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Cuba remembers Che
08/10/2007 17:14 - (SA)
Santa Clara - 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.
Castro marked the anniversary in a newspaper column that
was read out at the rally, saying the Argentine-born doctor
sowed the seeds of social conscience in Latin America and the
world.
"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. Body on display in laundry room His
bullet-riddled 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 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 billboard quoted Castro saying: "We want you to be like
Che." 'One, two, many Vietnams'
Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba where he is
remembered for promoting unpaid voluntary work by working
shirtless on building sites or hauling sacks of sugar. To this
day, he appears on a Cuban banknote cutting sugar cane with a
machete in the fields.
He left Cuba in 1966 to start a new anti-US guerrilla
movement in the jungle of eastern Bolivia, hoping to create
"two, three, many Vietnams" in Latin America.
Posters of the long-haired Guevara wearing a soldier's
beret with a single star turned the revolutionary outlaw into
an international folk hero and symbol of rebellion.
The image, based on a picture taken by Cuban photographer
Alberto Korda, has been massively reproduced on T-shirts, mugs,
baseball caps, Swatch watches, bikinis and other products of
the capitalist consumer society he fought against.
- Reuters
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