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aby
Malayalam
Directed by	Srikant Murali
Produced by	Suvin K Varkey
Screenplay by	Santhosh Echikkanam
Starring	Vineeth Sreenivasan Aju Varghese Suraj Venjaramoodu Sudheer Karamana Mareena Michael Vineetha Koshy
Music by	Songs: Bijibal Jason J. Nair Background Score: Anil Johnson
Cinematography	Sudheer Surendran
Edited by	Sooraj E S
Production company	Little Big Films
Distributed by	Central Films
Release date	23 February 2017
Running time	133 minutes
Country	India
Language	Malayalam

Aby is a 2017 Malayalam film directed by prolific advertisement filmmaker Srikant Murali in his feature directorial debut. It is written by Santhosh Echikkanam and produced by Suvin K Varkey under the banner of Little Big Films.Vineeth Sreenivasan plays the lead and titular character of Aby.^[1] Aju Varghese, Suraj Venjaramoodu play supporting characters      

The story of Aby revolves around a young guy with the same name, who nurtures a big dream. He dreams to fly just like the birds and his big aim in life is to make an aeroplane on his own, one day. But, Aby's crazy dream doesn't have much takers and certain situations push him out of his native place. Will Aby accomplish his dream or not forms the rest of the story.

Director – Srikant Murali

It is a decent debut for Srikant Murali, the director. The director comes out successful in delivering a decent film without adding many dramatic elements. He has remained in the safe zone, following the template of inspirational movies and hence, the room for innovation was lesser. On the flip side, the placement of songs looked irritating.

Writer – Santhosh Echikkanam

For sure, Aby is not the best work of Santhosh Echikkanam. One would get the feel like he could have concentrated a bit more on the development of each characters. But still, there are certain areas where the writer in him wins giving the necessary materials to the director to work on.

Vineeth Sreenivasan As Aby Vineeth Sreenivasan appears as the title character Aby. It was a pretty decent performance from the actor. He has pulled off the different stages of Aby's life successfully. There were certain sequences in which he was trying too much but overall, he has done justice to the character of Aby

Aju Varghese As Kunjoottan Aju Varghese plays Kunjoottan, one of the classmates of Aby. Well, the actor has mastered in doing such kind of roles and he has kept the entertainment quotient intact, with his portrayal of Kunjoottan.

Mareena Michael As Anumol Xavier Mareena Michael who was previously seen in Happy Wedding plays the childhood friend of Aby, in this film. The character of Anumol isn't like the stereotyped leading ladies in films and Mareena has done her part, pretty well. She is definitely a good prospect.
Suraj Venjaramoodu As Xavier Suraj Venjaramoodu appears as Xavier, father of Anumol, in Aby. It was a rather matured performance from this actor. There aren't any forced comedies for the actor in the film and we get to see him deliver some quality comedies in Aby.

Read more at: http://www.filmibeat.com/malayalam/reviews/2017/aby-movie-review-rating-plot/articlecontent-pf196102-254914.html
Read more at: http://www.filmibeat.com/malayalam/reviews/2017/aby-movie-review-rating-plot/articlecontent-pf196100-254914.html

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Aby is a boy who dreams to fly. The movie begins in his childhood, where he regularly jumped out of elevated positions in an attempt to fly; often injuring himself in the process. He barely spoke a word, leading his folk to believe that he is mentally disabled. He went to a special-needs school. His father worked as a policy agent, and eventually used Aby to gain sympathy of potential customers to make them sign his policies. Eventually, his mother finds out of his doings and his absence from school because of this. A big fight between them ensues and Aby's mother passes away next morning.

