Mon Oct 8, 2007 6:37pm BST
By Rosa Tania Valdes
SANTA CLARA, Cuba, Oct 8 (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.
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 Oct. 8, 1967,
and was shot the next day in a schoolhouse. 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
bronze statue of Guevara carrying a rifle in Santa Clara, the city in
central Cuba that Guevara "liberated" in 1958 in the decisive battle of
the Cuban revolution.
Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba where he is remembered for
promoting unpaid voluntary work by toiling shirtless on building sites
or hauling sacks of sugar. He still appears on banknotes cutting sugar
cane in the fields.
He was central bank governor and industry minister in the early years of
Castro's rule. He advocated nationalizing private businesses and dreamed
of a classless society where money would be abolished and wages unnecessary.
'MANY VIETNAMS'
But he left Cuba in 1966 to start a new anti-U.S. 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.
Guevara's tearful daughter Aleida Guevara, 46, said the recent leftward
shift in Latin American nations, brought about through the ballot box
instead of armed struggle, had vindicated her father.
"Today Latin America begins to awaken and their dreams are coming true,"
she said in the mausoleum where the remains of Guevara and other
guerrillas who died with him in Bolivia lie.
Fidel Castro, 81, has not appeared in public since an intestinal illness
forced him to hand over power to his brother Raul 14 months ago. As
Castro fades from the political stage and Cubans debate reforms to an
inefficient state-run economy, no one is advocating Guevara's economic
policies anymore.
In a speech at the memorial rally, Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes
said Castro "is recovering" and urged Cubans to unite around Raul and
the ruling Communist Party.
"We will never renounce our Communist ideals," said Valdes, a former
guerrilla commander in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
Citing Guevara's call to resist U.S. imperialism wherever it exists,
Valdes said Cuba would make no concessions to Washington's demands for
political change on the island. Cuba would never come "under the Yankee
boot," Valdes said.
Cuba stopped exporting armed revolution to Latin America in the 1980s.
One of the last shipments of weapons was used in Chile to ambush
military dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1986. Pinochet survived the attack.
The one-party state built by Castro with Guevara's help 90 miles (135
km) away from the United States has endured CIA-backed invasion plans
and assassination plots, and the hostility of 10 U.S. administrations.
"In almost five decades of extensive covert efforts to roll back the
Cuban revolution, the capture and death of Che stands as really the only
CIA success story," said Peter Kornbluh, an expert on Latin America at
the National Security Archives, a public interest documentation center
in Washington.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUKN0831723320071008
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