The real Che Guevara

CHE GUEVARA:

- Worked in a Leper colony and treated lepers

- Was instrumental in teaching over 900,000 Cubans to read

- Tended to thousands of sick campesinos

- Helped construct dozens of schools throughout Cuba

- Removed the Mafia and dictatorship of Batista from Cuba which had killed 20,000 Cubans and tortured thousands more

- Desegregated the schools in Cuba before they were in the Southern US

- Called out South Africa’s Apartheid in 1964, 30 years before the West!

- Denounced the racism and KKK in America

- Warned of the dangers of the IMF, 3 decades before most of the developing world realized they had been scammed into debt slavery

- Left a bourgeoisie comfortable life of the upper class, a potential well compensated career as a medical doctor, and a high regarded governmental position, each time to slog through the jungle and fight guerrilla wars against impenetrable odds! ... In fact, near the end it took 1,800 rangers to bring down his 25 men.


CHE'S "CRIMES" WERE:

~ Stopping American companies from owning 70 % of the arable land in Cuba

~ Teaching peasants to read, by bringing the Cuban literacy rate from 60 to 97 %

~ Having the 200 or so War Criminals who killed 20,000 Cubans for Batista shot against a wall

~ Fighting white mercenaries in the African Congo with an all black army

~ Speaking out against US and eventually USSR Imperialism while demanding that the poor of the world be allowed to live a life of dignity


"Che’s life is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom, we will always honor his memory." — Nelson Mandela

Che was no humanist. No communist leader, indeed, ever held humanist values. Karl Marx certainly was not one. True to their movement’s founding prophet, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Che held no respect for life. Blood needed to be shed if a better world was to be baptized. When criticized by one of his early companions for the death of millions during the Chinese revolution, Mao observed that countless Chinese die everyday, so what did it matter?

Likewise, Che could kill with a shrug. Trained as a medical doctor in Argentina, he chose not to save lives but to suppress them. After he seized power, Che put to death five hundred “enemies” of the revolution without trial, or even much discrimination.

Indeed, without his ideology, Che would have been nothing more than another serial killer. Ideological sloganeering allowed him to kill in larger numbers than any serial killer could imagine, and all in the name of justice. Five centuries ago, Che probably would have been one of those priest/soldiers exterminating Latin America’s natives in the name of God. In the name of History, Che, too, saw murder as a necessary tool of a noble cause. - Guy Sorman, Hollywood filmmakers blind to Che Guevara's brutality, The Australian, February 02, 2009

“There was no person more feared by the company (CIA) than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America.”
— Philip Agee, CIA Agent

Che was fighting against:
- American Oligarchy (United Fruit, Texaco, U.S. Sugar)
- The US based Mafia (1959 Havana)
- The Monroe Doctrine rationale for Latin American Imperialism (Bay of Pigs)
- The idea of Banana Republics (Arbenz 1953 coup)

Plus Che’s radicalism was spawned from living in Guatemala during the 1953 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz by the CIA at the behest of the United Fruit Company (those lovely capitalists who liked to kill brown Central Americans so Americans could have cheap bananas).

Beyond Cuba, the Che myth has inspired thousands of students and activists across Latin America to lose their lives in foolhardy guerrilla struggles. The left, inspired by the siren call of Che, chose armed struggle instead of elections. By doing so, it opened the way to military dictatorship. Latin America is not yet cured of these unintended consequences of Guevarism.

Indeed, fifty years after Cuba’s revolution, Latin America remains divided. Those nations that rejected Che’s mythology and chose the path of democracy and the free market, such as Brazil, Peru, and Chile, are better off than they ever were: equality, freedom, and economic progress have advanced in unity. By contrast, those nations that remain nostalgic for the cause of Che, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, are at this very moment poised on the brink of civil war. - Guy Sorman, Hollywood filmmakers blind to Che Guevara's brutality, The Australian, February 02, 2009.

Letter to Mayor Bloomberg of New York

Paquito D'Rivera, famous Cuban jazz musician, wrote this letter to Mayor Bloomberg with regard to Che Guevara Statue located in New York’s Central Park. He never received a response from the Mayor office. He ask us to feel free to make it public.

January 5-2009

Dearest Mayor Bloomberg:

In the mid fifties, still a young child, my father came home with a fabulous Benny Goodman LP, recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Ever since I’ve dreamed to be a working musician in the city of New York . What I never, ever dreamed, not even in my wildest nightmares, was that after having to join two million Cuban exiles in 1980, I was going to see a sad statue of Che Guevara, a couple of blocks away from the glorious sculpture of Cuban National hero Jose Martí at New York’s Central Park.

“The butcher of La Cabaña fortress”, as was the nickname of this lamentable Argentinean character, Guevara ––a self proclaimed enemy of the USA–– was responsible for countless murders and abuses in my homeland as well as in other countries, where he tried to impose totalitarian regimes by the law of his guns. So, although I heard that the ridiculous Spanish made sculpture is meant to be just temporarily at the spot on 60th street and 5th avenue, that doesn’t mean it9d be less offensive than having a Stalin monument in Orchard Beach, a Hitler portrait on the walls of Carnegie deli, or a representation of a man in KKK’s macabre rope next to the Duke Ellington’s memorial in Harlem.

So I really hope that you feel some respect and compassion for your many Cuban supporters and sympathizers, and remove ASAP such an anachronistic an insulting image from the surface of our beloved City.

Always with the same appreciation.

Sincerely:

Paquito D’Rivera

I have no real position on this discussion, just an observation: people will always defend their guy, as long as it is their guy. Doesn't matter what happened, once someone has grafted their emotions to one side of an issue, all the rhetoric and reason probably won't change their mind.

Maybe that's true for any discussion, but I noticed it more so in this thread. Even when forced to admit that the evidence doesn't quite make their guy look so good many posts play the 'he's only human' card. Let's apply that thinking to a few others:

Hitler: nobody's perfect.
Stalin's purges: I'm sure he had his reasons.
Mao Zhe Dong's Great Leap Forward: everyone makes mistakes.
G.H. Bush's Iraq invasion over WMDs: whoops!

I am not comparing transgressions, I'm just showing that this is how people have reacted in light of these transgressions, regardless of the severity. One would have better luck wrestling a t-bone from a pit bull than changing the mind of a hardened apologist.

If anything the spirited discussion makes me want to see the movies now.



Auto-Tune is not a genre, please stop treating it as such.

In a famous speech in 1961, Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates,” commanded Guevara. “Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.” “Youth,” wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass.”

“Those who choose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to “Yankee-Imperialist” Rock & Roll) were denounced as worthless “roqueros,” “lumpen” and “delinquents.” In his famous speech, Che Guevara even vowed “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!” - Murder & Myth The Truth Behind The T Shirt by Humberto Fontova

How Che died

In real life this is what happened:

Che, at the time of being taken prisoner, who was slightly wounded by a bullet in the leg, with the rifle up high shouted to his captors in Bolivia, “Don’t shoot, I’m Che, I’m worth more to you alive than dead” His 9 millimeters pistol had all its bullets when yielding it. Why he allowed to be taken prisoner and didn’t fight to the last bullet? He thought that they were not going to kill him, that they would judge him as they did with Régis Debray and Ciro Bustos. He only was able to beg for his life, he didn’t know to die like a man. - Che Guevara: The Fish Die by the Mouse
Link: http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y09/enero09/23_O_3.html

When they were a few feet away, a short, sturdy highland Indian named Sergeant Bernardino Huanca, broke through the brush and pointed his gun at them. He claimed later that Che told him: “Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead.” - Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara a revolutionary Life, 1997, p.733.

There's a lot to read and learn, pretty much like most subjects. Thanks for the references.

Auto-Tune is not a genre, please stop treating it as such.

The M-1 rifle with which Che surrenders, is not his, but that of his partner,
the Bolivian guerrilla Willy, with whom he changes his rifle to justify his surrender without a fight, since the one used by him, like that of the other leaders, was an M-2 in good condition. His 9 millimeters pistol had all its bullets when yielding it.

The wound in the leg was a slight scratch that it did not prevent him from walking. At the moment of surrender he said “Don’t shoot, I’m Che Guevara.” He didn’t fight until the last bullet, as he demanded from his subordinates, who fulfilled the order and gave their lives in pursuit of an impossible and foreign illusion. - Marcos Bravo*, “La otra cara del Che”

Captain Gary Prado Salmon commanded the unit that captured Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. Prado says that Che simply dropped his gun and surrendered. Prado remembers him responding, “Don't shoot, I'm Che, I'm worth more to you alive than dead.” Che was slightly wounded in the lower calf, and walked helped by a soldier, soldier Montenegro.

Prado said that after Guevara surrendered, he asked me, as I wrote in my book (The Immolated Guerrilla), “what are you going to do with me?” to which I replied: “You will be tried in Santa Cruz.”

Prado has stated that Guevara said Castro failed him at a crucial time. Guevara had said that Fidel Castro not only failed him on the Bolivian campaign but also probably betrayed him. - The Defeat of Che Guevara, by Gary Prado Salmón, 7/24/1990

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In his "Necessary Introduction" to The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara, Castro explain Che’s capture by the Bolivian Army in this way: “It has been established that Che, although wounded, continued to fight until the barrel of his M-2 was destroyed by a bullet, making it totally useless. The pistol he was carrying did not have a magazine. It was only due to these incredible circumstances that they were able to catch him alive. The wounds in his legs, although not fatal, made it impossible for him to walk unaided.

He was taken to the village of Higueras and remained alive for another 24 hours, more or less. He refused to say a single word to his captors and slapped a drunken officer who tried to taunt him.” [1]

Fidel Castro insists Che Guevara could never have been taken prisoner 40 years ago if his gun hadn't malfunctioned, calling Guevara "not a man who could have been taken prisoner" with a working gun.

The explanation of Che capture by the Bolivian Army given by Castro is pure propaganda, there is no proof this ever happened. Nothing in the actual record support Castro accounts of the facts. On the contrary everything points to Che surrendering without fighting to the last bullet. The firefighter was still raging after Che’s surrender. His men, unlike him, were fighting to the last bullet.

His description does not match at all with that of Sergeant Bernardino Huanca, or Captain Gary Prado, or Captain Felix I. Rodriguez, a former CIA agent, or the research conducted at the scene by Marcos Bravo. Castro, at that time, was unaware of the presence on the scene of these eyewitnesses.

[1] Fidel Castro: “Una introducción necesaria”, in Ernesto Che Guevara: Escritos y discursos (Tomo 3: Diario de Bolivia), op. cit., pp. 1-20.

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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?


No amount of Hollywood puffery will change the fact that commies aren’t cool.

Hollywood’s latest round of “Che-mania” kicked off last Friday in New York with a one week preview of Steven Soderbergh’s epic four hour biopic on the life and times of Ernesto Che Guevara. The film opens nationwide, edited into two halves, in January.

