Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Date of birth: June 14, 1928,Place of birth: Rosario, Argentina, Date of death: October 9, 1967 (aged 39)
Place of death: La Higuera, Bolivia
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che, or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, politician, author, physician, military theorist, and guerrilla leader. After his death, his stylized image became a ubiquitous countercultural symbol worldwide.
Early life
Ernesto Guevara was born on 14 June 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a family of Basque and Irish descent. Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy. Though suffering from the crippling bouts of asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete.
Witnessing the widespread poverty, oppression and disenfranchisement throughout Latin America, and influenced by his readings of Marxist literature, Guevara began to view armed revolution as the solution to social inequality. By trip's end, he also viewed Latin America not as separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy. His conception of a borderless, united Hispanic America sharing a common 'mestizo' heritage was a theme that prominently recurred during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he completed his studies and received his medical diploma in June 1953
After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people.
— Che Guevara, 1960
Cuba
Che convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience. When grenades were needed, Che set up a factory to make them. When bread was wanted, Che set up ovens to bake it. When new recruits needed to learn tactics and discipline, Che taught them. When a school was needed to teach peasants to read and write, Che organized it.
— Time Magazine: "Castro's Brain", 1960
Guevara arrived in Mexico City in early September 1954, and renewed his friendship with Ñico López and the other Cuban exiles whom he had met in Guatemala. In June 1955, López introduced him to Raúl Castro who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had formed the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. During a lengthy conversation with Castro on the night of their first meeting, Guevara concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one for which he had been searching and before daybreak he had signed up as a member of the 26J Movement
Although he planned to be the group's medic, Guevara participated in the military training with the members of the Movement, and, at the end of the course, was called "the best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor, Colonel Alberto Bayo. The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via the Granma, an old, leaky cabin cruiser. They set out for Cuba on November 25, 1956. Attacked by Batista's military soon after landing, many of the 82 men were either killed in the attack or executed upon capture; only 22 found each other afterwards. Guevara wrote that it was during this bloody confrontation that he laid down his medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, finalizing his symbolic transition from physician to combatant.
At this point Castro promoted Guevara to comandante of a second army column. However, Guevara's first idea to hit an enemy garrison at Bueuycito did not go as planned. When his men were late to arrive, he began the attack without them. He told a sentry to halt, but when the sentry moved, Guevara decided to shoot. However, his gun jammed, as did the gun of the young rebel who was with him. Guevara fled under a hail of bullets, which in turn brought a hail of bullets from the rebels in the hills, and the barracks surrendered before Guevara repaired his tommy gun. As Guevara said, "My survival instincts took over."
Guevara was also instrumental in creating the clandestine radio station Radio Rebelde in February 1958, which broadcast news to the Cuban people and statements by the 26th of July movement, and provided radio telephone communication between the growing number of rebel columns across the island. Guevara had apparently been inspired to create the station by observing the effectiveness of CIA supplied radio in Guatemala in ousting the government of Jacobo Arbenz.
In late July of 1958 Guevara would play a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle and destroy Castro's forces. Years later, USMC Major Larry Bockman, would analyze and describe Che's tactical appreciation of this battle as "brilliant".As the war extended, Guevara led a new column of fighters dispatched westward for the final push towards Havana. In the closing days of December 1958, Guevara directed his "suicide squad" in the attack on Santa Clara that became the final decisive military victory of the revolution. Radio Rebelde broadcast the first reports that Guevara's column had taken Santa Clara on New Years Eve 1958. This contradicted reports by the heavily controlled national news media, which had at one stage reported Guevara's death during the fighting. Batista, upon learning that his generals were negotiating a separate peace with the rebel leader, fled to the Dominican Republic the next day on January 1, 1959.
On January 8, 1959, Castro's army rolled victoriously into Havana. In February, the revolutionary government proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition of his role in the triumph.
Meeting with French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in March 1960. Guevara was also fluent in French.
On June 12, 1959, as soon as Guevara returned to Havana, Castro sent him out on a three-month tour of fourteen countries, most of them Bandung Pact members in Africa and Asia. He spent twelve days in Japan (July 15–27), participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that nation. During this visit Guevara also secretly visited the city of Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb fourteen years earlier. Guevara was "really shocked" at what he witnessed and by his visit to a hospital where A-bomb survivors were being treated.
Guevara played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During an interview with the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker a few weeks after the crisis, Guevara still fuming, stated that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. Sam Russell, the British correspondent who spoke to Guevara at the time came away with "mixed feelings", calling him "a warm character" and "clearly a man of great intelligence", but "crackers from the way he went on about the missiles."
Leaves Cuba
This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly abound in our suffering Latin American lands. Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our people, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers
— Che Guevara, to the U.N. General Assembly, December 11 1964
In December 1964, Che Guevara traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United Nations. He also appeared on the CBS Sunday news program Face the Nation and met with a range of people, from U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy to associates of Malcolm X. Malcolm X expressed his admiration, declaring Guevara "one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now" while reading a statement from Guevara to a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom.
