Guevara

Ernesto Guevara aka El Che: A Very Short Introduction

The Bolivian authorities wanted to cut his head off and send it to Cuba to verify his identity, or just to send a message; after an exhaustive debate, they amputated his hands at the wrist instead and shipped them in a very special container to La Paz, Bolivia; his body was injected with a heavy dose of formalin for preservation, it lay on the autopsy room which was no valhalla; just a squalid room of a school with a military-type stretcher next to a stone sink, perhaps a laundry tub. On October 12th the package arrives and the inspectors of the Argentinian police compare the fingerprints with the ones smudged on Guevara's journals―they match. The hands of the comandante suddenly disappeared and Fidel Castro wants answers; he actually does not believe that his compaňero is dead; the truth was kept secret for over forty years, because the three Argentinian were not authorized to speak. Immediately after the autopsy, the pictures of the cadaver riddled with bullets are published by every newspaper around the globe; the eyes of the comandante are wide open, as they are fixating the sky, his expression is dramatic, his body is statuary, he doesn't look dead at all, just deep in his thoughts, contemplating his next revolution.