Immortality, for many, lies in the eternal abode of a carnal but incorruptible body. However, another form of perpetuity emanates from the plane of the incorporeal: a man can last as long as his own ideas. In that sense, ordinary people are barely remembered, at best, for three generations. Then, their passage through this world fades away and the other death comes: oblivion.
They thought they had killed Ernesto in La Higuera, Bolivia. But his assassins did not know that bullets can only leave inert flesh, the same flesh that later devours the earth. That day they assassinated a man and a symbol was born: Che.
The Guerrillero returned multiplied, he ceased to be ours to conquer the world with the same deep look of Korda's iconic photo, a shocked look after the pain and injustice, while the mourning farewell of the victims of the sabotage perpetrated by the CIA to the French ship La Coubre was taking place.
At that time Guevara was already a militant on the side of just causes. He had caressed Latin America on his motorcycle trip and, after setting foot on the Granma yacht, his life changed forever. With a stroke of courage he opened a space in the history of his homeland.
Overcoming the limitations imposed by asthma, he became a full-fledged revolutionary, one of those who knew no fear and, by making Santa Clara a free city, he also helped, considerably, to achieve the longed-for freedom of the country that made him its son.
That is why he remains vigilant, from the place where his remains rest, right in the center of Cuba, like a lighthouse that illuminates the Caribbean island and radiates to the world. And the city wakes up every day to see him, as it did that October 1997, when hundreds of Villa Clara inhabitants carried, between their hands, a flower for Che.
His daughter, Aleida Guevara March, had expressed, a few months before, that his remains and those of his comrades in struggle returned to Cuba "turned into heroes, eternally young, brave, strong, audacious. No one can take that away from us; they will always be alive with their children, among the people."
Just inside the town, that October 17, in the immense line of people who paid tribute to him in Santa Clara, there was a little girl next to her father. In her tiny hands she carried a rose that the fighter who was returning home had placed in her honor. Those same hands that today write about Che.
What fools those who tried to kill him! They wounded his flesh, but in that instant the hero was born, with his redeeming star on his forehead and kissed by immortality.
