Everybody knows of the iconic symbol that is Che Guevara. He is on t-shirts and posters the world over but what do we really know of the South American hero who was shot in the jungles of Bolivia?

Che, whose full name was Ernesto Guevara, was born in Argentina in 1928. His father was a civil engineer named Ernesto Guevara Lynch. One of Guevara’s forebears, Patrick Lynch, was born in Galway in 1715. He left for Bilbao, Spain, and travelled from there to Argentina. Francisco Lynch (Guevara’s great-grandfather) was born in 1817, and Ana Lynch (his grandmother) in 1868.

Che’s first two years were spent in Caraguatay where his father had a plantation and where Celia, his sister was born. The family moved a lot during Che’s early years. He also developed asthma which was to haunt him throughout his life.

In 1948 Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. In 1950 he decided to take a year off and set about touring on a motorbike with a friend of his, Alberto Granado, a fellow student.

Che was 23 when they began their journey. They set off from Cordoba in Argentina on a 1949 Norton 500cc motorbike and travelled through Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico. They worked as casual labourers, football coaches and medical assistants along the way.

The poverty of the native population changed them forever. Guevara narrated this journey in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, which was translated into English in 1996 and used in 2004 as the basis for a motion picture of the same name. He returned to Argentina and completed his studies in 1953.

He first spoke of the revolution, saying “The revolution will fail unless it succeeds in breaking through the Indians’ spiritual isolation, touching them to the core, shaking them to their very bones, giving back their stature as human beings, otherwise, what good is it?”

The exact date that Che met Castro is not known but it was around 1955. Che did know Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother who was an experienced militant in the International Communist movement. Fidel and Che became friends.

Guevara , by 1956 was a fully trained member of the military. He married his first wife in 1955 and he had one daughter, Hilda. In the mountains Guevara met Aleida March in 1958, a 24-year-old revolutionary fighter, and she became his second wife in 1959.

Castro knew of Che’s leadership qualities and set him a task in the jungles of Cuba. In 1956, along with Fidel Castro and a handful of others, he crossed the Caribbean in the rickety yacht ‘Granma’ on the mad mission of invading Cuba and overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Landing in a hostile swamp, losing most of their contingent, the survivors fought their way to the Sierra Maestra. A little over two years later, after a guerrilla campaign in which Guevara displayed such outrageous bravery and skill that he was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana and launched what was to become the first and only victorious socialist revolution in the Americas.

In 1966 Guevara turned up incognito in Bolivia where he trained and led a guerrilla war in the Santa Cruz region. Guevara failed to win the support of the peasants and his group was surrounded near Vallegrande by American-trained Bolivian troops. In 1967 on 9th October Che was executed. At the age of 39 he was shot by Lieutenant Mario Teran in a dilapidated schoolroom at La Higuera, where he had been captured after a skirmish.

Guevara’s corpse was buried in a ditch at the end of the runway site of Vallegrande’s new airport. Forty years have passed and Che has persisted in our memory. His figure stares out at us from coffee mugs, posters and the end of key rings.

The real man has been swallowed by the myth. Ariel Dorfman in ‘Time’ magazine has written: “Gone is the generous Che who tended wounded enemy soldiers, gone is the vulnerable warrior who wanted to curtail his love of life lest it make him less effective in combat and gone also is the darker, more turbulent Che who signed orders to execute prisoners in Cuban jails without a fair trial.”

Main picture: Guevara in 1951 before undergoing the image overhaul which transformed him into the messianic-looking Che, seen below.