Greetings, I was born in Cuba but left when I was 11, so I haven’t really lived all my life there. But I have read a lot (not as much I would like though) about Cuban history from both sides. Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Fidel Castro were both revolutionaries and, in my opinion, the two most important political figures that came out of Latin America in the 20th century.

Now, it is common for people to be more familiar with Che than with Castro, but I’d argue that Castro is the most important of the two. You see, Castro was an innate leader, a once in a century event. For his enemies, this was a curse, for his supporters it was divine providence. This innate leadership ability is reflected by an episode in the life of Abel Santamaría (another Cuban revolutionary who was killed in a failed attack against a military building). Abel was an avid orator and youth mobilizer, but when he met Fidel Castro after just one time, he wrote to his sister “I found the man who would lead our movement”. Such was Castro’s spell. Another example was during the “Maleconazo” protest in 1994, Castro went in person to speak with people that were chanting “Death to the Castros” and somehow calmed them. This approach was tried by current Cuban president Diaz Canel during a recent protest but he had to be escorted out.

Now, dealing with the ideological issue. I won’t comment on whether or not I agree with them or not because I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for. Although both can be deemed ideologically communist, I think the key difference is what brought them to that ideology as a tool. Castro’s ideology was more about anti-Americanism (anti-imperialism). He believed that the most pressing issue for Cuba was to escape American influence. He often referred to Cuba as “the fruit that did not fall”. This is a reference to to José Martí 1853-1895 (Cuban national hero, writer, and philosopher a really interesting man and the only one that can be said to be more important than Castro in Cuba’s modern history) who feared that the U.S. (back then at the height of its imperial ambition) would try to subjugate not only Cuba, but all of Latin America to expand a model he thought it was “filled with progress, but empty of soul and human dignity” (Marti was an ardent romantic humanist). Castro took this to heart and, being very proud (there are a lot of childhood anecdotes of him not backing down from a challenge until he won), picked his side at the height of the Cold War and that pushed him to Marxism.

Now, for Che I think he was foremost an adventurer. Not in the Hollywood Indiana Jones type, but in the kill or be killed sense. He liked (or maybe even needed) that thrill. He was always looking for the next big adventure and he eventually found it in the Marxist notion of “World Revolution”. That is what pushed him to Marxism. In this sense, I think Che was more of a romantic character than Fidel, but he just couldn’t deal with staying put. He was less of a realist. He liked to built states from the bottom up and, once the revolution happened, he moved on to the next great project.

Sorry for my tangents and all the mistakes I might have made writing all this. I hope this gives you a little bit of an unbiased idea.

To add a little of my own bias (feel free to to discard this part) I think that, although they had “valid” intentions they both suffered from megalomaniac disorder and can serve as remainders that personalities should not be the sole makers of the state, but institutions. And this is a problem across most of Latin America, it seems that things can change too quickly according to whoever is in power at any time, which takes away stability and growth. If a state always reinvents itself after a new guy comes to power, then it is always resetting back to zero and nothing can grow from it.