Just days after Bolivian forces captured and executed Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Fidel Castro addressed hundreds of thousands gathered in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución, eulogizing his former comrade-in-arms as a model revolutionary. The speech, and the martyrdom that followed, transformed Guevara from a defeated guerrilla into one of the twentieth century's most reproduced political icons.
Che Guevara had been captured on October 8, 1967, in a Bolivian ravine after his attempt to spark a continent-wide guerrilla uprising collapsed into failure and isolation. He was executed the next day on the orders of the Bolivian government, his hands severed for fingerprint identification, his body hidden in a secret grave that wouldn't be found for nearly three decades.
In Havana, Fidel Castro seized the moment to transform a battlefield defeat into a propaganda triumph. Addressing a vast crowd in the Plaza de la Revolución, he declared Guevara an example for revolutionaries everywhere, framing his death as sacrifice rather than failure.
The photograph of Guevara's corpse, laid out and eerily serene, circulated worldwide, but it was Alberto Korda's earlier 1960 portrait — beret, gaze fixed on the horizon — that became the defining image, endlessly reproduced on t-shirts, posters, and murals, arguably stripped of political meaning and turned into pure iconography.
Key people: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro