JOINS IN MOURNING CHE
international character of the socialist revolution, he reminded the "rich" workers states of their duties with regard to those who are still poor.
Even more, he felt that with the exacerbation of the world situation, his duty was to again take up arms, to once again join the guerrillas. Thus he left not only the high posts in which he functioned in Cuba, he likewise left his family. In his last message he said that the supreme task was "to create two, three... many Vietnams." He fell in combat, arms in hand, under the blows of the Bolivian "gorillas" and their CIA masters. Not content with murdering him, they hastened to destroy his body while at the same time they sought to mutilate his memory.
The blow is a hard one, but this indomitable revolutionist will not vanish from the battle. His memory will be there. In all of Latin America and throughout the entire world, the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara will be mourned in the way he would have wished: "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms, and other men come forward to join in our funeral dirge with the chattering of machine guns and new calls for battle and for victory."
Glory to Ernesto "Che" Guevara! Long live the Latin-American socialist revolution! Long live the world socialist revolution!
THE AREA WHERE CHE FELL
In his speech October 15 stating why the Cubans had become convinced that Che Guevara was dead, despite the glaring contradictions in the declarations of the Bolivian dictatorship, Fidel Castro referred to the coincidence between the descriptions of the terrain given by the reporters at the scene and those contained in the notes presumably written by Guevara and quoted by the Bolivian generals. One of the sources cited by Fidel was the New York Times of October 8, which printed a report written before Che was killed.
Here are the pertinent paragraphs from the dispatch sent by Paul L. Montgomery from Camiri, Bolivia:
"Even for a man as traveled as Ernesto Che Guevara, the bleak cul de sac where the Andes fall off to the Amazon basin is a long way from anywhere.
"The sun rises blazing each morning on the dusty valley, baking the raw
earth and the brown brambles. The teeming insect life -- monstrous flies and mosquitoes, spiders and stinging beetles -swarm in the dead stillness. The heat and the dust and the bites turn the skins of humans to a cloak of misery. The harsh vegetation, dry and covered with thorns, makes sustained movement all but impossible except along the well-watched river banks and trails.
"According to military reports, the erstwhile Cuban major and 16 exhausted guerrilla companions have been bottled up in the valley by a tightening armed forces encirclement for nearly two weeks. The Bolivian military believes Major Guevara will not get out alive."