On December 17, Guevara left for Paris and embarked on a three-month tour that included the People's Republic of China, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Dahomey, Congo-Brazzaville and Tanzania, with stops in Ireland and Prague. In Algiers on February 24, 1965, he made what turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage when he delivered a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity. He specified the moral duty of the socialist countries, accusing them of tacit complicity with the exploiting Western countries. He proceeded to outline a number of measures which he said the communist-bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism.
Congo
In 1965 Guevara decided to venture to West Africa and offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and therefore had enormous revolutionary potential.
In his Congo Diary, he cites the incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces as key reasons for the revolt's failure Later that year, ill with dysentery, suffering from asthma, and disheartened after seven months of frustrations, Guevara left the Congo with the Cuban survivors. (Six members of his column had died.) At one point Guevara considered sending the wounded back to Cuba, and fighting alone until the end in the Congo, as a revolutionary example; however, after being urged by his comrades and pressed by two emissaries sent by Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly agreed to retreat. A few weeks later, when writing the preface to the diary he kept during the Congo venture, he began: "This is the history of a failure."
Bolivia
At Castro's behest, a parcel of jungle land in the remote Ñancahuazú region had been purchased by native Bolivian Communists for Guevara to use as a training area and base camp.
Training at this camp in the Ñancahuazú valley proved to be more hazardous than combat to Guevara and the Cubans accompanying him. Little was accomplished in the way of building a guerrilla army. Former Stasi operative Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known by her nom de guerre "Tania", who had been installed as his primary agent in La Paz, was reportedly also working for the KGB and is widely inferred to have unwittingly served Soviet interests by leading Bolivian authorities to Guevara's trail.
Guevara's guerrilla force, numbering about 50 and operating as the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia; "National Liberation Army of Bolivia"), was well equipped and scored a number of early successes against Bolivian regulars in the difficult terrain of the mountainous Camiri region. In September, however, the Army managed to eliminate two guerrilla groups in a violent battle, reportedly killing one of the leaders.
Capture and execution
Félix Rodríguez, a CIA operative, claims that he headed the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia. On October 7, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine. They encircled the area, and Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment with Simeón Cuba Sarabia. Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant Bernardino Huanca's account: that a twice wounded Guevara, his gun rendered useless, shouted "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead."
Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera. Early on October 9, the day after his capture, Barrientos ordered that he be killed. The executioner was Mario Terán, a sergeant in the Bolivian army who had drawn a short straw after arguments over who would get the honor of shooting Guevara broke out among the soldiers. To make the bullet wounds appear consistent with the story the government planned to release to the public, Félix Rodríguez ordered Terán to aim carefully to make it appear that Guevara had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army.
Moments before Guevara was executed he was asked if he was thinking about his own immortality. "No," he replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." Che Guevara also allegedly said to his executioner, "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." Terán hesitated, then pulled the trigger of his semiautomatic rifle, hitting Guevara in the arms and legs. Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out. Terán shot him again, this time hitting him fatally in the chest – at 1:10 pm, according to Rodríguez.
His body was then lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown to nearby Vallegrande where photographs were taken, showing a figure described by some as "Christ-like" lying on a concrete slab in the laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta hospital.
While researching his biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, author Jon Lee Anderson happened to discover the hidden location of Guevara's burial. Thus in 1997, the skeletal remains of a handless body were exhumed from beneath an air strip near Vallegrande, identified as those of Guevara by a Cuban forensic team at the scene, and returned to Cuba. On October 17, 1997, his remains, with those of six of his fellow combatants, were laid to rest with military honours in a specially built mausoleum in the city of Santa Clara, where he had won the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution.
Legacy
Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom" while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age." Guevara remains a beloved national hero to many in Cuba, where his image adorns the 3 $ Cuban Peso and school children begin each morning by pledging "We will be like Che."In his native homeland of Argentina, where high schools bear his name, numerous Che museums dot the country, which in 2008 unveiled a 12 foot bronze statue of him in his birth city of Rosario. Additionally, Guevara has been sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos as "Saint Ernesto", to whom they pray for assistance.
Dear Comrades, Continue the fight against Exploitation. Join Hands with Fighting Mass
C.SUNISH
Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Date of birth: June 14, 1928,Place of birth: Rosario, Argentina, Date of death: October 9, 1967 (aged 39)
Place of death: La Higuera, Bolivia
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, El Che, or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, politician, author, physician, military theorist, and guerrilla leader. After his death, his stylized image became a ubiquitous countercultural symbol worldwide.
