In all fairness to Obama, the national anthem hadn’t
started playing yet. Otherwise, his hands would have been over his ears.
Killer Chic
By Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 5, 2004
Grow a lousy beard, don’t cut your hair, commit mass murder, wreck an economy, and you too can be on the silver screen.
Leftists worldwide mourned the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara after his execution in October 1967 following a failed attempt to communize Bolivia. Historian and journalist Erik Durschmied notes:
(R)allies were held from Mexico to Santiago, Algiers to Angola, Cairo to Calcutta. The population of Budapest and Prague lit candles; the picture of a smiling Che appeared in London and Paris…when a few months later, riots broker out in Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, and from there the unrest spread to the American campuses, young men and women wore Che Guevara T-shirts and carried his pictures during their protest marches.
Guevara’s image remains widespread. While in Tel Aviv last year, at least twice I saw people with Guevara t-shirts. He has also appeared throughout Haiti’s largest slum thanks to one of former tyrant Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s thugs.
It was just a matter of time before Hollywood celebrated Guevara, which already has a long history of affection for Fidel Castro.
Benicio Del Toro will play Guevara in Terrence Malick’s Che, set to begin production in July and co-starring Javier Bardem, who played the persecuted Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in 2000’s Before Night Falls. Malick has been reported as also writing the script, which focuses on Guevara’s final years.
Robert Redford’s production, The Motorcycle Diaries, adapts Guevara journal of his travels through Latin America in his 20s and stars Gael García Bernal, a popular Mexican actor who also played Guevara in the Showtime miniseries Fidel. García Bernal has said of Guevara, “He’s a person that changed the world and really forces me to change the rules of what I am.” Redford met with Castro in January and screened the movie for Guevara’s relatives, whose widow called it “excellent.”
Guevara’s adaptation, though, will likely be characterized less by revelation than romanticism—no trivial difference given his savage sympathies and deeds.
In David Mamet’s House of Games, a con man refers to a “tell” or indicator of someone’s character. Guevara showed such indicators well before he caused so much havoc in Cuba, as part of Fidel Castro’s regime.
In December 1953, the 25-year-old Guevara was in Costa Rica. He wrote to his aunt from San José after seeing the United Fruit Company’s holdings in Costa Rica, “I have sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin [who died in March] that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.” Guevara’s travel journal includes this passage:
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.
He likewise 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....” By the middle of that year, Guevara had met the Castro brothers in Mexico City and was a comandante in their military campaign to overthrow Fulgencio Batista.
In October 1958, Guevara ordered rebel coordinator Enrique Oltuski to rob banks to finance operations. Oltuski refused, and Guevara wrote in his diary, “When I told him to give us a report of all the banks in the towns, to attack them and take their money, they threw themselves on the ground in anguish.”
When a boy in Guevara’s forces stole some food, however, he ordered him shot. Guevara also personally executed a peasant named Eutimio Guerra who informed on the rebels 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.
Accordingly, 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.”
“Individualism,” Guevara told a group in August 1960, “tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole individual at the —— benefit of the community.”
This was a far cry from Cuban founding father José Martí, who wrote, “Respect for freedom and for the ideas of others, of even the most wretched being, is my fanaticism.”
As would befit a Stalinist, Guevara pioneered Cuba’s gulag system. Socialist scholar Samuel Farber notes:
Clearly, Che Guevara played a key role in inaugurating a tradition of arbitrary administrative, non-judicial detentions, later used in the UMAP [Military Units to Aid Production] camps for the confinement of dissidents and social “deviants”: homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, practitioners of secret Afro-Cuban religions such as Abakua, and non-political rebels. In the ‘80s and ‘90s this non-judicial, forced confinement was also applied to AIDS victims.
The first of these camps was in Guanahacabibes, “at the remote, rocky, and devilishly hot westernmost tip of Cuba.” Guevara spoke of those sent there as “people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals.”
Add to this Guevara’s efforts to wreck other countries and the economic devastation he promoted while head of Cuba’s National Bank. Farber observes, “Guevara’s collectivism was pure, unadulterated Stalinism.”
Herbert Matthews, who glamorized Castro before 1959 in The New York Times, referred to Guevara as “a firm believer in maximum centralization.”
Vladimir Nabokov once described his sentiment for the Soviet Union as “healthy contempt.” Ernesto Guevara, an architect of atrocity, subjugation, and ruin, deserves nothing less.