The real Che Guevara

Why You Need to Throw Out Your Che Guevara T-Shirt
Why You Need to Throw Out Your Che Guevara T-Shirt - Mic

By Natalia Martinez*

While it happens fairly frequently, I am always surprised when I see someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. I've seen them in far-flung places abroad, and in unassuming coffee shops at home, but these sightings never cease to amaze me. For years, it has bewildered me that Guevara has garnered a seemingly growing number of admirers around the world who see his visage as a romantic and idealistic portrait of justice.

Films such as Motorcycle Diaries and Steven Soderberg’s Che, in which Guevara is played by Gael García Bernal and Benicio del Toro, respectively have aided in perpetuating the myth among new, misinformed audiences.

Unfortunately, branded merchandise and the allure of Hollywood (capitalistic forces, ironically) have made Guevara a compelling figure. We seem intent on ignoring how inglorious Guevara truly was, how many societies he fractured, the tyranny he perpetuated, and most importantly, the many people that died under his command.

He was much more than a Robin Hood tragically killed by the CIA. Guevara was a seeker of power who convinced the world that he was a successful warrior and a visionary philosopher, when I believe he was neither.

Guevara may have had a genuine interested and concern about poverty and the human condition when he was younger. It is also probably true that he was, for a time, a compassionate and thoughtful young man saddened by the inequality he witnessed in Latin America. But it is also true that his ideals later became corrupted by power, guerrilla tactics, and murderous rage.

This is a man who declared at a United Nations General Assembly in 1964 that executions were necessary and would continue in Cuba.

This is a man who confessed to admiring only three nations: the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea. He famously stated that he could find not one discrepancy between Mao Zedong’s view of the world and his own.

This is the man who have schemed with the Black Liberation Army to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, and the Liberty Bell. Not only was he extreme, but also he ridiculed and often punished any kind of moderation. He created a zero-sum between capitalism and China communism. Those around him who expressed moderate, intermediate positions such as democracy or a mixed economy were chastised and actively criticized as inferior.

This is the man who, in 1961, declared his mission to "make individualism disappear" and who unraveled a toolkit of command and control tactics and repressive methods to persecute those he deemed as individualists and dissenters. He actively persecuted homosexuals, sending some to internment camps where they were joined by other dissenters. Artists were also a chief target. In Cuba, many saw their books and works burned before being executed at Guevara’s behest.

This is a man who assumed the role of sole jury and executioner under Fidel Castro’s regime. Over the months he was in charge of La Cabana prison in Cuba, Guevara sentenced hundreds of people without proper trials or due process. This is the same man who personally executed a teenager for attempting to defend his father in front of a firing squad, as documented by La Cabana survivors.

Ever the fanatic, Guevara advocated for the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, assuming the U.S. would not tolerate such actions in its own backyard. The possibility of nuclear retaliation did not deter Guevara, claiming the population of Cuba would feel fulfilled if they were wiped out in the name of the revolution.

This is a man whose every guerrilla campaign ended in failure and the sacrifice of hundreds of lives, behind an inglorious vision.

In the face of all of this, I have often wondered if the people wearing Guevara t-shirts would not have been victims of his purges themselves. Free-thinkers, lovers of equality, seekers of a more just democracy — all of them would have been his targets. Instead, Guevara’s death at a young age, a handful of iconic portraits, and a persistent appeal to romantic rebellion have turned Guevara into a saintly symbol, bereft of the blood and sin that typically characterized his life.

*Natalia Martinez is a strategist and psychologist who has worked in a variety of industries across the private and nonprofit sectors. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and Government from Harvard University and an M.A. in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University.

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Sandokan said:

Many Leftists idolize Marxist mass murderers. They love destruction and death, to bring chaos, spread hate. They love to destroy and obliterated anything created before they gain power. They have no respect for anyone or anything that came before them, nor the sacrifices made, and are only concerned with their own agenda and ideology. If the shoe fit, were it.

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Sandokan said:

Many Leftists idolize Marxist mass murderers. They love destruction and death, to bring chaos, spread hate. They love to destroy and obliterated anything created before they gain power. They have no respect for anyone or anything that came before them, nor the sacrifices made, and are only concerned with their own agenda and ideology. If the shoe fit, were it.

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Sandokan said:

Many Leftists idolize Marxist mass murderers. They love destruction and death, to bring chaos, spread hate. They love to destroy and obliterated anything created before they gain power. They have no respect for anyone or anything that came before them, nor the sacrifices made, and are only concerned with their own agenda and ideology. If the shoe fit, were it.

