Che Guevara: The Fish Die by the Mouth

 

By Humberto (Bert) Corzo*

 

Introduction

 

The saying “The fish die by the mouth”, refers to those who speak more than the necessary until being fooled by their own speech. Can his mythical reputation survive the publication of his own words?

 

The objective of this article is to expose the truth about Che, to demystify it in the face of those who feel admiration by this mass murderer, exposing the facts based on his writings, diaries, speeches, letters and conversations with those who knew him.

 

Che never questioned the crimes of Stalin and Mao, nor the totalitarian conceptions of Marxism, incompatible with the ideals of liberty and democracy, defending until his death his Stalinists ideas. His fanaticism made him an implacable enemy of liberty. The French writer Regis Debray, author of "Revolution in the revolution", wrote about the Che that:  "He was adept of the totalitarianism up to the last body hair.”

 

The early years

 

Alberto Benegas Lynch in his book "MY COUSIN THE CHE" writes:  "On one occasion, one of my aunts told me that since early age Che delighted with causing sufferings to animals and, after growing up, insisted that the death (of others) was not so bad after all and that, in this context, he was ahead of the definition of Woody Allen: "dying is the same as falling asleep but without rising to make piss." Since early age his

sadism becomes transparent.

 

Carlos "Calica" Ferrer, one of his first friends, facilitated the first sexual relation of Che with the maid of the Ferrer family. It was made habitual for Che to maintain sexual relations with the maids who worked in the houses of his relatives and friends.

 

Carlos Figueroa, friend of Guevara in youthful times in Alta Gracia, says the following of Che: “I nicknamed him the Fast Rooster because he was eating in the dining room, and immediately, when the mucama (maid) enter the room he forced her to climb on the table to perform quick sex. After finished he got rid of the poor devil, and continued eating as if nothing had happened…” He used the women of lower social status as sex objects.

 

Che didn’t show interest in the politics of Argentina during his years as a student, unlike his student friends who liked to argue about politics and participate in some way. This attitude contrasts with that of his parents and his close friend Alberto Granado who were opposed to Peronismo. He recognizes it in a letter he wrote twenty years later: “I had no social preoccupations in my adolescence and had no participation in the political or student struggles in Argentina." [1] There are no other comments, neither letters nor other evidence which makes reference to his opinion on the most important political event of Argentina at that time.

During the period that Che was studying at the University of Buenos Aires, his opinion with respect to the political militants of the left, reach us through his girlfriend María del Carmen Ferreyra "Chichina," which relates that Che had a critical stance with regards to the left-wing militants, whom he accused of “sectarian and lacking in flexibility.”

 

First travel through Latin America

 

In “Notas de Viaje”, his travel diary through Latin America in 1952, narrates that upon arrival in Chile he and Granado posed as medical specialists in leprology, obtaining an interview with a local newspaper where they are recognize as such, which make them popular among the population, availing themselves of said deceit to obtain free room and board. In this case like in others reported by him, his lack of honesty, when he was in difficulties, conducted him to defraud those who crossed his path. His lack of ethics and morality becomes evident.

 

Waiting for a ship that will take them to Easter Island Che wrote: "Easter Island… there to have a white boyfriend is an honor for the females. There, work, what hope, the women do it all, one eats, sleeps and keep them content… What would it matter to remain a year there, who cares about studies, salary, family, etc.” [2] This commentary gives faith of his machismo, his discriminatory attitude against women.

 

Che,s racism becomes evident in these comments in his travel diary: “The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. The contempt and poverty unites them in the daily struggle, but the different way of dealing with life separates them completely; the black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.” [2] The movie “The Motorcycle Diaries” omitted this inconvenient observation in the Che’s diary.

 

Is ironic his remark about blacks with regard to the bath, since his personal hygiene left much to be desired. When young he earned the label of “el chancho” (the pig), since he seldom bathed.

 

Enrique Ros in his article "Che Guevara: His questionable medical title" writes: "In December, in less than 22 school days, he pass eleven subjects. Fifteen, almost half of the courses needed to acquire a doctorate, examined and passed in just three months, without having attended classes or practices throughout the year with the probable exception of the last few weeks…. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna would have to had attended 25 hours a day! in each of the 66 school days of October, November and December 1952 in order to fulfilled the academic requirements of the curriculum of 1937 in force in 1948 when he enrolled at the School of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires…. Faced with these new contradictions I requested a copy of the academic record of Ernesto Guevara…. I was informed that the Faculty of Medicine could not offer me a copy because the academic record of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna had been stolen.” Being Che an amateur photographer is inconceivable that no photos of the graduation exist, nor testimonies of doctors graduated with him or any other proof of his graduation. It looks that his graduation as a doctor is another myth about him.

