The intrepid young native of San Luis, perhaps never imagined that his death would come two days before his 27th birthday in the land of the Andes, to be inscribed in history as a Hero of a time that does not die.
The news filled Ché with consternation. Rolando, the San Luis of the Sierra and the Invasion, had died. His best soldier had fallen in combat. It was April 25, 1967.
A black day, Ché wrote in his diary. With the definitive farewell of Captain Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez, in the Bolivian jungle, the best man of the guerrilla was lost, and naturally, one of its pillars according to Ernesto Guevara de la Serna’s own assessment.
With the death of the proven fighter, Cuba was shaken by the severe blow, losing one of its sons who left for that sister nation to foster the seed of the National Liberation Movement that was already germinating in Latin America.
Men like Eliseo Reyes never die, because their example endures as the strength of courage and dedication, demonstrating their worth from an early age.
After his legacy, combatants of the Ministry of the Interior in Pinar del Rio, remember Captain San Luis, for the sleepless hours dedicated to that organism and his tenacious work against the banditry that infested the westernmost of the Cuban provinces.
The dark death of the brave Captain, in the midst of so much blood and so many tears, transcends the limits of his small stature to extend into the immense with its metallic form.
