Tema: The real Che Guevara

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."

In 1956, when Che linked up with Fidel, Raul and their Cuban chums in Mexico city, one of them (now in exile) recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as "Fascists!" and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.

In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. He had a hand in the following: "Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits."

At one point in 1962, one of every 19 Cubans was a political prisoner. Fidel himself admits that they faced 179 bands of "counter-revolutionaries" and "bandits." - Humberto Fontova, “Che the ‘Guerrilla Fighter’ – Literally!” LewRockwell.com, August 15, 2005

Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel, and cowardly. He was full of himself, a consummate fraud and an intellectual vacuum. He was intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke in cliches and was a glutton for publicity. But ah! he did come out nice in a couple of publicity photos, high cheekbones and all! And we wonder why he's a hit in Hollywood? - Humberto Fontova, Che Guevara: Assasin and Bumbler, The Cuban American National Foundation, Feb. 23, 2004

Fontova is right, Che was all of that and more.

One thing is certain: Guevara’s desire for the development of the New Man did not emerge from his empirical experience of actual men. In the Motorcycle Diaries, he meets many excellent and indeed magnificent men, rich and poor alike. Guevara’s desire for the development of the New Man, I believe, comes from his need to control the lives of others, his urge to power. With unique lack of self-knowledge, with an absolute absence of irony, he describes the character of Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile:

Valdivia’s actions symbolize man’s indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total control… . 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.

Could there be a better description of Guevara’s career itself?

In presenting Guevara as a romantic figure, generous and compassionate rather than ruthlessly priggish and self-centered, and by suggesting that he has anything to teach us other than negatively, the director is guilty of mendacity of a very high order. The film is an exercise in moral frivolity and exhibitionism, self-congratulation, of course, opportunism. It should sell as well as Guevara T-shirts. - Anthony Daniels, New Criterion, October, 2004.

Which New Man; fanatics, liars, assassins and failed men, reaching the total realization of being like Che?

Thirty nine years ago Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying, "what goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here. The number of men Che's "revolutionary tribunals" condemned to death in the identical manner range from 400 to 1892. The number of defenseless men (and boys) Che personally murdered with his own pistol runs to the dozens.

"Executions?" Che Guevara exclaimed while addressing the hallowed halls of the UN General Assembly December 9, 1964. "Certainly, we execute! " he declared to the claps and cheers of that August body. "And we will continue executing (emphasis HIS) as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the Revolution's enemies!" - Humberto Fontova, “Che Guevara 39 Years of Hype”, Guacarabuya, October 2006

The butcher of la Cabaña; he lives by the sword, he die by the sword.

"I don't need proof to execute a man" snapped Che to a judicial underling in 1959. "I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him!"

Not that you'd surmise any of the above from the mainstream media or academia-- much less Hollywood. From the high priests of the Fourth Estate Che Guevara gets only accolades. Time magazine, for instance, honors Che Guevara among "The 100 Most Important People of the Century."

The man who declared, "a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate," (and set a spirited example,) who boasted that he executed from "revolutionary conviction" rather than from any "archaic bourgeois details" like judicial evidence, and who urged "atomic extermination" as the final solution for those American "hyenas," (and came hearth-thumpingly close with Nuclear missiles in October 1962) is hailed by Time--not just among the "most important" people of the Century--but in the "Heroes and Icons" section, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov and Rosa Parks.

"If the Nuclear missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City," Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November of 1962. "We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims...We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm." This was Che's prescription for America almost half a century before Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Al-Zarqawi appeared on our radar screens.

But for the prudence of Nikita Khrushchev, Che Guevara's fondest wish would have made New York's 9-11 explosions appear like an errant cherry bomb. Yet listed alongside Che Guevara in Time's "Heroes and Icons of the Century," is Mother Theresa. From here the ironies only get richer. - Humberto Fontova, “Che Guevara 39 Years of Hype”, Guacarabuya, October 2006

Che had a deep hatred against the United States. From his statements we can infer he was a cold blooded killing machine.