[ALAVARO VARGAS LLOSA, author of Liberty for Latin America, is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.]

Thousands of Cubans and foreigners have been flocking to a mausoleum in central Cuba to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. For 10 years, the Cuban government has been telling the world that the body inside the mausoleum is that of the famous guerrilla.

It's a lie designed to bamboozle the population into worshiping the Argentine-born revolutionary as if he were a saint--and the Cuban Revolution as if it were a religion. A brilliant investigation by French journalist Bertrand de la Grange, recently published in Spain's El Pais newspaper, demolishes the official version.

In 1995, Bolivian Gen. Mario Vargas, who had fought Che's guerrillas in the 1960s, revealed that the revolutionary's body was buried a few meters from the airport runway in Vallegrande, a town close to La Higuera, the village in eastern Bolivia where Guevara was killed on Oct. 9, 1967. (Guevara had been executed after the Bolivian president ordered the soldiers who ambushed and captured him to get rid of him.) Cuba sent a forensic, diplomatic and legal team to Vallegrande. On June 28, 1997, they claimed to have found the body, which was brought to Cuba a few weeks before the 30th anniversary of the guerrilla's death.

Numerous facts belie the Cuban claim. Havana's envoys say they found the body in the same grave in which six other guerrillas killed in La Higuera were buried. However, Vargas says that Guevara's body was buried separately--a fact confirmed by the widow of Lt. Col. Andres Selich, the man who actually buried all the bodies in 1967.

A jacket and a belt were found on the body exhumed in 1997. But Guevara's real body was buried without clothes: His jacket was removed by Moises Abraham, the doctor who performed the autopsy in 1967. Abraham now lives in Mexico, where he has been visited by Cuban emissaries wishing to buy the jacket from him.

Erich Blossl, a German agricultural engineer who befriended Abraham in the 1960s and saw Guevara's jacket in 1967, says that the garment found on the body dug up in 1997 is not the same one. "It was a waterproof cape, like the ones used by the military," he says in reference to the clothes found on the body that was sent to Cuba. He had a chance to see it because the Cuban team asked him to take a look at it....

Arnold Shcherban - 11/4/2007

whose body is exposed in Havana's mausoleum?
Say the author of this article is correct and the Cuban authorities are wrong. Wrong, not necessarily means lying. Because, certainly, if
the author of this article is wrong, (and we have to account for such possibility as well, don't we?), he does not want us to call him a lier, does he?
But note: the whole pathos of his article is to catch Cuban authorities on a lie, with simultaneous attempt to annul the importance of the anniversary of Che's murder (outside of any legal procedures) by Bolivia's military hunta 40 years ago.
This is done along the common logical thread linking all anti-Cuban articles written by the author (and they are all anti-Cuban): everything that Cuban authorities say or do is an axiomatic lie, while, undoubtedly, everything that the author or the sources he uses say or do is either the holy truth or done out of good intentions, if sometimes lead to undesirable consequences (you know: "a road to hell is paved with noble intentions").

It is not surprising then that for the majority of common folks in Latin and Central America Che Gevara
was and mostly remains to be the fighter for freedom, as they understand it, for their dreams about better life, but for the author he was just Castro's, i.e totalitarian, "guerilla".

The real issue here is what theme was most important over the whole second half of 20th century and reamins to be so over the current period in the history of Central and Latin America: the struggle for national economic, political, and ideological sovereignity against the cotrol of US and local corporate elite or the struggle between the US and Cuba with its sympathizers (with the both struggles sharply skewed in the US favor).
I leave the reader to decide on the latter.