Canek Sanchez Guevara

Canek Sánchez Guevara (1974–2015) was a Cuban author, photographer, musician and dissident. The grandson of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, he grew up in the upper crust of post-revolutionary Cuban society, but soon became disillusioned with the government of Fidel Castro. After his mother's death, he went into exile in Mexico, where he worked as a writer for Proceso, penning criticisms of the Cuban government from a left-wing anarchist perspective. He died in 2015, following complications with cardiac surgery.

Biography Canek Sánchez Guevara was born in the Cuban capital of Havana on 22 May 1974. He was the son of Mexican left-wing activist Alberto Sánchez Hernández and Hildita Guevara Gadea, the eldest daughter of the Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara. where his mother worked at a government propaganda centre. In October 2004, he wrote in Proceso that: "The Cuban revolution has given birth to a bourgeoisie, to repressive apparatuses meant to defend from the people a bureaucracy very distant from that same people. But above all it has been anti-democratic because of the religious messianism of its leader." He further denounced "the criminalisation of difference, the means of persecution of homosexuals, hippies, free thinkers, trade unionists and poets" and the installation of "a socialist bourgeoisie". He concluded with a declaration that: "All my criticisms of Fidel Castro start from his distancing from libertarian ideas, of his treason committed against the people of Cuba and the frightful system of vigilance established to preserve the State by crushing people." In 2016, a number of his books were released posthumously. These included his autobiography Diario sin motocicleta and the novel 33 Revoluciones.