 

In August of 1953 from El Cuzco he wrote to his mother that in the eight days they were there, “El Chancho bathed once and by mutual agreement, for health purposes only.” [1]. Guevara in his Bolivia’s diary in September 10, 1967, writes: "I forgot to emphasize a fact, today, after just over six months, I shower. It is a record that many are already reaching." His Cuban comrades, because of his lack of personal hygiene, nicknamed him "ball of filth.”

 

In “Notas de Viaje” he wrote the following comment that he called “Notas en el Margen”:  “…and I know, because I see it printed in the night, that I, the eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas, howling like possessed, will assault the barricades or trenches, will stain in blood my weapon and, mad of fury, will slit the throats of any defeated  who fall into my hands… And I feel my nostrils dilated, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, of dead enemy; now I tense my body, ready for the fight, and I prepare my being as a sacred place so that it resurrects with new vibrations and new hopes the bestial howling of the triumphant proletariat. [1] This young person, egocentric and presumptuous, in this commentary expresses his rhetorical and ideological violence. This inconvenient comment too was omitted from the movie “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

 

Second travel through Latin America

 

In his notes of the second travel, July of 1953 in Bolivia, he narrates the following

: “When carrying all our luggage we were going to climb to second class, an employee of investigations confronted us and after some lobbying he proposed us to climb to first class and arrive free to Cuzco with the badges of two of them, which of course, we accepted.  Thus we traveled comfortably in first class giving the guys the amount of the price of second class.” [3] Here it remains very well reflected his moral weakness, his lack of austerity

 

Upon arrival in Costa Rica, he writes down the following: “I stayed outside with a young black woman that I picked up, Socorro, more whore that the hens, with 16 years on her back.”  Guevara makes his contempt for women clear and his latent social resentment is made evident once more time.

 

December 10, 1953, he wrote to his aunt from San José, Costa Rica, “In el Paso I have the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of our old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.” Another letter to the same aunt was signed with the words "Stalin II."

 

Even more important was the fact that when Guevara visited the USSR in his capacity as one of the leaders of the Cuban revolution in November 1960, insisted on placing a floral tribute in the tomb of Stalin, ignoring the recommendation of the Cuban ambassador Faure Chomón (one of the survivors of the Directorio Revolucionario that attacked the Presidential Palace). It is important to keep in mind that this occurred more than four years after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes.

 

During most of his life Che Guevara did not have a steady job, and depended on his mother, his sister Celia and her aunt Beatriz, who used to send him money, and other women in his life, to assist him in obtaining employment and also in the payment of his debts. Jon Lee Anderson in his biography of Che relates the following cases: “To help him in his quest to obtain a medical post, the well connected Hilda Gadea introduced him to some high-level government contacts of her…. The main contender for Ernesto’s attentions in February and March of 1954 was a nurse named Julia Mejia. She had arranged a house at Lake Amatitlan where Ernesto could go and spend the weekend. Soon, they were having a casual affair.…. In March, Ernesto’s situation changed very little. Hilda paid off part of his pension bill, and Julia Mejia got him a job interview in the eastern Petén jungle.…. With some jewelry Hilda gave him for the purpose, he paid off part of his pension bill.…. Right away, he found a night job unloading barrels of tar on a road construction crew. He worked a second night….It was the first sustained stint of physical labor he has ever done.”

 

In July Che wrote in his diary in reference to Hilda, “What did affect her was that I confessed about the fuck with the nurse.” [3] In August a friend of Gualo Garcia’s arrive in Guatemala in one of the planes that came to pick up the Argentine exiles, bringing 150 dollars sent by Che’s family and he gave it to him. Che writes in his diary that they also sent him, “two suits, 4 kilos of yerba and a mountain of stupid little things.” [3]

 

Che goes away with Hilda to San Juan Sacatepéquez in a good-bye trip, and he describes the following in his diary: “today, I dedicate it to bid farewell to Guatemala with a short outing to San Juan Sacatepéquez with a profusion of fondles and superficial screw.” [3]

 

“Nineteen fifty-five began with little change for Ernesto. For the moment , his reality remained that of a young Argentine vagabond”….“the fact that Ernesto now needed Hilda again for the occasional loan” and, as he has written in his diary, to satisfy his ‘urgent need for a woman who will fuck’.” [1]

 

In this vagabond life that he adopted by his own choice, he is shown to us as a cruel, harsh, irresponsible and one that take advantage of the women who had helped him during this period of his life, whom he considered of weak personality, and allowed him “to live without working”

 

Those who attempt to present Che as a philanthropist of firm Christian values, the answer is given to them in this excerpt of the letter he wrote to his mother on July 15, 1956 from a Mexican prison: “I am not Christ nor a philanthropist, I'm quite the opposite of Christ, and philanthropy seems to me something of....(illegible word), I fight for the things I believe in with all the weapons at my disposal, and try to leave the other dead to avoid myself to be nailed to a cross or anything else.”