When asked why the movie needed to be so long, co-producer and star Benecio Del Toro replied, “That is a question for Che. Why such a fulfilled life? We believe that this is the shortest film about Che Guevara’s revolutionary life that could be made.”

Well, no.

The shortest film about Che’s revolutionary life has already been made. In it, a couple of scruffy, paramilitary-looking, motorcycle-riding cartoon cockroaches decide to “take over” a kitchen, running amok until a giant muscle-bound can of Raid appears and “kills them dead.” - By Mark Goldblatt, Revenge of Che, nationalreview on line

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Guevara, in reality, belongs to that species of human vermin who attach themselves to a charismatic villain — in Che’s case, Fidel Castro; in Heinrich Himmler’s case, Adolf Hitler; in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s case, Osama bin Laden — and enact their murderous agendas until the countervailing forces of history end their pathetic existences. Granted, Che is more photogenic than either the thin-lipped Poindexter Himmler or the hairy-backed Super Mario Brother Sheikh. It’s hard to imagine either of them ever moving a gross of tee shirts the way Che does. But the fact that Che continues to sell is a testament to the historical ignorance of every consumer of his visage. Mark Goldblatt, Revenge of Che, National Review on line.

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"Che’s life is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom, we will always honor his memory."
— Nelson Mandela

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=FI1ixHnDo6I

Indeed, one of the ongoing mysteries of American popular culture is why Communism is merchandised more often and more effectively than Nazism or Islamism. Is it just a matter of public relations? Why does an obsessive Nazi-hunter like Simon Wiesenthal get positive press while an obssessive Communist-hunter like Joe McCarthy is vilified? Why is Marxist Theory, with its alternative view of individual versus collective rights, an accepted academic discipline — but Sharia Theory, with its alternative view of female empowerment, an insult to women?

The truth of the matter is that Nazism, Islamism, and Communism are all totalitarian movements. All three stand in direct opposition to Enlightenment values of religious tolerance and rational inquiry. All three seek to exterminate whoever stands in their way. Nazism justifies its genocide in the name of racial purity. Islamism, in the name of spiritual purity. Communism, in the name of socio-economic purity.

One way or another, the shallow graves get filled. - Mark Goldblatt, Revenge of Che, National Review on line.

So as you sit in the darkened theater, listening to Soderbergh’s Che murmur dreamily that the true revolutionary is guided by “love,” you might want to consider how that love was manifested in a man who used to lay on his side on top of a wall, chomping a cigar even as he urged on the firing squads he commanded. - Mark Goldblatt, Revenge of Che, National Review on line.

No doubt the pasty-white former plantation owners and mafia pimps in Miami who ran Cuba before the revolution think everyone else share's their priorities ... but this is not the case. In fact, over the last twenty years, it's apparent that Latin America as a whole is fed up with the colonial arrogance of not just US imperialis­m, but the local vassals and stooges who earn their keep selling out their own people.

Listening to the cowardly gusanos wail and cry ... it's like music. You lost. Fidel & Che whooped your fascist little asses and now you want sympathy? Get real. The Miami mafia and Batista lost. You will never get the land back. You will never again turn Cuba into your brothel.

Remember this: the USA still occupies one part of Cuba: Guantanamo Bay. The USA uses it as a torture camp. That's a fact. You can run all the "democracy­" BS you want. Those who support US domination of Cuba already have a crystal clear example of what that means.

History has already absolved Fidel and honored Che as an icon of freedom.

Deal with it.

In most cases, if you want to know how heroic someone is, first gage how much the right-wing hates them. The greater the teabaggers hate him, the more heroic he/she must be. Che Guevara, (one of the most heroic individuals of the 20th century) invites a large amount of hatred, vitriol, and misinformation from the conservative wing-nuts for two reasons:

(1) He represents many of the noble attributes that their bankrupt philosophy abhors, namely self-sacrifice, helping the poor, restoring justice when it comes to great inequality, and overthrowing the oligarch puppets of plantation capitalism.

(2) Che represents everything that the right-wingers secretly wish they were – brave, determined, dashing, charismatic, intelligent, poetic, and unshakable against impenetrable odds – while they took deferments from Vietnam – Che battled armies on 2 continents usually outnumbered 20 or 50 to 1.

While right-wingers have a dream of becoming rich and owning a 4 car garage – Che had a dream of liberating the entire 3rd world from Imperialism and ultimately gave his life for his ideals.

The worst propagandists against Che are also the Miami mafia and ex gusano goons of the dictator Batista who Che overthrew. These hacks spread lies about Che from the daily comforts of Miami and against a man who’s been dead for 40 + years. They are also bitter because they want their parent’s hacienda mansions and the slave labor that came with it back – that they enjoyed before Che came and spoilt all their fun.

Of the lying hacks, the worst clown of all is Humberto Fontova, an exile with no shame, credibility, or appreciation for historical truth. His screeds become the gospel for the Little Havana South Florida squad of hucksters on the CIA payroll – and ultimately get picked up and copy and pasted all across the internet by half-literate right-wing trolls who wouldn’t know their a$S from the elbow.

To me Che Guevara is one of the most heroic figures in world history who is a stoic example of what all those who speak of “revolution” should espouse to be.

This was a man who left a bourgeoisie comfortable life of the upper class, a potential well compensated career as a medical doctor, and a high regarded governmental position --- each time to slog through the jungle and fight guerrilla wars against impenetrable odds = for a better and more equitable society.

I endorse Jean Paul Sartre’s declaration that Guevara was the “most complete man of our time” … and find his life not only fascinating but deeply inspiring.

Guevara despite his crippling and acute asthma which would debilitate him almost daily to inches from death, directed “suicide squads” in the battle against the U.S. armed and backed Dictator Batista where with less than 300 men; he literally took on 10,000 Batista soldiers armed with tanks, jets, and U.S. weaponry, and came out victorious at and leading up to the victory at Santa Clara.

In Bolivia, Guevara spent almost over 1 hellish year in the festering jungle battling a disease which left his hands as mounds of swollen flesh, the fact that his allergic reaction to mosquito bites would leave walnut sized welts all over his body, kept fighting even when he was without food for nearly a month, went shoeless, without blankets, and STILL with less than 30 men took on a force of 1,800 Bolivian U.S. armed rangers with an air force, green beret advisors, and CIA technology. Despite these odds Guevara’s men killed 30 Bolivian troops before they even lost their first Guerrilla. Moreover, displaying his character, despite all these hardships, when Guevara could have simply taken the food of Bolivian campesinos to eat, he insisted on paying for everything.

Throughout his life Che tended to thousands of sick campesinos, helped construct dozens of schools throughout Cuba, worked in a Leper colony to helped those afflicted, and even when he was literally tied up in a small mud school house awaiting his own execution ! , still complained to the local teacher that in a nation where the leaders drove Mercedes … it was a travesty that the peasants were taught in a dilapidated place like he was in.

Although I don’t believe in religious dogma (neither did Che), and view myself as an atheist, I do find it telling that the person Che was so often compared to by those who knew him was Jesus Christ. Because of his implacable character, unbending morals, and innate desire to fight in favor of the afflicted, I think that those who knew him were left with no other figure to compare him to.

Was he perfect? Of course not. No human is. But in mind he was awfully close considering the circumstances and cards he was dealt. I also find it telling that the best “canard” his detractors and those propagandists of monopoly capitalism can come up with - was his short stint at La Cabana prison. Where Che simply reviewed the cases and convictions of war criminals convicted by revolutionary tribunal (modeled after Nuremburg). The same secret police and Batista backed torturers that killed 20,000 people and tortured tens of thousands more. At a time when Fidel and Che would release military captives in the Sierra after tending to them medically, Batista would gouge the eyes out of captives until they gave away rebel positions. The fact that Che saw to it that justice was delivered cold to the Cuban people to me only makes him more heroic. He knew that a “pedagogy of the wall” was the only thing that could cleanse a society from the thousands of goons who raped and terrorized it with impunity.

Yet I'm amazed how people apply some sort of “perfectionist” fallacy to Guevara or more foolishly overlook his heroism on the basis of the fact that Capitalists profit from his defiant image. This is exactly what the capitalist vampires want. They will take every hero of the toilers and the left and revise them into “terrorists” … they will take every noble guerrilla who fought against imperialism and craft them into “mad men” so as to make you think that heroism and socialism/Marxism etc are antithetical concepts. If this doesn’t work … the Capitalist/Imperialists will try to make real heroes into caricatures, or “de-fanged” banal symbols of popular culture – so as to “devalue” their serious and conceptual analysis on behalf of the working class. Thus Che dawns a bikini, Mao dawns a purse, and Lenin dawns your Zippo lighter.

I would implore those who give credence to the idea of a "revolution" … to give much deserved recognition to one of the few men in the past century who literally threw aside “the arm chair” and went out to (imperfectly) create it.


If the world had 100 Che’s … or hell even 10 … we would be in much better shape.


Hasta la Victoria Siempre !

= An inspiration to all those who battle injustice

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=O_QXOG1rDLs

= One of the greatest men to ever live

Cuba before Che under the Dictator Batista

- Americans owned 70 % of the arable land

- 1% of the population controlled 46 % of the wealth

- Batista's goons and secret police killed 20,000 Cubans (tortured even more)

- 40 % of the population were illiterate

- 50 % of the population lived in Bohio shacks

- Dissidents were hung and left to dangle in the streets as a warning sign

- The Mafia (Meyer Lansky & Co) ran Havana and used Cuba as a whorehouse for rich gringos from the U.S.

.... These are the conditions that allowed Fidel and Che to rise to power



Fidel Castro (with the help of Che) reclaims Cuba from the U.S. Oligarchs
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=oPlnGiS488s


Venceremos!

A Conservative Confronts Reality on Che ...


From the American Conservative magazine:

Lincoln, Wilson and FDR–each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed are widely considered to be the just and right ones. That is to say, the exact same moralizing, or rather anti-moralizing, that the ends justify the means that Che used in rationalizing revolutionary violence is employed to praise and sanctify approved figures who authorized much larger slaughters for the “right reasons.” Not only have sympathetic, shoulder-shrugging, anti-moralizing stories been told about these men, but we have built large physical monuments to them (or at least to two of the three mentioned above), which is rather more troubling in its way than silly people who wear T-shirts or directors who minimize the moral failings of their main characters.

"THE TRUE STORY OF CHE GUEVARA"


A Recently released Full Documentary From The History Channel .... (1 hr 30 min)

Watch it for free below ...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5762714709014580290

"The United States hastens the delivery of arms to the puppet governments they see as being increasingly threatened; it makes them sign pacts of dependence to legally facilitate the shipment of instruments of repression and death and of troops to use them."
--- Che Guevara, April 9 1961



----> A NEW DEFINITION FOR "CHUTZPAH"

When someone who supports the same country that nuked 2 cities and turned 250,000 people to dust ... the same country that fire bombed Dresden and burned 150,000 women and child alive, the same country that killed 15 million Natives because they felt it was their manifest destiny ... the same country that enslaved millions of blacks … the same country whose CIA has killed 6 million people since 1950 (John Stockwell) ... the same country that invaded Iraq which has caused 950,000 deaths ...

