The real Che Guevara
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Everything Else
victorin1 — 6 years ago(June 04, 2019 11:48 PM)
The real Che Guevara
Can his reputation survive the publication of his own words?
In December 1953, he wrote to his aunt from San José, Costa Rica,
“I have sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.”
[1, p. 62]Another letter to the same aunt was signed with the words
"Stalin II."
[2, p. 167] More important was the fact that when Guevara visited the USSR in his capacity as one of the most important leaders of the victorious Cuban revolution in November of 1960, he insisted on depositing a floral tribute at Stalin's tomb[1, p. 181]. It is important to remember that this was more than four years after Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes.
This from Che Guevara's Guevara journal of his travels through Latin America:
“I now feel my dilated nostrils, savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood, of enemy death; I now tense my body, ready for the struggle, and I prepare my being as a sacred place so that in it resounds with new vibrations and new hopes the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat.”
The Motorcycle Diaries omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form the film.
A phrase in a letter to his wife on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking in Cuba, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra:
“Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty.”
It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people.
[1] Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Vintage, 1998).
[2] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997. -
victorin1 — 6 years ago(June 08, 2019 12:29 AM)
When a boy in Guevara’s forces stole some food, he ordered him shot. In January 1957, Guevara personally executed a peasant named Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information and described the act in his diary:
“I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: “Yank it off, boy, what does it matter… I did so and his possessions were now mine.”
[2, p. 237]
Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. He ordered the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes:
“He had to pay the price.”
At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.
He wrote to a friend in December 1957,
“Because of my ideological background, I belong to those who believe that the solution of the world’s problems lies behind the so-called iron curtain….”
[3, p. 269]
“If in doubt, kill him” were Che's instructions.
On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written–adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.
[2]Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997).
[3] Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1980). -
victorin1 — 6 years ago(June 15, 2019 11:12 PM)
Guevara became “supreme prosecutor” at Havana’s La Cabaña fortress after Batista fled Cuba. Here he presided over hundreds of executions in proceedings that even a sympathetic biographer notes “were carried out without respect for due process.” [1, p. 143]
The "cold-blooded killing machine" did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution.
In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”:
“hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”
[4]
The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades.
Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before WWII. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20 thousand political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night Of The Long Knives." The famous night that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.
Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate.
Cuban journalist Luis Ortega who knew Che as early as 1954 writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime.
[4] Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The Killing Machine, The New Republic, 11/7/2005
Link:
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535 -
Adam60z — 4 years ago(December 08, 2021 01:14 AM)
I mean aside from looking cool, most people know in reality he was a fanatic who died in the Bolivian jungle, after having been there living as a homeless dude. He was finally picked up and killed by the Bolivian army and CIA.
Mean people suck. -
MortSahlFan — 6 years ago(June 15, 2019 11:32 PM)
if only he was more like Dick Cheney…
https://www.patreon.com/LoyalOpposition -
victorin1 — 6 years ago(June 22, 2019 04:40 AM)
In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected:
“He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural.”
He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will.
He ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of 1958:
“The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them.”
This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution. The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. [4]
[4] Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The killing machine, The New Republic, 11/7/2005 -
MovieManCin2 — 6 years ago(June 22, 2019 05:01 AM)
He was a Marxist thug, and I for one am glad he's dead!
And he was a coward. When he was captured, he threw up his hands and shouted
"Do Not Shoot! I am Che Guevara, and I am worth more to you alive than dead!"
Mmmm. Arrogant too.
MAGA! FAFO!
Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. Dumbocraps: evil people who celebrate murder. 
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victorin1 — 6 years ago(June 28, 2019 06:39 AM)
How Che Murdered
By Pierre San Martin
“It was during the last days of December 1959, the sound of the iron door opening was heard as they threw another person into the already crowded cell. It was a boy some 12 to 14 years old at most who had just become our newest cellmate. And what did you do? I defended my father so they wouldn't kill him, I couldn't stop it. Soon Che's goons came back, and they yanked the valiant boy out of the cell.
He gave the order to bring the boy first and he ordered him to kneel in front of the wall. The boy disobeyed the order with a courage that words can't express and responded to this infamous character:
“If you're going to kill me you're going to have to do it the way you kill a man, standing, not like a coward, kneeling.”
Walking behind the boy, the Che said
“whereupon you are a brave lad.”
