Word: che
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the gasping little boy might breathe, the family had to move to the hill town of Alta Gracia. There Che began a stubborn personal battle to beat the asthma. He swam, roamed the streets ;with a gang of toughs, played golf, took odd jobs in Córdoba's vineyards. His father taught him to shoot-and started him rambling through some of the 3,000 books, mostly leftist sociology and history, that crammed the family bookshelves. The boy was entranced with the works of Chile's Communist Poet Pablo Neruda, memorized many of his poems...
...took his first brash step into politics as a member of a nationalistic youth group specializing in street brawls. Che finished high school with distinction, and then, moved by the suffering of his father's mother* as she lay dying of cancer, decided to become a doctor. At 19 he entered the University of Buenos Aires Medical School...
Pinned Galahad. By this time his parents were separated, and young Che spent most of his time with his mother and her friends, who ranged the political spectrum from parlor pink to Moscow red. He battled in the streets against Dictator Juan Peron and played amateur rugby at top speed, wheezing to the sidelines from time to time for whiffs from the inevitable atomizer. He still bitterly recalls one violent episode from this period. Sitting in a Buenos Aires bar one evening, Che was annoyed when a U.S. merchant seaman made a pass at a girl near Che. Che tried...
...Chile, then hitchhiked to Peru and Ecuador, winding up with jobs as male nurses in a leper colony near the source of the Amazon. They floated downriver into Colombia, crossed into Venezuela, and snagged a lift to Miami aboard a plane carrying race horses from Buenos Aires. Che was turned back by U.S. immigration authorities. He headed home to finish the seven-year course of studies in three years. When he graduated in 1953, Peron was grabbing doctors for the army. Che ducked out of the country and set off on the long revolutionary road to Cuba...
...road led first to Bolivia, then in the throes of a historic revolution that dispossessed the rich of land and tin mines. In a filthy brown jacket, stained necktie and scuffed shoes, Che became a member of a group of coffeehouse leftists. He went on to Peru, Ecuador, Panama and finally to Costa Rica, a democratic haven for exiles from all over Latin America. Among them were five or six young Cubans who had been led in an attack on a Santiago barracks by a beardless young rebel named Fidel Castro on July 26, 1953-an anniversary that Fidel Castro...