Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider

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This article is about the Cuban guerilla. For Queen Tania of Dardania, see Tania (queen).

Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider (November 19, 1937 – August 31, 1967), better known as Tania or Tania the Guerilla, was a communist revolutionary and spy who played a prominent role in the Cuban government after the Cuban Revolution and in various Latin American revolutionary movements. She was the only woman to fight alongside Bolivian communist rebels under Che Guevara.

Bunke Bider was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the daughter of German communists Erich Bunke and Nadia Bider (who was Jewish). Her parents had fled to Argentina from Germany in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. In 1952, the family moved to East Germany. At the age of 18, Tamara Bunke was accepted into the ranks of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

During the 1950s, she studied political science at Humboldt University. After graduating, she began working for the East German Ministry of State Security where she took on several espionage missions. Highly committed to the Communist cause, she traveled throughout Europe and South America under several aliases, posing as a student of folklore.

Back in East Germany in 1960, she met Che Guevara. Guevara was visiting East Germany with a Cuban trade delegation and Bunke Bider worked as an interpreter. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution of which Guevara was an icon, Bunke Bider came to Cuba in 1961 to join the guerrillas. While in Cuba, she participated in work brigades, the militia, and the literacy campaign, working in the Ministry of Education, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples and the Federation of Cuban Women. She also traveled with Guevara throughout Latin America. It was during this period that she took on the guerilla name "Tania".

In November 1964, she traveled to Bolivia as a secret agent for Guevara's last campaign. It is reported that she used the name Laura Gutiérrez Bauer to gather information about Bolivian high society while working as a teacher, and also that she posed as a folk music collector.

In 1966 she joined Juan Vitalio Acuña's group of Bolivian guerrillas, possibly against Guevara's wishes.

On August 31, 1967, Bolivian soldiers ambushed the group while they were crossing the Río Grande at Vado del Yeso, and killed Bunke Bider and eight fellow communist guerillas. Bunke Bider's body was swept away in the river; Bolivian soldiers found it on September 6, and she was buried the next day, close to her fellow revolutionaries.

Her remains were tracked down to this location on October 13, 1998. They were transferred to Cuba, where she was reburied alongside her comrades.

She became a martyr of the Cuban Revolution.