Eventually, with little results and after months of frustration, he left the Congo to lead guerrillas in Bolivia.

On October 8, 1967, an informant led the Bolivian Special Forces to Che's guerrilla encampment. He was soon captured and executed the next day, in the town of La Higuera near Vallegrande.

After his hands were surgically amputated, army officers transferred Che's body to an undisclosed location.

Six days later, Castro acknowledged his death and proclaimed three days of public mourning. The revolutionary's body was identified only in 1997, when his remains were exhumed from beneath an air strip near Vallegrande. Later that year, he was laid to rest in a Santa Clara mausoleum in Cuba with full military honours, thirty years after he died.

Photograph: An unusual photo portrait of Che Guevara shaving while crossing Lake Tanganyika in the former Congo (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo) on his way to Tanzania after spending seven months in Congo training local guerrillas. The private diary of Guevara, describing his 225 largely unsuccessful days he spent in Congo, appears in its entirety for the first time in a book titled The African Dream of the Che, What Happened in the Congolese Guerrilla? by Cuban Brigadier General William Galvez. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images