A few years later, Aby is an adolescent and works at a mechanical workshop; now a savant in electronics. His father takes the salary to feed his alcoholism. His neighbor and girlfriend, Anumol goes to school with him, along with Kunjootan. She requests Any to help her make a science project for a competition, which Aby agrees to. The project ends with it getting big recognition and Anumol getting rewarded with prizes. However, on the day she gets honored, Aby's father arrives and makes a scene demanding the money as Aby made the project. A feud erupts between the neighbors. His father's alcoholism grows more and more volatile as he ends up burning a mockup helicopter made by Aby using an auto-rickshaw and salvage. Aby becomes frustrated and flees the town.

Aby reaches Bangalore where he meets some workers who sell salvage and scrap for money. He helps fix their phone and devises a mechanism to prank a man who was a nuisance to them. Soon, Aby becomes friends with them and joins their work. A few days later, he finds a discarded toy airplane, from where he meets G. K. Menon, an alcoholic airplane manufacturer. Menon quickly becomes fond of Aby and his wish to fly, discovering his technical intelligence in the process. Menon shares his basic knowledge with him, fuelling Aby's fascination. Soon, Menon receives a job to manufacture a light aircraft, to where Aby joins him. Aby records his conversations, learning more and more about aircraft in his free time. When the aircraft was built, Aby gets carried away and attempts to ride the aircraft and crashes it, earning Menon's frustration and anger. Menon scolds Aby and demands he go away, where he flees back to his hometown.

It is now 7 years since his return, and Anumol is helping the village expand. He has gathered materials, and begins work on a glider for three years. Anumol, amidst the rekindled family feud, helps Aby build a glider, which gradually grabs the attention of media and people from distant places. This earns her anger from her father who builds hatred towards Aby and his work. On the debut of his homemade glider with hundreds of onlookers, he is halted by law enforcement who stated that he did not have paperwork, making the flight illegal. Aby, with the help of Anumol and several of his townsfolk gathers the required paperwork. His father provides the money he's saved up, showing that he is turning into a better man and leaving his alcoholism. Menon even appears, being a certified airplane manufacturer, says that Aby has built the most efficient model he has seen in his career; giving him approval. Anumol's father attempts to sabotage the paperwork, where Anumol begs and pleads to let Aby fly and not take vengeance on his dreams. Anumol's father reconsiders his actions and decides that he wants to see Aby achieve his goal.

Aby's glider is now ready to go once again, with the correct paperwork filed in and now legal. However, another obstacle arises as the law enforcement gets a tip against Aby's disability paperwork and that his craft hasn't been flown by a certified pilot. Anumol's father confesses to tipping against him, with Menon vouching for Aby's mental status. This promptly evolves into a huge quarrel involving the frustrated onlookers, which Aby takes advantage of and flies the glider successfully; with the aid of Menon giving instructions. Hundreds of onlookers and the police watch with fascination, ending the argument and proud that Aby has made his dreams to reality.

At present time, Aby is shown as an expert glider, selected by Air Asia in Dubai; and is seen soaring the skies with a glider as the movie ends.

The movie has received positive reviews from critics .Awarding the film 3.5 in a scale of 5, Litty Simon from Malayala Manorama wrote: In his first directorial venture as a filmmaker, Srikanth aptly portrays various emotions – innocence, the love, the family bonding, the failure, and achievements. With a simple plot, Aby is a movie that can be enjoyed by all age groups. The feel-good motivational drama, Aby, made with some genuine intentions is a darling film...^[8]

In her review for The Times of India ,Deepa Soman rated the film 3.5 out of 5 stars.She lauded the crew for brilliant casting, right from the child artiste who plays the little Aby, his parents (Sudheer Karamana and Vineetha Koshy), his friend Kunjoottan played by Aju Varghese and his lady love Anumol by Mareena Michael.Overall, this is one of those films with an unconventional underdog as the hero, for whom you would root with tears in your eyes and a smile on your face, and come out of the hall with a wholesome cinematic experience.^[9]

Arathi Kannan of The New Indian Express has written that Aby is the kind of a movie where wishes written on the blue skies are made into a reality with sheer earnestness and persistence.She has mentioned that 'Aby's story makes for a scroll that rolls down to read ‘optimism’ in bold, Aby stands true to the inspirational movie genre and strives towards the goal, flitting through serendipitious meetings and the right-person-at-the-right-time situations.^[10]

Directed by debutante Srikant Murali, written by Santhosh Echikkanam, Vineeth Sreenivasan's Aby is an inspirational story of a boy who wishes to fly. Aby is a special and highly intelligent boy whose sole purpose in life is to build a flying machine.

