HAVANA – Cuban President 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 on Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of his capture and execution 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 commander in Cuba’s revolution. His bones, brought to Cuba from Bolivia a decade ago, are entombed under the statue on the site of Guevara’s key military victory that prompted former Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista to flee the island nation 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 also was 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 previous recording of Castro reading a letter Guevara wrote to him four decades ago also was 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 on Barrientos Ortuno’s 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.
