Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was wounded and captured in Bolivia when the small guerrilla force he was eading was ambushed by troops. The next day, on orders from the CIA and Bolivian top brass, Guevara was murdered. He was 39 years old.
Guevara was a man of consistent courage and revolutionary dedication. He had been one of the core fighters who sailed with Fidel Castro in 1956 to launch the guerrilla struggle that ousted the Batista dictatorship in Cuba.
He had held top government posts under Castro as capitalism was overturned - head of the Industry ministry (INRA), head of the National Bank. He had negotiated key trade agreements for sale of sugar to Peking and to Moscow that ensured the survival of the Revolution.
Yet none of these roles grabbed the attention of the world's youth as dramatically as his tragic death on a failed and ill-conceived expedition in Bolivia.
Indeed the death of Guevara was also the birth of the Guevara legend; the image of the courageous, selfless revolutionary internationalist was perpetuated.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when opposition to the Vietnam War reached mass proportions, the walls and doors of countless students and youth throughout the world featured posters bearing the handsome features of the slain martyr to the struggle against imperialism.
Trotskyists
Even those whose Trotskyist politics * should have made them more critical setaside some of their usual criteria and mistakenly proclaimed Che to be (unconsciously, of course) one of theirs.
It had been Che Guevara who summed up the need for international solidarity, with his immortal call for Two, three, many Vietnams' to break the isolation of the Vietnamese fighters and break the grip of imperialism.
But those who have sought to make Guevara a political model as well as a splendid example of a committed anti-imperialist fighter are forced to overlook Che's real weaknesses, and ignore the lessons to be learned from his struggles.
Che Guevara was by birth an Argentine, born in 1928 in Rosario, the eldest of five children in a liberal, left wing tamily.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1953 he travelled northwards through Latin America, he arrived in Guatemala, where the democratically elected Arenz government had expropriated uncultivated land from the US United Fruit Company, and was facing a mounting offensive orchestrated by the CIA.
Che, who had read Marx and Lenin (but apparently no Trotsky) made contact with left wing circles and attempted to ioin the feeble resistance to the ÜS invasion. But the Arbenz regime refused to arm the workers and peasants to fight imperialism, and the Guatemalan Communist Party, hand in glove with Arbenz, did little more.
Forced to flee Guatemala, but clearly learning little about the politics of Stalinism, Che moved to Mexico, where he met up with exiled Cubans, including Raul Castro, brother of Fidel.
On hearing of the proposed guerrilla expedition to Cuba to overthrow the brutal and corrupt Batista dictatorship, No. 29 revolution:
"....the indigenous bourgeoisies have lost all capacity to oppose imperialism - if they ever had any - and are only dragged along behind it like a caboose. There are no other alternatives. Either a socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution."
But though he sided with left guerrillaist splits in Latin American Community Parties, Che never followed through the logic of this argument to challenge the official line emanating from Moscow, or to study the writings of Trotsky.
Peasantry
One obstacle to him embracing a clear perspective of permanent revolution was his persistent focus upon the method of guerrilla warfare, and thus on downplaying the role of Latin America's growing urban working class and emphasising the peasantry as the key revolutionary force.
Summing up the Cuban revolutionary experience as early as 1960, he insisted that the lessons for the whole of Latin America were:
"1. Popular forces can win a war against the army.
2 It is not always necessary to wait until all the conditions for revolution exist: the insurrectional centre can create them.
3. In underdeveloped Latin America the arena for struggle must be basically the countryside.
Going further, he argued that The guerrilla fighter is above all an agrarian In these one-sided conclusions, which he never revised, we can see the seeds of Guevara's own tragic and wasted death. It is a particular irony that his own guerrilla grouping in Bolivia was betrayed by local peasants who saw them as strange intruders and reported them to the police.
No other Latin American country was as rotten-ripe as Cuba for the regime to be toppled by a voluntaristic guerrilla struggle.
Thousands of brave anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist fighters went pointlessly to their deaths trying to apply the 'Cuban model' in countries where it stood no chance of working.
Despite this final failure most genuine socialists, however, will feel a glow of affection for Che's heroic effort to put his own revolutionary, internationalist convictions into practice. As the barbarism of the US onslaught on Vietnam seemed unchallenged, Che spoke for millions:
"Let us develop genuine proletarian internationalism, with international proletarian armies. Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity, so that to die under the colours Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Laos, Guinea, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil - to mention only the current scenes of armed strugle - will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, ar African and even a European.
So Che the Argentine, having renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship, died stateless under Bolivian skies.
He deserved not to be patronised and adapted to with grovelling tributes proclaiming him a 'revolutionary of action', but politically challenged on his basic misconceptions so that millions more could learn the correct way forward.
Today's youth can be urged to celebrate Che's struggles and successes, and emulate his dedication and his courage: but not his politics.