uncomfortably numb: Cuba remembers Che Guevara 40 years after his fall

Monday, October 8, 2007

Cuba remembers Che Guevara 40 years after his fall

SANTA CLARA, Cuba (Reuters) - Communist Cuba paid tribute on Monday to its
poster boy, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, 40 years after the guerrilla fighter was
captured and executed in Bolivia.

The man he helped to power in Cuba's 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro, was too
ill to attend a memorial rally at the mausoleum where Guevara's remains were
placed when they were dug up from an unmarked Bolivian grave in 1997.
But Castro marked the anniversary in a newspaper column written from his sickbed, saying the Argentine-born doctor sowed the seeds of social conscience in Latin America and the world, and describing him as a flower prematurely cut from its stem.

"I make a halt in day-to-day combat to bow my head, with respect and gratitude, before the exceptional fighter who fell 40 years ago," Castro wrote.
Guevara was captured by CIA-backed Bolivian soldiers on October 8, 1967, and was shot the next day in a schoolhouse. His bullet-ridden body, eyes wide open, was put on display in a hospital laundry room and later buried in an unmarked grave. He was 39.
About 10,000 Cuban workers and students gathered on Monday before a monument of the guerrilla fighter carrying a rifle in Santa Clara, the city in central Cuba that Guevara "liberated" in 1958 in the decisive battle of the Cuban revolution.
"Che was loved, in spite of being stern and demanding. We would give our life for him," said 80-year-old Tomas Alba, who fought under Guevara's command. A banner proclaimed him as a "true example of revolutionary virtues."

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