Early life
Ernesto Guevara was born on 14 June 1928 in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a family of Basque and Irish descent. Growing up in a family with leftist leanings, Guevara was introduced to a wide spectrum of political perspectives even as a boy. Though suffering from the crippling bouts of asthma that were to afflict him throughout his life, he excelled as an athlete.
Witnessing the widespread poverty, oppression and disenfranchisement throughout Latin America, and influenced by his readings of Marxist literature, Guevara began to view armed revolution as the solution to social inequality. By trip's end, he also viewed Latin America not as separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy. His conception of a borderless, united Hispanic America sharing a common 'mestizo' heritage was a theme that prominently recurred during his later revolutionary activities. Upon returning to Argentina, he completed his studies and received his medical diploma in June 1953
After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people.
— Che Guevara, 1960
Cuba
Che convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience. When grenades were needed, Che set up a factory to make them. When bread was wanted, Che set up ovens to bake it. When new recruits needed to learn tactics and discipline, Che taught them. When a school was needed to teach peasants to read and write, Che organized it.
— Time Magazine: "Castro's Brain", 1960
Guevara arrived in Mexico City in early September 1954, and renewed his friendship with Ñico López and the other Cuban exiles whom he had met in Guatemala. In June 1955, López introduced him to Raúl Castro who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, the revolutionary leader who had formed the 26th of July Movement and was now plotting to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. During a lengthy conversation with Castro on the night of their first meeting, Guevara concluded that the Cuban's cause was the one for which he had been searching and before daybreak he had signed up as a member of the 26J Movement
Although he planned to be the group's medic, Guevara participated in the military training with the members of the Movement, and, at the end of the course, was called "the best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor, Colonel Alberto Bayo. The first step in Castro's revolutionary plan was an assault on Cuba from Mexico via the Granma, an old, leaky cabin cruiser. They set out for Cuba on November 25, 1956. Attacked by Batista's military soon after landing, many of the 82 men were either killed in the attack or executed upon capture; only 22 found each other afterwards. Guevara wrote that it was during this bloody confrontation that he laid down his medical supplies and picked up a box of ammunition dropped by a fleeing comrade, finalizing his symbolic transition from physician to combatant.
At this point Castro promoted Guevara to comandante of a second army column. However, Guevara's first idea to hit an enemy garrison at Bueuycito did not go as planned. When his men were late to arrive, he began the attack without them. He told a sentry to halt, but when the sentry moved, Guevara decided to shoot. However, his gun jammed, as did the gun of the young rebel who was with him. Guevara fled under a hail of bullets, which in turn brought a hail of bullets from the rebels in the hills, and the barracks surrendered before Guevara repaired his tommy gun. As Guevara said, "My survival instincts took over."
Guevara was also instrumental in creating the clandestine radio station Radio Rebelde in February 1958, which broadcast news to the Cuban people and statements by the 26th of July movement, and provided radio telephone communication between the growing number of rebel columns across the island. Guevara had apparently been inspired to create the station by observing the effectiveness of CIA supplied radio in Guatemala in ousting the government of Jacobo Arbenz.
In late July of 1958 Guevara would play a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle and destroy Castro's forces. Years later, USMC Major Larry Bockman, would analyze and describe Che's tactical appreciation of this battle as "brilliant".As the war extended, Guevara led a new column of fighters dispatched westward for the final push towards Havana. In the closing days of December 1958, Guevara directed his "suicide squad" in the attack on Santa Clara that became the final decisive military victory of the revolution. Radio Rebelde broadcast the first reports that Guevara's column had taken Santa Clara on New Years Eve 1958. This contradicted reports by the heavily controlled national news media, which had at one stage reported Guevara's death during the fighting. Batista, upon learning that his generals were negotiating a separate peace with the rebel leader, fled to the Dominican Republic the next day on January 1, 1959.
On January 8, 1959, Castro's army rolled victoriously into Havana. In February, the revolutionary government proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition of his role in the triumph.
Meeting with French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in March 1960. Guevara was also fluent in French.
On June 12, 1959, as soon as Guevara returned to Havana, Castro sent him out on a three-month tour of fourteen countries, most of them Bandung Pact members in Africa and Asia. He spent twelve days in Japan (July 15–27), participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that nation. During this visit Guevara also secretly visited the city of Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb fourteen years earlier. Guevara was "really shocked" at what he witnessed and by his visit to a hospital where A-bomb survivors were being treated.
Guevara played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During an interview with the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker a few weeks after the crisis, Guevara still fuming, stated that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. Sam Russell, the British correspondent who spoke to Guevara at the time came away with "mixed feelings", calling him "a warm character" and "clearly a man of great intelligence", but "crackers from the way he went on about the missiles."
Leaves Cuba
This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly abound in our suffering Latin American lands. Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our people, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers
— Che Guevara, to the U.N. General Assembly, December 11 1964
In December 1964, Che Guevara traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the United Nations. He also appeared on the CBS Sunday news program Face the Nation and met with a range of people, from U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy to associates of Malcolm X. Malcolm X expressed his admiration, declaring Guevara "one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now" while reading a statement from Guevara to a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom.