The plot of the movie revolves around Aby, his deep desire to hover through the air, and his childhood love Anumol. How Aby overcomes every hurdle to finally ascend to the sky forms the crux of the movie.

The story has great potential to it, but unfortunately, it does not reflect onto the movie. The screenplay is indistinct and vague and has a number of unwanted characters and unnecessary scenes.  Moreover, the basic nature of many characters keeps changing and is illogical. The movie would have been much more appealing if the makers had concentrated more on the subject and restricted the story in the first half to a quarter of an hour.

The direction is very amateurish and the director appears to have no control over the screenplay, which seems to have many missing scenes in it. The process of building an aeroplane or any flying device is very complex and hence while making a movie based on the subject, it is advisable to do some technical research on it. For a movie that shows the story of a genius, Aby has a little science in it.

Vineeth Sreenivasan's performance as a differently abled young man is unsatisfying and disappointing. In spite of his heartfelt effort, he does not succeed to enthral the audience with his portrayal of Aby. Mareena Michael has acted decently and is bound to have a good future in Malayalam cinema. Even though his character is poorly written, Manish Choudhary performs elegantly. The rest of the cast including Suraj Venjarammood, Sudheer Karamana, Aju Varghese and Vinitha Koshy live up to the expectation

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa]^[4] June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967)^[1] was an Argentine Marxistrevolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.^[5]

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed.^[6] His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology.^[6] Later, in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.^[7] Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.^[8]

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals,^[9] instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba's armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion^[10] and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.^[11] Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism, and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedy being proletarian internationalism and world revolution.^[12][13] Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed.^[14]

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a "new man" driven by moral rather than material incentives,^[15] he has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist-inspired movements. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century,^[16] while an Alberto Korda photograph of him, titled Guerrillero Heroico (shown), was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as "the most famous photograph in the world".^[17]

Ernesto Guevara was born to Ernesto Guevara Lynch and his wife, Celia de la Serna y Llosa, on June 14, 1928,^[1] in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a middle-class Argentine family of Spanish (including Basque and Cantabrian) descent, as well as Irish by means of his aristocratic ancestor Patrick Lynch.^[18][19][20] In accordance with the flexibility allowed in Spanish naming customs, his legal name (Ernesto Guevara) will sometimes appear with "de la Serna" and/or "Lynch" accompanying it.^[21] Referring to Che's "restless" nature, his father declared "the first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels".^[22]

Very early on in life, Ernestito (as he was then called) developed an "affinity for the poor".^[23] Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy.^[24] His father, a staunch supporter of Republicans from the Spanish Civil War, often hosted many veterans from the conflict in the Guevara home.^[25]

Despite suffering crippling bouts of acute asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete, enjoying swimming, football, golf, and shooting, while also becoming an "untiring" cyclist.^[26][27] He was an avid rugby union player,^[28] and played at fly-half for Club Universitario de Buenos Aires.^[29] His rugby playing earned him the nickname "Fuser"—a contraction of El Furibundo (raging) and his mother's surname, de la Serna—for his aggressive style of play.^[30]

Guevara learned chess from his father and began participating in local tournaments by age 12. During adolescence and throughout his life, he was passionate about poetry, especially that of Pablo Neruda, John Keats, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, César Vallejo, and Walt Whitman.^[31] He could also recite Rudyard Kipling's "If—" and José Hernández's Martín Fierro by heart.^[31] The Guevara home contained more than 3,000 books, which allowed Guevara to be an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, with interests including Karl Marx, William Faulkner, André Gide, Emilio Salgari and Jules Verne.^[32] Additionally, he enjoyed the works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Vladimir Lenin, and Jean-Paul Sartre; as well as Anatole France, Friedrich Engels, H. G. Wells, and Robert Frost.^[33]

