The Revolutionary’s March

Havana burned with victory on New Year’s Day, 1959. Not the kind of burn you feel from a sparkler clutched in eager fingers, but the kind that crawls up your spine when something fundamental has shifted in the world. The guerrillas’ cheers echoed through streets where Batista’s shadow had once stretched long and terrible. Those cheers weren’t for the turning of a calendar page, no sir. They were for something older than calendars, older than governments—the sound of the oppressed finally tasting freedom.

Two days later, on January 3rd, La Cabaña fortress became a theater of justice—or vengeance, depending on which side of history you stood. Hundreds of revolutionary guerrillas conducted open trials, the kind where the verdict travels before the evidence like a bullet before its sound. They were there to punish Batista’s men—torturers, murderers, the kind of men who sleep soundly after making others scream. The trials had teeth, and those teeth were hungry.

Meanwhile, the military commander they called “Che” finally allowed his body the luxury of rest. Picture him there, among medical tents that smelled of antiseptic and revolution, a smile playing across his face like summer lightning. He was waiting—Christ, weren’t they all waiting?—for his friend Fidel Castro to return from Santiago de Cuba, where they’d captured Moncada, that symbolic prize.

(The waiting is always the hardest part, as any executioner would tell you.)

According to Richard L. Harris, who wrote Che Guevara: A Biography in 2010, Che never saw himself becoming the grand revolutionary figure of ‘59. Three years earlier, he’d been just another restless young man with a motorcycle and no particular destination. He named his Norton 500 “La Poderosa”—The Mighty One—with the kind of reverence boys reserve for things that carry them away from what they know.

That motorcycle journey with his buddy Alberto Granado later became The Motorcycle Diaries—first a book, then a movie. Funny how a man’s aimless wandering can become legend when he later changes the world. That’s how history works sometimes, creating importance retroactively, like footprints filling with blood.

Everything changed for Ernesto Guevara when he met Fidel Castro in Mexico City. Some people go their whole lives without feeling destiny’s hand on their shoulder. Che felt it that day, heavy as a father’s grip, inescapable as death.

He wasn’t Ernesto Guevara de La Serna to the Cubans—that mouthful of Argentine privilege. He was just “Che,” a foreigner who somehow became the beating heart of their revolution. When victory came, he stood equal to Castro in the people’s eyes, loved with the fierce devotion that only revolutionaries and rock stars inspire.

As the revolution blossomed (and oh, how it blossomed, like one of those night-blooming flowers that reeks of both perfume and decay), Che ascended to the triumvirate of power alongside the Castro brothers. He wasn’t just a soldier—he was a voice that could set minds ablaze.

“¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” he once whispered to a Bolivian schoolteacher named Julia Cortez. Until victory always awaits. Just a handful of words, but they burrowed into her like parasites, making her love the very man her country had captured. Words have power. Some men know how to harness it better than others.

Castro knew what he had in Che. In his memoir, he described Guevara as that rarest of creatures—a statesman without personal ambition. Maybe that’s why Castro trusted him so completely, making him president of Cuba’s Central Bank and a special diplomat. Trust is always more freely given to those who don’t seem to want what you have.

When Che accepted these positions, he shed his Argentine citizenship like a snake shedding skin. Cuba was his home now. Cuba was his cause.

The fledgling revolutionary government needed allies—every new regime does, especially ones with the stink of communism on them. They needed to spread their message, to find friends in a world dominated by their enemies. Who better to send than the charismatic doctor who loved nothing more than the open road?

So in mid-1959, Che packed his bags and led a Cuban delegation around the world—Asia, Europe, Africa. Two months of handshakes and speeches and laying the groundwork for a future that would never quite arrive.

From July to August, Indonesia became his temporary stage. Not by accident—a few years earlier, in 1955, President Sukarno had made waves by hosting the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung. Their slogan might as well have been printed on Che’s heart: reject imperialism, reject capitalism. The same old story that’s been playing out since the first man built a fence and called the land his own.

