In 1941, although he continued to live in Alta Gracia, Ernesto enrolled in the ?Dean Funes? School in Cordoba. It was a liberal school, where discrimination was not admitted. He commuted daily over 35 kilometers from Alta Gracia to Cordoba. His family then decided to move to the latter. There he met Tomas, Alberto and Gregorio Granado and Gustavo Roca. He kept his passion for reading. He read Sigmund Freud, Pablo Neruda, Horacio Quiroga, Jose Ingenieros, Anatole France, Jack London, Carlos Gustavo Jung, Alfredo Adler and also a short version of Karl Marx ?The Capital?.
In 1942, after his fourteenth birthday, Ernesto asked his father?s permission to go with his younger brother Roberto to work in the grape harvest at a nearby vineyard during holidays. For several days they worked in the harvest, but he then had to interrupt it and returned home due to continuous asthma attacks. Ernesto learned of the abuse dispensed on the workers and even had an argument with the farm owner when he refused to pay them all the wages for the days they had worked.The man alleged that the youngster had not honoured their commitment of working all the days they had planned.
In 1947, when his grandmother fell terminally ill in March, Ernesto immediately left for Buenos Aires. He spent 17 days by her side. After witnessing her grandmother?s agony and death, he decided to quit studying engineering that he had begun a year earlier, and went for medicine. The family moved to the Argentine capital. They lived in the home formerly occupied by Ernesto?s grandmother, on Arenales and Uriburu streets.
He studied hard between 12 and 14 hours a day at the library with the aim to finish his medicine studies earlier. He attained this the following year when he passed in May all the subjects for the first year, in June all those of the second year and in December he finished the third year. In December 1947 Ernesto enrolled in the School of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires with record 59345.
"?And when I took my first steps to become a doctor, when I began studying medicine, most of the concepts I now have as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideas. I wanted to be successful like everybody else; I dreamt of being a famous researcher, I dreamt of working tirelessly to achieve something that, ultimately, would not be made available to the whole of mankind, but at that moment it would have been a personal victory. I was, as we all are, a child of my milieu?"
While Ernesto was studying medicine he was also working in different places, among them the municipality of Buenos Aires and on a merchant ship where he worked as a nurse. His first trip abroad was on an oil ship that sailed from the port of Comodoro Rivadavia. He traveled to Trinidad and Tobago. During this period he worked at the Institute of Allergy Research, owned by Salvador Pissani, an outstanding specialist, with whom he made friends.
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A
detailed chronology of Che's life you can find
in this book "A Brave Man" on Cuba
Directo website |
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