In my dreams I am fighting by your side, walking those miles of heavy rocks and infected mud in Cuba and in Bolivia, carrying my weapon even if my arms and my knees are trembling from tiredness and the bites of mosquitos, even if my back is arching and screaming from pain, my eyes hurt from sleepiness, my stomach is keeping on crying for a little food and my mouth is as dry as the desert, longing for a drop of pure water.

But you would keep my heart alive, you would cheer my soul up, you would make me crawl a thousand more miles when I feel I cannot even breathe - with your kindling words, your harsh curses, your magical smile, your enchanting courage and your own example that is still shining bright like the sun, even 47 years after your death.

You show us the example of change, of courage, of a feeling heart. A spoilt boy, living his calm life of reading books, making exciting trips and having fun, woke up and saw the pain and the injustice around him. All of us can see these things but most of us would never devote our lives to do something for the change. You left your comfortable life in Argentina and later in Cuba – you left your family, your loved ones behind to fight, to make a change. You fought not only with guns – you fought with words and deeds. You were studying economy books, consulting with financial professionals, cutting cane on the fields under the Cuban sun, building schools and carrying heavy sacks, pushing sleeping time away in order to work more for a country, for a continent, for a world. You couldn’t see your children grow up, you were suffocating from asthma while working for the Cuban society, for Latin America or while fighting for freedom. Your enemies never cared about it.

You were brave enough to pick up the gun and fight, to face an enemy with bigger force and better weapons, to speak your mind when no one understood or agreed with you, when no one dared to support you, to change your ideals when you realised that the old path led to somewhere you didn’t want to go.

They said and they say you were a mass murderer, a madman, someone who should have been stopped before coming into this world. They saw you shouting fight, war, resistance, they saw you fighting, shooting, and crying for the blood of the enemy. But they know nothing about you, they didn’t care about your thoughts, your deeds and your aims. They just picked up your mistakes or just simply prepared and spread lies that they still keep on spreading.

It is not that I support violence. It is not that I agree with everything you said and did. It is that one must see the whole picture to be able to realise what a remarkable person, a true hero you were and you will always be.

You made mistakes, you had your own faults that every human being does have. Sometimes you were too cruel, sometimes you were too impatient, sometimes you didn’t notice the wrong way that you wanted to follow to reach your aims. It is all you and they shouldn’t be taken away from you. I don’t need a perfect picture – I just need the real picture of you.

Was it your fate to die in Bolivia? I wonder how many times people ask themselves: why didn’t he realise that he should have planned everything more carefully? That he should have stayed in hiding for a longer time?

It is so easy to be clever after the things have taken place. It is so easy to say that we would have done it the other way.

It did happen. You were caught. You died in La Higuera. Your body was shot, your body was buried in a secret place only to be found thirty years later. They killed your body, but they were and they will be unable to touch your soul, your heart, your words, your heritage.

You were killed much before I was even born, still you are here with me every moment when I see a crying child, deprived of her or his home, family or right to live a normal life, when I see a homeless man, picking up an unfinished cigarette from the pavement, keeping his head down ashamed, when I hear about a woman, beaten up by her husband, tortured or killed simply because she is a woman, a prostitute, someone who was at the wrong place in the wrong time, when I hear about wars on TV, when my heart breaks watching injustice and pain around the world. You are here with me every moment when I hear Cuban melodies, when I read your diaries and your articles.

I wish you were here. I wish you would teach me what to do in order to make a change in the world around me. You believed in your ideas – I believe in you. I would be walking with you until my bones fall into tiny pieces and become the part of the soil - for you, Comandante.