Tema: The real Che Guevara

True as this may be, it just doesn't make cold blooded murder look any better.

"Everybody did it" is not really an excuse; otherwise one could justify anything, from genocide to serial sexual homicide to child molestation. "Everyone else does it" does not make it right, or acceptable.

In his research, author Humberto Fontova reveals that Guevara personally shot more than two dozen people, including some defenseless boys.

Until Andy Garcia made The Lost City, not one film has depicted the mass killings of the Castro regime, let alone Hollywood darling Che Guevara coldly executing unarmed prisoners. Do you think we'll see Che's mass executions at La Cabana dramatized by a major studio anytime soon?

Iniciado por Tamakun

Che was a staunch Stalinist, which after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 started to move away from the Soviet Union, and by 1965 has become a Maoist Stalinist.

Che's loyalties seem rather.. fluid. Is it better to say that he was a bonafide red crusader who believed in red doctrine or a simply a dirty mercenary? This fellow has a persistent legacy and I often see youth wearing t-shirts with his face on them. It's a certain fact that red agitators tend to be whitewashed in the minds of the world but the old saying goes "A zebra can't change its stripes." I've always seen Che as more of a self-serving opportunist but, I suppose, there's nothing that says a devoted red can't have a mercenary's view of the world. Given the ultimately materialistic worldview that reds have, it seems rather reasonable to see how a red might in fact be the perfect mercenary.

Some people have spent time on this thread rationalizing, justifying and excusing the mass executions carried out by their hero Che Guevara, whether it was calling into question the established fact that he personally shot people as a guerrilla fighter and at La Cabaña or demonizing his victims as nothing more than spies, deserters and basically criminals who deserved it.

It goes to show that Che is not the martyr that leftists and brainless kids who wear his shirts believe he is, as his hands are stained with the blood of hundreds of summarily executed victims.

El número exacto de las víctimas cubanas del Che no ha sido verificada independientemente. El número de muertes atribuidas al Che varía e incluye las ejecuciones que él cometió personalmente, así como las órdenes de ejecución que ordenó y / o emitió. En su libro "Yo Soy El Che!" el periodista Luis Ortega, que conocía al Che, reporto que él envió 1,897 hombres al pelotón de fusilamiento. Daniel James, por su parte, escribe en "Che Guevara: Una biografía" que el Che reconoció el haber ordenado "varios miles" de ejecuciones en los primeros años del régimen castrista. El Dr. Lago ha documentado más de 4,000 muertes en Cuba, en su mayoría ejecutados por fusilamiento, durante los primeros tres años después de la toma de posesión de Fidel Castro (1959-1962), un periodo durante el cual el Che Guevara es reconocido por haber sido uno de los ejecutores principales del gobierno castrista.

Most of the people have been subjected to a barrage of propaganda and know very little about the real Che. That is the reason why is important to spread the truth about his character, who really he was, a “cold-blooded killing machine.”

In addition, combat deaths or killings perpetrated in other countries where Che led guerrilla operations – such as Bolivia and Congo – have not been tallied.

"Che was a Marxist soldier who aided the Cuban revolution," says Darrow. "He advocated the philosophy of communism, which is responsible for over 100 million murders, and he personally supervised the executions of scores of people himself."

Thanks to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI the "walking of the walk" that Castro and Che had planned for those "hyenas" was uncovered in November of 1962. On Nov. 17 1962, J Edgar Hoovers' FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term "terrorist" was not used at the time) by Cuban agents that targeted Macy's Gimbel's, Bloomindales and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba's "Foreign Liberation Department" at the time.

A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2000 people, al-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day. - Humberto Fontova, Che Guevara Planned Attacks Against the U.S., NewsMax.com, November 21, 2007.

Frightening what the Castro-Che regime had in storage for the American people.

Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" they dreamt of yelling at the Yankee hyenas in October of 1962, right before the mushroom clouds. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest (Nikita Khrushchev) they might have pulled it off. "If the missiles had remained," Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker in November 1962 regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City." - Humberto Fontova, Che Guevara Planned Attacks Against the U.S., NewsMax.com, November 21, 2007.

Che hatred against the United States was so deep, that he did not give a damn that such action sealed the annihilation of the Cuban people and a large part of humanity.

