Tema: The real Che Guevara

Guevara became “supreme prosecutor” at Havana’s La Cabaña fortress after Batista fled Cuba. Here he presided over hundreds of executions in proceedings that even a sympathetic biographer notes “were carried out without respect for due process.”[1, p. 143]

The "cold-blooded killing machine" did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution.

In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” [4]

The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades.

Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before WWII. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20 thousand political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night Of The Long Knives." The famous night that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.

Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega who knew Che as early as 1954 writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime.

[4] Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The Killing Machine, The New Republic, 11/7/2005
Link: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535

In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: “He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural.” He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will.

He ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of 1958: “The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them.” This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution. The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. [4]

[4] Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The killing machine, The New Republic, 11/7/2005

Chilling story of a former political prisoner Pierre San Martin, an eyewitness to the cold blooded murder of a child between 12 and 14 years of age carried out by the abominable monster of cruelty Che Guevara in the fortress of La Cabana. How it is possible that nowadays there are so far people who feel admiration for this mass murderer?

“It was during the last days of December 1959, the sound of the iron door opening was heard as they threw another person into the already crowded cell. It was a boy some 12 to 14 years old at most who had just become our newest cellmate. And what did you do? I defended my father so they wouldn't kill him, I couldn't stop it. Soon Che's goons came back, and they yanked the valiant boy out of the cell.

He gave the order to bring the boy first and he ordered him to kneel in front of the wall. The boy disobeyed the order with a courage that words can't express and responded to this infamous character: “If you're going to kill me you're going to have to do it the way you kill a man, standing, not like a coward, kneeling.”

Walking behind the boy, the Che said “whereupon you are a brave lad.” He upholstered his pistol and shot him in the nape of the neck so that he almost decapitated him.”

Here's a cold-blooded murderer who executed thousands without trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an ”unnecessary bourgeois detail,” who stayed up till dawn for months at a time signing death warrants for innocent and honorable men, whose office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions – and today his T-shirts adorn people who oppose capital punishment. By his own count, Che sent 2,500 men to "the wall."-Pierre San Martin, How Che Murdered, El Nuevo Herald , Diciembre 28, 1997. http://www.trenblindado.com/Sanmartin.html

When the Rumanian writer Stefan Bacie visited Havana, Che Guevara
invited him to be present at an execution. Bacie has made reference a few times
to this macabre invitation, the last time in his poem:

"I DO NOT SING TO CHE"

I do not sing to Che,
neither I have sung to Stalin
with Che I spoke enough in Mexico,
and in Havana he invited me,
biting the pure between the lips,
like inviting somebody to a drink in the bar,
to accompany him to see how people are shot
at the wall in la Cabaña.

I do not sing to Che,
neither I have sung to Stalin;
let Neruda, Guillen and Cortazar sing to him;
they sing to Che (the singers of Stalin),
I sing to the youth of Czechoslovakia.

The difference between ‘Che’ Guevara and Pol Pot was that Guevara never studied in Paris.

But the mass-executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who opposes capital punishment! Is there a psychiatrist in the house?!

Che, the radical left symbol, was a homophobe.

Che played a principal role in setting up Cuba's first labor camp in the Guanahacabibes region in western Cuba in 1960-1961, to confine people who had committed no crime punishable by law, revolutionary or otherwise. This "crimes" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music. Che defended that initiative in his own words: “We only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway.

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of UMAP, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros's wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.” - Álvaro Vargas Llosa, “Che Guevara, the killing machine”, The New Republic, 11/7/2005

This type of forced confinement without due process was also applied to AIDS victims during the decade of the 80s and 90s.