On December 17, Guevara left for Paris and embarked on a three-month tour that included the People's Republic of China, the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Dahomey, Congo-Brazzaville and Tanzania, with stops in Ireland and Prague. In Algiers on February 24, 1965, he made what turned out to be his last public appearance on the international stage when he delivered a speech at an economic seminar on Afro-Asian solidarity. He specified the moral duty of the socialist countries, accusing them of tacit complicity with the exploiting Western countries. He proceeded to outline a number of measures which he said the communist-bloc countries must implement in order to accomplish the defeat of imperialism.
Congo
In 1965 Guevara decided to venture to West Africa and offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and therefore had enormous revolutionary potential.
In his Congo Diary, he cites the incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces as key reasons for the revolt's failure Later that year, ill with dysentery, suffering from asthma, and disheartened after seven months of frustrations, Guevara left the Congo with the Cuban survivors. (Six members of his column had died.) At one point Guevara considered sending the wounded back to Cuba, and fighting alone until the end in the Congo, as a revolutionary example; however, after being urged by his comrades and pressed by two emissaries sent by Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly agreed to retreat. A few weeks later, when writing the preface to the diary he kept during the Congo venture, he began: "This is the history of a failure."
Bolivia
At Castro's behest, a parcel of jungle land in the remote Ñancahuazú region had been purchased by native Bolivian Communists for Guevara to use as a training area and base camp.
Training at this camp in the Ñancahuazú valley proved to be more hazardous than combat to Guevara and the Cubans accompanying him. Little was accomplished in the way of building a guerrilla army. Former Stasi operative Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known by her nom de guerre "Tania", who had been installed as his primary agent in La Paz, was reportedly also working for the KGB and is widely inferred to have unwittingly served Soviet interests by leading Bolivian authorities to Guevara's trail.
Guevara's guerrilla force, numbering about 50 and operating as the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia; "National Liberation Army of Bolivia"), was well equipped and scored a number of early successes against Bolivian regulars in the difficult terrain of the mountainous Camiri region. In September, however, the Army managed to eliminate two guerrilla groups in a violent battle, reportedly killing one of the leaders.
Capture and execution
Félix Rodríguez, a CIA operative, claims that he headed the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia. On October 7, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine. They encircled the area, and Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment with Simeón Cuba Sarabia. Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant Bernardino Huanca's account: that a twice wounded Guevara, his gun rendered useless, shouted "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead."
Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera. Early on October 9, the day after his capture, Barrientos ordered that he be killed. The executioner was Mario Terán, a sergeant in the Bolivian army who had drawn a short straw after arguments over who would get the honor of shooting Guevara broke out among the soldiers. To make the bullet wounds appear consistent with the story the government planned to release to the public, Félix Rodríguez ordered Terán to aim carefully to make it appear that Guevara had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army.
Moments before Guevara was executed he was asked if he was thinking about his own immortality. "No," he replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." Che Guevara also allegedly said to his executioner, "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man." Terán hesitated, then pulled the trigger of his semiautomatic rifle, hitting Guevara in the arms and legs. Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out. Terán shot him again, this time hitting him fatally in the chest – at 1:10 pm, according to Rodríguez.
His body was then lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown to nearby Vallegrande where photographs were taken, showing a figure described by some as "Christ-like" lying on a concrete slab in the laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta hospital.
While researching his biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, author Jon Lee Anderson happened to discover the hidden location of Guevara's burial. Thus in 1997, the skeletal remains of a handless body were exhumed from beneath an air strip near Vallegrande, identified as those of Guevara by a Cuban forensic team at the scene, and returned to Cuba. On October 17, 1997, his remains, with those of six of his fellow combatants, were laid to rest with military honours in a specially built mausoleum in the city of Santa Clara, where he had won the decisive battle of the Cuban Revolution.
Legacy
Nelson Mandela referred to him as "an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom" while Jean-Paul Sartre described him as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age." Guevara remains a beloved national hero to many in Cuba, where his image adorns the 3 $ Cuban Peso and school children begin each morning by pledging "We will be like Che."In his native homeland of Argentina, where high schools bear his name, numerous Che museums dot the country, which in 2008 unveiled a 12 foot bronze statue of him in his birth city of Rosario. Additionally, Guevara has been sanctified by some Bolivian campesinos as "Saint Ernesto", to whom they pray for assistance.
Dear Comrades, Continue the fight against Exploitation. Join Hands with Fighting Mass
C.SUNISH
2 comments:
;We will be like CHE;.....heart touchable.....the blood heating lifestory of CHE............
watch the movie- MOTORCYCLE DIARIES. GAEL GARCIA BERNAL as Che.
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