Choking back tears, the daughter of Ernesto "Che" Guevara turned his remains over to the Cuban people at a ceremony near Havana with a shout of "Farewell, forever, until victory!"
Those reportedly were Guevara's last words when he left Cuba in 1966 on a quixotic bid to spread a communist revolution.Guevara's remains, buried three decades ago under a remote airstrip in Bolivia, were returned to his adopted homeland late Saturday at a Cuban military airfield.
The burial location had been kept secret all those years, apparently to deny his followers a shrine. A search for the remains began in earnest after retired Bolivian officers said two years ago the body was buried at the airstrip in Vallegrande, 550 miles east of the Bolivian capital.
Cubans watching the simple ceremony, broadcast on television early Sunday, said it matched the personality of Che, who was known for his irreverence and dislike of grandiose displays.
The Bolivian government had confirmed the skeletal remains as Guevara's earlier Saturday and flown them to his adopted homeland, along with those of three other Cuban revolutionaries shot by CIA-backed Bolivian troops in 1967. The guerrillas unsuccessfully had tried to spark a peasant uprising in Bolivia.
Aleida Guevara, daughter of the Argentine-born revolutionary, struggled to read a statement to President Fidel Castro, relatives and former guerrilla colleagues of Guevara.
"Today we receive their remains, but they do not arrive in defeat; they return converted into heroes, eternally young," a text of her statement said.
Guevara's remains will be re-buried at a mausoleum in Santa Clara, the provincial capital where he lead a December 1958 offensive that helped topple dictator Fulgencio Batista.