The same country that since 1949 has led CIA coups in - Greece, Iran, British Guyana, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Haiti, Laos, South Korea, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, Zaire, Ghana, Cuba, Cambodia, El Salvador, Chile, Australia, Liberia, Chad, Grenada, Fiji, Venezuela ... and installed puppet governments.

Not to mention propped up the many brutal tyrants like Pinochet, Suharto, Marcos, and Somoza ... backed contra movements through the School of the Americas ... and sold arms to Iran and Saddam's Iraq at the same time as they fought each other and killed over a million people ...

HAS THE CHUTZPAH to pretend to be upset that Cuba under CHE had tribunals (just like the Nuremburg one after WWII the US had) and then as a result had a few hundred of the brutal dictator Batista’s convicted henchmen, rapists, & torturers (most who were the secret police of the BRAC and who had killed 20,000 people) executed at La Cabana.

WOW ... there are no words for the audacity of such insanity !

American Reich-Wing Propaganda would make Goebbels blush.

QUOTES ABOUT THE HEROIC ICON - CHE GUEVARA




"Che's life is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom. We will always honor his memory."

~ Nelson Mandela




"He was demanding of everyone and practiced being a personal example. Once, Guevara and other ministry officials were served steaks during a severe food shortage. Steaks are a treasured meal for Argentines, but Guevara became incensed and ordered it all removed. "What is this?" Saenz quoted Guevara as saying in his biography. "No one is touching this meat. Take it away."

~ Tirso Saenz, fought under Che




"On his trips, he would receive gifts from his hosts, some of them very expensive. He would get presents for me as well, and he would give them away if he considered them too ostentatious. I was given a color TV only to see Che pass it on to a factory worker. And back then, it was sort of an unimaginable item. Once, after a trip to Algeria, he received a barrel of an excellent wine. When he arrived home, he told me to give it to the army barracks near our home. I would not always unconditionally obey his mandates. Knowing that wine was one of the few treats he allowed himself, I kept five liters."

~ Aleida March, Che's Wife




“He taught me to think - he taught me the most beautiful thing which is to be human"

~ Urbano - Former Cuban rebel fighter




“Che is not only an intellectual, he was the most complete human being of our time – our era’s most perfect man.”

~ Jean Paul Sartre, renown philosopher and author who knew him




"It was like a Christ taken down from the Cross."

~ Peter Weiss, playwright




"I make a halt in day-to-day combat to bow my head, with respect and gratitude, before the exceptional fighter who fell 40 years ago."

~ Fidel Castro




“Che sowed the seeds of social conscience in Latin America and the world, he was a flower prematurely cut from its stem.”

~ Fidel Castro




“He always did what he said he was going to do, that's why he is still timely.”

~ Alberto Granados, lifelong friend




“But what actually was he? A mythic doctor who traveled the length of Latin America? A guerrilla fighter? Comrade-in-arms of Fidel Castro? A revolutionary who tried to liberate the world from the shackles of imperialism? Ernesto Che Guevara was all that and much more.”

~ Op Rana, senior editor for the China Daily




“Why did they think that by killing him, he would cease to exist as a fighter? ... Today he is in every place, wherever there is a just cause to defend.”

~ Fidel Castro




"Che was loved, in spite of being stern and demanding. We would give our life for him."

~ Tomas Alba, fought under Che




"Even his ideological foes admire him because he represents the great virtues it takes to be a revolutionary. Bravery, fearlessness, honesty, austerity and absolute conviction. Those are the prerequisites to carry others into what is actually quite a miserable existence."

~ Jon Lee Anderson, Che Biographer




“Che stands out as a latter-day mythological hero, admired for his daring and his faith -- and some would say his innocence – in trying to achieve the impossible.”

~ Jon Lee Anderson, Che Biographer




"I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent."

~ Jon Lee Anderson

(* author of the 814 page – Che: A Revolutionary Life)




“Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba where he is remembered for promoting unpaid voluntary work by working shirtless on building sites or hauling sacks of sugar. To this day, he appears on a Cuban banknote cutting sugar cane with a machete in the fields.”

~ Reuters, Oct 8 2007




“In Bolivia, images of Che hang next to images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, & Pope John Paul II.”

~ The Observer, September 23, 2007




“In Bolivia, Che is compared to a medieval painting of John the Baptist, who then became the iconic figure in death for millions who had paid little or no attention to him while he was alive.”

~ Christopher Roper




“For my mother who is sick, I pray to the Lord and hesitantly to Saint Ernesto, to the soul of Che Guevara.”

~ Father Agustin - Polish priest in Vallegrande, Bolivia (reading a written prayer by a parishioner)




“It was difficult to recall that this man had once been one of the great figures of Latin America. It was not just that he was a great guerrilla leader; he had been a friend of Presidents as well as revolutionaries. His voice had been heard and appreciated in inter-American councils as well as in the jungle. He was a doctor, an amateur economist, once Minister of Industries in revolutionary Cuba, and Castro's right-hand man. He may well go down in history as the greatest continental figure since Bolivar. Legends will be created around his name.”

~ Richard Gott - Guardian journalist, 1967 dispatch on the day of Guevara's death




“He was just like a Christ, with his strong eyes, his beard, his long hair. He is very miraculous.”

~ “Susana Osinaga, the nurse who cleaned Guevara's corpse




“Today the laundry where Guevara's corpse was laid is a place of pilgrimage. On the wall above, an engraving reads: ‘None dies as long as he is remembered’.”

~ The Observer, September 23, 2007




“Che is a figure who can constantly be examined and re-examined. To the younger, post-cold-war generation of Latin Americans, Che stands up as the perennial Icarus, a self-immolating figure who represents the romantic tragedy of youth. Their Che is not just a potent figure of protest, but the idealistic, questioning kid who exists in every society and every time."

~ John Lee Anderson, Biographer




“It's like he is alive and with us, like a friend. He is kind of like a Virgin (Mary) for us. We say, `Che, help us with our work or with this planting,' and it always goes well.”

~ Manuel Cortez, a farmer who lives next door to the schoolhouse where Che was executed




“Che is politics answer to James Dean, a rebel with very specific cause.”

~ David Segal, Washington Post




“Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked the talk. There’s just something cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him.”

~ Benecio Del Toro, actor who plays Che in 2 upcoming films




“He’s a person that changed the world and really forces me to change the rules of what I am.”

~ Gael García Bernal, actor who plays Che in ‘Motorcycle Diaries’




“Long live our cry of freedom. Long Live Che !”

~ Jesse Jackson, 1984 at the University of Havana




“One thousand killed in 5 days of fierce fighting in Santa Clara, Commander Che Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men.”

~ New York Times Headline, Jan 4 1959




“Che’s military leadership was permeated by an indomitable will that permitted extraordinary feats.”

~ Jorge Castaneda, Che Biographer




“Che waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill. He is a hero and icon of the century.”

~ Ariel Dorfman, Head of the dept of Latin American Studies at Duke University




“There is no figure in the 20th century that has produced such a body of fascinating, varied, and compelling imagery as Che Guevara.”

~ David Kunzle, UCLA Professor




“Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western World. With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious 60’s.”

~ Time Magazine, 1968




“1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che. His death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time. He was a role model.”

~ Christopher Hitchens, current day conservative columnist




"The CIA opened a file on Che in 1953 in Guatemala, months before the downfall of Jacob Arbenz, where the young doctor arrived looking for work. There he joined the local popular militias which were asking to be armed to repel the North American intervention. When he later went to Mexico and joined up with Fidel and Raul Castro the CIA' preoccupation multiplied."

~ Philip Agee, CIA Agent




“Che exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire. He was an amazing example, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them. Everywhere there was an injustice, Che showed up. That’s a pretty good resume.”

~ Tom Morello, Musician & Activist in Guitar World Interview




“A legend. A hero to radical youth to this day. All over Cuba pictures of Che remind the Cuban people of their debt to this extraordinary man.”

~ David Sandison, publicist for Rolling Stone




"I could write a thousands years and a million pages about Ernesto Che Guevara."

~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, (Nobel Prize Winner)




“Nothing could be more vicariously gratifying than Che’s disdain for material comfort and everyday desires.”

~ Ariel Dorfman, Time Magazine




“The emblematic impact of Ernesto Guevara is inconceivable without its dimension of sacrifice. Che renounces comfort for an idea.”

~ Jorge Castaneda, Biographer




“Che was aided by a complete freedom from convention or material aspirations.”

~ Phillip Bennett, Boston Globe




“This secular saint was ready to die because he could not tolerate a world where the poor of the earth, the displaced and dislocated of history, would be relegated to its vast margins.”

~ Ariel Dorfman, Time Magazine




“The George Washington of Cuba.”

~ Ed Sullivan & Harry Truman




“Che has a good sense of humor. His conversation was free of propaganda and bombast. He spoke calmly, in a straight forward manner and with the appearance of detachment and objectivity.”

~ Richard Goodwin, special counsel to President John F. Kennedy




“Che presented a Christ-like image … with his mortuary gaze it is as if Guevara looks upon his killers and forgives them.”

~ Jorge Castaneda, Newsweek writer




“Che’s image derives from a visual language … it also references a classical Christ-like demeanor.”

~ Trisha Ziff, Guggenheim Museum creator




“It was out of love, like a perfect night, that Che had set out. In a sense he was like an early saint.”

~ I.F. Stone, Nation columnist, after meeting Guevara




“Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating; Che Guevara guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and a perceptive sense of humor.”

~ Time Magazine - August 8, 1960




“We gave each case due and fair consideration and we didn’t come to our decisions lightly. Che always had a clear idea about the need to exact justice on those found to be war criminals. Our paramount concerns were that no injustice was committed. In that Che was very careful.”

~ Duque de Estrada




“Che was interested in everything from sociology to philosophy to mathematics and engineering. There were 3,000 books in the Guevara home.”

~ John Gerassi, Newsweek editor




“The asthmatic boy spent long hours developing an intense love of books and literature. He devoured the children’s classics of the time, but also Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Jules Verne. He also explored Cervantes, Anatole France, Pablo Neruda. He bought and read the books of all the noble prize winners in literature and held intensive discussions with his history and literature professors.”

~ Jorge Castaneda




“Che’s life demonstrates conclusively that he was not a hypocrite.”

~ Christopher Hitchens, New York Review of Books




“Ernesto Che Guevara is one of the most appealing figures of our century.”

