Che Guevara: A total failure the Cuban dictatorship turned into a successful and profitable myth

Che Guevara was not good at much of anything other than killing, torturing, and bigotry. He was a coward and a complete failure, but the myth of a gallant revolutionary propagated after his death enjoys great success, and profits.

Cuban independent journalist Luis Cino explains in CubaNet (my translation):

Che Guevara, the successful myth of a failure

Undoubtedly, Che Guevara’s posthumous legend proved to be Castroism’s most successful and lucrative marketing program.

On October 9, 1967, in La Higuera, a Bolivian Army officer, acting on orders from dictator René Barrientos, killed the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, who had been captured and wounded in the leg the day before.

Abandoned to his fate by the Cuban government, Guevara’s guerrilla group was annihilated by inexperienced Bolivian rangers, whom Guevara disdainfully referred to as “little soldiers” in his Campaign Diary.

This was not Che Guevara’s first military failure. In 1965, his ultra-secret incursion into the Congo ended just over six months after it began, forcing Guevara and the accompanying Cuban military personnel to cross Lake Tanganyika with the enemy at their heels, seeking refuge in Tanzania.

“There was not a single trace of greatness in that retreat,” Guevara bitterly admitted in notes he wrote during the several weeks he spent as a refugee in the Cuban Embassy in Dar es Salaam before flying to Algiers and then Prague.

Most of Guevara’s military endeavors, starting with the Granma yacht landing, which he himself described as “a shipwreck,” were pathetic failures. His only military success could be noted in December 1958, facing soldiers of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s army, who, demoralized, did not show much effort in preventing the rebels from taking the city of Santa Clara.

He also failed as an economist. Before Fidel Castro appointed him Minister of Industries, he presided over the National Bank, performing poorly in both positions. His departure to fight in the Congo left a calamitous mark on the Cuban economy, which had to be rectified by followers of Soviet guidelines.

Despite speaking and writing extensively on organizing the socialist economy, Guevara, with Trotskyist and Maoist inclinations, never managed to clearly and coherently articulate his economic thought. In “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” he only managed to demonstrate the excess and impracticability of his statist-collectivist and superhuman idealism.

Although talented as a writer, Guevara did not excel in theoretical work. After writing “Passages of the Revolutionary War,” his attempt to capture his military doctrine in the book “Guerrilla Warfare” resulted in a confused manual of tactics and strategy. Clarifying Guevara’s theory of guerrilla focus would require the work of French author Régis Debray and his book “Revolution in the Revolution?”

As a doctor, he barely practiced medicine, preferring weapons and the training of fighters he called “killing machines,” like those in the firing squads executing his relentless orders at La Cabaña fortress during the early months of 1959.

Despite failing in all his endeavors and possessing a personality marked by stoicism that led to dehumanized extremes of demand and discipline, Che Guevara, 57 years after his death, remains the most revered and enduring icon of the global left.

The photo of Guevara taken by Korda in 1960 during the burial of the victims of the La Coubre explosion, later popularized by Ferlinghetti worldwide, appears as a fetish of consumer society on posters, t-shirts, mugs, and keychains.

Most Europeans and Americans who wear Che’s face on their t-shirts, many claiming to be peace lovers, have a vague and romantic notion of who the figure was, unaware of his extremist inclination towards revolutionary violence.

Undoubtedly, Che Guevara’s posthumous legend proved to be Castroism’s most successful and lucrative marketing program.

2 thoughts on “Che Guevara: A total failure the Cuban dictatorship turned into a successful and profitable myth”

  1. Expert packaging, media complicity and gullible people who practically beg to be deceived by appealing lies can go a very long way. However, it’s not just a matter of ignorance or stupidity but a matter of perversity.

  2. Back in 1958 my aunt met him. My uncle was a Doctor Who spent some time with him in Santa Clara. Un flaco con el brazo partido, she shook his hand. 6 months later her brother was shot by a firing squad by his orders
    Murdering SOB who Relished it.
    My aunt was almost 100 years old. Would love to go to Santa Clara and blow up that monument!

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