As he grew older, he developed an interest in the Latin American writers Horacio Quiroga, Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío, and Miguel Asturias.^[33] Many of these authors' ideas he cataloged in his own handwritten notebooks of concepts, definitions, and philosophies of influential intellectuals. These included composing analytical sketches of Buddha and Aristotle, along with examining Bertrand Russell on love and patriotism, Jack London on society, and Nietzsche on the idea of death. Sigmund Freud's ideas fascinated him as he quoted him on a variety of topics from dreams and libido to narcissism and the Oedipus complex.^[33] His favorite subjects in school included philosophy, mathematics, engineering, political science, sociology, history and archaeology.^[34][35]

Years later, a February 13, 1958, declassified CIA 'biographical and personality report' would make note of Guevara's wide range of academic interests and intellect, describing him as "quite well read" while adding that "Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino."^[36]

Motorcycle journey

Main articles: The Motorcycle Diaries (book) and The Motorcycle Diaries (film)

In 1948, Guevara entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. His "hunger to explore the world"^[37] led him to intersperse his collegiate pursuits with two long introspective journeys that would fundamentally change the way he viewed himself and the contemporary economic conditions in Latin America. The first expedition in 1950 was a 4,500-kilometer (2,800 mi) solo trip through the rural provinces of northern Argentina on a bicycle on which he installed a small engine.^[38] This was followed in 1951 by a nine-month, 8,000-kilometer (5,000 mi) continental motorcycle trek through most of South America. For the latter, he took a year off from his studies to embark with his friend Alberto Granado, with the final goal of spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo leper colony in Peru, on the banks of the Amazon River.^[39]

In Chile, Guevara found himself enraged by the working conditions of the miners in Anaconda's Chuquicamata copper mine and moved by his overnight encounter in the Atacama Desert with a persecuted communist couple who did not even own a blanket, describing them as "the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation".^[41] Additionally, on the way to Machu Picchu high in the Andes, he was struck by the crushing poverty of the remote rural areas, where peasant farmers worked small plots of land owned by wealthy landlords.^[42] Later on his journey, Guevara was especially impressed by the camaraderie among those living in a leper colony, stating "The highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among such lonely and desperate people."^[42] Guevara used notes taken during this trip to write an account, titled The Motorcycle Diaries, which later became a New York Times best-seller,^[43] and was adapted into a 2004 award-winning film of the same name.

The journey took Guevara through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Miami, Florida, for 20 days,^[44] before returning home to Buenos Aires. By the end of the trip, he came to view Latin America not as collection of separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy. His conception of a borderless, united Hispanic America sharing a common Latino heritage was a theme that recurred prominently during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he completed his studies and received his medical degree in June 1953, making him officially "Dr. Ernesto Guevara".^[45][46]

Guevara later remarked that through his travels in Latin America, he came in "close contact with poverty, hunger and disease" along with the "inability to treat a child because of lack of money" and "stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment" that leads a father to "accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident". It was these experiences which Guevara cites as convincing him that in order to "help these people", he needed to leave the realm of medicine, and consider the political arena of armed struggle.^[6]

Guatemala, Árbenz, and United Fruit

On July 7, 1953, Guevara set out again, this time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. On December 10, 1953, before leaving for Guatemala, Guevara sent an update to his Aunt Beatriz from San José, Costa Rica. In the letter Guevara speaks of traversing the dominion of the United Fruit Company; a journey which convinced him that the Company's capitalist system was a terrible one.^[48] This affirmed indignation carried the more aggressive tone he adopted in order to frighten his more Conservative relatives, and ends with Guevara swearing on an image of the then recently deceased Joseph Stalin, not to rest until these "octopuses have been vanquished".^[49] Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 acres (91,000 ha) of uncultivated land.^[50] Pleased with the road the nation was heading down, Guevara decided to settle down in Guatemala so as to "perfect himself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary."^[51]

