Cuban exile in Miami believes Che Guevara's remains still buried

Cuban exile in Miami believes Che Guevara's remains still buried
Associated Press
Posted March 23 2007, 3:20 PM EDT

MIAMI -- A former CIA operative and Cuban exile is the latest to call
the 1997 reburial of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara a fraud,
because he said the body of one of Fidel Castro's closest friends is
still in Bolivia.

Gustavo Villoldo, 71, said he has strands of faded hair that he snipped
before burying Guevara's body under a Bolivian airstrip in 1967. He
believes the remains are likely still there, not in the official grave
site in a Cuban mausoleum. DNA tests could confirm his theory, he said.

But Villoldo would also need Guevara's relatives to come forward to
confirm a DNA match, an unlikely possibility as most of his children are
supportive of the Cuban government.

Villoldo was involved in Guevara's capture in October 1967 in the
jungles of Bolivia, according to unclassified U.S. records and other
documents. He said he wrote down the burial coordinates and hopes one
day to give them to Guevara's family.

Since the Cuban government announced in 1995 that its anthropologists
had uncovered Guevara's remains from the Bolivian airstrip, some experts
have raised doubts about the discovery. They question whether it was a
public-relations stunt to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Guevara's
death.

No DNA testing was done on the remains before they were reburied. Cuban
officials relied on information from retired Bolivian generals, whom
Villoldo maintains were not even there the night he sneaked Guevara's
body out of an improvised morgue and buried it.

Also, Villoldo insists he and others buried only Guevara and two rebels
that night, while the anthropological team found the remains of seven men.

Still, Alejandro Inchaurregui, one of two forensic anthropologists who
discovered the bones in 1995, maintains the reburied remains do belong
to Guevara.

``I don't have the slightest doubt that the skeleton we found was that
of Che,'' he said.

According to Villoldo, his father committed suicide after Guevara, then
head of Cuba's national bank, announced plans to seize the family's
General Motors distributorship.

After fleeing to Miami, Villoldo joined the ill-fated Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba and was later sent in 1965 to the Congo to hunt down
Guevara before being tapped to help lead the Bolivia operation.

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