This Cuban bomb plot was far from "irrational." Castro and Che weren't suicide bombers by any means. In blasting Manhattan and incinerating thousands of New Yorkers they sought to heat things up again, to rekindle all those thrills he'd experienced the previous weeks during the Missile Crisis.

Given the temper of the times, he knew his Soviet sugar daddies would be implicated too. Then the U.S. might retaliate. Then Castro and Che would have exactly what he'd dreamed about and tried to provoke a few weeks earlier: an intercontinental nuclear exchange. - Humberto Fontova, Che Guevara Planned Attacks Against the U.S., NewsMax.com, November 21, 2007.

Millions dead in the United States, millions dead in the Soviet Union, and almost certainly, millions dead in Cuba. But Castro and Che themselves would be nowhere near harms way.

Soviet ambassador to Cuba during the Missile Crisis, Alexander Allusive, reports a fascinating — if unsurprising — datum about those days. While Castro was begging, threatening, even trying to trick Khrushchev into launching a nuclear strike against the U.S., while he was ranting and yelling and waving his arms about grabbing his Czech machine gun and "fighting the Yankee invaders to the last man!" while frantically involved in all this, a "fearful" (Allusive's term) Castro and Che were also making reservations with Allusive for a first-class seats in the Soviet embassy's bomb shelter. - Humberto Fontova, Che Guevara Planned Attacks Against the U.S., NewsMax.com, November 21, 2007.

Like cowards they look for their safety first, without any regard for the consequences of their act.

A Cuban Movie Proposal

As the world's leftists keep celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's death and keep selling him as the ultimate champion of a people's revolution, I keep thinking about my friend Carlos Barberia.

When you talk to Barberia, you see the other side of Guevara, who has become a romanticized icon.

After all, when the guerrillas came down from the mountains, ironically, they stayed at the Hilton. For the first few months of 1959, Castro and his top men occupied three floors of the prestigious Havana hotel. And when the guerrillas and the musicians got hungry in the middle of the night, they all gathered at the hotel kitchen looking for leftovers.

That's where Barberia met Castro and Guevara. They hit it off right away. Barberia was an admirer of the rebels, and the rebels found him entertaining.

"We became very friendly, and we would talk about all kinds of things," Barberia said.

During those first few months of 1959, Castro had put Guevara in charge of the firing squads that executed hundreds of Batista government officials and other Cubans considered potential enemies. Guevara served as prosecutor, judge and jury. And at one point, Barberia felt it was getting out of hand.

"I simply suggested to Fidel that they should consider stopping the firing squads, and El Che was listening," Barberia said. "I told them they were killing too many people."

A few hours later, at the crack of dawn, a group of Guevara's men went knocking on Barberia's door in Havana. He was told that Guevara wanted to see him at La Cabana, the old Spanish fortress that had been turned from a tourist attraction to a prison, complete with firing squads.

Barberia said Guevara greeted him at the officers' club, a beautiful dining room that had a glass wall overlooking the castle's courtyard. He said he knew the room well because his Kubavana Orchestra had performed there many times back when La Cabana was still a place for tourists. But in the first few months of Castro's rule, that courtyard had become the stage for Guevara's bloody firing squads.

Barberia said Guevara invited him to breakfast, ordered two rare steaks and told him to sit facing the courtyard. Barberia had been invited to watch the executions.

"They brought four guys out, but when they shot the first one, I got up and I walked away," Barberia said.

Barberia felt that his rejection of Guevara's methods made him a marked man. In December 1959, upon learning that Guevara's men were investigating him, Barberia went into hiding in Havana and then out of Cuba. When Guevara's men went looking for him, Barberia said, "They took my father and had him shot." - Miguel Perez, A Cuban Movie Proposal, www.creators.com, November 6, 2007

Carlos Barberia is the bandleader of the Orchestra Kubavana, New Jersey. Luckily he manage to escape, but sadly not his father

There are more to this story. The saga continues

Barberia, now 72, has made strides in the United States, both as a bandleader and as an advertising salesman for New York Spanish-language radio stations. But when he is confronted with images of Guevara, Barberia is visibly affected. His face turns red. His eyes shed tears. When he sees young Americans who don't know Guevara's true history blindly following a murderer who has been turned into a pop-culture icon, Barberia makes a visible effort to restrain himself.