Che Guevara
The Making of a Marxist Martyr
by Terrell Clemmons



The Façade
Four decades after his death, the visage of Che Guevara survives him as a symbol of passion, idealism, and restless discontent with the status quo. In fact, as time passes, his celebrity grows. In 2004, Robert Redford produced The Motorcycle Diaries, a film chronicling Che’s eight-month-long motorbike odyssey across South America at age twenty-three. The New York Times said the film “humanizes” Che, portraying him as a “restless, passionate bohemian with dancing eyes and a deepening core of empathy for the poor.” In 2007, a lock of hair cut from his corpse, along with photos of his dead body, sold for over $100,000, and Che-Lives.com was billed as the largest leftist site on the internet.
Hollywood is especially smitten. In 2008, Steven Soderbergh directed a two-part, four-hour biopic titled, simply, Che, with Benicio del Toro playing the lead. “Groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics!” del Toro said of his character. Johnny Depp wears a Che pendant around his neck, and Angelina Jolie reportedly sports a Che tattoo somewhere on her body, though she won’t say where. Che’s face has become an emblem of chic on everything from sarongs to coffee mugs to mouse pads. You can even say chic on your feet with a pair of Che chucks.


The Facts
Born in 1928 to bohemian Argentine aristocrats, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna completed medical school in Buenos Aires in 1953, then wandered about through Latin America for the next two years. It was during this time that he adopted the nickname “Che,” an Argentine slang speech filler meaning something like “Hey you” or even “Dude.” The name fit. Up until that time, his life was just about that aimless and ill-defined.
That all changed in the summer of 1955, after a chance meeting in Mexico City with Fidel Castro, who was planning his overthrow of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. Che, having seen poverty and lived in squalor, had by this time become convinced that only a Marxist revolution could remedy the world’s ills. In Castro and in Cuba, he found his leader to follow and his people group to liberate. A year later, Castro and Che set out on a junker yacht for Cuba.
By 1959, after two years of guerilla insurgency, a coup was achieved. Che was made comandante of La Cabana, the colonial fortress turned military prison overlooking Havana harbor, and he set about governing with ruthless intensity. He knew that for the revolution to succeed, resistance would have to be swiftly dealt with, so he put his firing squads to work on triple shifts. For the next three years, the comandante imprisoned dissidents at a higher rate than Stalin did and oversaw more executions than Hitler did during his first six years in power.
Che also took up the task of remaking Cuba according to the Marxist vision, which included assuming command of Cuba’s national bank and taking charge of industry. Within a year, the value of Cuba’s peso plummeted to almost nothing; her sugar, cattle, tobacco, and nickel industries were in shambles; and her people carried food ration cards.
Many sought to leave. Since the Cuban revolution, an estimated two million Cubans have fled the country, another eighty thousand have died trying, and suicide has become one of the highest causes of death among the adults who remained. Cuba’s abortion rate is 60 percent.
The perplexing question, especially for Cuban survivors is: Exactly what about all of this is chic?
The Fabrication
The recasting of Che the executioner into Che the revolutionary and cause célèbre began in 1967, on the day Che died, and it illustrates the public relations finesse of Fidel Castro, a pragmatic power-seeker who knew a useful idiot when he saw one, dead or alive. Although Che had left Cuba under a cloud two years earlier, Castro responded to the news of Che’s death by declaring a three-day period of national mourning. “If you wish to express what we want our children to be,” he told a crowd in Havana’s Revolution Square, “we must say from our hearts as ardent revolutionaries, ‘We want them to be like Che!’” From then on, Cuban schoolchildren began their day saying, “Pioneers of Communism, we will be like Che!”
It makes perfect sense that Castro would want everyone to be like Che, for Che served Castro to his dying breath. It also makes sense that Cuban schoolchildren would be forced to pay tribute to this would-be role model. They have no choice. What doesn’t make sense is why anyone in the free world would follow suit.
Yet they do. A 2008 University of Arizona student paid homage to Che in the student newspaper, the Daily Wildcat: “To be a revolutionary . . . you have to cause change from the norm. It doesn’t even have to be good or be positive; it just has to be a change.” Actress Susan Sarandon expressed the allure, saying that people who dedicate themselves to a cause at the expense of everything else “are really fascinating people.” Here we have the morally vacuous idealism that venerates a mass murderer: It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you really believe it and give it your all.
