Che in Palestine, more than 60 years after a journey through the resistance
On June 19, 1959, the prominent Latin American leader visited the Strip, saw the horrors of forced displacement and incited resistance.
There is a photo. Or several. In one of them, the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla Ernesto (Che) Guevara de la Serna looks beyond the frame and next to him are the resistance leaders Abdullah Abu Sitta and Qassem El-Farra, members of the Legislative Council of Palestine.
It is June 19, 1959 and it is also the first visit by a prominent Latin American leader to the Gaza Strip.
His trip was made possible at the invitation of the then president of Egypt Gamal Abdel-Nasser, recognized leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.
That day Che spoke and his words seemed like a drawing, with the Levantine fields breathing: enlarging and shrinking depending on the number of listeners. There he mentioned the word “resistance” as the only form of liberation.
The coordinator of the Al-Bureij camp, Mustafa Abu Middain, took him to visit the territory and showed him the situations of hardship.
"We have a worse poverty situation," replied the man from Rosario. "You have to show me what you have done to liberate your country. Where are the training camps? Where are the people's mobilization centers?" he added, according to the research Che Guevara in Gaza: Palestine becomes a World Cause.
That meeting was followed by meetings with Nasser in his office, visits to public functions, and even the reception of the Great Liberator of the Oppressed Order.
Much later, on October 9, 1967, joint forces of the local Army and the US Central Intelligence Agency located Guevara while he was commanding a guerrilla group in Bolivia.
They annihilated his companions, arrested him and executed him, under orders of the de facto president of the South American country, General René Barrientos.
From then on, the hero's physical strength, his energy to mobilize people, his intelligence to fight and keep justice alive would no longer be there.
However, now many can recognize his voice: it is in the Palestinian students who studied in Cuba, in the resistance, in the fight of this people against the Israeli occupation, in the heart, in the flood higher than the fire of artifice.
https://espanol.almayadeen.net/noticias/politica/1754656/el-che-en-palestina--a-m%C3%A1s-de-60-a%C3%B1os-de-un-viaje-por-la-res