 

In a letter to Tita Infante, in October of 1956, he comments to her: “Of course, all the scientific works went to hell and now I am only an assiduous reader of Carlitos and Federiquito (in reference to Karl Marx and Frederick Engel) and other itos…. On the other hand I will tell you that I have a group of kids in the sixth year grade dazzled with my adventures and interested in learning something about the doctrines of San Carlos (euphemism for Karl Marx)…. My free time is dedicated to an informal study of San Carlos’ doctrines.” In this and other letters it becomes evident the Marxist formation of Che, and in this case also the use of the Marxist doctrine in the “brainwashing” of the children with political purposes.

 

Pedro Corzo in the documentary "Anatomía de un Mito" relates his conversations with Miguel Sanchez, el "Coreano", responsible of the military instruction of Castro’s Granma expeditionary force in Mexico in 1956. El Coreano affirmed that “Che always had problems with the blacks and despised them just like the Indians of Mexico", to which he referred as “the illiterate Indians of Mexico.” Che shows his racist face again.

 

Bloodthirsty in Sierra Maestra

 

The rebels finally got ready for the attack, leaving Osorio behind in the custody of two men. “The orders were to kill him the minute the shooting started,” Che wrote matter-of-factly, “something they obeyed with strictness.” [2] The execution took place in the early hours of January 17, 1957 when the shooting began.

 

Hilda Gadea, the first wife of Che, published in her book “Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra”, the letter that him send to her dated January 28, 1957, in which his sadistic and violent disposition can be appreciated in this phrase: “Dear Old Woman: Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty, I am writing these ardent lines inspired by Martí.”     

                                                                                                                         

February 18, 1957 the rural guide Eutimio Guerra, accused of passing information to the enemy, is prosecuted by the rebels and sentenced to death. At the moment of the execution, his companions were undecided to shoot him, and that's when Che stepped forwards, draws his pistol killing Eutimio with a shot in the temple, describing the act in his diary of the Sierra Maestra: “….I ended the problem giving him a shot with a 32 (caliber) 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.” [1]. Later Che will write in his diary: “….to executes a human being is something ugly, but exemplary. From now on nobody here will refer to me again as the tooth-drawer of the guerrilla.” In a letter to his father referring to this execution he writes: "I'd like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing."

 

Marcos Bravo, leader of the Movimiento 26 de Julio, in his book “La Otra Cara Del Che”, narrate that a 17 years old government soldier, captured and interrogated by Che, answered: “I haven't killed anyone, comandante.  I just got out here! I'm an only son, my mother's a widow and I joined the army for the salary, to send it to her every month...don't kill me!." "Don't kill me! -- why?," Che replied. The young soldier was tied up in front of a recently dug pit and shot.

 

In April the chivato (informant) Filiberto Mora was trick and apprehended by the rebels, and Che wrote in his diary: “The man, Filiberto, has been deceived, but the minute he saw Fidel he realized what was happening and start to apologize.”….“The chivato was executed; ten minutes after given him the shot in the head I declared him dead.”

 

In late May two soldiers in civilian clothes, who were spying around the sawmill of Uvero, were taken prisoner. We determined to execute them before the attack to the garrison of the army in the Uvero. Che wrote in his diary: “The tomb was dug for the two informant guards and the marching orders were given. The rear guard executed them.”

 

In September Enrique Acevedo, a fifteen year old who has joint Che’s column, wrote in his diary: “At dawn they bring in a big man dressed in green, head shaved like the military with big mustaches: is Cuervo, who is stirring up trouble in the zone of San Pablo de Yao y Vega la Yua. He has committed abuses under the flag of the July 26….Che received him in his hammock The prisoner tries to give him his hand, but doesn’t find a response. What is said doesn’t reach our ears, even so their words are strong. It seems to be a summary trial. At the end he sends him away with a contemptuous gesture of his hand. They take him to a ravine and execute him…”

 

After the execution, Che moved off toward the area near mount Caracas in an operation to clean up the armed band commanded by the Chino Chang that operated in this zone.

Soon afterward Chang was apprehend, the judgments began. Chang accused of stealing and a peasant accused of being a rapist, were executed. Che wrote about the execution: “First we executed the peasant rapist and Chino Chan, they were tied to a tree in the forest, both of them calm...”

 

A few days later Dionisio Oliva, accused of stealing cattle and supplies destined for the rebels, was captured along with others, among whom was Echevarría, a brother of one of his Granma comrades. Oliva was executed and Che also ordered the execution of Echevarría for unspecified crimes and wrote down in his diary: “He had to pay the price.”

 

In the month of October Che also executed Aristidio, a farmer who during his absence sold the revolver that he had given him, and expressed his desire to abandon the fight when the rebels moved to another place. His doubt about the legality of Aristidio’s execution was reflected in his diary: “whether he was really guilty enough to deserve death.”  

 

In other occasions Che would simulate executions, blindfolding the defendants and firing shots into the air, as a method of psychological torture.

