Basket.

Practically everyone knows how he looks like, but how many actually know who he is? I've genuinely been wondering for a while.

I speak, of course, of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine trained doctor turned revolutionary guerilla, who was captured by Bolivian troops in the jungles of Bolivia on this day in 1967. There is hardly a person who has not seen his famous image, splashed on t-shirts, posters, wall paintings and various other memorabilia all across the world. The image is not reproduced here because the original photograph, taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda at a funeral service on March 5, 1960, and thousands of variants can easily be found with a very simple Google image search.

Certainly a remarkable individual in the history of the 20th century, Guevara may be the representation of Marxist-Leninist ideals in its purest form - an individual who truly believed in the cause he fought for most of his life, and fatally dedicated to spreading its perceived benefits across most of the newly-independent, impoverished and undemocratic Third World of the 1960s.

Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, into an upper-middle class family with strongly left-wing views (ironic how so many Communist leaders have bourgeois roots, isn't it). A sickly child prone to severe asthma attacks (asthma was to plague him all his life), he nonetheless grew into a fine student and athlete, graduating from the University of Buenos Aires with a medical degree in 1953. While still a student in 1951, he and his friend Alberto Granada, a biochemist and political radical, had taken a road trip around South America. It was on this trip that Guevara observed and experienced first-hand the poverty and powerlessness of the masses - and decided that the only remedy for widespread social and economic inequalities lay in revolution.

After completing his studies in 1953, Guevara travelled to Guatemala, where the leftist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman held power and was attempting left-wing social reforms. It is believed that here was where Guevara acquired his famous nickname due to his Argentine roots; "che" is a Spanish interjection commonly used in speech in much of South America, roughly corresponding to English exclamations like "hey!" or "wow!". In a vocative sense, it can also mean "friend", roughly corresponding to the English "mate", "dude" or "pal".

A 1954 CIA-backed coup overthrew the Arbenz regime, and it was this event that cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialistic, oppressive bully insuperably opposed to the treatment of South America's endemic socioeconomic inequality. It also strengthened his conviction that Marxist ideals were the only answer to such problems, and violent revolution the only way to put these in place.

Guevara fled Guatemala after the coup and ended up in Mexico City, where he met Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, exiles from Cuba after a failed revolt against the dictatorial right-wing regime of President Fulgencio Batista in 1953. He quickly joined the Castros' "26th of July Movement", and returned with the brothers and 80 other guerillas to Cuba in November 1956 to again attempt revolution.

The expedition landed in swampy southeastern Cuba and was promptly attacked by Batista's forces. Only 15 rebels survived, but they fled to the inaccessible Sierra Maestre mountains, where they slowly gained strength and support against Batista's corrupt government. Guevara rose to become one of Fidel Casro's closest aides.

It was he, then, who won the decisive encounter of the Cuban Revolution, capturing the city of Santa Clara in 1958. Batista was forced to flee the country, and the rebels took control, entering Havana on January 2, 1959.

Guevara played a prominent role in the new government, initially overseeing the purge of political enemies, including many former members of the Batista regime. Later, he became Communist Cuba's effective Finance Minister, guiding it on the socialist path along with Fidel Castro. He wrote extensively during this period, mostly on ideology and the tactics and strategy of guerilla warfare.

Prior to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara was part of a Cuban delegation to Moscow that endorsed the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba. He believed that the missiles would forestall American action against Communist Cuba - which had reason to be worried because of the failed American-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. He reportedly told British reporter Sam Russell after the crisis that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, the Castro regime would have fired them.

After April 1965, Guevara dropped from public view and then vanished altogether. The reasons for his disappearance are still vague, and are attributed variously to the failure of his Marxist economic reforms, a split within the Cuban government (between pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions) and a personal split between he and Castro. The second-mentioned seems the likeliest, for the Sino-Soviet split was then at its height and Guevara's orientation towards the PRC's brand of Marism-Leninism was causing problems for a Cuba that was becoming increasingly reliant on the USSR for aid.

It was only later discovered that Guevara had in fact gone to Africa to aid the pro-Lumumba, Marxist Simba movement in the then newly-independent former Belgian Congo. The revolt was suppressed by the Congolese army and white mercenaries, and Guevara left the Congo with a band of Cuban survivors after spending seven hardship-filled months there. He decided that he could not return to Cuba for "moral reasons" and spend the next half a year living in Dar-es-Salaam, Prague and the GDR. He eventually only returned in order to prepare a new expedition to foment revolution in Latin America.

This was to take Guevara to his final stop - Bolivia. After unsuccessful attempts to rouse the Bolivian masses, Guevara was left with guerilla band of just 50, mainly native Cubans he had brought along with him initially. Abandoned by all the allies he had expected to aid him, he waged a long, lonely campaign in the thick Bolivian jungle as the Bolivian army, assisted by CIA operatives, sought to hunt him down.

On October 8, 1967, they finally managed to surround Guevara and the remnants of his band in the vicinity of the village of La Higuera. The guerillas put up a fierce resistance until all were killed or wounded, and Guevara was captured after being shot in the legs. He was taken to a dilapidated schoolhouse in the village and held overnight, his execution already ordered. In the early afternoon of October 9, 1967, the guerilla leader was shot several times by a Bolivian army sergeant and expired at the age of 39. On October 15, Castro admitted his death and declared three days of national mourning in Cuba. Guevara's remains were only exhumed and positively identified in 1997. On October 17, 1997, they were laid to rest in a specially-built mausoleum in the city of Santa Clara, where he had won the decisive battle of the revolution thirty-nine years earlier.

Undoubtedly one of the best-known figures (if only by his face) of the past century and even today, Guevara was the ultimate revolutionary. He gave up a comfortable life to fight for ideals he genuinely believed in, and was loyal to his form of Marxism-Leninism to the very end. It was his steadfast belief in, and willingness to fight for his ideals, that eventually led to his death - it is a naivety of sorts, one can say.

Power may corrupt most - it did not Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He deserves admiration for that.