AP News, October 8th, 2007
Fidel Castro paid homage to Ernesto "Che" Guevara as an "exceptional combatant" while many of the Argentine guerrilla's relatives and former comrades gathered in central Cuba Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of his capture and killing in Bolivia.
Castro, who has not been seen in public since undergoing intestinal surgery and ceding power to his brother Raul more than 14 months ago, did not attend the low-key ceremony in Santa Clara _ one of several tributes to Guevara around the Americas.
Still, the ailing leader's presence was felt when a government presenter read his message to several thousand people gathered before the towering bronze statue of Guevara in Santa Clara.
Guevara was a top revolutionary commander in Cuba's revolution. His bones, brought to Cuba from Bolivia a decade ago, are entombed under the statue that is the site of Guevara's key military victory that prompted former leader Fulgencio Batista to flee Cuba on Dec. 31, 1958.
Guevara later became a naturalized citizen of Cuba and the revolutionary government's first industry minister.
"I halt in my daily combat to bow my head, with respect and gratitude, to the exceptional combatant who fell on the 8th of October 40 years ago," Castro wrote in the essay, which was also published Monday in the Communist Party daily Granma. "I give him thanks for what he tried to do, and for what he could not do in his country of birth because he was like a flower yanked prematurely from its stem."
A previously made recording of Castro reading a letter Guevara wrote to him four decades ago was also broadcast over loudspeakers.
Soldiers captured Guevara on Oct. 8, 1967, in Bolivia, where he was trying to foment an uprising against the military government of Gen. Rene Barrientos Ortuno, who rose to power in a coup and was later elected president. He was executed upon Barrientos' orders in the small mountain community of La Higuera the next day.
The iconic image of Guevara with a scraggly beard and a beret is still embraced by many in Cuba and the rest of Latin America, where he inspired guerrilla movements in the 1970s and 1980s.
But the image is hated by anti-Communists, especially Cubans in exile who recall the dogmatic Marxist's role in the purge trials and executions of hundreds of police and army officials accused of torturing and killing opponents while Batista was in power.
Raul Castro, who fought with Guevara in the mountains during Cuba's revolution, attended the ceremony but did not speak.
After Monday's ceremony, Guevara's daughter, Aleida, joined other relatives in placing flowers at the tomb, saying Cubans should still subscribe to her father's Communist vision of a "new society."
"We have to be present and firmer than ever," she said.
In other tributes to Guevara around Latin America, more than 7,000 people, most of them young people, held a Sunday march in Bolivia.
Bolivian President Evo Morales on Monday was remembering Guevara in Vallegrande, 280 miles southeast of La Paz, where the revolutionary's remains were secretly buried for nearly three decades before they were discovered and returned to Cuba.
In Guevara's native Argentina on Sunday, about 400 young people waved "Che" flags on the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires and listened to local rock bands playing in his memory.
Maria Eva Rodriguez, an 18-year-old high school student in the group milling on the Plaza outside Argentina's Government House, said many young Argentines have little idea today of what Guevara stood for.
"In Cuba, Che was part of a revolution," Rodriguez said. "But here in Argentina he didn't do anything. Here he's more a symbol of rebellion."