~ David Krunzle, UCLA Professor




“Che’s luminous gaze of a prophet has become a symbol for all the poor in the world.”

~ Fidel Castro




“Che Guevara was a pop icon of mythic proportions.”

~ PBS forum, ‘the Legacy of Che’




“He was the first man I ever met who I thought not just handsome but beautiful. With his curly reddish beard, he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday-school print of Jesus.”

~ Christopher Hitchens




“Che taught us all that freedom, democracy, and socialism are inseparable.”

~ Maurice Zeitlin, UCLA Professor




“As utopian as Che’s dreams may have been, as utopian as a world of peace and plenty for all may seem, no social justice is possible without a vision like Che’s.”

~ Fabian Wigmister, Professor




“Few doubt Che’s sincerity.”

~ David Segal, Washington Post




“Che’s decency and nobility always led him to apologize.”

~ Jorge Castaneda




“Bravery, fearlessness, honesty, austerity, and absolute conviction … he lived it … Che really lived it.”

~ John Lee Anderson, Biographer




“Che Guevara’s Socialism and Man in Cuba is one of the great documents in the history of socialism.”

~ John Gerassi, Time editor




“I think there is not a country in the world including all the regions of Africa and any other country under colonial domination, where the economic colonization, the humiliation, the exploitation have been worse than those which ravaged Cuba. The result in part of the policy of my country.”

~ President John F. Kennedy, 1963




“Che died a martyr’s death in 1967.”

~ David Segal, Washington Post




“Che Guevara was young and charismatic and brutally murdered with the support of the CIA.”

~ Trisha Ziff, Guggenheim Museum Creator




“For some reason when I was finally face to face with one of my bitterest enemies, yet I felt no hate for Che Guevara at that moment. It’s hard to explain. I walked outside the little school house and heard the shots. I looked at my watch and it was 1:10 pm on October 9th, 1967.”

~ Felix Rodriguez, CIA operative who ordered Che's death




"They who sing victory over his death are mistaken. They are mistaken who believe that his death is the defeat of his ideas, the defeat of his tactics, the defeat of his guerrilla concepts ... If we want to know how we want our children to be we should say, with all our revolutionary mind and heart: We want them to be like Che."

~ Fidel Castro, Oct 18, 1967




“We predict that Guevara will be eulogized as the model revolutionary who met a heroic death."

~ October 1967, Bureau of Intelligence and Research report - for US Secretary of State Dean Rusk




“Che never wavered from his firm revolutionary stand, even as other Cuban leaders began to devote most of their attention to the internal problems of the revolution."

~ Brian Latell, CIA analyst in an October 18, 1965 intelligence memorandum




“From March to August of 1967, Che Guevara and his guerrilla band strike pretty much at will against the Bolivian Armed Forces, which totals about twenty thousand men. The guerrillas lose only one man compared to 30 of the Bolivians during these six months.”

~ New York Times, 9/16/67




“1:30 p.m.: Che’s final battle commences in Quebrada del Yuro. Simon Cuba (Willy) Sarabia, a Bolivian miner, leads the rebel group. Che is behind him and is shot in the leg several times. Sarabia picks up Che and tries to carry him away from the line of fire. The firing starts again and Che’s beret is knocked off. Sarabia sits Che on the ground so he can return the fire. Encircled at less than ten yards distance, the Rangers concentrate their fire on him, riddling him with bullets. Che attempts to keep firing, but cannot keep his gun up with only one arm. He is hit again on his right leg, his gun is knocked out of his hand and his right forearm is pierced.”

~ Daniel James, Che Biographer




“The situation is gruesome with Che lying in dirt, his arms tied behind his back and his feet bound together, next to the bodies of his friends. He looks like a piece of trash with matted hair, torn clothes, and wearing only pieces of leather on his feet for shoes.

~ Felix Rodriguez, CIA operative right before Che's execution




"Guevara’s death carries significant implications: It marks the passing of another of the aggressive, romantic revolutionaries ... in the Latin American context, it will have a strong impact in discouraging would be guerrillas.”

~ Memorandum to President Johnson by Walter Rostow




"There was no person more feared by the company than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America."

~ Philip Agee, CIA Agent




“The CIA agents and then-Bolivian president Rene Barrientos' soldiers may have killed him in cold blood in La Higuera's mud-floored school 40 years ago, but they couldn't kill his spirit. He has lived on - in the dreams of visionaries, in the fight of the oppressed, in the hearts of the revolutionaries, in the struggles of man.”

~ Op Rana, senior editor for the China Daily




“Che dressed in disguise to visit his own children before a secret trip to Bolivia to foment revolution there. When the kids arrived, I introduced them to a Uruguayan old man, 'Ramon' [Che], a 'friend' of dad's. They never imagined this 60-year-old man could be their daddy. For both Che and me, it was an extremely painful moment. The kids played with 'Ramón' all day. Then, Aleidita [then 7] hit her head after running wild, and Che [a physician] took care of her. Soon afterwards, she came to me to tell me a secret he could overhear: 'Mommy, this man is in love with me!'”

~ Aleida March, Che’s wife




"Though communism may have lost its fire, Che remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution."

~ Time Magazine, while naming him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century




“The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep inside that T shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience.”

~ Ariel Dorfman




"The ideals and actions of Commander Ernesto Guevara are examples for those who defend equality and justice. We are humanists and followers of the example of Guevara."

~ Bolivian President Evo Morales, Oct 9 2007




“With the news of Che’s death, rallies were held from Mexico to Santiago, Algiers to Angola, and Cairo to Calcutta. The population of Budapest and Prague lit candles; the picture of a smiling Che appeared in London and Paris…when a few months later, riots broker out in Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, and from there the unrest spread to the American campuses, young men and women wore Che Guevara T-shirts and carried his pictures during their protest marches.”

~ Erik Durschmied, historian and journalist

THE TRUTH ABOUT THOSE - CHE HAD SHOT (Vol 1)

One of the first tasks of the triumphant Cuban revolutionaries in 1959 was to establish justice for the thousands of Cuban families whose sons and daughters, mothers, fathers, and neighbors had been tortured and slaughtered on the streets and in the dungeons of the Dictator Batista's regime. The martyred dead numbered at least 20,000 in a country then of 6 million. Justice had already begun with the end of the regime as spontaneous retributions took place against known torturers and murderers whose cover and protection had vanished.

Che was assigned the task of establishing a just and fair but also transparent justice and to bring the process under revolutionary control, ensuring due process, defense lawyers, and fair proceedings. Popular, public 'revolutionary tribunals' were organized in large stadiums and courthouses. Volumes of public testimony were given, with horrific testimony of the most vile tortures and bestial murder recorded and made public. Che was assigned the role as "Supreme Prosecutor" at La Cabaña fortress, and reviewed those cases and handled the appeals of those ... ALREADY sentenced to death for their deeds. Duque de Estrada, whose job it was to gather evidence, take testimonies, and prepare the trials, also sat with Che, the "supreme prosecutor", on the appellate bench, where Che made the final decision on the men's fate. Duque has stated that the two of them "were in agreement on almost 100 percent of the decisions which they did not come to lightly" and that they "got a lot of flak" for giving each case due and fair consideration.

Some 200 or so of the worst torturers and murderers of the US-backed Batista tyranny were shot by firing squads. No one has ever offered a shred of credible evidence that anyone innocent was executed.

It is also important to note that Jon Lee Anderson, author of the 814 page definitive biography - "Che: A Revolutionary Life", has stated that in his 5 years of research: "I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent." Anderson also notes that "Those persons executed by Guevara or on his orders were condemned for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war or in its aftermath: desertion, treason or crimes such as rape, torture or murder."


... THE END


__________________________________________________ ______

---> After WWII the US had the Nuremberg trials and hung the guilty Nazis.

---> After the ouster of the brutal dictator Batista ... Che was put in charge of their own tribunal and had the guilty torturers, goons, and henchmen shot.

= SAME THING

THE TRUTH ABOUT THOSE - CHE HAD SHOT (Vol 2)


SUPPORTED BY SCHOLARLY PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC JOURNALS ...

The application of the death penalty in Cuba against war criminals and others followed the same procedure as that seen in the trials by the Allies in the Nuremberg trials. Had the Revolutionary Government not applied severe legislation against the few hundred torturers, terrorists, and other criminals long employed by the Batista regime, the people themselves would have taken justice into their own hands--as happened during the anti-Machado rebellion--and thrown the society into chaos. It was only the population's confidence in the government's effective and cautiously selective administration of revolutionary justice that kept the society in order. The death penalty was imposed on the enemies of the people--those who had killed, tortured, and committed crimes against humanity during the revolutionary war and continued to conspire against the revolution. These were the traitorous elements that supported and participated in the Batista regime and received shelter in the United States or Falangist Spain and those that feared fulfillment of the promise to the end of class privilege, exploitation, and all abuses of the Batista regime maintained by the overthrown Cuban bourgeoisie, American corporations, and the U.S. regime.[1]

THE TRUTH ABOUT THOSE - CHE HAD SHOT (Vol 3)

Cuba's Revolutionary Tribunals — Separating Fact from Fiction
Nov 12, 2007
By Tony Saunois


The 40th anniversary of Che’s death also witnessed numerous charges that he was a “butcher,” owing to his role in overseeing the trials and executions of counter-revolutionaries following the Cuban revolution. Below we reprint an excerpt from Che Guevara: Symbol of Struggle by Tony Saunois replying to these attacks.

You can read the book on-line at
www.socialistalternative.org/publications/che

From La Cabaña, Che oversaw the Revolutionary Tribunals that were used as a means of purging the army of its most pro-Batista elements. The trials centered on those who conducted torture and murder under the Batista dictatorship…

The Tribunals provoked a massive attack by U.S. imperialism, which denounced such measures as criminal. However, the reprisals had the support of the mass of Cubans, especially the poor, who had suffered horrific crimes at the hands of Batista's thugs.

The Tribunals were not elected committees of workers, soldiers, and representatives of local communities as would have been advocated by Marxists during such revolutionary conditions.

However, the measures taken by the Tribunals were to defend the revolution and to try to exact some justice for the victims of Batista's sadistic torturers. Those accused were given defense lawyers and the right to disprove or justify their actions…

[In the main,] only in the cases of brutal torture or death, which involved hundreds of cases, were executions the verdict. Former prisoners and the families of the dead or “disappeared” were asked to give evidence and show the scars they were left to carry for life.

These elementary rights are in marked contrast to the "justice" given during the 1980s throughout Latin America as military regimes fell one after another across the continent. Unlike in Cuba after the fall of Batista, the new pro-capitalist governments have permitted a conspiracy of silence to take place to protect the military and police … Despite hundreds of thousands suffering torture and death, few prosecutions have been made against those responsible for such crimes in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and other countries…

The friends and families of "los desaparecidos" (the disappeared) still get no reply to their simple question, carried on placards throughout the continent: "¿Donde Están?" (“Where are they?”). In Argentina, after more than a decade of weekly protests in front of the Presidential Palace, the mothers of the disappeared are still asking this same question and still get no reply.

