Latson led her article, titled “How Che Guevara Didn’t Let Asthma Affect His Ambitions,” with her “even greater threat to his revolutionary ambitions” line about the leftist’s asthma, and noted that “asthma was a constant threat from his earliest youth.” She continued with an account of the physical abuse that Guevara’s father inflicted on his “tiny and sickly” son when he was a child, which “instead of toughening him up…left him with a persistent cough and severe asthma.”

The Time journalist also pointed out that the communist’s “approach to his own health was no gentler; asthma didn’t keep him from embracing the rowdiness of youth…[Guevara] ‘played amateur rugby at top speed, wheezing to the sidelines from time to time for whiffs from the inevitable atomizer.'”

After briefly noting that the asthma “sometimes slowed him down along the way” (and cited a 1953 incident that triggered a “terrifying asthma attack that lasted two full hours”), Latson outlined that the communist “did little to ward off future asthma attacks, with a lifestyle that involved regular raging—and chain-smoking cigars. If anything, his own affliction seemed to be an afterthought. Although he earned a medical degree before embarking on his Communist crusades, he didn’t focus on respiratory ailments.”