Not long ago, when Barberia waited for a bus on Bergenline Avenue, he spotted a Guevara T-shirt on a rack at a sidewalk sale. And he couldn't take it. They had brought the T-shirt out too close to the comfort zone. He grabbed the T-shirt, took it inside the store and paid for it. And then he took it back outside and set it on fire.

When police arrived, Barberia said he was honest in explaining his outburst. "Che Guevara killed my father," he told the officers. "He had my father shot by a firing squad in Cuba." - Miguel Perez, A Cuban Movie Proposal, www.creators.com, November 6, 2007

Che Guevara, that some try to present as a philanthropist and of deep Christian values, the answer is given to them in letter he wrote to his mother, July 15, 1956 from a Mexican prison:

“I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I'm all the contrary of Christ…. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and I try to leave the other man dead so I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place..." - Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997

An excellent assessment of Che Guevara by Liz Balmaseda.

More than a mortal, more than a revolutionary, Che Guevara is pure mystique, a pop-culture phenom born of a cool graphic image.

Che, the brand, has been unparalleled in its reach across cultures and purposes, from the militant to the materialistic to the rampantly mundane, emblazoned on every imaginable surface: T-shirts, posters, belt buckles, lighters, lip gloss, curtains, shot glasses, skateboards, action figures, nesting dolls, tattoos, maracas, bikinis.

Che, the revolutionary, was far less successful. Despite his critical role in the rebel takeover of Cuba in 1959 and his firebrand writings, the medical student-turned-guerrilla failed at every other revolt he endeavored. His last mission led to his capture and death in Bolivia.-
Liz Balmaseda, Who was Che Guevara?,Palm Beach Post, June 18, 2008

But there was one guerrilla mission he excelled at, notoriously so. As warden at La Cabaña fortress prison in the months following the Castro takeover, he became the revolution's chief executioner. How many "enemies of the revolution" faced his firing squad during the first six months of 1959 ranges between 160 and more than 500. That stint earned him the nickname of the "Butcher of La Cabaña."

In the early years of the Cuban revolution, Guevara served as jail warden, minister of industry and - ironically for a militant who once urged "the struggling masses" to rob banks - as president of the National Bank of Cuba, during which time he issued bank notes signed "Che." Guevara was one of the architects of Cuba's totalitarian police state. - Liz Balmaseda, Who was Che Guevara?,Palm Beach Post, June 18, 2008

Che, the butcher of La Cabaña, declared that "at La Cabaña all executions are carried out under my express orders.”

The rebel who wrote the ultimate guerrilla manual in his 1960 handbook, Guerrilla Warfare, embarked on several botched missions.

His secret operation to organize rebels in the Congo was so disastrous, the Castro government deep-sixed the details for years. Guevara left the Congo for his doomed - and final - mission, in Bolivia.

Guevara described his guerrilla self as "bloodthirsty" and "violent" and a "coldblooded killing machine." These were traits he put into action during the bloody rebel uprising of the late 1950s, with point-blank executions and other displays of brutality.- Liz Balmaseda, Who was Che Guevara?,Palm Beach Post, June 18, 2008

Che, in his diary about his guerrilla experience in the Congo in 1965, begins with this observation: ''This is the history of a failure.”' The guerrilla adventure he led in the Congo was a fiasco. He reaped what he saw.

The true impact that the regime Che co-founded had on race relations. Special attention would be given to the life of Eusebio Penalver who was the longest serving black political prisoner of the 20th century. He was incarcerated in Cuba longer than Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in South Africa. His jailers called him "Nigger" and "Monkey." They also warned him that they would pull him down from the trees and cut off his tail. Instead, they just put him in solitary confinement. No wonder only 8% of Cuba's communist rulers are black. And no wonder 85% of its prisoners are black. The term "apartheid" could be applied to Cuba if only American progressive professors were honest.

Photo of Che wearing his GMT Rolex watch. It should be dedicated to all those communist professors who talk like revolutionaries, live like hypocrites, and fail to teach their students about inconvenient truths.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eam69/135299056/