Cuba Remembers T-Shirt Icon

Here's my favorite photo of Che Guevara, having just assumed room temperature. Put that on a t-shirt, why don't you?

Fidel has another column to remember the sad day.

I'll assume they're in mourning at college campuses nationwide.

Communist Cuba paid tribute on Monday to its poster boy, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, 40 years after the guerrilla fighter was captured and executed in Bolivia.

The man he helped to power in Cuba's 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro, was too ill to attend a memorial rally at the mausoleum where Guevara's remains were placed when they were dug up from an unmarked Bolivian grave in 1997.

Castro marked the anniversary in a newspaper column that was read out at the rally, saying the Argentine-born doctor sowed the seeds of social conscience in Latin America and the world.

"I make a halt in day-to-day combat to bow my head, with respect and gratitude, before the exceptional fighter who fell 40 years ago," Castro wrote.

Guevara was captured by CIA-backed Bolivian soldiers on Oct. 8, 1967, and was shot the next day in a schoolhouse. His bullet-riddled body, eyes wide open, was put on display in a hospital laundry room and later buried in an unmarked grave. He was 39.

About 10,000 Cuban workers and students gathered on Monday before a monument of the guerrilla fighter carrying a rifle in Santa Clara, the city in central Cuba that Guevara "liberated" in 1958 in the decisive battle of the Cuban revolution.

"Che was loved, in spite of being stern and demanding. We would give our life for him," said 80-year-old Tomas Alba, who fought under Guevara's command.

A billboard quoted Castro saying: "We want you to be like Che."

This drivel also gives Reuters another chance to take a swipe at U.S. policy.

The one-party state built by Castro with Guevara's help 90 miles (135 km) away from the United States has endured CIA-backed invasion plans and assassination plots, and the hostility of 10 U.S. administrations.

"In almost five decades of extensive covert efforts to roll back the Cuban revolution, the capture and death of Che stands as really the only CIA success story," said Peter Kornbluh, an expert on Latin America at the National Security Archives, a public interest documentation center in Washington.

Uh, Mr. Kornbluh, what happened to their benefactors in the former Soviet Union?