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US Conservative said:

The move The Chekist can be seen for free on youtube. Our marxist forumites would do well to watch.

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TheDemSocialist said:

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Don’t Be Like Che… Say NO to Nuclear Arms
Don’t Be Like Che… Say NO to Nuclear Arms / Rolando Pulido | Translating Cuba

Rolando Pulido

SAY NO TO NUCLEAR ARMS

“If the missiles had remained in Cuba we would have used them against the very heart of America, including the city of New York. We are never going to 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.” Che

DON’T BE LIKE HIM. SAY NO TO VIOLENCE.

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Sandokan said:

Millions dead in the United States, millions dead in the Soviet Union, and almost certainly, millions dead in Cuba. The butcher of La Cabaña in action, a cold-blooded killing machine reminiscent of Lavrenti Beria.

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TheDemSocialist said:

Uhhh what in the **** are you talking about?

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Che Guevara’s image doesn’t fit ghastly reality
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/10/16/3693495/che-guevaraa-image-doesnt-fit.html

BY HUMBERTO FONTOVA
HFONTOVA.COM

Good thing the college “hipsters” who wear Che T-shirts didn’t live in Stalinist Cuba under their idol.
“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!” snarled the KGB-mentored Che Guevara in 1961. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service! Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think of individuals! Individualism must disappear from Cuba!”

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 Che’s KGB-trained 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.

Today, the world’s largest image of the man whom so many college hipsters sport on their shirts adorns Cuba’s headquarters and torture chambers for its KGB-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.

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 murdered more people in its first five years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six.

Forty-six years ago this month, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine (Oct. 9 marked the 40th anniversary of his death). Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood up against a wall and shot. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it was then.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as his victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner, to this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”

As commander of La Cabaña 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 La Cabaña had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.

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On Anniversary of Che Killing

Felix Rodriguez, left, with Ernesto "Che" Guevara before he was shot to death in Bolivia.

Former CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who participated in the historic manhunt to capture Ernesto "Che" Guevara, says the Marxist revolutionary was little more than a criminal and devoted killer who deserves to be demystified.

"I believe that eventually people will see what he really was. He was an assassin," said Rodriguez, who spoke to Newsmax about Guevara in advance of the 46th anniversary of his death on Oct. 9, 1967, at age 39. "He was an individual with very little regard for life. He enjoyed killing people." - On Anniversary of Che Killing, CIA's Felix Rodriguez Remembers, by Andrea Billups and Kathleen Walter, 10 Oct 2013

Rodriguez said he talked to the military official who trained Guevara, who told him of Che's fascination with violence.

"We have history from the man who trained him, who is a Cuban, who was the one who trained him in Mexico," said Rodriguez. "He was the one who trained Fidel and all of his people."

Rodriguez said the trainer told him that "Che was fascinated" with killing and recounted how Guevara asked him, "What does it feel like when you personally shoot somebody and you see the blood coming out?"

Rodriguez said, "On [Oct. 8], which happened to be on a Sunday, that's when the firefight started and Che was ... wounded on the right leg."

First wounded, then captured, Guevara was intent on saving his own life.

"The soldier who captured him told me that when [Guevara] came face-to-face with the army, he told them, 'Don't shoot, I am Che. I am worth to you more alive than dead,'" Rodriguez said.

"You don't want to talk about Africa but we were told by your own people you had like 10,000 guerrillas and they were very poor soldiers," Rodriguez said he told Guevara. "So he said, 'Well, if I had 10,000 guerrillas it would have been a big difference, but you're right, they were very poor soldiers.' And we talked about the Cuban economy, about the different situations."

"So at that point in time I thought there was no counter-order for sure, so I came into the room, I stood right in front of him, and said, 'Commander, I'm sorry, I tried my best.'"

Che Guevara would not be kept alive.

"He perfectly understood what I was saying. He turned white like a piece of paper. He said, 'It's better this way; I should have never been captured alive.'

"I recall, for example, in Paris … this young Frenchman … had a T-shirt with Che Guevara's figure on it and he was 20 years old. And the guy looked at it and said, 'He's a rock singer.' So it means that a lot of people see this in the store, they buy it, and they have no idea."

Rodriguez said: "This guy was really a criminal. It's a matter of record that you can check that he said many times that if he had the atomic bomb he would have thrown it over New York. To implement socialism in the United States was worth it, the life of millions of American innocent people."

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