CUBA: Santa Clara, Che’s Cuban Hometown

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

SANTA CLARA, Cuba, Oct 17 1997 (IPS) - A seven-metre high bronze ‘Che’ on a tall pedestal has welcomed visitors to this central Cuban city for the past nine years.

Santa Clara – where the remains of the legendary Argentine- Cuban guerrilla leader and six of his comrades-in-arms also killed in Bolivia in 1967 were laid to rest Friday – has for decades been known as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s Cuban hometown.

The capital of the province of Villa Clara was founded by Spanish colonizers in 1689 at the foot of a tamarind tree. It was first known as Los Dos Cayos, later Pueblo Nuevo de Anton Diaz, and finally Gloriosa Santa Clara.

In this city, 300 kms from Havana, Che won his most spectacular military battle, and found the love of Aleida March, the woman with whom he had his four Cuban children: Aleida, Camilo, Celia and Ernesto.

“The truth is that it would have been better if he had returned alive,” says Ramon Castillo, who at age 58 still remembers when “Che would turn up every once in a while around Santa Clara and stay at the March family’s house.”

Castillo is one of the many people who formed a nearly one kilometre long line through downtown Santa Clara Thursday to pay homage to Che and his fallen companions.

Thirty years after his death, the remains were found in June this year, identified by a team of Cuban and Argentine scientists, and transferred to Cuba – the Argentine-born Che’s adopted home – on Jul. 12.

Alongside Guevara’s bones lie those of Olo Pantoja, Rene Marinez Tamayo, Alberto Fernandez Montes and Carlos Coello from Cuba, Simon Cuba from Bolivia and Juan Pablo Chang from Peru.

Boisterous by nature and cheerful in the face of misfortune, the inhabitants of this Caribbean island nation let a solemn silence reign as Che returned home.

“Happiness and pain…all that at the same time,” said Zoraida Gomez, a 39-year-old engineer, without perhaps realising she was repeating almost verbatim a phrase Che wrote in his farewell letter to Cuban President Fidel Castro in 1965.

The city of 210,000 inhabitants has been preparing for this moment. Houses were painted, placards with Che’s photo distributed and the tomb at the base of the statue which was finished in 1988 with bronze donated by local townspeople was prepared.

More than a quarter of a million people are estimated to have attended the funeral ceremonies which began in Havana Saturday and continued in Santa Clara Wednesday, attended by representatives of neighbouring provinces.

“Che is still special for a large part of the population of this country, and that is something that even opponents of the government must respect,” commented a Cuban who described himself as “detached” from the revolutionary process.

Thousands of people came out Tuesday to pay homage to the funeral cortege that travelled the 300 kms separating the two cities – the same kms covered in the opposite direction by Che on Jan. 1, 1959, when he received the order to march on Havana.

A triumphant Che left Santa Clara after heading the only large- scale classic battle waged by one of the columns of the Rebel Army, founded by Castro, in the struggle against the 1952-59 dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

The history books tell how Clara Batista concentrated 3,000 troops armed with automatic rifles, light and heavy machine guns, bazookas, mortars, 10 tanks, 10 small tanks and air forces in Santa Clara.

Che took Santa Clara with roughly 200 men, many of them exhausted from previous fighting and marching hundreds of kilometres, and armed with M-1 Gerand rifles, M-1 and M-2 carbines, 30.06 calibre machine guns and one bazooka.

Commander Guevara said that in Santa Clara “we would eat soldiers for breakfast, airplanes for lunch and tanks for dinner,” Joel Iglesias Leyva, the captain of Guevara’s troops, recalls.

The local residents opened their homes to the rebels, who broke through the walls and moved from house to house seeking better shooting positions, according to one of the veterans, Oscar Fernandez Mell.

“I was six years old when Che died, and I grew up with the version that he was cremated and his ashes strewn over the Bolivian jungle,” Miguel Diaz Canell, the secretary of the Villa Clara branch of Cuba’s governing Communist Party, told IPS. “I never thought his remains would appear.”

The 36-year-old university graduate, a native of Santa Clara, sits on the Communist Party’s Central Committe. He is defined as a “follower of Che” by Guevara’s daughter Aleida, in her description of the new generation of young party leaders.

U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin said “time has stopped in Cuba, but the world has changed,” referring to the homage paid to Che.

Rubin said things like this will not “change people’s desire and need to have access to the modern world,” and added that the tributes sounded like “the Cold War era.”

But while the idealisation of Che has become a thing of the past for many Cubans, the guerrilla leader continues to symbolise the purest part of the revolution that took power in 1959.

Academics here say it is time to rescue Guevara’s thinking in all its complexity, including those essays that were critical of ‘real’ socialism, some of which have never been published in Cuba.

“He was not a perfect man,” said Milene Garcia, a 17-year-old who plans to study sociology. “He committed errors like everyone does. But he knew how to be critical of himself and lived like everybody else, without allowing himself even one single privilege.”

In Santa Clara everyone remembers Che. The city’s Plaza of the Revolution, which in most provincial capitals in Cuba is dedicated to heroes of the independence war against Spain, is dedicated to Guevara.

Alongside the railroad running through the city, the wagons recalling the armoured train derailed by Che’s column in late December 1958 remain untouched as if in an enormous open air museum.

A simple monument revokes Che’s memory in each of the towns he liberated on his campaign through Las Villas – the name given back then to the territory that today encompasses the provinces of Villa Clara, Cienfuegos and Santi Spiritus.