In Guatemala City, Guevara sought out Hilda Gadea Acosta, a Peruvian economist who was well-connected politically as a member of the left-leaning Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA, American Popular Revolutionary Alliance). She introduced Guevara to a number of high-level officials in the Arbenz government. Guevara then established contact with a group of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro through the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. During this period, he acquired his famous nickname, due to his frequent use of the Argentine filler syllable che (a multi-purpose discourse marker, like the syllable "eh" in Canadian English).^[52] During his time in Guatemala, Guevara was helped by other Central American exiles, one of whom, Helena Leiva de Holst, provided him with food and lodging,^[53] discussed her travels to study Marxism in Russia and China,^[54] and to whom, Guevara dedicated a poem, "Invitación al camino".^[55]

On May 15, 1954, a shipment of Škoda infantry and light artillery weapons was dispatched from Communist Czechoslovakia for the Arbenz Government and arrived in Puerto Barrios.^[56] As a result, the United States government—which since 1953 had been tasked by President Eisenhower to remove Arbenz from power in the multifaceted CIA operation code named PBSUCCESS—responded by saturating Guatemala with anti-Arbenz propaganda through radio and dropped leaflets, and began bombing raids using unmarked airplanes.^[57] The United States also sponsored a force of several hundred Guatemalan refugees and mercenaries who were headed by Castillo Armas to help remove the Arbenz government. Though the impact of the U.S. actions on subsequent events is debatable, by late June, Arbenz came to the conclusion that resistance against the "giant of the north" was futile and resigned.^[57] This allowed Armas and his CIA-assisted forces to march into Guatemala City and establish a military junta, which would, twelve days later on July 8, elect Armas President.^[57] Consequently, the Armas regime then consolidated power by rounding up hundreds of suspected communists and executed hundreds of prisoners, while crushing the previously flourishing labor unions and restoring all of United Fruits previous land holdings.^[57]

Guevara himself was eager to fight on behalf of Arbenz and joined an armed militia organized by the Communist Youth for that purpose, but frustrated with the group's inaction, he soon returned to medical duties. Following the coup, he again volunteered to fight, but soon after, Arbenz took refuge in the Mexican Embassy and told his foreign supporters to leave the country. Guevara's repeated calls to resist were noted by supporters of the coup, and he was marked for murder.^[58] After Hilda Gadea was arrested, Guevara sought protection inside the Argentine consulate, where he remained until he received a safe-conduct pass some weeks later and made his way to Mexico.^[59]

The overthrow of the Arbenz regime and establishment of the right-wing Armas dictatorship cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to redress the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries.^[51] In speaking about the coup, Guevara stated:

The last Latin American revolutionary democracy – that of Jacobo Arbenz – failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the United States. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company.^[58]

Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened.^[60] Gadea wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."^[61]

Mexico City and preparation

Guevara arrived in Mexico City on 21 September 1954, and worked in the allergy section of the General Hospital and at the Hospital Infantil de Mexico.^[62][63] In addition he gave lectures on medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in the National Autonomous University of Mexico and worked as a news photographer for Latina News Agency.^[64][65] His first wife Hilda notes in her memoir My Life with Che, that for a while, Guevara considered going to work as a doctor in Africa and that he continued to be deeply troubled by the poverty around him.^[66] In one instance, Hilda describes Guevara's obsession with an elderly washerwoman whom he was treating, remarking that he saw her as "representative of the most forgotten and exploited class". Hilda later found a poem that Che had dedicated to the old woman, containing "a promise to fight for a better world, for a better life for all the poor and exploited".^[66]