He upholstered his pistol and shot him in the nape of the neck so that he almost decapitated him.”
Here's a cold-blooded murderer who executed thousands without trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an
”unnecessary bourgeois detail,”
who stayed up till dawn for months at a time signing death warrants for innocent and honorable men, whose office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions – and today his T-shirts adorn people who oppose capital punishment. By his own count, Che sent 2,500 men to "the wall." [5]
[5] Pierre San Martin, How Che Murdered, El Nuevo Herald , Diciembre 28, 1997.
https://www.militaryimages.net/media/che-guevara-and-fidel-castro.2047/page-2#xfmg-comment-7157
Chilling story of a former political prisoner Pierre San Martin, an eyewitness to the cold blooded murder of a child between 12 and 14 years of age carried out by the abominable monster of cruelty Che Guevara in the fortress of La Cabana. How it is possible that nowadays there are so far people who feel admiration for this mass murderer? -
MovieManCin2 — 6 years ago(June 29, 2019 04:15 AM)
He was an asshole and a mass murderer. Once again I am GLAD he is dead. Hopefully he's being tortured in hell.
MAGA! FAFO! Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. Dumbocraps: evil people who celebrate murder. -
victorin1 — 6 years ago(July 01, 2019 01:39 AM)
When the Rumanian writer Stefan Bacie visited Havana, Che Guevara
invited him to be present at an execution. Bacie has made reference a few times
to this macabre invitation, the last time in his poem:
"I DO NOT SING TO CHE"
I do not sing to Che,
neither I have sung to Stalin
with Che I spoke enough in Mexico,
and in Havana he invited me,
biting the pure between the lips,
like inviting somebody to a drink in the bar,
to accompany him to see how people are shot
at the wall in la Cabaña.
I do not sing to Che,
neither I have sung to Stalin;
let Neruda, Guillen and Cortazar sing to him;
they sing to Che (the singers of Stalin),
I sing to the youth of Czechoslovakia.
The difference between ‘Che’ Guevara and Pol Pot was that Guevara never studied in Paris.
But the mass-executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who opposes capital punishment! Is there a psychiatrist in the house?! -
victorin1 — 6 years ago(July 04, 2019 07:33 AM)
Che, the radical left symbol, was a homophobe.
Che played a principal role in setting up Cuba's first labor camp in the Guanahacabibes region in western Cuba in 1960-1961, to confine people who had committed no crime punishable by law, revolutionary or otherwise. This "crimes" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music. Che defended that initiative in his own words:
We only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway.
This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of UMAP, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros's wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago. [4]
[4] Álvaro Vargas Llosa, “Che Guevara, the killing machine”, The New Republic, 11/7/2005
This type of forced confinement without due process was also applied to AIDS victims during the decade of the 80s and 90s. -
victorin1 — 6 years ago(July 11, 2019 06:59 AM)
Che, the radical left symbol, was a homophobe.
“Che played a principal role in setting up Cuba's first labor camp in the Guanahacabibes region in western Cuba in 1960-1961, to confine people who had committed no crime punishable by law, revolutionary or otherwise. This "crimes" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music. Che defended that initiative in his own words:
“We only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway.”
This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of UMAP, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros's wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.” [4]
[4] Álvaro Vargas Llosa, “Che Guevara, the killing machine”, The New Republic, 11/7/2005
This type of forced confinement without due process was also applied to AIDS victims during the decade of the 80s and 90s.
. -
Pingfa — 3 years ago(August 07, 2022 08:16 PM)
Che, the radical left symbol, was a homophobe.
Historically all far left regimes were, save for the Bolsheviks. Which is why it's bizarre twist that somehow it's become a requirement for the modern 'left' to promote LGBTQRSJWPism, and that many of them fancy the USSR to be a rainbow paradise, despite the fact that it remained illegal up until the collapse of the Union. -
bigbadwolf666 — 4 years ago(September 18, 2021 04:17 PM)
This is beyond bizarre.
I strangely used to be an unflinching loyal supporter but through the years and education I've come to realize it was all one big lie and I dont know historians dont just smash him. He was evil like the Devil doesnt deserve the support he gets from the masses that dont really know the truth.
This thread is quite good.
Without strife, your victory has no meaning.
Without strife, you do not advance.
Without strife, there is only stagnation.
