Our very own Humberto Fontova in The Miami Herald:
Che Guevara’s image doesn’t fit ghastly reality
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.
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 unarmed and 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!”
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