30 Years After His Death, Cuba Honors Its Che

Women wept, children gaped and young parents pointed with pride at the small, flag-draped casket Saturday as tens of thousands of Cubans paid homage for the first time to the bones of Che Guevara--a guerrilla fighter whose zeal inspired a generation of leftists and whose image has sold T-shirts across the globe.

“Che is an idol for us,” Juan Carlos Muniz, who was born the year Guevara died, said moments after he, his wife and their 3-year-old son joined the estimated 2,500 Cubans an hour who were filing past the box containing Guevara’s remains in Havana’s towering Jose Marti memorial.

“Here in Cuba, we feel Che every day, and there’s so much emotion when one finally enters and sees the remains of a true hero for the first time.”

In a land isolated by its ideology and dependent upon symbols such as Guevara, Saturday marked the beginning of a week of official mourning and of national homage to his ideals--and those of his fellow guerrillas, many of whom continue to govern here decades after his death.

Unearthed earlier this year in Bolivia, where Guevara was captured and executed by an army officer 30 years ago last week, the bones were shipped back to Cuba, where the Argentine-born revolutionary fought alongside Fidel Castro to bring the Communists to power in 1959.

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans are expected to pay their first and last respects to the bones as they lie in state here, along with those of six of his fellow fallen comrades, until midnight Monday, when they will be taken south to Santa Clara. There, in the town where Guevara was captured during the Communist revolution, they will be reburied Friday in a permanent government shrine.

This week’s ceremonies are a poignant example of how the Cuban regime uses powerful symbolism to help keep its ideology alive in a world where communism now seems as anachronistic as Guevara himself.

At a time when Cuba’s grass-roots Communist values appear threatened as never before--under the pressure of a U.S. trade embargo and after the collapse of Cuba’s Soviet benefactor--Guevara’s famous bearded portrait towered alongside those of Marx, Lenin and Cuban party founder Julio Mella during last week’s Cuban Communist Party Congress.

During the congress, the 71-year-old Castro spent one of his nearly seven hours at the podium praising his fallen comrade, who he said “will be eternal as long as eternity exists.”

A new Che wing opened last week at Havana’s Museum to the Revolution, where pieces of Guevara’s clothing and even his hair and beard are on display. Another museum that opened last week at La Cabana, a former prison where Guevara presided over trials after the revolution, exhibits his machine gun, field glasses, knapsack and knife.

His 50-foot portrait hangs across the front of Havana’s former Economy Ministry building, where Guevara once served. And hundreds of Che knickknacks are on sale at the city’s newly privatized markets.

On Thursday, the actual anniversary of Guevara’s death, every Cuban school set aside two hours for Che remembrances--outdoor assemblies filled with other powerful symbols of Cuban life.

At the Gustavo Joaquin Ferrer school in Havana’s middle-class Nuevo Vedado neighborhood, first-graders marched with single red roses in their left hands and placed them beneath a large portrait of Guevara. His words boomed through loudspeakers, as did such Cuban revolutionary songs as “There Are Still Dreams.”

The school ceremonies coincided with the first-graders’ official induction into the Pioneers, Cuba’s version of the Scouts and the first step into socialist institutions. Parents, most with tears of joy in their eyes, proudly tied blue scarves around their children’s necks as the youngsters stood at attention in the courtyard.

“Next, we get red--the color of blood,” said 6-year-old Ricardo, who did not give his last name.

“Do you know the story of Che?” a reporter asked Ricardo as several friends gathered.

Ricardo shook his head, and his friend Marilon said, “I don’t remember.”

There were signs even in the long lines Saturday that Guevara’s memory needs some reinforcing.

Just minutes after Muniz’s son viewed Guevara’s casket, the child’s mother asked him whom he most wanted to be like when he grows up. His answer: “Fidel.”

But critics of this week’s hoopla say the Communist hero would have disapproved of the veneration. Even his daughter Aleida Guevara confirmed at a news conference here last week that her father shunned adulation during the years he served as Cuba’s economy minister and in other posts.

“He laughed at himself. He couldn’t accept people adoring him,” said Aleida Guevara, who works as a government pediatrician.

“He might have felt embarrassed” at this week’s celebrations, she added. “But he would have recognized the love and the loyalty of these people who think of him as their own son.”

Guevara’s son Camilo, a lawyer for the Fisheries Ministry who appeared beside his sister, said: “I wouldn’t say this is a sanctification. Rather it is a symbol--a symbol for the Cuban children as a goal for their values.”

Aleida Guevara added that she would prefer to see her father’s memory subjected to less commercialization, which she said represents the antithesis of his ideology.

“I hate to see my father’s face in ashtrays and on somebody’s bottom on their jeans. This is mercantilism. It’s opportunism. These people are just trying to make money.

“But I also have the hope that there are some young people who follow not the fashionable image but who search for the man in a global society that is losing all its values.”