Guevara was known for seeking to spread the Cuban Revolution. He sought to do so as an insightful but ultimately mistaken observer and participant in what actually occurred in the Sierra Maestra: revolution through the barrel of a gun. He preached the armed struggle to hundreds, if not thousands, of young enthusiasts across Latin America and in Africa; he gave his life for it, and they lost theirs. Until 1979 in Nicaragua, not one of the fires he or Castro tried to light throughout the region survived, let alone burst into flames. The results were not glorious snapshots of the barbudos entering Havana in January of 1959 but rather military coups, torture, disappearances and thousands of student lives lost in vain.

When the left finally reached power in many Latin American nations, its path and features did not at all resemble Guevara’s vision. Gifted labor union and indigenous leaders, charismatic intellectuals, scheming military officers and persistent mayors and legislators made their way gradually up the ranks of their political parties, their electoral systems and their countries’ governments. Once in office, they did not govern like Guevara would have wished. They were everything but idealistic revolutionaries: social-democratic reformers, moderate globalists, nationalist demagogues, corrupt couples or dynasties and would-be dictators. Some extracted millions of their countrymen from poverty and inequality. Others strengthened democratic institutions. Others plunged their countrymen into destitution and violence as in Venezuela.

But the millions of young people everywhere who wear Guevara’s effigy on their chest are a product of what he came to symbolize. The students who took to the streets in Berkeley and Riverside Heights, in Mexico City and the Left Bank, in Prague and Milan, just months after his death, were already carrying posters and banners of the martyred revolutionary. They, unlike their hero, did largely change the world, though obviously not in the manner he would have hoped. Theirs was an existential, cultural, generational and antiwar rebellion that laid the groundwork for the freedoms we enjoy today, at least in the Western nations, Latin America and parts of Asia.

Women’s freedom to use their bodies as they see fit and to fight back against countless abuses; the freedom for people of color to elect who they wish and fight racism where it shows its face; the freedom for university students to participate in the design and execution of educational plans; the expanding possibility of people with different sexual orientations to come out from the shadows: All these joys of life in the 21st century stem, in one fashion or another, from those years in the 1960s.