The silence of U.S. imperialism about these crimes, in which it and its agencies such as the CIA are directly implicated, has been deafening. It has been in marked contrast to its reaction to the tribunals headed by Che in Cuba.

A gruesome picture was painted by U.S. imperialism of what was taking place in Havana. The “terror” of the new regime was hypocritically denounced and Che was presented as Public Enemy Number One…

Che was determined to carry through this policy … Che repeated endlessly to his Cuban comrades during this period that [left-wing President Jacobo] Arbenz had failed in Guatemala because he failed to purge the armed forces and allowed the CIA to penetrate and overthrow his government [in 1954 after he nationalized the lands of the United Fruit Company]. He was determined not to allow history to be repeated in Cuba.

On January 22, 1959, a mass rally was called in Havana to support the government's “war trials” policy. Estimates vary, but anywhere between half a million and one million participated in this mass demonstration…

Banners denounced U.S. imperialism for its double standards, compared the trials of Batista's assassins with the Nuremberg trials of convicted Nazis after the Second World War, and demanded “revolutionary justice.”

Castro asked all those who agreed with revolutionary justice to raise their hands. Up to one million hands were raised to a cry of “¡Sí!”

Castro commented: “Gentlemen of the diplomatic corps, gentlemen of the press of the whole continent, the jury of a million Cubans of all ideas and all social classes has voted.”

[deleted]

[deleted]

Or you might consider Che in his own words.

Here is Che, for example, recounting the execution of Eutimio Guerra for betraying the Cuban revolution: “I fired a .32 caliber bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.” Mark Goldblatt, Revenge of Che, National Review on line.

Humberto Fontova

And here’s Che philosophizing on the rule of law: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” - By Mark Goldblatt, nationalreview on line

[deleted]

Oh, and here’s Che lamenting the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis: “If the missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”

Finally, here’s Che on his commitment to his cause: “In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.”

Which raises an intriguing entomological question: Can a cockroach squish a worm? - Revenge of Che, by Mark Goldblatt, nationalreview on line.

Hollywood hotshot Benicio Del Toro is not a stand-up comic, but he seemed to be playing one earlier this month when he said he found the role of Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara, in the new film "Che," like Jesus Christ. "Only Jesus would turn the other cheek. Che wouldn't," Mr. Del Toro explained. Right. And Bernie Madoff is Mother Teresa, only she wasn't into fraud.

With next month marking the 50th anniversary of the Castro dictatorship, it's no surprise that the film industry is trying to cash in by celebrating pop-culture icon Guevara. As one of Fidel Castro's lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and a Castro enforcer in the years following the rebel victory, his name is synonymous with the Cuban Revolution.

Interesting films are hard to come by these days and "Che" is a good example of the problem. Rebel glamour sells T-shirts and coffee mugs so why not another airbrushed rerun of Guevara's life? Or, more precisely, some mythical version of it, sanitized for the mass market. Meanwhile the real marvel of the past 50 years in Cuba -- the steady stream of heroic nonconformists who have risked all in their aspiration to think, speak and act freely -- remains the untold epic of our time. - MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY, Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara, WSJ.com, December 29, 2008.

Victorin stop posting like a bot and shut up if your not even going to reply to the posts explaining that your info is made up of lieing sources or twisting words like your last reply.

This is exactly how misinfo spreads. Through retards like this guy.

If Mr. Del Toro's "Christ" comment is foolish, it's nothing compared to film director Steven Soderbergh's explanation of why we should care about Che. Bad things happen in society when "you make profit the point of everything," the movie director told Politico.com. Che's "dream of a classless society, a society that isn't built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology."

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh's personal revulsion with profits, the "methodology" that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a "homicidal idea of justice," Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 "Message to the Tricontinental," Che spoke these words: "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." - MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY, Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara, WSJ.com, December 29, 2008.

The results of Che's utopian agenda aren't much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, "The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster."

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their "morality" on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties. - MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY, Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara, WSJ.com, December 29, 2008.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba's privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims -- artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience -- would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, which collected more than 11,000 signatures calling for free elections and civil liberties in 2002, says that in recent months there has been a crackdown, "with a fierce persecution against Varela Project activists, other members of the opposition, and the ongoing scandal of not freeing the prisoners of conscience."- MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY, Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara, WSJ.com, December 29, 2008.

Among Castro's captives is Oscar Elias Biscet, an Afro-Cuban doctor who is renowned for his commitment to peaceful resistance and is serving a 25-year sentence. Fifty-eight journalists, writers and democracy advocates rounded up in March 2003 also languish in Fidel's deplorable jails. The total number of political prisoners is not known but is undoubtedly much higher.

State security and rapid-response brigades -- aka thugs paid to rough up dissidents -- have been fully employed this year. But, despite the terror and the threat of imprisonment, the Cuban spirit still struggles for freedom.

At least five resistance publications now circulate in eastern Cuba. Thirty-two-year-old blogger Yoani Sánchez has been warned to keep quiet, but she still chronicles the ridiculousness of Che economics, giving a voice to ordinary Cubans who live lives of desperation. The Ladies in White -- wives, sisters and mothers of prisoners of conscience -- still walk quietly in Havana on Sundays. Rock bands mock the old dictator.

This is the wonder of the revolution: Fifty years of state terror hasn't silenced the resistance. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film about it. - MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY, Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara, WSJ.com, December 29, 2008

Paquito D'Rivera, famous Cuban jazz musician, wrote this letter to Mayor Bloomberg with regard to Che Guevara Statue located in New York’s Central Park. He never received a response from the Mayor office. He ask us to feel free to make it public.

January 5-2009

Dearest Mayor Bloomberg:

In the mid fifties, still a young child, my father came home with a fabulous Benny Goodman LP, recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Ever since I’ve dreamed to be a working musician in the city of New York. What I never, ever dreamed, not even in my wildest nightmares, was that after having to join two million Cuban exiles in 1980, I was going to see a sad statue of Che Guevara, a couple of blocks away from the glorious sculpture of Cuban National hero Jose Martí at New York’s Central Park.

“The butcher of La Cabaña fortress”, as was the nickname of this lamentable Argentinean character, Guevara ––a self proclaimed enemy of the USA–– was responsible for countless murders and abuses in my homeland as well as in other countries, where he tried to impose totalitarian regimes by the law of his guns. So, although I heard that the ridiculous Spanish made sculpture is meant to be just temporarily at the spot on 60th street and 5th avenue, that doesn’t mean it9d be less offensive than having a Stalin monument in Orchard Beach, a Hitler portrait on the walls of Carnegie deli, or a representation of a man in KKK’s macabre rope next to the Duke Ellington’s memorial in Harlem.

So I really hope that you feel some respect and compassion for your many Cuban supporters and sympathizers, and remove ASAP such an anachronistic an insulting image from the surface of our beloved City.

Always with the same appreciation.

Sincerely:

Paquito D’Rivera

In a famous speech in 1961, Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates,” commanded Guevara. “Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.” “Youth,” wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass.”

“Those who choose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to “Yankee-Imperialist” Rock & Roll) were denounced as worthless “roqueros,” “lumpen” and “delinquents.” In his famous speech, Che Guevara even vowed “to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!” - Murder & Myth The Truth Behind The T Shirt by Humberto Fontova

By the mid ’60s, the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle (blue jeans, long hair, fondness for the Beatles and Stones) or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked out of Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” emblazoned in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar. - Murder & Myth The Truth Behind The T Shirt by Humberto Fontova

Ignorance, of course, accounts for much Che idolatry. But so does mendacity and wishful thinking, all of it boosted by reflexive anti-Americanism. The most popular version of the Che T-shirt, for instance, sports the slogan “fight oppression” under his famous countenance. This is the face of the second in command, chief executioner and chief KGB liaison for a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and executed more people in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed in its first three years in power than Hitler executed in his first six. - Murder & Myth The Truth Behind The T Shirt by Humberto Fontova

If you're going to wear a T-shirt with someone's image on it, it seems like you should know more about the real person whose image you're sporting (and therefore sponsoring), like, say, Che Guevara.

The truth about Che Guevara. Know anyone wearing one of those t-shirts? You might want to show this to them.

Clip taken from Glenn Beck's documentary "The Revolutionary Holocaust- Live Free.. or Die"
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rKH1hid4o8&feature=related

The documentary "The Revolutionary Holocaust- Live Free.. or Die", is a good video with an excellent message. Che, Mao, Stalin, Hitler. What do they all have in common? They are all cold hearted, racist, killing machines. Che like any other communist leader, killed people who believed in simple freedom. Overthrowing one dictatorship to replace it with another is not heroic. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHVMFnTRjEE&feature=related

It would take sixteen hours to even begin to inventory the problems of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” a bad movie about a bad guy, the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The “Roadshow Edition” that I endured at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, clocks in at 4 hrs, 23 minutes in length. The film is divided into two overlong parts, the first dealing with the Cuban Revolutionary War, the second dealing with Guevara’s Bolivian disaster.

An hour of this movie is tedious; four hours of it sends one into a coma deeper than that of Fidel himself. The guy sitting behind me at the Nuart who, judging from his intermission cell-phone conversation is an enthusiastic Che lover, snored during Che’s Bolivian martyrdom. So historical questions aside, does the movie succeed as entertainment? No. It bores. - “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy, by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

Let me say some nice things about the film. There is some lovely cinematography. There are nifty opening graphics of a map pointing out the various provinces of Cuba, although when the graphics re-appear after intermission and proceed to point out every single country in South America, it feels like a fourth grade geography lesson. Soderbergh seems to think that his audience is composed of idiots. I’m finished being nice, by the way.

The truth about Che Guevara. Know anyone wearing one of those t-shirts? You might want to show this to them.

Clip taken from Glenn Beck's documentary "The Revolutionary Holocaust- Live Free.. or Die"
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rKH1hid4o8&feature=related

There is an entire anti-Che industry of lying hucksters who make their living by creating lies about the heroic guerrilla and then parroting each others lies as if it gives them any credibility. Luckily, when actual historians research the man, they realize just how many noble qualities he does have and see through the Miami propaganda.

It is actually hard to think of another historical figure who was as well rounded, intelligent, poetic, brave, sincere, audacious, and revolutionary as Che Guevara. This is why he has so much resonance over 40 years after his CIA-aided execution.

There is a Che in all of us who dream of a better World and his ghost haunts the U.$. Empire wherever they go and attempt to rape the resources of other nations. Anyone who has ever seen 3rd world poverty up close understands Che's fury and determination. Anyone who has ever seen how the top 1% live in luxury while most barely have enough to eat will sympathize with Che's struggle.