 

“Che's trail through the Sierra Maestra was littered with the bodies of chivatos (informers), deserters and delinquents whose deaths he had ordered and in some cases carried out himself” [1]

 

Che wrote on December 14 of 1957 a letter to René Ramos Latour ("Daniel"), National Coordinator of the Movimiento 26 de Julio who died in combat, the following: “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 and I see this Movement as one of the many inspired by the bourgeoisie’s desire to free themselves from the economic chains of imperialism.” [4]

 

Latour responded back to Che on December 18: “Let me just put on record our view, which of course is entirely different from yours…Our fundamental differences are that we are concerned bringing oppressed people of ‘our America’ a government that respond to their longing for Liberty and Progress, government that will be cohesive units that can guarantee their rights as free nations and make themselves respected by the big powers. On the other hand, those with your ideological preparation believe that the solution to our problems lies in getting rid of the harmful Yankee domination through the no less harmful Soviet domination.” [3] In the same letter Ramos Latour wrote that the ideology of the Movimiento 26 de Julio was inspired by the political thought of José Martí, which

consisted of making Cuba a democratic and prosperous country, but with social justice, and that pact with other opposition forces were necessary and healthy.

 

Dr. Armando M. Lago, founder of Cuba Archive, calculated a total of 47 executions, most of them guajiros (farmers), carried out by the guerrilla, and 35 casualties of the guerrilla in combat, during the year 1957. These figures are convincing evidence of the terror implanted by the guerrilla.

 

June 27 of 1958 Che wrote in his diary: “In the night there were three escapes”. One of them was double; Rosabal condemned to death for being a chivato, Pedro Guerra of Sori’s squad and two military prisoners. Pedro Guerra was captured: he has stolen a revolver for the escape. He was executed immediately.” [1]

 

Vargas Llosa writes the following: “He also ordered his men to assault 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…’ The impulse to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to the oppressive politics of Guevara.” What he proposed was a return to the period of political gansterimo which took place at the end of the decade of the 40’s, with whom Castro was associated during his student days.

 

Jaime Costa Vazquez, former commander of the rebel army, said that much of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdes, who later became minister of the Interior of Cuba, were Guevara's direct responsibility, because Valdes was his subordinate and fallow his orders. “If in doubt, kill him” were Che's instructions. Costa says that Che ordered the execution of dozens of people after the fall of Santa Clara. Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas in his article "The other side of the coin," says:  "The capture of the town of Santa Clara was bloody for their opponents…. Many prisoners were summarily executed. Send to the wall of executions, without trial nor mercy. These executions were carried out in front of photographers, journalists and movie cameras. The prisoners, in many cases, were rural youths who had joined the army as a last resort to escape unemployment and were known as ‘casquitos’ (little helmets).”

 

Che in La Cabaña

 

Guevara was appointed by Castro's military chief of La Cabaña fortress in Havana after Batista fled from Cuba, a position he held from January to September 1959, and also responsible of the Comisión Depuradora (Cleansing Commission), with the purpose to implement the revolutionary terror. In an appearance on Channel 6 of the TV in February 1959, Che declared that "at La Cabaña all executions are carried out under my express orders.” Here he presided over hundreds of executions in summary trials that even a sympathetic biographer as Jorge Castañeda, in his book "Companion: Life and Death of Che Guevara”, said that “they were carried out without due respect for the good doing of justice.”

 

Luis Ortega, in his book ¡Yo soy el Che! relates what Che tells to Duke Estrada: “It is necessary to work at night, the man offers less resistance at night than during the day. In the nocturnal calm the moral resistance is weakened. Do the interrogations at night. It is not necessary to make many inquiries to shoot somebody. What one need to know is if it is necessary to shoot him. Nothing more. You should always give the accused the possibility to do his discharge before executing him. And this means, understand me well, that the accused should always be executed, without mattering which has been his discharge. Make no mistake about this. Our mission doesn’t consist in giving procedural guarantees to anyone, but to make the revolution, and we must begin by the same procedural guarantees.”

 

Napoleón Vilaboa, member of the Movimiento 26 de Julio and advisor of Che in La Cabaña, relates the execution of José Castaño Quevedo, director of the Buró de Represión de Actividades Comunistas (BRAC), against who criminal accusations did not weigh and whom he led to Che’s office: “While giving laps around his desk and the chair where the military was sitting, Che drew his 45 pistol and killed him right there with two bullets in the head.”

 

Chilling story of the former political prisoner Pierre San Martin, eyewitness of the murder in cold blood of a boy between 12 and 14 years of age carried out by the abominable monster of cruelty Che Guevara in La Cabaña fortress in 1959: “…the sound of the iron door opening was heard as they threw another person into the already crowded cell…. And what did you do? we ask almost in unison. With his bloody and beaten face he stared at us and responded “I defended my father so they wouldn't kill him, I couldn't stop it.  Those sons of bitches murdered him.”  

