Wednesday, September 30, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
CUBA: Che Guevara’s Family May at Last Have a Tomb to Cry Over
Dalia Acosta
- “If someone knows where he is, send him back. Four of his children are living in Cuba without knowing where their dead father is,” a close friend of the family of Ernesto “Che” Guevara told IPS here on Wednesday.
Twenty-eight years after the famous Argentine-Cuban guerrilla fighter, a symbol for several generations of leftists from Latin America and throughout the world, was killed in Bolivia, retired General Mario Vargas Salinas – one of the three officers who witnessed the secret burial of his body – decided to shed some light on one of this century’s great mysteries.
On Monday, Vargas told the New York Times that Guevara’s body was buried along with the remains of five other guerrilla fighters under a primitive landing strip in Vallegrande, 475 kilometres southeast of La Paz, Bolivia.
“A long time has passed, and it is time for the world to know,” said the retired general, who added that he was breaking his 28-year silence because he thinks it is time for Cuba and Bolivia to resolve their differences.
And on Tuesday, General Gary Prado Salmon, who also witnessed the burial, confirmed Vargas’ version.
Acording to Rodolfo Saldana, a Bolivian who fought alongside Che Guevara, and who lives in Cuba, “a similar version was whispered a while ago,” but what is important now is “that it has been confirmed by the participants.”
After being riddled with nine bullet-wounds on Oct. 10, 1967, the body of the 39-year-old Argentine-Cuban was photographed in the Vallegrande hospital.
On Oct. 11, the Bolivian government decided to make Guevara’s body disappear, in order to keep his burial site from becoming the destination of pilgrimages by his followers.
Nevertheless, his admirers continue to carry flowers to the Vallegrande hospital and the La Higuera school where he was shot by Bolivian security forces. And indigenous communities in the area venerate their Saint Ernesto of La Higuera.
But up to now, no one knew Che Guevara’s final resting place.
What was known was that none of the journalists at Vallegrande hospital were allowed to leave the premises on that day in October, 1967, and that a military jeep set off for the airport carrying Guevara’s remains.
Che’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, used to repeat one version: “they threw him where a highway was being built, and laid asphalt over him.”
Another rumour was that his body was carried to the end of the Vallegrande airport’s landing strip, wrapped in a military cape and thrown in a gully, which was filled in and covered with asphalt to expand the landing strip.
Cuban authorities have always insisted that the Bolivian armed forces and government wanted to make a symbol disappear.
Today’s generations try not to idealise the famous guerrilla fighter, who demanded peace and justice in Latin America, but see him as a human being with virtues and defects.
“He is my father, nothing more than that,” Hilda Guevara Gadea, Guevara’s oldest daughter, had said in an unprecedented interview, before she died without knowing where her father was buried.
And Ganet Sanchez Guevara, Hilda’s son, told Radio Fides from La Paz in Havana on Tuesday that he does not know “whether to believe or doubt the news.”
Human rights organisations have announced that they will ask the Bolivian government to return Guevara’s remains to his family.
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CUBA: Che Guevara’s Family May at Last Have a Tomb to Cry Over
Dalia Acosta
- “If someone knows where he is, send him back. Four of his children are living in Cuba without knowing where their dead father is,” a close friend of the family of Ernesto “Che” Guevara told IPS here on Wednesday.
(more…)
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