... America needs a Che Guevara of our own.

To me Che Guevara is one of the most heroic figures in world history who is a stoic example of what all those who speak of “revolution” should espouse to be.


This was a man who left a bourgeoisie comfortable life of the upper class, a potential well compensated career as a medical doctor, and a high regarded governmental position --- each time to slog through the jungle and fight guerrilla wars against impenetrable odds = for a better and more equitable society.


I endorse Jean Paul Sartre’s declaration that Guevara was the “most complete man of our time” … and find his life not only fascinating but deeply inspiring.


Guevara despite his crippling and acute asthma which would debilitate him almost daily to inches from death, directed “suicide squads” in the battle against the U.S. armed and backed Dictator Batista where with less than 300 men; he literally took on 10,000 Batista soldiers armed with tanks, jets, and U.S. weaponry, and came out victorious at and leading up to the victory at Santa Clara.


In Bolivia, Guevara spent almost over 1 hellish year in the festering jungle battling a disease which left his hands as mounds of swollen flesh, the fact that his allergic reaction to mosquito bites would leave walnut sized welts all over his body, kept fighting even when he was without food for nearly a month, went shoeless, without blankets, and STILL with less than 30 men took on a force of 1,800 Bolivian U.S. armed rangers with an air force, green beret advisors, and CIA technology. Despite these odds Guevara’s men killed 30 Bolivian troops before they even lost their first Guerrilla. Moreover, displaying his character, despite all these hardships, when Guevara could have simply taken the food of Bolivian campesinos to eat, he insisted on paying for everything.


Throughout his life Che tended to thousands of sick campesinos, helped construct dozens of schools throughout Cuba, worked in a Leper colony to helped those afflicted, and even when he was literally tied up in a small mud school house awaiting his own execution ! , still complained to the local teacher that in a nation where the leaders drove Mercedes … it was a travesty that the peasants were taught in a dilapidated place like he was in.


Although I don’t believe in religious dogma (neither did Che), and view myself as an atheist, I do find it telling that the person Che was so often compared to by those who knew him was Jesus Christ. Because of his implacable character, unbending morals, and innate desire to fight in favor of the afflicted, I think that those who knew him were left with no other figure to compare him to.


Was he perfect? Of course not. No human is. But in mind he was awfully close considering the circumstances and cards he was dealt. I also find it telling that the best “canard” his detractors and those propagandists of monopoly capitalism can come up with - was his short stint at La Cabana prison. Where Che simply reviewed the cases and convictions of war criminals convicted by revolutionary tribunal (modeled after Nuremburg). The same secret police and Batista backed torturers that killed 20,000 people and tortured tens of thousands more. At a time when Fidel and Che would release military captives in the Sierra after tending to them medically, Batista would gouge the eyes out of captives until they gave away rebel positions. The fact that Che saw to it that justice was delivered cold to the Cuban people to me only makes him more heroic. He knew that a “pedagogy of the wall” was the only thing that could cleanse a society from the thousands of goons who raped and terrorized it with impunity.


Yet I'm amazed how people apply some sort of “perfectionist” fallacy to Guevara or more foolishly overlook his heroism on the basis of the fact that Capitalists profit from his defiant image. This is exactly what the capitalist vampires want. They will take every hero of the toilers and the left and revise them into “terrorists” … they will take every noble guerrilla who fought against imperialism and craft them into “mad men” so as to make you think that heroism and socialism/Marxism etc are antithetical concepts. If this doesn’t work … the Capitalist/Imperialists will try to make real heroes into caricatures, or “de-fanged” banal symbols of popular culture – so as to “devalue” their serious and conceptual analysis on behalf of the working class. Thus Che dawns a bikini, Mao dawns a purse, and Lenin dawns your Zippo lighter.


I would implore those who give credence to the idea of a "revolution" … to give much deserved recognition to one of the few men in the past century who literally threw aside “the arm chair” and went out to (imperfectly) create it.


If the world had 100 Che’s … or hell even 10 … we would be in much better shape.


Hasta la Victoria Siempre !


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/CheinBolivia1.jpg

The documentary "The Revolutionary Holocaust- Live Free.. or Die", is a good video with an excellent message. Che, Mao, Stalin, Hitler. What do they all have in common? They are all cold hearted, racist, killing machines. Che like any other communist leader, killed people who believed in simple freedom. Overthrowing one dictatorship to replace it with another is not heroic.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHVMFnTRjEE&feature=related

It would take sixteen hours to even begin to inventory the problems of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” a bad movie about a bad guy, the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The “Roadshow Edition” that I endured at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, clocks in at 4 hrs, 23 minutes in length. The film is divided into two overlong parts, the first dealing with the Cuban Revolutionary War, the second dealing with Guevara’s Bolivian disaster.

An hour of this movie is tedious; four hours of it sends one into a coma deeper than that of Fidel himself. The guy sitting behind me at the Nuart who, judging from his intermission cell-phone conversation is an enthusiastic Che lover, snored during Che’s Bolivian martyrdom. So historical questions aside, does the movie succeed as entertainment? No. It bores. - “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

Let me say some nice things about the film. There is some lovely cinematography. There are nifty opening graphics of a map pointing out the various provinces of Cuba, although when the graphics re-appear after intermission and proceed to point out every single country in South America, it feels like a fourth grade geography lesson. Soderbergh seems to think that his audience is composed of idiots. I’m finished being nice, by the way.- Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

Benicio Del Toro, a talented actor, is miscast as Ernesto Guevara; he has none of the cocky swagger and sarcastic humor of the real Che. He looks chronically depressed throughout the film. No one would follow Del Toro’s Che, except to a pharmacy to make sure he refilled his Zoloft.

At times the other actors, who unlike Del Toro are portraying Cubans, don’t even seem remotely Cuban; at other times the attempts of these same actors to behave and sound Cubanazo, chico, are hokey and forced. - Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

But “Che” fails on a much deeper level. It attempts to depict actual historical events, the effects of which still play out today and affect millions of people. Does the movie tell the truth? It barely even tries. It is in this failure to connect with historic truth that the film sinks from being a mere failure to being an ugly lie. - Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

In an interview, Soderbergh quoted Che’s Castro-approved biographer Jon Lee Anderson as saying, “there are a million Ches. He means something different to everyone.” This is not only wrong, it is nonsense, and it perfectly sums up the kind of divorced-from-reality magical thinking that plagues Hollywood today and results in so many bad movies. There are a million STORIES about “el Che,” but there was only one living, breathing Ernesto Guevara.- Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

Pre-Revolutionary Cuba is predictably presented in this film as a screamingly poor, fifth-world country. It seems that every other character is illiterate. People who were there remember it differently, and United Nations statistics from the period tell a different story: Cuba was in fact the fourth most literate country in Latin America. “A people that don’t know how to read and write are an easy people to fool,” scolds Del Toro, index finger in the air. Ironic, that, considering how the Castros have always used the written word to fool people in Cuba and all over the world, via surrogates like Anderson, who blandly parrot the official version of Cuban history. - Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

At the end of the first half of the film, Che orders a rebel to return a red convertible the rebel has plundered. Che was not a plunderer, you see. Even if this incident is factually true, its inclusion in this film is a lie, because the film neglects to tell us that shortly after the war, Guevara moved into an extravagant beachfront mansion in Tarara, a few miles outside of Havana (after kicking out the previous owner). In March of 1959, Che lamely explained in a letter to future exile Carlos Franqui, then editor of the newspaper Revolucion, that “I am ill…due to my revolutionary work…Doctors advised a house at a distance (from Havana), so as to avoid too many visitors and I was lent this one by the Ministry of Property Recovery…” - "Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy by Joe Lima, Big Hollywood, Jan. 01, 2009

Soderbergh is a very talented movie director. But talk about overconfidence. He's become embarrassing in his self indulgence. I think some in Hollywood love the idea of a radical who can "fight the system". That's basically how they see it. Most of the people who praise Che know little to nothing about him. He's more of an idea to them than a fact.

They think he's this guy who fought imperialism instead of Fidel's executioner. A butcher who was a humorless psychopath. Fidel's crew are what happens when terrorists win. They turn their country into a living hell, where people have no rights and are killed or imprisoned for talking back. Maybe that's why some leftists admire them. They wish they had that kind of power themselves. -

I'm not sure I understand Hollywood disconnect about mass murderers anymore.

Hitler (socialist) = bad

Mao (communist) = ignored

Stalin (communist) = ignored

Castro (communist) = praised

Che (communist) = anointed

Was it that Hitler was just not left enough? Because on the order of numbers dead, he was only third.

I've always thought lefty types love Che for the same reason teen "Satanists" love Charles Manson. Che did and said what they want to but can't. He hated Blacks, killed people he didn't like and took whatever e wanted. For the nihilistic left he's the ultimate fantasy figure.

"Che is not only an intellectual, he was the most complete human being of our time."
— Jean Paul Sartre


In addition to being a Marxist revolutionary, Che was also a talented writer (authored dozens of books, diaries & essays), theorist of guerrilla warfare, internationalist statesman, self-taught economist, medical physician, and poetic intellectual who wrote some of the most impassioned pleas for battling against imperialism that you will ever read.

So, what are some of the things that Che did?

Che Guevara:

- Traveled the length of South America and worked in a Leper colony where he treated lepers (as seen in the excellent film/memoir ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’).

- Was radicalized from living in Guatemala during the 1953 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz by the CIA (Operation PBSUCCESS) on behalf of Secretary of State Dulles and the United Fruit Company. He tried to no avail to organize a resistance in the streets as U.S. planes bombed and strafed the capital city.

- Was named "the best guerrilla of them all" by their instructor General Bayo, despite having crippling asthma, during their training for invading Cuba.

- Tended to numerous sick campesinos in the Sierra Maestra as both a doctor and even at times as a dentist.

- Set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, taught new recruits about tactics, organized schools to teach illiterate campesinos to read and write, established health clinics, workshops to teach military tactics, a newspaper to disseminate information, and set up the Radio Rebelde station – All as a guerrilla fighter in the Sierra Maestra.

- Won the Battle of Santa Clara where his men were outnumbered 10:1.

- Played a pivotal role in the victorious two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime, rising from medic to second in command behind only Fidel Castro.

- Helped remove the Mafia and U.S.-backed dictatorship of Batista from Cuba which had killed 20,000 Cubans and tortured thousands more. He also saw to it that a few hundred of the worst war criminals received revolutionary justice by firing squad.

- Stopped American companies from owning 70 % of the arable land in Cuba and 1% of the Cuban population from controlling 46 % of the wealth.

- Helped spearhead a nationwide literacy campaign in Cuba, which brought the national literacy rate from 60 to 97 % in 1 year.