Near the wall where they conducted the executions, with his hands on his waist, paced from side to side the abominable Che Guevera. 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 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, 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.” [6]

 

The Rumanian writer Stefan Bacie, in his poem “I do not sing to Che”, made reference how Che Guevara invited to accompany him to see how people are shot at the wall in La Cabaña.

 

The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it, according to the journalist of this newspaper Hart Phillips, "400 in the first two months.” The journalist Tetlon of the London Daily Telegraph writes the following, “sometimes four courts functioned simultaneously, without lawyers or character witnesses, imparting judgment, contemplating the capital punishment, as many as 80 people in joint trials. The judicial proceedings were shameless farces that shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them.

 

Jorge Castañeda in his Guevara’s biography mentions that the deceased father Iñaki de Aspiazu, a catholic Basque sympathizer of the revolution, spoke of 700 victims. Luis Ortega 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. Félix Rodríguez, an exagent of the CIA, which participate in the capture of Che in Bolivia, told Vargas Llosa that he faced Che after his capture recriminating him the “more or less 2.000” executions for which he was responsible throughout his life. “He told me that they were all CIA agents and did not discuss the figure” In contrast with the Nuremberg trials, at the end of the Second World War, of the 24 Nazi leaders accused of war crimes only to 11 of them the death penalty was applied.

 

In a letter written in May 1959 to his friend Julio “El Gaucho” Castro he says good-bye with this phrase: “A strong hug from the one who is called and whom history will cal….CHE”. In a Christmas letter to his parents he wrote: “We walk over pure history of the highest American category; we are the future and we know it, we build with happiness although we have forgotten individual affections.” [1] These sentences, which describe him from head to toe, reveal his arrogant character, his delusions of grandeur, when exaggerating his own historical importance.

 

Export of guerrillas

 

After the triumph of the revolution Castro and Che launched the guerrilla movement across Latin America. A plan was immediately organized to initiate guerrilla focus with Che’s assistance, in Panama, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Colombia.

 

The invasion of Panama at the end of April of 1959 was a failure. The Panamanian authorities captured two Cuban invaders. On June first a group of Nicaraguan, among which was Rodolfo Romero an old companion of Che, under the direction of Joaquin Chamorro, left Havana towards Nicaragua. Chamorro, after its capture, admitted the military assistance provided by Castro and Che. The invasion of Santo Domingo in mid June 1959, ended in failure with a balance of more than 200 dead, among them the Cuban

leaders of the expedition Jiménez Moya and Horacio Rodriguez. In August 1959 they began in Haiti the conflict that concluded with the defeat of the invaders. In November 1960 some officers of the Guatemalan army took up arms. Airplanes of the Cuban Air Force flew over the military airfield of Zacapa, one of the two places of the uprising, supplying the insurgents. This uprising also failed.

 

The Cuban intervention in Venezuela in support of the guerrilla, fails when the army of Venezuela, in November of 1963, surprises a landing originated in Cuba in the peninsula of Paraguaná. In February of 1964 the OAS condemned the interference of the Castro regime in Venezuela.

 

The guerrilla operation began in Argentina at the beginning of 1964 in the province of Salta, with the Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti in charge of it. The operations were supervised by Che. In April of 1964, the Argentine army attacked the guerrilla camp with the result of several guerrillas dead, among them the Cuban instructor captain Hermes Peña, Che’s escort, and 14 were taken prisoners. Masetti disappeared in the jungle of Salta without leaving a trace, and the guerrilla focus was eliminated. When Alberto Granados asked him why he was depressed as a result of this setback, Che answer to him: "Here you see me behind a desk, screwed, while my people die during the missions to which I have sent them.”

 

José Pardo LLada in the book "Fidel and Che," writes what Che told him in1959: “We must do away with all the newspapers, because a revolution with freedom of the press cannot be done. The newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.”  The regime controlled, censured or shut down newspapers and magazines, television and radio stations and the movie industry. Freedom of the press and information were suppressed.

 

The commercial/diplomatic mission

 

In June of 1959 Guevara was sent in a diplomatic mission with the purpose to establish new trade relations, carry out sugar sales and obtain weapons in Yugoslavia, not being successful in any of them. In Cairo he met with Gamal Abdel Naser, who told in his memoirs that Guevara asked him how many people had emigrated from their country as a result of the agrarian reform. When Naser answered that nobody had gone away, Che angrily told him that “the way to measure the depth of the change is to measure the number of people that felt that there was no place for them in the new society”

 

In India his meeting with Prime Minister Nehru, during a splendid lunch, did not provide result in the establishment of trade relations. In Japan his proposal to permute sugar by Japanese products was rejected in the interview he held with the Minister of Foreign Trade. In its interview with the prime Minister of Indonesian Sukarno, also failed in selling sugar and in the establishment of trade relations. During its stay in Yugoslavia he met Josip Broz Tito, not being successful in obtaining weapons from this country.