The Fallacy
The charisma ascribed to Che seems to be connected to his raw passion and drive. While Castro merely sought power and used whatever means necessary (including Che) to attain it, Che, a pure Marxist, actually believed. “You’ll see,” the would-be liberator predicted at the outset, “when Castro’s running things, everybody will read and have food on the table.” Confident that the rotors of revolution would churn out a purified social order, Che radically destroyed the old to make way for the new. “We are the future,” he wrote to his father in 1959.
Che sycophants utterly fail to discern the disconnection between revolutionary rhetoric and revolutionary reality. Here are five aspects of Che they either don’t know or overlook:
Blood. For all his talk about liberation, what Che apparently liked most was killing people. “I’d like to confess,” he wrote to his father after his first kill, “I really like killing.” He liked it so much that he had a section of wall cut out of his La Cabana office, to give him a better view of the execution yard. In 1961, he began the appalling practice of draining the blood from condemned prisoners before shooting them. The blood was then sold for $50 a pint, most of it to North Vietnam. An average prisoner brought in about $250.
Theft. According to the myth, Che selflessly identified with the poor, but in reality he had no problem helping himself to the accoutrements of wealth, often other people’s. When he took up residency in Havana, for example, he appropriated for himself a lovely seaside estate with seven bathrooms, a projection TV, a chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benz, and a large swimming pool.
Disregard for human rights and justice. To Che, individuals didn’t matter except to the extent that they served the revolution. He executed prisoners out of “revolutionary conviction,” without concern for “archaic bourgeois details” like due process or judicial evidence. In other words, he killed people when it suited his purposes to do so.
He particularly had his sights on America. When the Soviet Union withdrew its nuclear missiles from Cuba, Che was furious. “If the nuclear missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America,” he told the London Daily Worker in 1962.
Neglect of and indifference to actual people. Despite Che’s professed goal of food and education for all, he felt no obligation to provide for his own family. When he left Cuba in 1965, this father of five children wrote, “I am not sorry that I leave nothing material to my wife and children; I am happy it is that way. I ask nothing for them, as the state will provide them with enough to live on and receive an education.” This was consistent with his political philosophy. “The revolution is what is important. Each one of us, on our own, is worthless.”
Finally, delusion—the root problem with Marxism. According to Marxist ideology, societal problems are caused by the unequal distribution of wealth. To remedy the ill, the “have-nots” are summoned to armed struggle against the “haves.” It’s a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. Carlos Eire, the son of a pre-Castro government official, records a telling scene from his childhood in his memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana. Carlos, eight years old when Castro took over, recalls the family maid, an angry woman named Caridad who loved Castro, taunting him when his parents weren’t around: “Pretty soon, you’re going to lose all this.” “Pretty soon you’ll be sweeping my floor.” “Pretty soon I’ll be seeing you at your fancy beach club, and you’ll be cleaning out the trash cans while I swim.”
But it didn’t work out that way. It never does.
The Fallout
Castro followed the Marxist script because it advanced his cause. But Che, like Caridad, actually believed it. Ironically, Che’s faith became his undoing. By 1964, he had outlived his usefulness to Castro, and Castro cut him loose. Che left Cuba “voluntarily,” still bent on revolution, but with no support, no leader to follow, and no people group to “liberate.” He died three years later on the receiving end of a bullet in a Bolivian mountain village. Some suspect that Castro had betrayed him. But—the revolution was what mattered. The individual was worthless.
The Arizona student was right about one thing. Che caused change. But he’s wrong about everything else. It does matter whether the change is positive or negative, and it does matter what you believe. Because Marxism is founded on falsehood, it will forever be nihilistic at its core, and it will always end badly. It holds great power to destroy, but none to create or build. This is why the utopia Che envisioned for Cuba never materialized but morphed into a nightmare. In reality, Cuba got plundered and decimated, and Che got betrayed and shot.
And all that remains of Che is the myth and the merchandise. •