- Instituted agrarian reform as minister of industries and broke up the large estates, served as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, and traversed the globe to 40 + countries as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism.

- Trained the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and brought the Soviet nuclear-armedballistic missiles to Cuba which won the agreement from Kennedy that the U.S. would never invade the island again.

- Composed a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, which is still studied by military academies and insurgents all around the world even today. He also created his own military theory of Focalism (Foco Theory), which describes how rural peasants can utilize guerrilla warfare and class consciousness to overthrow a urban based dictatorship.

- Desegregated the schools and universities in Cuba before they were in the Southern U.S.

- Called out South Africa’s Apartheid in 1964 to the U.N., 30 years before the West!

- Denounced the racism and KKK in America in the 1960’s and denounced Patrice Lumumba’s assassination by the Belgians/CIA on the World stage.

- Warned of the dangers of the IMF, 3 decades before most of the developing world realized they had been scammed into debt slavery.

- Fought white mercenaries in the African Congo with an all black army in 1964.

- Battled 3 U.S.-backed dictators on 3 separate continents (Batista/Cuba, Mobutu/Congo, & Barrientos/Bolivia).

- Spoke out against US and eventually USSR Imperialism while demanding that the poor of the world be allowed to live a life of dignity.

- Gave his life to help bring down capitalism, imperialism, and neocolonialism by leaving a bourgeoisie comfortable life of the upper class, a potential well compensated career as a medical doctor, and a high regarded governmental position, each time to slog through the jungle and fight guerrilla wars against impenetrable odds. In fact, near the end it took 1,800 Bolivian and CIA assisted rangers to bring down his 25 men.



"Above all, always be capable of feeling most deeply any injustice committed against anyone in the world. That is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary."
— Che’s last words to his children in a farewell letter

I am glad to discover not everybody in the US, ignores the truth about this Mass Murderer, who is revered as a hero. By the way he did not wear a red beret, he used a black one, when are this Hollywood researchers going to be detail oriented. Pity that talented people lend themselves to participate in this masquerade. Is it that they get very well paid, or is it that or is it that their hearts belong to Daddy Lenin.

I am sick and tired of these millionaires who claim to be liberals. As such they should start by sharing their wealth. It is very easy to live like royalty, without food lines, being able to say and do what they desire. Why don’t they move somewhere else, where they can be happier, I am sure many people would like to trade places with them. When Ali Baba and his thieves came to power in 1959, all they have done is destroy what used to be a prosperous and advanced country. Mr. Lima I understand and admire your article, it is about time somebody faced this idiots with the truth.

The film gives us no idea of what happened after the Cuban Revolutionary government took power. Quite a lot did happen. We all know about the Bay of Pigs invasion, which deserves its own four-hour movie, hopefully directed by someone other than Soderbergh. We also all know that hundreds of thousands of people left Cuba in the early 1960s. People have never stopped leaving. - Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

What’s less known to outsiders is that under Castro’s command, the Cuban Revolution began, very early on, to eat its own. The highest rank in the Revolutionary army was then the rank of “Comandante.” Here’s what happened to a few Revolutionary Comandantes: In October 1959, Comandante Huber Matos, who is omitted from this film, criticizes the influence of Communists in the Revolutionary Government, and tenders his resignation. He is arrested, and serves twenty years in prison, during which time he endures severe torture. The dashing Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos is killed in an airplane crash within a week of the arrest of Huber Matos. The wreckage has never been found. Matos, who along with Camilo flanks Fidel in the famous photographs of Fidel’s entry into Havana, is among many who have never accepted the plane crash story. In March of 1961, Comandante William Morgan, of Cleveland, Ohio, also omitted from this film, is arrested and executed. - Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

Revolutionaries were now being eliminated as well, not just Batistianos. In this dangerous atmosphere of Revolutionary cannibalism, Che recklessly blasted the Soviet Union in a speech in Algiers in 1965. Guevara was famously an admirer of Mao; Fidel in those days was firmly in the Soviet column, and with good reason: the Soviets were pumping massive amounts of capital into Cuba. In Cuba, when you disagree with Fidel, guess who wins? Che’s attack on the absolutely vital Soviet Sugar Daddy was nothing short of foolish.

Without knowledge of these important events, largely omitted from the film, one simply cannot observe Guevara’s Bolivian debacle from an informed perspective.
- Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

Che did preside over a gulag. He was the first Revolutionary Comandante in charge of La Cabaña fortress, the old Spanish fort that became ground zero in the Cuban gulag archipelago. Che had taken charge of La Cabaña on January 3rd. Again, hardly time for due process. Before long, the prison cells of La Cabaña began to fill not with Batistianos, but with former comrades of Fidel and Che. My cousin, Oscar Plá began his odyssey through the Cuban gulag at the age of 15, in October of 1961, and finally emerged for good at the age of 33; his initial incarceration was in La Cabaña.

In prison Oscar got to know several people who had direct contact with el Che. Two, Bernardo Paradela, and Raul Venta del Mazo, both veterans of the struggle against Batista who later turned against the Revolution, were hung upside down for over a month and interrogated. Guevara came to taunt them every single day of their ordeal. - Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

The right-wing continually lies about Che, because they fear his heroic example ...

Victorin and this thread is a pathetic example of the lengths the fascist propagandists will go to smear Che.

Luckily people are smarter than that, and he is just wasting his time.

Cinematically speaking, the problem with the Bolivian portion of the film is that there is simply not two hours of movie to be squeezed from this disaster. If the first two hours of the film are boring, the second two are stuporific.
One can only imagine what the Indigenous Bolivians thought of the loud, smelly, bearded foreigners who suddenly appeared in their midst: “Saludos, comrades, we’re here to liberate you. Do you have anything to eat? Listen, don’t tell anyone you saw us, or we’ll kill you. By the way, I am not Che Guevara. What’s that? Oh, you don’t speak Spanish?”- Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

No less than the now-exiled Daniel Alarcon, code named “Benigno” in Bolivia, and one of only three survivors of the expedition, today believes that Fidel set Che and the rest of his guerrillas up for failure, and death. He also has interesting things to say about the death of Camilo Cienfuegos.

Whatever “the Cuban experience” as Guevara referred to the guerrilla war of 1956-1959 was, it was nothing like Bolivia, and Guevara’s experiences in Cuba in no way prepared him for what he encountered in South America.- Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

At the end of the film, a Bolivian soldier asks Guevara if there was religion in Cuba. Guevara answers that yes, there are many religions in Cuba. In fact, religious persecution in Cuba at the time was a terrifying reality. From training fire hoses on a group of twelve to fourteen year old girls on their way into the Church of La Caridad del Cobre, a place sacred to Cubans since the 1600s, to teach Catechism class (this happened to my cousin Oscar’s wife, Miriam) to the internment of thousands in the UMAP camps of 1965 – 1968, where Jehova’s Witnesses in particular had it very rough, tortured with fire ants until they renounced their faith, religion was under fire in Cuba. A more honest answer from Che would have been, “yes, there is religion in Cuba, but we’re doing everything we can to get rid of it.”.- Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

I wish that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro could live in Cuba, not as the pampered VIPs that they are when they visit today, but as Cubans do, with no United States Constitutional rights, with ration cards entitling them to tiny portions of provisions that the stores don’t even stock anyway, with chivatos surveilling them constantly. How long would it be before Mr. Soderbergh started sizing up inner tubes, speculating on the durability and buoyancy of them, asking himself, could I make the crossing on that? How long before Mr. Del Toro started gazing soulfully at divorced or widowed tourist women, hoping to seduce and marry one of them and get out? Only then could they see why this insipid, frivolous and pretentious movie they have made is nothing less than an insult to millions of people, who really do live like that, and who’ve lived like that their entire lives. - Part II: “Che:” Bad Movie About A Bad Guy Gets Worse

How individuals from the left can worship Che? When cornered, he surrendered and shouted "I'm Che', I'm worth more to you alive than dead" He planned to blow up buildings in NY at the same time he was visiting the "intellectuals" at their lavish parties they threw for him. The movie didn’t include how the regime butcher sold the blood of political prisoners. Some people just can't handle all the freedom we have in the US and must find something wrong with it so they can feel guilty.

Che was an extreme left winger whose whole life was dedicated to an ideology which has led to the death and misery of many people.

He was, after all, the one who wrote: “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.”

He was just another narcissist using the same century’s old doctrine to justify mass murder and torture. What a pity the so tolerant lefties in Hollywood don't share this view.

“Che” film gets thumbs up in Cuba,” ran the headline from CNN’s Havana Bureau last December 8. Benicio Del Toro, who stars as Che, was being feted as the Castro regime’s guest of honor during the Havana Film Festival while presenting the movie he co-produced. “The lengthy biopic of the Argentinean revolutionary won acclaim from among those who know his story best,” continued the CNN story.

Indeed, but the acclaim came because those “who knew his story best” (Castro and his Stalinist henchmen, the film’s mentors/co-producers) saw that their directives had been followed slavishly, that Che’s (genuine) story was completely absent from the movie. - By Humberto Fontova, Fidel Castro: Hollywood Screenwriter, Dec 28th 2009

The screenplay for the Soderbergh/del Toro biopic was based on Che Guevara’s diaries which were published by Cuba’s propaganda ministry with the forward written by Fidel Castro himself. The film includes several Communist Cuban actors and the other Latin American actors spent months in Cuba being prepped for their roles by members of Cuba’s “Che Guevara Institute.” - By Humberto Fontova, Fidel Castro: Hollywood Screenwriter, Dec 28th 2009

A proclamation from Castro’s own press ministry dated 12/7/08 actually boasted of their role: “Actor Benicio del Toro presented the film (at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater) as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) for its assistance during the shooting of the film, which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba.” The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) is an arm of Stalinist Cuba’s propaganda ministry.- By Humberto Fontova, Fidel Castro: Hollywood Screenwriter, Dec 28th 2009

The Stalinist regime that co-produced this film and now feted its director and star — employing the midnight knock and the dawn raid among other devices by its KGB-mentored secret police- rounded up and jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin’s and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed (out of a population of 68 million) in it’s first six. Ernesto “Che” Guevara initiated this bloodbath and mass-jailing under the direction of Soviet GRU agent Angel Ciutah, who was Che’s chief mentor and houseguest (in the most luxurious mansion in Cuba, by the way) only weeks after Che entered Havana and stole it from it’s owner, threatening him with a firing squad.- By Humberto Fontova, Fidel Castro: Hollywood Screenwriter, Dec 28th 2009

“I’m here in Cuba’s hills thirsting for blood,” Che wrote his abandoned wife in 1957. “Dear Papa, today I discovered I really like killing,” he wrote shortly afterwards. Alas, this killing very rarely involved combat; it come from the close-range murder of bound and blindfolded men and boys.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart,” said a former political prisoner to this writer, “you knew there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” In fact the one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara’s life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically. Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro skip over these fascinating quotes and Che’s one genuine accomplishment as a revolutionary.- By Humberto Fontova, Fidel Castro: Hollywood Screenwriter, Dec 28th 2009

When will sanity prevail and these people will be taken to task for telling blatant lies about a psycho like Che. Next they will make a movie about Stalin or Hitler and it will be told from a side that will show the "humanity and true struggle that these poor men would have endured. They killed people out of sheer insane hatred for the world.