During this time he renewed his friendship with Ñico López and the other Cuban exiles whom he had met in Guatemala. In June 1955, López introduced him to Raúl Castro, who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had formed the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. During a long conversation with Fidel on the night of their first meeting, Guevara concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one for which he had been searching and before daybreak he had signed up as a member of the July 26 Movement.^[67] Despite their "contrasting personalities", from this point on Che and Fidel began to foster what dual biographer Simon Reid-Henry deems a "revolutionary friendship that would change the world", as a result of their coinciding commitment to anti-imperialism.^[68]

By this point in Guevara's life, he deemed that U.S.-controlled conglomerates installed and supported repressive regimes around the world. In this vein, he considered Batista a "U.S. puppet whose strings needed cutting".^[69] Although he planned to be the group's combat medic, Guevara participated in the military training with the members of the Movement. The key portion of training involved learning hit and run tactics of guerrilla warfare. Guevara and the others underwent arduous 15-hour marches over mountains, across rivers, and through the dense undergrowth, learning and perfecting the procedures of ambush and quick retreat. From the start Guevara was Alberto Bayo's "prize student" among those in training, scoring the highest on all of the tests given.^[70] At the end of the course, he was called "the best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor, General Bayo.^[71]

The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via the Granma, an old, leaky cabin cruiser. They set out for Cuba on November 25, 1956. Attacked by Batista's military soon after landing, many of the 82 men were either killed in the attack or executed upon capture; only 22 found each other afterwards.^[73] During this initial bloody confrontation Guevara laid down his medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, proving to be a symbolic moment in Che's life.^[74]

Only a small band of revolutionaries survived to re-group as a bedraggled fighting force deep in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they received support from the urban guerrilla network of Frank País, the 26th of July Movement, and local campesinos. With the group withdrawn to the Sierra, the world wondered whether Castro was alive or dead until early 1957 when the interview by Herbert Matthews appeared in The New York Times. The article presented a lasting, almost mythical image for Castro and the guerrillas. Guevara was not present for the interview, but in the coming months he began to realize the importance of the media in their struggle. Meanwhile, as supplies and morale diminished, and with an allergy to mosquito bites which resulted in agonizing walnut-sized cysts on his body,^[75] Guevara considered these "the most painful days of the war".^[76]

During Guevara's time living hidden among the poor subsistence farmers of the Sierra Maestra mountains, he discovered that there were no schools, no electricity, minimal access to healthcare, and more than 40 percent of the adults were illiterate.^[77] As the war continued, Guevara became an integral part of the rebel army and "convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience".^[8] Guevara set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, taught new recruits about tactics, and organized schools to teach illiterate campesinos to read and write.^[8] Moreover, Guevara established health clinics, workshops to teach military tactics, and a newspaper to disseminate information.^[78] The man whom Time dubbed three years later "Castro's brain" at this point was promoted by Fidel Castro to Comandante (commander) of a second army column.^[8]

As second in command, Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads to track those seeking to go AWOL.^[79] As a result, Guevara became feared for his brutality and ruthlessness.^[80] During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also responsible for the sometimes summary execution of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies.^[81] In his diaries, Guevara described the first such execution of Eutímio Guerra, a peasant army guide who admitted treason when it was discovered he accepted the promise of ten thousand pesos for repeatedly giving away the rebel's position for attack by the Cuban air force.^[82] Such information also allowed Batista's army to burn the homes of peasants sympathetic to the revolution.^[82]Upon Guerra's request that they "end his life quickly",^[82] Che stepped forward and shot him in the head, writing "The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutimio so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]."^[83] His scientific notations and matter-of-fact description, suggested to one biographer a "remarkable detachment to violence" by that point in the war.^[83] Later, Guevara published a literary account of the incident, titled "Death of a Traitor", where he transfigured Eutimio's betrayal and pre-execution request that the revolution "take care of his children", into a "revolutionary parable about redemption through sacrifice".^[83]