 

In one of the paragraphs of the July 1959 letter to his mother, published in the book written by his father “My son the Che”, writes: “I am still the same loner that I used to be, looking for my path without personal help, but now I possess the sense of my historic duty. I have no home, no woman, no children, nor parents, nor brothers and sisters, my friends are my friends as long as they think politically like I do.”  When Hilda Gadea, his wife, arrived in Cuba with his daughter in January 1959, she found out that her husband was living with his lover Aleida March, which became pregnant. In May Che divorced his wife and married his mistress in his office at La Cabaña. After a brief honeymoon, he left the country in his first diplomatic trip. During the two months he was absent, he never communicate with Aleida. Aleida told the following to Anderson: “Che was a ‘machista’ like most Latins.” He was irresponsible with his own family, leaving their wives and children when they needed him most, to continue his guerrilla adventures.

He repaid Hilda with treason the help and love she gave him. Women played a secondary role in his life.

 

Che's homophobia

 

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… people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree.... It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions there are hard.” [5]

 

“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.” [5]

 

Che's homophobia is expressed in the poster placed at the entrance to the forced labor camp, where homosexuals were confined, which read:  “The work will make you men”', replica of the slogan “The work will make you free” used in the Nazi concentration camps. It intended to correct the homosexual behavior applying rigorous punishments with the intention of modifying this social deviation, which does not constitute a crime punishable by law.

 

In the 80s and 90s this non-judicial, forced confinement, was also applied to AIDS victims.

 

In a TV speech June 26, 1961, when he was Minister of Industries said: “The Cuban workers have to start being used to live in a collectivism regimen and by no means can they go on strike.” December 15, 1959 marked the start of the process of the purges of the union leaders, democratically elected in the X congress of the CTC carried out in November 1959, destroying the labor union movement and abolishing labor rights conquered by the laborers.

 

Economic, diplomatic, and political failures

 

In 1961 Guevara was appointed minister of industry, and in the name of diversification, the cultivated area was reduced and the manpower utilize in other activities. Cuban industrialization failed due to the lag of raw materials for the new industries.

Already by 1963 the hopes of industrialization were abandoned, and during the period  

1961 to 1991, the Island will survive thanks to the Soviet subsidy of $ 120 million.

 

As head of the Cuban diplomatic delegation in the Conference of Punta del Este, in his speech at the fifth plenary meeting of CIES, 8 August of 1961, predicted the following:

“The rate of growth presented as a most beautiful thing for all Latin America is a

2.5 percent net growth… We speak of 10 percent growth with no fear whatsoever; 10 percent growth is the rate that Cuba foresees for the coming years… What does Cuba intend to have by the year 1980? A net income per capita of around $3,000; more than the United States currently has.”  Cuba’s per capita in 2004 was only $1,873 dollars. “During the period 1960-1979, Cuba was the only Latin American country showing negative GDP results. In the 1991-2000 decade its GDP annual average was –1.9%, thereby placing Cuba next to the last among the Latin American countries, only higher than Haiti.” [7] This result is largely attributable to the adverse effects of the economic policy of Che on the Cuban economy. In 1959 Cuba ranked second in economic wealth in Latin America.

 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 12, 1962, Che supported Fidel in the nuclear confrontation with the United States. Che was disappointed when Khrushchev decided, under the threat of nuclear war, to retire the missiles (See Nikita Khrushchev Memoirs). He told Sam Russell the British reporter of the socialist newspaper Daily Worker that “If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of U.S. including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. In this struggle to the death between two systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”

 

In his deep hatred against the United States, this monster of cruelty did not hesitate in supporting the nuclear confrontation without given a damn that such action sealed the annihilation of the Cuban people and a large part of humanity.

 

On December 11, 1964, during a debate in the United Nations General Assembly Che said: “As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not include coexistence between exploiters and the exploited.” As representative of the Cuban government he was severely attacked because of the firing squad executions without any judicial process and evidence as required by the rule of law. Guevara, in his second intervention, making use of the right of replica, responded:  “We must say here what is a well-known truth, which we have always expressed to the world: Shooting people yes, we have shoot people and will continuo to do so until it will be required. Our fight is a fight to the death”. [7] This demonstrates his intransigence with his political enemies; he was willing to make the blood run and wasn’t worried to carry millions of people to their death.

 

In response to a question of Richard Hottelet of CBS in the program Face the Nation, New York, 14 of December of 1964, Che replied: “In America, the road to the liberation of the peoples, which will be the road of socialism, will march through the bullets in nearly all countries, and I can predict with confidence that you will be a witness.” Che, an advocate of political violence, failed once more.