Why have so many Cubans risked their lives and that of their families to get out of paradise? Answer that all you apologists for Che and Castro. Why does Castro have to fence in the people of his county as did the East Germany and all other communist countries? Why are these countries turned into prisons?

The United States has to try to keep people out, because we can’t afford that many to live here. The communists have to keep people from leaving, because so many don’t want to live under them.

do you like the little bubble you live in?

I find it absolutely stunning that this psychopath still has fans. But then, there are still useful idiots who think Fidel's Cuba is a paradise. The useful idiots of Hollywood are licking Castro's blood-drenched boots; they don't have to live there.

Che fighting in Africa with an all black army against white South African mercenaries in 1965
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/CheinCongo2.gif


One of the favorite LIES of the right-wing LOSERS is that Che was racist against blacks. They always attack where they think heroes are strongest. Their "evidence" for this LIE is his diary passage about "blacks being indolent and lazy". However, the "black is indolent" line is always taken out of context ... what is the truth?

That quote was written by Che when he was 24 and encountered blacks for the first time in a Venezuelan slum during his Motorcycle trip around South America. *** The full context of this statement is addressed by biographer Jon Lee Anderson on page 92 of "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life." However, months later he announced himself a transformed man and even denounced the racism he encountered while living in Miami for a month. The quote was from 1952, before he was Che.


Years later in Cuba he showed he was not racist through his actions:


- Che pushed for racially integrating the schools in Cuba, years before they were racially integrated in the Southern United States.


- Che's friend and personal bodyguard was Harry "Pombo" Villegas, who was Afro-Cuban (black). Pombo accompanied Che to the Congo and to Bolivia, where he survived and now lives in Cuba. Of note, Pombo speaks glowingly of Guevara to this day


- When Che spoke before the U.N. in 1964 he spoke out in favor of black musician Paul Robeson, in support of slain black leader Patrice Lumumba (who he heralded as one of his heroes), against white segregation in the Southern U.S. (which still unfortunately existed), and against the white South African apartheid regime (long before it became the Western 'cause de jour').


- Che was also heralded by Malcolm X during this trip to NY and in contact with his associates to whom he sent a letter, and later on behalf of his actions in Africa - praised by Nelson Mandela and the Black Panther's Stokely Carmichael.


- When Guevara ventured to the Congo, he fought with a Cuban force of 100 Afro-Cubans (blacks) including those black Congolese fighters who he fought alongside against a force comprised partly of White South African mercenaries . This resembled the fight in Cuba, where Che's units were also made up of mostly mulattos and blacks.


- Later Guevara offered assistance to fight alongside the (black) FRELIMO in Mozambique, for their independence from the Portuguese.


- Lastly, in August 1961 (9 years after his "indolent" remark), Guevara attacked the U.S. for "discrimination against blacks, and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan", which matched his declarations in 1964 before the United Nations (12 years after his "indolent" remark), where Guevara denounced the United States policy towards their black population, stating:

"Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?"
--- CHE GUEVARA


IMAGES:

Che's bodyguard Pombo then
http://www.nydailynews.com/img/2007/10/01/gal_cheguevara_4.jpg

Pombo now
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/07pQed51Cq67X/610x.jpg

Che in Africa with his all black army
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/90/254180447_c767decf1f.jpg


Only to someone completely uninformed, could Che ---(a man who fought in Africa with an all black army against white South African mercenaries of Apartheid)--- be seen as "racist" for a diary passage he wrote as a youth 15 years earlier.

[ANTI-RACIST CHE]


ON EDUCATION ...

"The days where University education is a privilege of the white middle class are over. The University must paint itself black, mulatto, worker, and peasant." — Che Guevara to the University of Las Villas, 1959


ON U.S. RACISM ...

"Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men -- how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?" — Che Guevara to the U.N., December 11, 1964


ON SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID ...

"We speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?" — Che Guevara to the U.N., December 11, 1964

The left loves the psychopaths because they dream of the day when they will have that kind of power. It's sick and twisted, but then so is their ideology, they truly are the enemy of humanity and civilization, a bunch of barbarians in waiting.

A May Day march without Che Guevara posters and Mexican flags is like a fish with a bicycle. We observed the bemusing spectacle two weeks ago. Now it’s time to reflect. Some marchers, apparently wracked with guilt between the primacy of the two symbols, devised a handy modus vivendi for their tortured consciences’

It seemed that few groups of Mexican demonstrators forget to glorify the man on record (June, 1956) as dismissing Mexicans en masse as, “a rabble of illiterate Indians.” In 1956, while residing in Mexico and training with the Castro brothers for their "invasion" of Cuba, Che Guevara sneered at his hosts and the “rabble” of Mexican citizens surrounding the training camp in those exact words. So recalls one of Che’s military trainers of the time, the Cuban (but non-commie) Miguel Sanchez. - Humberto Fontova, Che on May Day, , May 14, 2010

Labor groups were also prominent on May Day with their Che Guevara regalia. “The workers movement has no borders,” proclaimed their abundant posters.

In a TV speech June 26, 1961, when Che Guevara was Cuba’s “Minister of Industries” he proclaimed: “The Cuban workers have to start being used to live in a collectivist regimen and by no means can they go on strike.”

This “no strike” provision was unacceptable to Cuban laborers—many of whom took up arms in protest. One of these was a 20-year-old boy named Tony Chao Flores, who was promptly captured by Che’s goons. Within weeks Che Guevara saw to it that Tony be bound to the execution stake. - Humberto Fontova, Che on May Day, , May 14, 2010

The Left admire Che, a man who murdered thousands, a racist, and a women basher and homophobic, who is responsible for the oppression of millions. May God bless Tony and many others like him.

Just read all the nonsense that bitter pathetic liars like Victorin say about Che, how much they hate him even after 45 years, and you'll know how great he was and still is. Losers fear Che's example, because while they live only for themselves, he gave his life for HUMANITY. None of them are even worthy to speak his name, much less lie about him on the internet.

CHE LIVES and ALWAYS WILL in the hearts of millions.

Communist regimes have imprisoned and killed more people than any other political system during the 20th century. How is possible that our universities and colleges embrace this sadistic ideology? It is very difficult to sway their opinions even with the use of unambiguous facts, since they behave like religious fanatics.

Che Guevara, the killing machine, is promoted as a hero by liberal professors in our universities and colleges. Is this the kind of people that the left wants to impose on us? Is there anything that we can do to stop these “useful idiots” from spreading their venom? Yes, keep fighting back by exposing the truth, until they begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

[SOME QUOTES]

"Che was an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom." — Nelson Mandela

"Che was the most complete human being of his age. He lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel." — Jean Paul Sartre

"There was no person more feared by the company than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America." — Philip Agee, CIA Agent

"That he was shot after capture demonstrates the fear that the Bolivian authorities felt even of an imprisoned Che. They were afraid to bring to him to trial: afraid of the echoes his voice would have aroused from the courtroom: afraid to prove that the man they hated was loved by the world outside. This fear will help to perpetuate his legend, and a legend is impervious to bullets." — Graham Greene

"Che was not only a heroic fighter, but a revolutionary thinker, with a political and moral project and a system of ideas and values for which he fought and gave his life. The philosophy which gave his political and ideological choices their coherence, color, and taste was a deep revolutionary humanism. For Che, the true Communist, the true revolutionary was one who felt that the great problems of all humanity were his or her personal problems, one who was capable of "feeling anguish whenever someone was assassinated, no matter where it was in the world, and of feeling exultation whenever a new banner of liberty was raised somewhere else." — Michael Löwy

"'Revolutionaries are not normal people': an understatement in relation to Ernesto Che Guevara. Physician, brilliant intellect, competent soldier, charismatic leader, developed—and eventually creative--Marxist economist, always a man able to capture the spirit of an experience in his own being, Che remains one of the four or five greatest revolutionaries in modern history." — Alfredo López

"Che ate babies, he stole my mansion which had 45 bedrooms in it, life was heaven in Cuba before Che. He personally shot 3,500,000,000 people and then drank their blood one by one. My Grandmas sisters aunts brothers neighbor who was blind, one time saw Che bite the head off of a young kitten." — Every bitter lying Gusano in Miami

"You may cut the flowers, but it will not stop the spring."
"Podran cortar las flores, pero no detendran la primavera."
— (A saying about Che's legacy written on many walls throughout Latin America)

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History will not absolve the killers. In a free Cuba Tony and all the other assassinated by the Castro brothers, Che and company will be honor and remembered with love.

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. - Terrell Clemmons, “The Making of a Marxist Martyr”, Salvo Magazine, summer 2010

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?- Terrell Clemmons, “The Making of a Marxist Martyr”, Salvo Magazine, summer 2010

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.

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.

"When you saw the beaming look on Che's face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad," said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, "you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara." As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che's second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work. - Humberto Fontova, Guerrilla Doofus and Murdering Coward, Townhall.com, October 9, 2010.

"The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth." ― Che Guevara

SOURCE: 'On Revolutionary Medicine' (1960)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1960/08/19.htm

[NELSON MANDELA, at a rally honoring the CUBAN REVOLUTION & CHE in 1991] ―

"From its earliest days the Cuban revolution has itself been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist-orchestrated campaign to destroy the impressive gains made in the Cuban revolution... We admire the achievements of the Cuban revolution in the sphere of social welfare. We note the transformation from a country of imposed backwardness to universal literacy. We acknowledge your advances in the fields of health, education, and science... We also honour the great Che Guevara, whose revolutionary exploits, including on our own continent, were too powerful for any prison censors to hide from us. The life of Che is an inspiration to all human beings who cherish freedom. We will always honour his memory... Long live the Cuban revolution! Long live Comrade Fidel Castro!"

Even as a youth, Ernesto Guevara's writings revealed a serious mental illness. "My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands!” This passage is from Ernesto Guevara's famous Motorcycle Diaries, though Robert Redford somehow overlooked it while directing his heart-warming movie.

The Spanish word vencido, by the way, translates into "defeated" or "surrendered."And indeed, "the "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" very, very rarely reached Guevara's nostrils from anything properly describable as combat. It mostly came from the close-range murders of defenseless men (and boys.) Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro and Che's theft of their humble family farm, all refused blindfolds and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen. "Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!" "The defiant yells would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble," wrote eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares. - Humberto Fontova, Guerrilla Doofus and Murdering Coward, Townhall.com, October 9, 2010.

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