Che Guevara Timeline

To implement the Ley de la Sierra penal law extended nationwide after the revolution, Castro named Guevara commander of La Cabaña Fortress prison for a five-month tenure (January 2 – June 12, 1959), during which war criminals were tried amid 93% public approval for the tribunal process. He ordered the execution of Rojas on January 7, 1959.

Image source: La Cabaña

On June 2, 1959, Guevara married Aleida March, a Cuban-born member of the 26th of July Movement with whom he had been living since 1958.

Image source: Aleida March

In 1960, Guevara ordered the construction of the Guanahacabibes camp, a labor camp intended to 'rehabilitate' his employees who had committed infractions at work.

Image source: Guanahacabibes Peninsula

While in Jakarta, Guevara visited Indonesian president Sukarno to discuss the Indonesian revolution of 1945–1949 and establish trade relations between the two nations.

Image source: Sukarno

In March 1960, massive explosions ripped through the French freighter La Coubre, which carried Belgian munitions from Antwerp while docked in Havana Harbor, heightening international threats against revolutionary Cuba.

Image source: La Coubre explosion

After Eisenhower reduced US imports of Cuban sugar, Cuba's main crop, Guevara addressed 100,000 workers in front of the Presidential Palace on July 10, 1960, denouncing US 'economic aggression.'

At the First Latin American Congress in September 1960, when asked about Cuba's ideology, Guevara replied, 'If I were asked whether our revolution is Communist, I would define it as Marxist.'

At the end of 1960, Guevara visited Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Hungary, and East Germany, signing a trade agreement in East Berlin.

In 1961, Guevara proposed a four-year plan drafted by JUCEPLAN for rapid industrialization and agricultural diversification, targeting a 15% annual growth rate and a tenfold increase in fruit production, to be implemented from 1962 through 1965.

With the literacy rate at only 60-76% before 1959, the government at Guevara's behest dubbed 1961 the 'year of education,' mobilizing 100,000 volunteers into literacy brigades sent into the countryside to build schools, train educators, and teach illiterate guajiros.

Image source: Cuban literacy campaign

On April 17, 1961, 1,400 US-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba. Guevara's earlier role training militia forces helped repel the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Image source: Bay of Pigs Invasion

In March 1962, Guevara admitted in a speech that the economic plan was a failure, calling it 'an absurd plan, disconnected from reality, with absurd goals and imaginary resources.' By 1962 Cuba had introduced a rationing system for food, and economic decline continued as the 1963 sugar harvest brought in only 3.8 million tons, the lowest in over twenty years.

Image source: Rationing in Cuba

As main architect of the Cuban–Soviet relationship, Guevara traveled to the Soviet Union in August 1962 to sign off on basing Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba, a decision that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Image source: Cuban Missile Crisis

In February 1963, Guevara published the essay Against bureaucratism, describing the 'guerrillaism' of the Cuban leadership, the necessity of bureaucratization to prevent rash decision-making among ex-guerrillas, and the need to de-bureaucratize to end idleness in production.

By December 1964, Guevara had emerged as a 'revolutionary statesman of world stature' and traveled to New York as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United Nations.

In early 1965, Guevara went to Africa to offer his guerrilla knowledge and experience in the Congo Crisis. Egyptian President Nasser saw the plan as 'unwise' and warned he would become a 'Tarzan' figure doomed to fail. On September 27, 1965, the ANC and its allies launched Operation South, destroying Kabila's forces.

Image source: Congo Crisis

In Algiers on February 24, 1965, Guevara made what turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage, delivering a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity.

Pressed by international speculation regarding Guevara's fate, Castro stated in June 1965 that the people would be informed when Guevara wished them to know. In late 1966 FRELIMO representatives reported meeting him in Dar es Salaam about aiding Mozambique's revolution, an offer they rejected. On International Workers' Day 1967, Major Juan Almeida Bosque announced Guevara was 'serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America.'

Journalist Pablo Daniel Magee's book Opération Condor (2020) reconstitutes Guevara's first incursion into Bolivia on October 3, 1966. His diary's first entry dates to November 7, 1966, shortly after arrival at the farm in Ñancahuazú. His ELN force of about 50 fighters scored successes against Bolivian army regulars in the mountainous Camiri region during early 1967, causing the government to overestimate its size.

Image source: Ñancahuazú Guerrilla

On October 7, 1967, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine—the final entry date of his diary. The 2007 documentary My Enemy's Enemy alleges Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie possibly helped the CIA orchestrate his capture.

Guevara was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed on October 9, 1967. A declassified memorandum dated October 11, 1967 informed US President Lyndon B. Johnson of his death. Régis Debray, captured with Guevara in April 1967, later expanded on the circumstances of his capture in a 1968 prison interview.

In late 1995, retired Bolivian General Mario Vargas revealed to biographer Jon Lee Anderson that Guevara's corpse lay near a Vallegrande airstrip. In July 1997, Cuban geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists discovered seven bodies in two mass graves, including one man without hands, consistent with Guevara.

On October 17, 1997, thirty years and eight days after his death, Guevara's remains, with those of six fellow combatants, were laid to rest with military honors in a specially built mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba, where he had commanded the decisive military victory of the Cuban Revolution.

Image source: Che Guevara Mausoleum

Despite disagreement on his legacy, Time named Guevara one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while Alberto Korda's photograph Guerrillero Heroico was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as 'the most famous photograph in the world.' A high-contrast monochrome graphic created by Jim Fitzpatrick in 1968 became universally merchandised on T-shirts, hats, posters, and tattoos. In 2008, a 3.5-meter bronze statue of him was unveiled in Rosario, Argentina, his birthplace, where high schools bear his name and Che museums dot the country.

Image source: Che Guevara in popular culture

In July 2008, the Bolivian government of Evo Morales unveiled Guevara's sealed diaries, composed of two frayed notebooks, along with a logbook and several black-and-white photographs documenting the campaign.

In August 2009, anthropologists working for Bolivia's Justice Ministry discovered and unearthed the bodies of five of Guevara's fellow guerrillas near the Bolivian town of Teoponte.