I recently had the pleasure of walking by a large protest against the prison at Guantanamo Bay. As I happened past, a youngish and obviously passionate man with long hair was screaming about inequity and human rights. He was wearing a Che Guevara shirt.
It is unfortunate and perhaps ironic that today’s Left continue to idolize Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. From history books and popular culture (Motorcycle Diaries comes readily to mind), we hear about ‘Che the hero,’ ‘Che the liberator,’ and ‘Che the revolutionary.’ Much of this can be attributed to the masterful propaganda of the (thankfully) now-ailing Fidel Castro, who had the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times virtually running his revolution for him, forty odd years ago. In 1995, with the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara’s death, his famous 1961 portrait – now the most commonly reproduced print in the world – became something of a fashion piece in popular culture. To this day, ‘Che’ shirts continue to adorn the bodies of young college students and revolutionary-types across the country and around the world. None of these individuals, apparently, ever bothered to question their hero’s motives.
Unless you are the type of person who blindly declares “fuck the system!” – the kind, for example, that idolizes Timothy McVeigh (all of those children were guilty by association, after all) – I should hope that you concern yourself with more than revolution for revolution’s sake. For this reason, after I introduce you to the real story of Ernesto Guevara’s life, I believe that many of you will never adorn yourselves with Che’s likeness again. In the following paragraphs, looking beyond Che’s idealized perception as hero, liberator, and revolutionary, I will present three of the man’s true personas.
Che the Executioner
Despite what you might hear from Hollywood, Ernesto Guevara never graduated from the University of Buenos Aires medical school, and was never a doctor – just ask the University of Buenos Aires. He did, however, chronicle his thoughts in a journal, though Motorcycle Diaries conveniently skipped over choice entries such as this:
“Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”
The above passage, in which Guevara discusses his planned revolution, is perhaps too telling. Throughout his career as Fidel Castro’s underling in post-Batista Cuba, Guevara personally ordered the executions of between 1500 and 2000 people. (In an interview with a CIA agent shortly before his execution, he put the number at “several thousand,” though they were “all CIA agents and spies,” of course.)
But while most revolutions have their executions, ‘Che’ especially enjoyed the job. In 1957 – before he had any command authority – Guevara volunteered to accompany Eutimio Guerra (Castro’s personal bodyguard), who had been ordered to execute a rebellious peasant. When alone with Guevara and the peasant, Guerra hesitated. Seeing this, Guevara drew his own pistol and performed the execution without reserve. In his diaries, ‘Che’ describes the peasant’s death: “He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine.” Shortly afterward, Guevara’s father received the following message: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.” It was this attitude that led to his appointment, the following summer, to the position of commander of La Cabana prison. There, as many of the prison’s inmates and officers now describe, Guevara insisted on performing many of the executions himself – from five feet away, and with a forty-five caliber pistol, no less.
Che McVeigh
But let us pretend that none of these executions happened, or that they were somehow justified; even with this substantial gift to Guevara, the man’s revolutionary ideals continue to betray a monstrous character.
In his will, Guevara praises the “extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines.” To those who knew Guevara, this was not a surprise. For example, in pamphlets that were handed to every Cuban soldier before the battles in Angola, he wrote: “Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.” Clearly, Guevara was not exactly a “peaceful” revolutionary.
Indeed, Guevara’s “ideology” went much further. Like a true Marxist, he believed that Bourgeois society was corrupt beyond repair. Thus, the “new society” would likely need to be constructed upon the ashes of the old. For this reason, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara was a strong advocate of nuclear war. He envisioned the ashes, I suppose, quite literally; if a few hundred million had to die in the process of the revolution, so be it.
While nuclear war did not happen, Guevara was able to implement social reforms to “purify” his own society. In practice, this meant that “delinquents” – defined as those who drank, disrespected authority, were lazy, or listened to loud music – were placed in special concentration camps. Additionally, in 1965, Guevara’s concentration camps expanded to include homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Afro-Cuban priests. Meanwhile, Guevara took up residence in a mansion in Havana, seized from one of the “Bourgeois.”
Che the Gorilla
Guevara’s career as a guerilla soldier was also rather less than stellar. In fact, before his capture and execution in Bolivia by the CIA, Guevara had never actually led soldiers in a real battle. While an entire account of Guevara’s military “career” is beyond the scope of this article, the following examples should be illuminating.
During the “war” against Batista’s forces, very few actual military clashes took place. The New York Times, duped by a reporter who was actually an agent of Fidel Castro, reported huge battles with thousands of casualties in each. Officials from Cuba’s US embassy, curious about these claims of bloodshed, decided to perform their own investigation. They found that, in all of Cuba and during the entire two year period of “revolution” against the Batistas, the total number of casualties on both sides was 182. Later investigations into some of the revolution’s more famous “battles,” such as Guevara’s famous capture of a train carrying Batista munitions, revealed that the Batista “enemies” had simply been paid off to surrender (between $250,000 and $1,000,000, depending on who you ask); Guevara’s own diary reports exactly one casualty in the train “conflict.” This, of course, did not stop Guevara from executing twenty-seven of the captured soldiers.
More impressive, perhaps, was Guevara’s performance during the Bay of Pigs battle. Having been duped by the CIA into believing that the Bay of Pigs was a diversion, Castro took his army to the “real” landing site, at Pino del Rio. There, through the fog, the CIA had sent a small boat containing a tape recording of battle, as well as a number of time-release roman candles. While maneuvering to engage the boat, Guevara suffered one casualty – himself: inexplicably (though some have proposed a botched suicide attempt), he managed to fire a bullet through his own chin, just missing his brain (the scar is visible in most post-1961 pictures).
These examples are fairly illustrative of Guevara’s military career. A full account can be located on the Internet with little effort, and I recommend his campaign in Congo, as an especially good highlight. Guevara also attempted to create revolutions throughout South America, all of which failed dramatically. And, as mentioned earlier, his first actual battle – in Bolivia – was his last.
I can also highly recommend Guevara’s book on guerilla warfare, as well as his personal diary; if you are having a bad day, find a copy, open to a random page, and have a few good laughs. An example: “It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken.”
If you would like to read more about Guevara, the following are excellent sources, which provided the information contained in this article:
Humberto Fontova’s “Fidel’s Executioner,” located at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=19823
Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s “The Killing Machine,” located at
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/che/brand.htm
and Ryan Clancy’s “Che Guevara should be scorned – not worn,” located at
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-10-30-guevara-edit_x.htm.
