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.
Forty years after the death of Ernesto ”Che” Guevara, the turbulent life of Cuba’s revolutionary hero continues to inspire films and books, while his stoic image and self-sacrifice have become iconic for leftists worldwide. His legacy remains as vivid today in communist-ruled Cuba as it was, with schoolchildren still instructed to pledge each morning that: ”Pioneers for communism, we will be like Che.”