 

Guevara, during his trip to Algeria in1965, when questioned about the economic failure cynically replied: “We have a country to experiment on; we make mistakes but we will go on experimenting until we learn.” Such learning adventure has resulted in the biggest economic debacle ever experienced in Latin America.” [8]

 

February 1965 at the International Conference of Algiers, Che in his speech criticized the Soviet Union policy by adopting what he called “the law of value”, which organizes and regulates human activity in the capitalist society. This contributed to the cooling of the relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Soviet ambassador in Havana complained to Castro about the anti-Soviet behavior of Che. Castro disagreed publicly with the anti-Soviet policy of Che, and this caused Che to be removed from the ruling circle.

 

In March 1965 Castro sent Che, who had assumed a pro Chinese position, as head of a delegation to China with the purpose to restore the damaged relations. The Chinese comrades argued that the revolution was influenced by the “soviets revisionist”, argument that was rejected by the Cuban delegation, causing the stalling of the talks. Che, once again, failed in his mission.

 

Guerrilla failure in the Congo

 

Guevara in his diary about his guerrilla experience in the Congo between April and December 1965, begins with this observation: ''This is the history of a failure.”' The adventure he led in the Congo was a fiasco.

 

Che, white leader of the expedition composed by two battalions of Cuban black soldiers, around 200, found out that blackness did not guarantee the mix of Cubans with Africans and the Cuban regime recognized later as a mistake that all the soldiers sent were black.  The black Cubans were foreigners, who considered themselves superior and treated the Congolese with gestures of contempt, who resented such treatment.

 

In the epilogue, Guevara asks the question What did the revolution actually have to offer the peasants of the fertile eastern Congo? He concluded that the tiny numbers of industrial workers were satisfied and not revolutionary, the peasants suffered no land hunger, the troops did not believe they would be fighting the Americans and race was not a sufficient motivating factor either. Again and again he pointed to a lack of leadership amongst the Africans, the incompetence of the Congolese fighters and a terrible disorganization. Che’s assessments make him look like a racist. It is also clear that the goals of the Africans were much different than his.

 

Message to the Tricontinental

 

In his "Message to the Tricontinental", 16 of  April 1967, writes: “Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

 

“We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline.”

 

“The peaceful road is eliminated and violence is inevitable. In order to achieve socialist regimes there will flow rivers of blood, the road to liberation should be continued even if it means the loss of millions of atomic victims.” [9] Fanatic defender

of the communist philosophy, which has been responsible, according to figures from The Black Book of Communism, for the deaths of nearly 100 million people.

 

These statements clearly reflect his feelings and intentions, that of killing in any place in a cold and indiscriminate way. This use of hatred and incitement to violence, it is not but another manifestation of the doctrine of terrorism through the centuries to justify mass murder and torture.

 

Defeat in Bolivia

 

Che’s Diary in Bolivia contains the following observations: “The rural base remains underdeveloped, although it seams that by means of planned terror, we will achieve the neutrality of the most, the support will come later. There has not been a single incorporation…the rural mobilization is nonexistent, save in the tasks of information that bother… the Army is showing more effectiveness in its action and the rural masses do not help us in any way and they become informers….The rural masses do not help us at all” was the melancholic conclusion of Guevara in his Bolivian diary. The 26 of September he write down in his diary, "defeat", in reference to “the disastrous ambush of La Higuera.”

 

In reference to the Bolivian peasants, writes in his diary on June 19, 1967 “the inhabitants one must hunt them to be able to speak with them because they are like little animals.” Genius and figure right up to the grave.

 

Che, at the time of being taken prisoner, who was slightly wounded by a bullet in the leg, with the rifle up high shouted to his captors in Bolivia, “Don’t shoot, I’m Che, I’m worth more to you alive than dead”  His 9 millimeters pistol had all its bullets when yielding it. Why he allowed to be taken prisoner and didn’t fight to the last bullet? He thought that they were not going to kill him, that they would judge him as they did with Régis Debray and Ciro Bustos. He only was able to beg for his life, he didn’t know to die like a man.

 

Félix I. Rodriguez, a Cuban exagente of the CIA, in conversation with writer Jacobo Machover told him the following: “Later he told me that they shot all the foreign agents in Cuba who invaded the country. Then I told him:  Commander it is ironic that you tell this to me, because you are foreigner and has invaded Bolivia.”

 

Felix, who was giving intelligence advice to the Bolivian army in the zone where Che was operating, relates that when he entered the premises where Che was kept prisoner he told him he was going to be executed: “Commander, I am sorry, I've tried, but they are superiors’ orders of the high command. He became pale like a ghost. I never saw a person lose the expression of the face as he did, then he told me “is better thus, I never should have fallen prisoner.”

 

In La Cabaña Che used to send convicts to the execution wall writing this note, “give him aspirin.” In Bolivia they gave him a dose of his own medicine.

