`Che' Guevara's Final Hours -- Cuban Rebel's Captor Reveals Last Words, Gifts Exchanged

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che" Guevara spoke bitterly of comrade-in-arms Fidel Castro in his final hours, according to a never-before-revealed account of the eve of his execution. "Fidel betrayed me," he told his captors.

Guevara, caught and executed by Bolivian army troops in 1967 as he tried to export Cuba's revolution, surrendered a diary to Bolivian officer Jaime Nino de Guzman in which he rendered a fiery communist manifesto for the people of South America.

"We make our voices heard for the first time," one entry in the handwritten journal declared. "We have to reach all the corners of this continent with the echo of our cry for rebellion.

"We rise today having exhausted all possibilities of a peaceful fight to show through our example the road to follow."

Nino de Guzman, a retired air-force general recently named as Bolivia's ambassador to Austria, spoke to The Associated Press Thursday.

While he has talked about his role in Guevara's last days, the interview marked the first revelation of some of the revolutionary's final words and of an exchange of gifts between the two men, captor and captive.

Three decades later, Guevara is revered as a revolutionary hero in Cuba and remains a mythic figure across Latin America, where his bearded likeness can be seen on everything from T-shirts to truck mudguards.

Nino de Guzman met the Argentina-born Guevara on Oct. 9, 1967, after the guerrilla leader had been injured and captured by Bolivian troops at Quebrada Vado del Yeso, 435 miles southeast of La Paz.

Then a helicopter pilot, Nino de Guzman was sent to the village where Guevara and other survivors of the guerrilla band were being held.

He met the guerrilla in a small room, surrounded by Bolivian soldiers. He lighted Guevara's pipe for him, and the two struck up a conversation.

According to Nino de Guzman, Guevara told his captors he had favored starting a guerrilla front in Peru instead of Bolivia, but came to Bolivia on Castro's insistence.

Guevara also complained that support from Cuba and from the Bolivian Communist Party broke down early in his ill-fated guerrilla campaign here.

More than once, the defeated revolutionary declared: "`Fidel betrayed me."'

"Nearly all of Guevara's actions and words amounted to a wish to die," Nino de Guzman recalled. He quoted Guevara as telling him: "I'm worth more dead than alive to you and Fidel."

A Cuban-born CIA agent tried to talk to Guevara, Nino de Guzman said.

Guevara spat at the man, saying, "I don't talk to traitors."

Nino de Guzman said he gave Guevara some tobacco, and the wounded guerrilla took a brown-covered booklet out of his boot and gave it to him.

When Guevara's skeleton was exhumed last year from its unmarked grave in Bolivia for a hero's burial in Cuba with Castro presiding, scraps of the tobacco were still in his jacket pocket.

The booklet was Guevara's proclamation to Latin Americans, and Nino de Guzman disclosed its existence for the first time. He said he hadn't wanted to release it until now.

After Guevara was shot by order of the army high command, Nino de Guzman flew the body to its first burial site. He showed the AP photos of the bloodied corpse, many of which had been published before.

In the diary, Guevara acknowledged the risk of his work: "Our lives will be the witnesses of the seriousness of the struggle we have taken on that will only end with victory or death."

"We declare ourselves anti-imperialist fighters," he wrote, and repeated: "Victory or death."