Posted on 10/10/2005 1:34:29 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
October 8 was the 38th anniversary of the day the quaking "guerrilla hero" was prompted to say: "Don't Shoot! I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"
According to many eyewitness accounts, Che's own victims conducted themselves much differently on their last day alive. "Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!"
"The defiant yells would make the walls of La Cabana tremble," wrote eyewitness Armando Valladares.
Outside Havana and in the countryside, Che's murder victims often faced the firing squads untrussed, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. "Aim right HERE!" was a favorite among some of the these as they reached below the belt. This was a favorite, they say, of the campesinos Castro and Che's firing squads murdered during the Escambray rebellion. "'Cause y'all ain't got any!" yelled these Cuban rednecks right before the volley shattered their bodies.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro's theft of their humble family farm.
On Christmas Eve 1961 Juana Diaz spat in the faces of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. They'd found her guilty of feeding and hiding "bandits" (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the theft of their land). When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.
Traditionally, only one or two members of a firing squad have loaded guns. The rest shoot blanks. Not Castro's and Che's. In these, all ten members shot (and still shoot) live ammo – all ten bullets rip into the staked hero or heroine.
This incorporates more members into Castro's criminal organization, more members to resist desperately any overthrow of the system, with the consequent settling of accounts.
Cuba's population in 1960 was 6.2 million. According to the human Rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro's prison camps. At one time during 1961-62, 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses islandwide. This makes Castro's political incarceration rate higher than Stalin's and Hitler's.
"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"
This is from Che's famous "Motorcycle Diaries," recently made into a heartwarming movie by Robert Redford. It seems that Mr. Redford omitted this passage from his touching film. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murders of defenseless men (and boys.)
In actual combat (puerile skirmishes, actually) his imbecilities defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted" Guevara, Groucho Marx in "Duck Soup" comes across like Hannibal. The century's most famous guerrilla fighter in fact never fought in anything properly describable as a guerrilla war. When he finally started getting a tiny taste of one in Bolivia, he was promptly routed.
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," declared the Cuban Revolution's chief executioner, Che Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."
By the way, exactly a month after this declaration by his chief executioner, Castro received an engraved invitation: Harvard Law School was asking the honor of his presence to address the school. "Castro visit triumphant!" blared the Harvard Law Record on April 30, 1959. "The audience got what it wanted – the chance of seeing the Cuban hero in person, if not at as close a range as might have been desired!"
Castro brought the house down, the very roof shook with the cheers and whoops of the faculty and student body at the world's most prestigious institution of Western jurisprudence.
One defector claims Che signed 400 death warrants during the first month of the Cuban Revolution. Another says over 600. 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.
The scope of Che Guevara's mass murder is unclear. The exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. The number of men (and boys) who Che sent, without trial, to be bound to a stake and blown apart by bullets runs from the hundreds to the thousands.
And the mass executioner's T-shirt adorns the very people who oppose capital punishment – as Harvard Law School's faculty certainly did while clapping, hyperventilating and throwing their panties at Castro on stage.
Che's image is particularly ubiquitous on college campuses. But in the wrong places. He belongs in the marketing, PR and advertising departments. His lessons and history are fascinating and valuable, but only in light of P.T. Barnum. One born every minute, Mr. Barnum? If only you'd lived to see the Che phenomenon. Actually, ten are born every second.
His pathetic whimpering on his last day alive: "Don't shoot!" I'm Che!" I'm worth more to you alive than dead!" proves that this murdering swine was unfit to carry his victims' slop buckets.
Yessssssssssssss.
As much as I like the "Commies Aren't Cool" shirt from "Those Shirts" I think a shirt with that photo and your comment would be even better.
I thought about making one, but the daughter of che has hired lawyers to go up against people using her father's likeness without her permission.
That's not very communistic of her!
Most honest accounts of che put him as a drug addicted bungler who was sent by the Castro brothers overseas to "foment revolution", because he was too much a liability in Cuba..
During my years in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, a group calling itself (as I recall) the "Soviet-American Friendship Committee" would show up on campus periodically. They were all white-haired men and women, relics from the 1930s, who remained true believers in Communism. They would pass out a selection of books and pamphlets by the likes of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. They had learned nothing from the bloody record of Communism. As mother says, there is no fool like an old fool.
No offense, but the time to tell him who Che was, in detail, was right then. It was a teaching moment. If it happens again, don't let it pass you by.
Here's another story about a Che shirt. A kid in one of my economics classes at college kept showing up with one. One day while I was in the computer lab I noticed he was working at a computer a couple of rows over. I went to Yahoo News, found a shot of the boat that some Cuban refugees had made out of an old truck, printed it out, and handed it too him. Then i sttofd there witing for the inevitable question.
"What's this?"
"That's a photo of a boat made out of a 1950's vintage truck. It was made by Cuban refugees so they could leave the island and reach America. That's how desperate people are to escape the paradise built Che built."
I could see the wheels turning. Unfortunately, I didn't know at the time that Che was the chief executioner and enforcer in the Castro revolution, or otherwise I would have hit him again while he was staggered. Since he had nothing to say to me, I turned and walked to my next class.
I don't know how much impact I had in the end, but I never had him give me crap in economics class agian. And he was hostile. God only knows what you could have done with your Che fan.
My Sociology textbook, printed last year, refers to Marx and Engels in every chapter..
Hey, over here! A thread about Cuba's favorite son...NOT!
My grandfather always told me "You will always be recognized for the company you keep".
Fortunately I took his words to heart because the losers I dumped are now dead or even worse losers........
Let me guess: the references to Marx and Lenin are not critical.
Which textbook are you using (author, title, and publisher)? I would like to check it out.
I'm working in Argentina and live in Chile and it constantly amazes me at the amount of Che crap that is everywhere. I can understand the attraction in Argentina...this country is a political basket case and the fantasy of Che would easily take with these nuts. Mostly it is just kids who haven't a clue.
"Ooh, Rock me Doctor Zaius!"
Keep up the good work. You never know where your words will hit home.
I just had a letter from a woman who heard me speak about six years ago, and my talk was hurried, disorganized, and I didn't think I made sense, (I was rushing in late from a plane). She said what I said had inspired her to continue with a job of work that became a success.
You never know.
Che-ers for that picture!
"Society: The Basics" Eighth Edition. 2004 Written by fellow traveler, John J. Macionis. The class is required to graduate, so I will do what Im told. It just amazes me that they can stretch blame assessment out over a whole semester..
So give 'em a clue. It might change their lives.
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