Today, October 8, the world recognizes the most famous and prominent revolutionary of the 20th century, Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna. In Cuba, the site of his final resting place, this day is known as “The Day of the Heroic Guerilla.” Argentinean born, the doctor met Cuban revolutionaries in exile in Mexico. After meeting Dr. Fidel Castro, he signed up to be the 2nd member of Castro’s revolutionary army (the 1st was Castro’s brother, Raul Castro) and returned to Cuba in a poorly equipped ship called the Granma in 1956 to wage a guerilla war.

They set up a rebel base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. At first, Che was the field unit’s doctor but after volunteering for some of the more daring missions, he grew in prominence. Despite his severe asthma, Che grew from a soldier to a military commander. In the final stages of the revolutionary war, he captured the strategic city of Santa Clara which facilitated the fall of Havana to the rebel army. A true internationalist, he resigned from the Cuban government to go fight for revolution in first Africa and then Bolivia. On October 8, 1967, he was captured alive by Bolivian armed forces, who were trained in anti-guerilla warfare by the American CIA. Anyone who knows Guevaran history can conclude that he was not one to be taken alive. In fact, his rifle had become incapacitated and thus, he did not have the option to die fighting and was captured alive. He was executed the next day.

The Bolivian authorities buried his body in a secret location because they feared that people would build a shrine on his final resting place and that it would turn into a pilgrimage site. His martyrdom, nevertheless, survived and his revolutionary message grew to be bigger in death than in life, so much so, that they even made songs dedicated to him on the other side of the globe. After restoring diplomatic ties with one another, Cuba sent an excavation team to Bolivia in 1997 and retrieved Che’s body and brought it back to Cuba and buried it in the city that he captured in the revolutionary war, Santa Clara. 38 years after his death, his tomb is Cuba’s main tourist attraction and is an international pilgrimage site. Che certainly left behind a living legacy of resistance.

Farewell letter from Che to Fidel Castro

Year of Agriculture

Havana, April 1, 1965.

Fidel:

At this moment I remember many things: when I met you in Maria Antonia’s house, when you proposed I come along, all the tensions involved in the preparations. One day they came by and asked who should be notified in case of death, and the real possibility of it struck us all. Later we knew it was true, that in a revolution one wins or dies (if it is a real one). Many comrades fell along the way to victory.

Today everything has a less dramatic tone, because we are more mature, but the event repeats itself. I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban revolution in its territory, and I say farewell to you, to the comrades, to your people, who now are mine.

I formally resign my positions in the leadership of the party, my post as minister, my rank of commander, and my Cuban citizenship. Nothing legal binds me to Cuba. The only ties are of another nature  those that cannot be broken as can appointments to posts.

Reviewing my past life, I believe I have worked with sufficient integrity and dedication to consolidate the revolutionary triumph. My only serious failing was not having had more confidence in you from the first moments in the Sierra Maestra, and not having understood quickly enough your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary.

I have lived magnificent days, and at your side I felt the pride of belonging to our people in the brilliant yet sad days of the Caribbean [Missile] crisis. Seldom has a statesman been more brilliant as you were in those days. I am also proud of having followed you without hesitation, of having identified with your way of thinking and of seeing and appraising dangers and principles.

Other nations of the world summon my modest efforts of assistance. I can do that which is denied you due to your responsibility as the head of Cuba, and the time has come for us to part.

You should know that I do so with a mixture of joy and sorrow. I leave here the purest of my hopes as a builder and the dearest of those I hold dear. And I leave a people who received me as a son. That wounds a part of my spirit. I carry to new battlefronts the faith that you taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be. This is a source of strength, and more than heals the deepest of wounds.

I state once more that I free Cuba from all responsibility, except that which stems from its example. If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of this people and especially of you. I am grateful for your teaching and your example, to which I shall try to be faithful up to the final consequences of my acts.

I have always been identified with the foreign policy of our revolution, and I continue to be. Wherever I am, I will feel the responsibility of being a Cuban revolutionary, and I shall behave as such. I am not sorry that I leave nothing material to my wife and children; I am happy it is that way. I ask nothing for them, as the state will provide them with enough to live on and receive an education.

I would have many things to say to you and to our people, but I feel they are unnecessary. Words cannot express what I would like them to, and there is no point in scribbling pages.

Written: April 1, 1965 *********************************************

On the Day of the Heroic Guerilla, we remember Che Guevara

Oct 09, 2012 http://pflp.ps/english/2012/10/09/on-the-day-of-the-heroic-guerilla-we-remember-che-guevara/

On October 8, 2012, the Day of the Heroic Guerilla, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine remembers Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara, revolutionary leader, fierce fighter, and principled struggler whose true commitment to internationalism and liberation lives on in the struggles of peoples around the world for freedom, justice and socialism.

Following the revolutionary victory in Cuba in 1959, Che’s commitment to international revolution did not diminish, and he joined Bolivian revolutionaries in 1966. On October 8, 1967, Che and his comrades were captured and surrounded by the US-backed Bolivian military, and executed.

