ocean Press, 320pp, paperback, 2005. Original copies of the "Guevara" edition of the Japanese Famicom edition go for high amounts on the collectors' market. Che Guevara's exploits during the Cuban Revolution were very loosely dramatized in the 1987 video game Guevara, released by SNK in Japan and "converted" into Guerrilla War for Western audiences, removing all references to Che but keeping all the visuals and a game map that clearly resembles Cuba.

Che: The Movie at the Internet Movie Database – Benicio Del Toro (announced to begin production in 2005). The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) – Gael García Bernal (2004). Fidel at the Internet Movie Database – Gael García Bernal (2002). Hasta la victoria siempre at the Internet Movie Database – Alfredo Vasco (1999).

Leandro Katz (1997). "El Día Que Me Quieras" at the Internet Movie Database ("The Day You'll Love Me" is a song by Carlos Gardel) – dir. Evita at the Internet Movie Database – Antonio Banderas (1996). Che! at the Internet Movie Database – Omar Sharif (1969).

El 'Che' Guevara at the Internet Movie Database – Francisco Rabal (1968).