Yesterday's Birthday.

"It's the birthday of a man whose image has become one of the most popular cultural icons- and counterculture icons- of the past half century: Che Guevara, born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna 82 years ago in Rosario, Argentina (1928), to parents of Irish and Spanish descent. His family was affluent and believed strongly in socialist ideals. He swam competitively, played rugby, and learned to speak French fluently before heading off to medical school. At 23, he took a year off from medical school and set out on a motorcycle ride with a friend of his. For nine months, he traveled around, traversing 8,000 miles by motorcycle, steamship, horseback, hitchhiking, river raft, and cargo plane. The journey became the basis for his New York Times best-selling book The Motorcycle Diaries.

He finished medical school, traveled to Guatemala to promote his ideas of land reform and peasant revolt, and went on to Mexico, where he became friends with Raul Castro. Raul decided that Che had a lot of ideas in common with his older brother Fidel Castro, who was living in exile in Mexico after leading a failed uprising in Cuba. In 1955, Che and Fidel had a series of meetings in a house in Mexico City in which they planned to invade Cuba and overthrow the corrupt Batista regime. They gathered other Cuban exiles into their ranks, and Fidel put Che in charge of training the soldiers for combat.

Guerrilla fighters set out from Mexico on a wobbly old yacht, called the Granma, and landed on Cuba's east coast, where they began inciting revolt. In late December 1958, Che led a crucial victory in the town of Santa Clara, boarding and overtaking a railroad train full of Batista's soldiers and weapons. And a few days later, on January 1, 1959, Batista fled the country and Fidel Castro marched victoriously into Havana, where he began setting up the new revolutionary government- the one that still rules Cuba today. Che held various internal ministry posts in the new government, including director of the national bank. He also oversaw the execution of war criminals, and he served as the ambassador to a number of nations around the world. It was Che Guevara who orchestrated the close ties between revolutionary Cuba and the Soviet Union. He set up massive trade agreements in one deal, the USSR would buy 3 million tons of sugar from Cuba--and arranged for the Soviets to provide military support if Cuba should be threatened by hostile neighbors.

It was around this time, in 1960, that Cuban photographer Alberto Korda snapped that famous photo of Che Guevara, at a funeral for victims of a ship explosion. It's the image that's on millions of tee shirts, posters, key chains, coffee mugs, hats, and other items. Korda declined royalties for the photo when it became famous in 1967, and he objected when British advertisers later tried to use the image to sell vodka. Che's four children by his second wife, all of whom still live and work in Cuba, likewise to not receive royalties, but have asked New York lawyers for help in stopping a fashion designer from their dad's face on bikinis.

Che was captured in Bolivia in October 1967, while trailing guerrilla fighters for an uprising. He was executed at a schoolhouse the next day. His famous last words: "Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." He was 39."

Courtesy of The Writer's Almanac.