PART - 2

He was suffering from the crippling bouts of asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, but he excelled as an athlete. He was an avid rugby union player despite his handicap and earned himself the nickname "Fuser" — a contraction of "El Furibundo" ("The Raging") and his mother's surname, "Serna" — for his aggressive style of play.

By the age of 12 Che Guevara learned chess from his father and began participating in local tournaments. As a teenager he became passionate about poetry, especially that of Pablo Neruda. Guevara also wrote poems throughout his life. He was an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, with interests ranging from adventure classics by Jack London, Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne to essays on sexuality by Sigmund Freud and treatises on social philosophy by Bertrand Russell. In his late teens, he developed a keen interest in photography and spent many hours photographing people, places and archaeological sites.

In 1948 Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. In 1949 he made the first of his long journeys, exploring northern Argentina on a bicycle, and for the first time coming into contact with the very poor and the remnants of the Indian tribes. In 1951, after taking his penultimate exams, his friend, Alberto Granado, a biochemist, suggested that Guevara take a year off from his medical studies to embark on a trip they had talked of making for years, traversing South America. Guevara and Granado soon set off from their hometown of Alta Gracia astride a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle they named "La Poderosa II" ("The Mighty One, I") with the idea of spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper colony in Peru, earning his living by casual labor as he went : he visited southern Argentina, Chile, where he met Salvador Allende, Peru, where he worked for some weeks in the San Pablo leprosarium, Colombia at the time of La Violencia, and where he was arrested but soon released, Venezuela, and Miami. He returned home for his finals sure of only one thing, that he did not want to become a middle-class general practitioner. Che Guevara narrated this journey in "The Motorcycle Diaries", which was translated into English in 1996 and used in 2004 as the basis for a movie of the same name.

Witnessing the widespread poverty, oppression and disenfranchisement throughout South America, and influenced by his readings of Marxist literature, Guevara decided that the only solution for the region’s inequalities was armed revolution. His travels and readings also led him to view Latin America not as a group of separate nations but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide strategy for liberation. His conception of a borderless, united Ibero-America sharing a common 'mestizo' culture was a theme that would prominently recur during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he expedited the completion of his medical studies in order to resume his travels in South America and received his diploma on 12 June 1953, specializing in dermatology, and went to La Paz, Bolivia, during the National Revolution which he condemned.

........................continued on http://thecheschase3.blogspot.com/