Che Guevara - A ruthless killer

A young boy of 14 stood in the courtyard of a government building, falsely accused of treasonous crimes against the state. Without the bother of a trial, or the protection of laws, he was publicly executed, shot in the head by a murderous Doctor. No, not the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele but rather Hollywood leftist icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The boys’ stunned family stood nearby, watching and awaiting the same fate. Che’s face is famous. You see it emblazoned on T shirts and posters in University dorm rooms across America. He is idolized by rockers such as Rage against the Machine, models wear Che bikini’s, he’s on beer labels, bandannas, key rings, Zippo lighters even desk clocks. Scads of actors and actresses wear Che’s image as a symbol of their commitment to the club of the “radical chic”. Most of the devotees of the cult of Guevara know little about him or what he actually stood for.

The real Che Guevara was far from romantic, but rather a maniacal Stalinist murderer. Che was born in Argentina to a Cuban aristocratic family. He had a comfortable upbringing, becoming a doctor before leaving home to join a communist revolution in Guatemala in 1952. Jacobo Arbenz, a leftist army officer, became President of Guatemala, and for his first act of Communist largesse, nationalized the property of the United Fruit Company, as well as the land of the local big ranchers and farmers. Che was caught up in enthusiasm for this experiment in 'socialism' and he wrote: “I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated".

Guevara cut and ran from Guatemala to Mexico when a US backed invasion force smashed the Arbenz regime in 1954. Here he joined up with other Cuban exiles that surrounded Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. In 1956, Che and 80 other members of the July 26 Movement founded by Fidel Castro had landed in Cuba to carry on a guerrilla campaign against the US backed dictator Batista. Che’s first execution was carried out against a suspected informer. He wrote: "I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain". With Castro’s victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro was put in charge of building up the states control over the people. He set out to purge the army of suspected Batista supporters and for those that survived the purges, he sent to Soviet style re-education classes. Che took it upon himself to be the supreme prosecutor, and ordered the executions of 550 Cuban soldiers in the first few months. Here’s a cold-blooded murderer who executed hundreds without a trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an “unnecessary bourgeois detail.” Che believed that revolutionaries must become cold-killing machines motivated by pure hate. He would stay up till dawn signing death warrants for innocent men, and his office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions. Odd how today his T-shirts adorn people who oppose capital punishment. Secret graves and crude boxes with bullet-riddled corpses delivered to ashen-faced loved ones – that’s the real Che legacy.

Here’s the documented body count of Che Guevara. 14 executed by Che in the Sierra Maestra during the anti-Batista guerrilla struggle (1957-1958): 23 executed in Santa Clara at Che’s orders in only two days (January 1-3, 1959): 164 executed at La Cabaña Fortress prison at Che Guevara’s orders. Email me, and I will send you the documentation of these murders by Che. The people are listed, name after name by the Truth Recovery Archive of Cuba. There is even a “new improved” Che poster, but this one is made up with the faces of 180 of his documented victims.

Che was the main link, indeed the architect, of the increasingly closer relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. The nuclear missile deal which almost resulted in a nuclear war in 1962 was engineered at the Cuban end by Che. When the Russians backed down in the face of US threats, Che was furious and said that if he had been in charge of the missiles, he would have fired them off. In December 1964, Che Guevara traveled to New York City as head of the Cuban delegation to speak at the U.N. He also appeared to a fawning press corps at the New York Times and again on the CBS Sunday news program Face the Nation. The champagne corks popped in Cuban-American households in October 1967 when Bolivian Soldiers and U.S. Special Forces tracked down the murderous Che Guevara in Bolivia. When he whimpered to his captors in Bolivia, “Don’t shoot – I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” he had a point. Then he got a major dose of his own medicine. The picture of the slain Che Guevara is the second most famous picture of one of Hollywood’s favorite killers.