Havana, .- Cuba commemorated this Saturday the 55th anniversary of the death of the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla Ernesto “Che» Guevara, in a political act in the central city of Santa Clara where his remains have rested since 1997.
The activity, broadcast live on state television, showed the Cuban president, Miguel Diaz-Caneland other authorities deposit flowers in the homonymous Mausoleum located in the province of Villa Clara, about 300 kilometers from Havana.
They also witnessed, together with thousands of people, according to television images, allegorical songs to the figure of “Che” who was captured on October 8, 1967 and killed a day later in La Higuera, Bolivia.
«55 years ago, by order of the empire, he was murdered in a little school in La Higuera. Useless attempt to quell the rebellion. His assassins only managed to infinitely multiply his mobilizing example,” Díaz-Canel wrote on Twitter.
In his official account he published other messages alluding to the date with phrases from the deceased former president Fidel Castro about “Che”.
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Born in Rosario, Argentina in 1928, Ernesto Guevara met Castro in Mexico in 1956 and joined the armed expedition that rose up in the Sierra Maestra mountains to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista (1952-1959).
In the first years of the revolution, “Che”, who received Cuban nationality for services rendered to the 1959 Revolution, was appointed president of the National Bank and later Minister of Industry.
His idea of promoting the revolution in Latin America took him to Bolivia in 1966, where he was captured by the army on October 8, 1967 in the Yuro ravine (center) and taken to a school in the village of La Higuera, where he was killed the next day.
His remains were buried in a pit dug in the Bolivian town of Vallegrande and rescued in 1997 by a team of Cuban and Argentine experts who returned them to Cuba.
Since then, they rest in the Mausoleum of Santa Clara, where a statue of Guevara with a rifle, uniform, beret, hair and disheveled beard was raised on a 16-meter pedestal.
Beneath the statue, which weighs more than 20 tons of bronze and is almost 7 meters tall, is a complex that houses the mausoleum and the museum and is visited daily by between 800 and 1,000 people.
In the mausoleum, a plaque with the effigy and the name of the “Heroic Guerrilla” hides his mortal remains along with those of several of his companions.
55 years after his death, the imprint of “Che” is still valid in the political propaganda of the island.