Salvo Magazine: Che Guevara - Salvo 13

During the Cuban missile crisis on October 1962, Che demanded that nuclear war be unleashed on the United States. He told British reporter Sam Russell that “if the nuclear missiles had been under Cuban control (during the Cuban missile crisis), they would have fired them off.” Reportedly, he was disappointed when Khrushchev decided to draw back his weapons in the missile crisis. "If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression." And a couple of years later, at the United Nations, he was true to form: “As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not include coexistence between exploiters and the exploited.”
On December 11, 1964, during a debate in the United Nations General Assembly where Guevara represented de Cuban government, this was severely attacked because of the firing squad executions without any judicial process and evidence as required by the rule of law. Guevara, on his own voiced, responded:

“Shooting people yes, we have shoot people and will continuo to do so until it will be required.” [1] This show that he was a person convinced of what he was doing, and could care less and has not any prejudice to send to the firing squad a lot of people, on condition that his points of view will prevail.
[1] Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqAvuiyzz5k.

In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”This use of hatred to encourage the dehumanization of ones enemy is but another manifestation of the doctrine found throughout the centuries to justify mass murder and torture.

“Che shout to his captors in Bolivia, “Don't shoot – I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!”. Then why didn't he save his last bullet for himself? He could only beg for his life. The murderous, cowardly and epically stupid little weasel named Che Guevara in Bolivia, got a major dose of his own medicine. Justice has never been better served.- Humberto Fontova, “The Real Che Guevara”, NewsMax.com, June 25, 2002”

Che only was able to beg for his life, he didn’t know to die like a man, like the 14 years old boy he killed at La Cabaña that said to him: “If you're going to kill me you're going to have to do it the way you kill a man, standing, not like a coward, kneeling.”

“Che Guevara, who did so much to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda. His contemporary followers delude themselves by clinging to a myth, except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression: “I have a Che T-shirt and I don't know why.”

Thanks to Che's own testimonials, his thoughts and his deeds, we now know exactly how deluded so many of our contemporaries are about him.-The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand.

The worshipers of Che aren’t rebels or peace activists. They are tools promoting the harmful legacy of collectivism and the havoc it has brought all over the world.

Che's legacy in Cuba is one neighbor spying on another, high suicide rates, and a generation of young Cubans risking their lives on rafts in the Florida Straits rather than continue to live under a despotic government. Che's true legacy is simply one of terror and murder. - Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The New Republic, July 11, 2005.

The racism of Che Guevara

Che didn't think much of Mexicans. In 1956 while residing in Mexico, Che refer to the Mexican as: "a band of illiterate Indians."

Che also delighted in belittling blacks. "The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving," that's Che himself in his celebrated Motorcycle Diaries. Can't imagine how Robert Redford left that out of his charming movie.

In his diaries Che also referred to Bolivian villagers as "animalitos" (little animals.) Wonder if Evo Morales has read them? He's too busy ribbon-cutting Che monuments in Bolivian villages.

Che’s racism comments about blacks and Indians appears in “The Motorcycles Diaries: Notes on a Latin America Journey”, available in print. The reference to the Mexicans is provided by Miguel Sánchez, “el coreano”, Che’s comrade in Mexico responsible of the military instruction of Castro’s Granma expeditionary force.

Quotes from the book “The Motorcycle Diaries”

“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese."

"The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”

Guevara’s elevation as symbol of goodness, due to the self-indulgence and frivolity of pampered Western pseudo revolutionaries, speaks clearly of their lack of critical objective analysis, forgetting that, as Anthony Daniels states, "The difference between ‘Che’ Guevara and Pol Pot was that Guevara never studied in Paris."