Fact File
Name: Ernesto "Che" Guevara Occupation: Revolutionary Died: October 8th, 1967 Famous because: He liberated Cuba and subsequently became an international icon of radical youth Why in the news: His remains have been discovered in a remote Bolivian village and returned to Cuba
After two weeks of digging, the body of Ernesto "Che" Guevara was found last week beneath the concrete of an airstrip in southern Bolivia. For three decades the whereabouts of the legendary revolutionary's grave had been the subject of intense speculation. Last Saturday, the mystery finally solved, his remains were flown back to Havana.
Guevara has become something of a tourist attraction in Bolivia, where he was shot by US-trained special forces in 1967 after leading an abortive uprising. Companies offer guided tours of the countryside in which he waged his final campaign. For a few bolivenance, you can see the towns he visited and the site where he was captured and killed.
The more macabre can visit the hospital where for two days Bolivian army officers put his bullet-riddled corpse on display before disposing of it, anxious that his final resting place would not become a martyr's shrine. Now the opportunists can add another attraction - "Come see Che Guevara's unmarked grave".
Meanwhile, in Cuba, the country he liberated with Fidel Castro, child "pioneers" take a vow to be "just like Che". The instantly recognisable portrait of his ruggedly handsome face is visible everywhere in Havana. As the news broke that Guevara's body had been found, the country was celebrating the "year of the 30th anniversary of the fall in battle of the Heroic Guerrilla and his comrades".
The find is just another memorable chapter in the life of Che Guevera. It had a rather mundane beginning.
Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928, to a middle class family, his father was Ernesto Guevara Lynch. "Did your granny come from Ireland?" Che was asked by reporters when he stopped off in Dublin Airport in 1964. Guevara could only say that he "presumed she was of Irish descent". Guevara, a severe asthmatic, received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1953. He left home for Guate mala, where he worked for the leftish government until it was overthrown by the United States and a military regime installed.
He fled to Mexico and met exiled Cuban revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro, under whose leadership he became convinced that revolution was the only way to rid Latin America of its social inequities. Guevera helped plan an invasion to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The force comprised just over 80 men. They sailed from Mexico in November 1956 but, due to attacks by Batista forces, only 12 guerrillas landed.
As the rebels fought their way through the country, their numbers swelled. Batista fled the country in 1959 and the rebels had won.
Guevara, as Minister for Industry and later Economics, was deeply involved in the reforms made by Castro's Communist Party of Cuba. But for the committed Marxist it wasn't enough. In 1965, he renounced Cuban citizenship and left his wife and five children for Bolivia.
He wrote to his parents: "I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for those peoples who fight to free themselves . . . Many will call me an adventurer and I am one of a different sort; one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes."
Sensing his attempt to recreate the Cuban revolution in Bolivia could be his undoing, he wrote, nevertheless, to Castro: "Other nations of the world call for my modest efforts."
Richard Gott, of the Guardian, was in Bolivia on October 8th, 1967, the day Guevara was captured and killed by a unit of the Bolivian army under CIA direction.
"I had met him at a party in Havana," he remembers. "He was a most attractive, beautiful man. Everyone stopped talking when he walked into the room."
Gott puts Guevara's now mythical status down to his "deeply hostile approach to the US, which was universally felt among the left in the wake of Vietnam.
"He was someone who appeared so anxious to change the world. When he gave up everything, his ministry, his expensive car to go back to the hills and fight, that gave him an added integrity".
It was his impetuous nature which led eventually to his downfall. He was the opposite of a procrastinator. Always doing today what could be better put off until tomorrow. Guevara was dead within two years of his arrival in Bolivia to fight the oppressive government there.
His legend has been passed on through every possibly medium. The fashion boutiques named after him in the sixties were slightly incongruous, given that he constantly wore battle-dress and often had to be persuaded to wash. But they added to his image of the Il Che the Chic Hero.
In the 1960s he took pride of place on the wall of every radical student and, more recently, the rock band Rage Against The Machine chose his image for the cover of their first album.
Last Saturday, when his remains arrived in Cuba, along with those of three guerrillas exhumed from the same grave, President Castro and members of Guevara's family were there to welcome their hero's remains home.
"They do not return vanquished," said Guevara's daughter, Alieda. "They come as heroes, always young, valiant, strong and brave".
In his last letter to his children he had written: "Grow up as good revolutionaries . . . always remain capable to feeling deeply whatever injustice is committed."
"It will be difficult to find a man who is his equal," Castro once said of Guevara. "A revolutionary purer than he or more exemplary than he." His body will be placed in a mausoleum in the square named after Ernesto "Che" Guevera.