Did Cuba really find Ché's remains?
Cuba said it found the remains of revolutionary leader 'Ché' Guevara in
Bolivia 10 years ago. Now a magazine article has challenged the statement.
From Miami Herald staff and wire reports
A story in a Spanish-Mexican magazine has challenged Cuba's claim that
it found the long-missing remains of revolutionary hero Ernesto ''Ché''
Guevara in Bolivia in 1997.
Guevara was leading a guerrilla force when he was captured and executed
in 1967 by Bolivian army troops assisted by CIA operatives. The remains
found in 1997 are now in a mausoleum in the Cuban city of Santa Clara.
The Letras Libres magazine reported in this month's edition that there
were several inconsistencies in the identification of the remains
recovered in 1997 by a team of Cuban forensic experts from an unmarked
grave in Vallegrande, where Guevara's body was last seen.
DISSECTING EVIDENCE
According to the report, the remains included a shirt and a belt,
supposedly Guevara's, which could not have been his, and a container of
tobacco that did not match the description of the container he was known
to have had.
The report said Cuban leader Fidel Castro pushed the search team to find
remains before October 1997 -- the 30th anniversary of Guevara's death
-- ``in order to distract the Cuban people from their pressing hardships
and to relaunch the country's revolutionary fervor.''
The Cuban search team included three geophysical engineers, a forensic
anthropologist, an archaeologist and a historian, and was led by the
director of the Havana Forensic Medicine Institute, Jorge González,
Letras Libres said the Cubans' identification of Guevara's remains was
endorsed by a forensic team from Argentina, which gave it greater
credibility, and was carried out with ''the suspicious complicity of a
commission picked by the Bolivian government to supervise the
operation,'' led by the former ambassador to Havana, Franklin Anaya.
DENTAL RECORDS
Guevara's identification, according to the official Cuban version, was
based on dental records and the fact that the recovered skeleton had no
hands. The guerrilla leader's hands were amputated by the army after his
execution.
A Miami Herald report in 1997 also cast some doubt on the Cubans' findings.
Gustavo Villoldo, a Cuban exile and CIA operative who was advising the
Bolivian troops hunting Guevara, told the newspaper that he personally
supervised the secret burial of Guevara and two other guerrillas in an
unmarked grave.
But the Cuban search team that claimed to have found Guevara's remains
said it found six other bodies in the same grave.
Villoldo, who still lives in South Florida, was quoted in the Herald
story as saying that he had no reason to doubt the Cuban search team
indeed had dug up Guevara's remains -- though he remained mystified by
the seven bodies found.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/cuba/16692711.htm
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