Castro praises 'Che' 40 years after capture

HAVANA - 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 yesterday 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 Guevara around the Americas.

A government presenter read Castro's message to several thousand gathered before the towering bronze statue of Guevara in Santa Clara.

Guevara was a top rebel commander in Cuba's revolution. His bones, brought to Cuba from Bolivia a decade ago, are entombed under the statue, at the site of Guevara's key military victory that prompted former leader Fulgencio Batista to flee Cuba on 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, also published yesterday 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 previously made recording of Castro reading a letter Guevara had written 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 government of Gen. Rene Barrientos Ortuno. He was executed on Barrientos' orders 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 anticommunists, especially Cubans in exile who recall the dogmatic Marxist's role in the purge trials and executions of hundreds of police and army officials accused of torturing and killing foes of Batista.

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

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