 

Fidel Castro used Che as spokesman in the propagation of his anti-imperialist platform and cynically continues to use him after his dead glorifying his memory for propaganda purposes. Daniel Alarcón (Benigno) Ramírez who fought under Che’s command in the Sierra Maestra, and accompany him in the guerrilla adventures in the Congo and Bolivia, being one of the survivors of that latest adventure, now exiled in France, in a TV interview admitted that Che had been betrayed in Bolivia: “Yes, Che and all of us were betrayed in Bolivia. Fidel send us coldly calculated to a remote place, well-selected for its lack of human resources and food. Later, they cut off us the arms supplies, intelligence, food, and finally: communications …. No longer I had doubts, had verified in irrefutable form the treason. All of us had been handled as worthless pawns in the murky chessboard of Fidel, in a cruel and inhuman form.”

 

Evo Morales carried out an official celebration of the 40 anniversary of Che's death, celebration that was repudiated by more than 50% of Bolivians, opposed to the praise of an invasion of foreigners that killed 55 Bolivian soldiers and several civilians. General Gary Prado, who led the military column that captured Che, said: “The tribute should be made to the soldiers who defeated the invaders.”

 

Epilogue

 

Those who seek to hide his condition of ruthless assassin and consider him a martyr willing to give his life in defense of his ideas do not take into consideration his disposition to snatch it from those who did not share his ideas. José Martí in letter to Maximum Gomes, dated October 20, 1884, expresses his thought that the act of given one’s life for one ideas is not sufficient cause of glorification: “….Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who avails himself of a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if he too risks his life. To give one's life is a right only when one gives it unselfishly.”

 

Che failed in all the enterprises that he undertook; in his unfinished medical career, a profession he never practiced, as an economist at the head of the National Bank and the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, as Minister of Industry, where he presided over the failure of industrialization, as a diplomat and politician in his relations with the Chinese, Soviet Union, Japan, India, Egypt and Yugoslavia, in the guerrilla organization in Latin America, in his guerrilla adventures in the Congo and Bolivia and even in the fomentation of violence.

 

In an interview granted by his girlfriend María del Carmen Ferreira "Chichina", to La Voz del Interior, she summarized Che’s failure with these lapidary words: “Poor Ernesto, he was not successful in anything: not as a doctor, neither as a photographer, as an economist, or as propagator of the Revolution.” 

 

In a letter to the editor of the Uruguayan weekly Marcha, published March 1955 under the title “Socialism and Man in Cuba”, where Che addresses the issue of the "new man" says: “To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man….This is the dictatorship of the proletariat operating not only on the defeated class but also on individuals of the victorious class…. Man under socialism, despite his apparent standardization, is more complete…. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken.” During the last 50 years the young people have been indoctrinated with the concept of the new man, who would be complete, unselfish, communitarian and of moral values rather than material values. The result has been a new man incomplete, selfish, individualistic, of double morale and materialistic.

 

Cuban schoolchildren begin their classes each day with the following slogan of indoctrination: “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” They will be then the new men; fanatics, liars, assassins and failed men, reaching the total realization of being like Che. Hatred to the enemies of the revolution is inculcated to the children in scholastic age. This quote of José Martí condemns hatred: “The haters should be declared traitors to the Republic. Hatred does not construct”

 

Che was fanatical, dogmatic, spiteful, envious, arrogant, proud, a liar, racist, devoid of morals, mercenary and homophobic, a bloodthirsty murderer, “a cold killing machine”,

that the fanaticism of the left has turned into a hero.

 

[1] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997

 

[2] Ernesto Guevara: “The Motorcycles Diaries: Notes on a Latin America Journey” (Ocean Press, 2004)

 

[3] Ernesto Guevara: “Otra Vez: Diario inédito del segundo viaje por Latinoamérica”.  (Ocean Sur, USA, 2007)

[4]Carlos Franqui, “Diario de la revolución cubana”. (Ediciones R. Torres, Barcelona, 1976)

 

[5] Alvaro Vargas Llosa, “The Killing Machine: Che Guevara”, The New Republic, July 11, 2005

 

[6] Pierre San Martin, “Como asesinaba el Che Guevara”, El Nuevo Herald, Diciembre 28, 1997.

 

[7] Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqAvuiyzz5k. This fragment was extracted from the video “Che Guevara: Anatomía de un mito”.

 

[8] Humberto (Bert) Corzo, “Comparative Study of Cuba’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), based on Existing Statistical Data during the Republic and Today’s Communist System”, La Nueva Cuba, Julio 30, 2002

 

[9] Che Guevara, “Tactics and Strategies of the Cuban Revolution”, Revista Verde Olivo, Prensa Latina 8-10-68.

 

* Humberto (Bert) Corzo was born in Cuba. In 1962 he graduated from University of Havana with a degree in Civil Engineering. Since coming to the United States in 1969, he established his residence in Los Angeles, California, where in 1972 he obtained the registration as a Professional Engineer. He has over forty five years of experience in the field of Structural Engineering. He is a Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Cuban-American Association of Civil Engineers.