Cuba remembers Che Guevara 40 years after his execution

COMMUNIST Cuba paid tribute yesterday to 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 after they were dug up from an unmarked Bolivian grave in 1997.

Castro marked the anniversary in a newspaper column that was read 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,” wrote Castro.

Guevara was captured by CIA-backed Bolivian soldiers on October 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 people gathered yesterday before a statue of Guevara carrying a rifle in Santa Clara, the Cuban city that Guevara “liberated” in 1958.

Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba.

He was central bank governor and industry minister in the early years of Castro’s rule. He advocated nationalising private businesses and dreamt of a classless society where money would be abolished and wages unnecessary.

But 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.

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.

Guevara also had Irish roots. His ancestor Patrick Lynch was born in Galway in 1715.

Cuban Ambassador Noel Carrillo will speak at a rally in Guevara’s memory on Thursday at Liberty Hall in Dublin, followed by a “celebration” at the Cuban restaurant Floridita.