Imagine the scene at Che’s arrival—him in full military regalia, the green beret perched atop his head like a crown, being welcomed by Sukarno himself. The Merdeka Palace watched as these two men—so different in background, so similar in vision—clasped hands and spoke of freedom as if it were a woman they both loved.

Historial.id tells us Sukarno shared his philosophy of Marhaenism with the visitor from Cuba. “Historical change must break through, shatter,” Sukarno told Che, eyes burning with conviction. “And from that shattered situation, we build something new, a respectable and humanizing society.”

(Easy to talk about shattering things when you’re not the one being broken, ain’t it?)

The meeting bore fruit—bilateral relations between Cuba and Indonesia, focused on health and sports. The boring stuff of diplomacy that follows the exciting stuff of revolution.

The Cuban delegation’s schedule was tighter than a hangman’s noose. After Jakarta came Yogyakarta, and on July 31, they walked the grounds of Gedung Agung alongside Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, touring the sultanate complex like tourists—except tourists don’t usually discuss the overthrow of global power structures between photo opportunities.

For Che, revolution was like gardening—it needed the right fertilizer to grow. And his fertilizer of choice came wrapped in tobacco leaves. The man loved his cigars; they were as much a part of him as his beret, as his asthma, as his revolutionary fervor.

So it’s no surprise that after visiting the Sultan’s palace, Che made his way to the oldest cigar factory in Southeast Asia—N.V. Negresco, later renamed Taru Martani in 1972. “Taru” means leaf, “martini” means to give life. A pretty name for a factory built on an addiction.

The evidence of his visit still exists, yellowing photographs in frames hanging in the café that’s now part of the factory complex. A larger photo decorates the hallway, where the ghost of Che lingers among the earthy scent of tobacco that never quite fades from the walls.

The factory welcomed him like a returning hero, creating an exclusive cigar edition titled “ERNESTO” just for him. Che took them home, probably never imagining that decades later, tourists would buy these same cigars as souvenirs of a revolutionary they never met.

Today’s “ERNESTO” cigars come in packs of three, medium-sized, decorated with a crowned yellow lion on a red circular background. The taste is creamy from the fermentation, with a smooth aroma but a bold draw—just like the man they’re named for. Smooth on the surface, but God, the fire underneath.

Che wasn’t all politics and cigars, though. He brought his beloved camera along—a Nikon S2, Soviet-made of course. It had been his constant companion since his days as a photographer for the Mexican newspaper Agencia Latina back in the 50s.

Picture him there at Borobudur Temple in Magelang on that warm afternoon, the revolutionary temporarily transformed into just another tourist, snapping photos with his Nikon clutched in both hands. Even legends need vacations.

The Indonesian chapter of Che’s story had an epilogue. On May 13, 1960, Sukarno returned the favor, visiting Cuba where both Che and Castro welcomed him with open arms. Forty-eight years after that meeting, in 2008, PT Pos Indonesia commemorated the moment with special stamps showing Sukarno, Castro, and Guevara at Havana’s Jose Marti Airport—three men frozen in time, their dreams still intact, their failures not yet written.

Seven years after walking among Indonesia’s ancient temples, Che tried once more to change the world. He led guerrillas into Bolivia, determined to free another country from American capitalism’s grip. But fate—or the CIA—had other plans.

They caught him, those shadowy men who protect empires from idealists. In the Bay of Pigs, La Higuera, they executed him like you might put down a rabid dog—quickly, efficiently, with just enough ceremony to send a message.

Che Guevara died at 39, an age when most men are just beginning to understand the world. His body failed before his conviction did. And sometimes, late at night when the world is quiet enough to hear such things, you might catch the whisper of his famous phrase—¡Hasta la victoria siempre!—carried on a wind that smells faintly of Cuban cigars and Indonesian spices and the metallic tang of revolution.

(But victory never came, did it? Not the way he imagined it. Not the way any of us imagine it. That’s the thing about revolutions—they’re like wheels, always coming back around to where they started, just with different men at the top.)