Che and Medicine: Ernesto Guevara on the Social Role of Doctors

Che Guevara’s passion for public health contributed to his a legacy of social medicine in Latin America, and this book explores and reveals his thoughts on the role of a doctor.

Features an introduction by Aleida Guevara March, MD, a Cuban physician who is the eldest daughter of four children born to Ernesto ＂Che＂ Guevara and his second wife, Aleida March

Before Ernesto Che Guevara became ＂Che,＂ before he traveled Latin America, before he joined Fidel in Cuba, he was a medical student. In 1956 he wrote to his mother before leaving to go and join the guerilla expedition to Cuba: ＂My path seems to be slowly but surely diverging from that of clinical medicine, but not so far that I have lost my nostalgia for hospitals. What I told you about the professorship in physiology was a lie, but not a big one. It was a lie because I never planned to accept it, but the offer was real and there was a strong possibility that they were going to give it to me, as I had an interview and everything. Anyway, that’s all history. Saint Carlos [Karl Marx] has made a new recruit.＂

He had started a book on the role of the doctor in Latin America, a work he fully intended to continue writing. It remained incomplete at the time of his death in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine, just eleven years later.

ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA was born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928. During his medical studies in Buenos Aires, he took a trip with his friend Alberto Granado on an old Norton motorcycle through all of Latin America, the basis for The Motorcycle Diaries. In 1954, he became involved in political activity in Guatemala and was an eyewitness to the overthrow of the elected government in a CIA-organized coup. In Mexico City, Che linked up with exiled Cuban revolutionaries and met Fidel Castro in 1955. He would go on to become a Rebel Army commander, a key leader of the new revolutionary government, and a central leader of what would become the Communist Party of Cuba.

ALEIDA GUEVARA MARCH, MD, is a Cuban physician who is the eldest daughter of four children born to Ernesto ＂Che＂ Guevara and his second wife, Aleida March. She is a doctor of medicine, based at the William Soler Children’s Hospital in Havana. She has also worked as a physician in Angola, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.