Memories of Che in Cuba

WASHINGTON – What has surprised me most in the tales from my friends who have ventured down to Cuba since the Obama “thaw” in relations has been their descriptions of the pictures and memorials to the late Che Guevara. The exaggerated tributes everywhere on the island are reverent – it is he, not the Castro brothers, who has become Cuba’s revolutionary saint.

Indeed, there is even an elaborate museum devoted to the figure – and, yes, the fantasy – of Che, the nickname for Argentine rebel Ernesto Guevara, who rode his motor bike up the spine of the Andes in the 1950s, accidentally met Fidel Castro in Mexico City and became second only to him in overthrowing the Cuban dictatorship.