His life is a banner of revolt from Berkeley to rebel villages in southern Mexico to the streets of Paris, a symbol for everything from life-or-death insurrection to trendy leftist nostalgia.
Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara was killed 30 years ago in Bolivia, and his bones -- unearthed from a long-secret burial site -- will be reburied Friday in Cuba, the country he helped guide to socialism.
On Saturday, as Cuba began a week of ceremonies honoring Guevara, tens of thousands of Cubans formed lines in the plaza to file past the small, flag-draped wooden caskets holding the bones of Che and six other fighters who fell in Bolivia in 1967.
``The baby never would have forgiven us if we did not take him here,'' said social science teacher Juan Carlos Lopez, holding his 5-month-old son, Ariel. The honor ``is the least you can do for a hero of the Americas, of the world.''
On Tuesday, a motorcade will carry Guevara's remains to the city of Santa Clara beneath newly painted bridges adorned with the words of his departure from Cuba: ``Forever onward to victory.'' On Friday, his remains will be placed in a mausoleum-shrine there.
Guevara, then a restless 25-year-old Argentine doctor, joined Fidel Castro's band of Cuban revolutionaries in 1955 while working as a roving photographer and part-time laboratory researcher.
He survived the near-disaster of Castro's 1956 sea journey to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma and rapidly proved himself a brave -- and sometimes independent-minded -- rebel fighter against the forces of President Fulgencio Batista.
It was Guevara who commanded the greatest battlefield victory of Castro's revolution, the battle of Santa Clara in December 1958 that pushed Batista to flee into exile.
Guevara left Cuba in 1964 to help rebels in the Congo, renouncing his Cuban citizenship but relying on Cuban aid. He was forced to pull out a year later.
Back in Cuba, Guevara secretly organized another revolution, this time in Bolivia.
But his band there, including several Cubans, failed to build the popular support among Bolivians that Castro had created in Cuba during his revolution. Bolivia's army tracked down Guevara, took him prisoner and executed him on Oct. 9, 1967.
Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald