Castro, Cuba Pay Homage To Che On Anniversary Of His Death
Fidel Castro paid homage to Ernesto "Che" Guevara as an "exceptional combatant" as 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 killing 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 the guerrilla leader being held 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 built in Santa Clara. A previously made recording of Castro reading a letter Guevara wrote to him four decades ago was also broadcast over loudspeakers.

"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 was also 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."

Soldiers captured Guevara on Oct. 8, 1967 in Bolivia, where he was trying to foment an uprising, and executed him 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.

But the image is hated by anti-communists, especially Cubans living in exile who recall the dogmatic Marxist's role in the purge trials and executions of hundreds police and army officials accused of torturing and killing opponents during the Fulgencio Batista government the rebels overthrew.

Raul Castro, who fought with Guevara in the mountains during Cuba's revolution, attended the ceremony, but did not speak. Instead, another former comrade-in-arms, Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdes, gave the key address, which focused as much on domestic matters as it did on Guevara's legacy.

"Che's ideas and the legacy of his comrades ... are a living element that should remain present in our daily tasks," said Valdes, one of only three men who hold the honorific title of Commander of the Revolution and currently Cuba's Communications Minister.

But Valdes also called on Cubans to remain united during what he called "more difficult and dangerous" times marked by Castro's illness and increased U.S. government hostility toward the island.

Echoing Raul Castro's numerous proposals for talks with American officials, Valdes also proclaimed that "we will not renounce the possibility of a dialogue if some day there are more realistic leaders in that country" while still remembering Fidel Castro's vow that "they never will have Cuba."

Valdes headed the delegation that returned Guevara's bones from Bolivia a decade ago to Cuba, where Fidel Castro oversaw an elaborate ceremony in which they were entombed under the statute in Santa Clara, site of Guevara's key military victory that prompted Batista to flee the island on New Year's Eve, 1958.

After Monday's ceremony, Guevara's daughter Aleida joined other relatives in placing flowers at the revolutionary's tomb, saying that Cubans should still subscribe to her father's communist vision of a "new society."

"We have to be present and firmer than ever," she said.

In other tributes to Guevara around Latin America, more than 7,000 people, most of them young people, held a Sunday march in Bolivia.

Bolivian President Evo Morales on Monday was remembering Guevara in Vallegrande, about 450 kilometers southeast of La Paz, where the revolutionary's remains were secretly buried for nearly three decades before they were discovered and returned to Cuba, where Guevara became a naturalized citizen and the revolutionary government's first industry minister.

In Guevara's native Argentina on Sunday, about 400 young people waved "Che" flags on the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, a listened to a series of local rock bands playing in his memory.

Maria Eva Rodriguez, an 18-year-old high school student in the group milling on the Plaza outside Argentina's Government House, said many young Argentines have little idea today of what Guevara stood for.

"In Cuba, Che was part of a revolution," Rodriguez said. "But here in Argentina he didn't do anything. Here he's more a symbol of rebellion."