Nine days later, Fidel Castro spoke, memorializing Che and commemorating October 8 as the Day of the Heroic Guerilla, saying “Che died defending no other interest, no other cause than the cause of the exploited and oppressed of this continent. Che died defending no other cause than the cause of the poor and humble of this earth. Before history, people who act as he did, people who do and give everything for the cause of the poor, grow in stature with each passing day and find a deeper place in the heart of the people with each passing day.

In Palestine, Che’s spirit, his commitment to liberation, rises in the streets of our occupied homeland. We mourn and honor our Guevara Gaza, Mohammad al-Aswad, and the thousands of Palestinian Guevaras, the eternal martyrs, who have struggled, fought, sacrificed and died for the liberation of Palestine, and the thousands of Palestinian Guevaras still to come, to hold high the banner of the resistance until the day of victory is ours.

On the 45th anniversary of Che’s death, we remember him as one of the martyrs of Palestine, a great martyr for the freedom of the oppressed of the world. And we continue to live his words: “Let us sum up our hopes for victory: total destruction of imperialism by eliminating its firmest bulwark: the oppression exercised by the United States of America and if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people, how great and close would that future be.” Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

Che Guevara Presente! Viva viva Palestina!

— Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org

Che remembered in Houston on May day 2012

https://www.youtube.com/user/TVGuevaristas

Havana, February 13, 2015
Remarks at the presentation of the book ¿Quién mató al Che?
Cómo la CIA logró salir impune del asesinato by Michael Ratner
and Michael Steven Smith, Social Sciences Publishing House, Cuba.
[Spanish translation of Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder]

Unofficial translation by Susana Hurlich, Havana
================================================
A Book that was Missing
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada

Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, in addition to being eminent lawyers, are active participants in the most important battles of the North American people for justice and freedom. Their book, dedicated to Leonard Weinglass – who, up to his last breath, devoted his life to the liberation of the Five Cuban anti-terrorists who served long years of unjust and cruel imprisonment in the United States – pays well-deserved tribute to our mutual friend when our heroes have now returned free to the Homeland.

To fight for justice in that country means, above all, to seek the truth and make it known in the most difficult of circumstances, confronting the concealment and manipulation of a powerful machinery determined to impose nothing else but ignorance on millions of people. This is a task that Lenny as well as Ratner and Smith have known how to carry out assiduously and consistently.

To prove that Ernesto Guevara was assassinated by the CIA, that his death was a war crime – a crime that never perishes – and that this deed was entirely the responsibility of the U.S. government called for an unremitting search.

After many years of demanding that the authorities comply with their own laws with respect to public access to information, today we can read documents that, despite the crossings-out and deletions that still seek to conceal numerous facts, allow the reader to discover that the official versions about Ernesto Guevara’s final combat were deliberately distorted.

It’s all about trying to make us believe that Washington preferred that Che, defeated and taken prisoner, would continue to live and that the crime was the result of unilateral decisions made by soldiers of the Bolivian Army who were then a docile instrument of the Empire.

Much has been written about Che and his epic Bolivian campaign and there are many authors who echoed the interpretation fabricated by the exponents of “plausible deniability.” At this stage, when both selective and massive assassination and the practice of torture and extrajudicial executions have become a generalized practice of a new way of making war, the book by Ratner and Smith is an opportune reminder that such treatment has a long trajectory.

It is as old as that of using servile armies and assassins – uniformed or not – as simple tools causing countless suffering to the peoples of Latin America under military dictatorships that the United States equipped, trained and managed.

In an earlier book, published in 1997 and the result of an equally relentless pursuit, the authors had revealed how the FBI tracked Ernesto Guevara’s activities in Guatemala and Mexico when he was not yet Che. In this book that they offer us now it can be confirmed that during his Bolivian campaign he was obsessively followed at the highest levels in Washington.

The U.S. Government’s Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the cold-blooded murder of a wounded and unarmed young prisoner by the name of Ernesto Guervara. The actual perpetrators of the cowardly act were soldiers who acted under the control of the CIA and obeyed their orders without batting an eye.

Some are still walking, however, on the streets of Miami or are in their offices at Langley, mulling over their frustration. Because they could not kill Che. Che continued to live and his message returned victorious in a new Bolivia and in a Latin America that confidently moves ahead towards complete emancipation.

Because Che fought all his life leading the list of those named as essential by Bertolt Brecht. Essential are those who are never missing when they are most needed, those who are present, always on the front line, when the struggle is harder and more complex.

That is why Che lives. Because we need him now more than ever.

The Cuban edition of this book appears in a new juncture in which we greatly need the Guevarian light. Now we are entering a stage that poses new challenges that we must face with wisdom and firmness. The historic enemy of our people has not changed its nature or its strategy of domination, only its tactics. Because its crude and violent policy – and it is recognized as such – of half a century failed, now it will test methods that intend to be more subtle to achieve the same ends.

We must accept the challenge and advance down that path without ever abandoning our principles. And always remembering Che’s visionary warning. Do not trust the imperialists “not even a little bit, not in anything.”