Che in the Congo

On April 24 fifty years ago, an idealistic rebel named Ernesto Guevara, better known as Che, sneaked into an unstable, recently independent, uranium- and cobalt-rich African country called the Congo. With him were a dozen Cuban fighters of African origin. They had been sent by Cuban leader Fidel Castro to help the rebels there make a stand against "Yankee imperialism." It didn't work out, with Guevara calling the whole episode "a failure." "There are too many armed men and what is lacking are soldiers," he reported back to Castro (story, video): http://www.afp.com/en/news/fifty-years-later-tracing-ches-failure-dr-congo

   Epilogue: Shortly after Guevara left, Gen. Joseph Mobutu seized power from the coalition government of Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba and ruled, with Western support, from 1965 to 1997. In 1971, he renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2015/02/upper-crust-to-dust.html). In its list of "Top 15 Toppled Dictators," Time magazine called him "the archetypal African dictator": http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2097426_2097427_2097458,00.html