Cuba, as well as other Latin American countries, held celebrations on Monday in Ernesto "Che" Guevara’s honor, the revolutionary born in Argentina and killed 40 years ago in Bolivia.

Current Cuban acting leader Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother, accompanied by Guevara’s widow, the four children that survived the revolutionary and several veterans that fought side-by-side with him in the ’50s, held a ceremony in Che’s honor.

Fidel Castro, who ceded the leadership of Cuba to his brother Raul on July 31, 2006 as he is ailing, didn’t attend the celebration meeting, but he praised the world-known revolutionary in one of his articles.

"I make a halt in the daily combat to bow my head, in respect and gratitude, before the exceptional fighter who fell on October 8 40 years ago," Castro wrote. Castro also referred to Guevara as being "a flower that was prematurely pulled off its stem". His article was read during the ceremony.

The reason why the Santa Clara was chosen to organize the ceremony is the fact that that was the place where the Cuban rebels led by Guevara defeated the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista in a crucial battle fought in 1958.

A day before the ceremony took place, many Cubans joined in a voluntary working day meant to help the progress of the country, a practice that Che carried out in the early days of the Cuban regime.

Argentina, Bolivia and Mexico are amongst other countries which made plans to honor the well-known revolutionary and there were announced theatre performances and concerts as part of the ceremony.

“Che” Guevara

The Argentine-native Ernesto Guevara de la Serna studied medicine as a young man and during his travels throughout South America he had contact with the impoverished conditions in which many people lived. This experience led him to believe that the region's socio-economic differences could only be remedied by socialism through revolution. Thus he intensified his study of Marxism and traveled to Guatemala to find out more about the reforms that were being implemented there by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

While in Mexico in 1956, Guevara joined Fidel Castro's revolutionary 26th of July Movement, which managed to take hold of power from the dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959.

After the success of "la revolucion," Guevara was given the role of "supreme prosecutor" and he supervised the trials and executions of hundreds of suspected war criminals from the previous regime.

Guevara left Cuba in 1965 for Congo-Kinshasa and then Bolivia, where he attempted to start new revolutions. In Bolivia he was captured in a military operation sustained by the CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces.

He was executed in the town of La Higuera near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967 by the Bolivian Army.