Although comrades in India have always been fond of conversing about PM Modi’s public relations wing, very little awareness exists on the exceptional PR their Latin American celebrity-comrade Che Guevara enjoys at a global level.
Che Guevara the revolutionary has eclipsed Che Guevara the racist, Che Guevara the mass murderer and Che Guevara the autocrat. Yesterday, October 9th, saw Che Guevara cover photos come up in comrades’ profiles, in observance of his death anniversary.
So let us start with the most pleasing instant we can find from Che’s life: his death. The selective PR is palpable from the event of his death itself. We only know Guevara who uttered before his death “Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man”.
Nobody knows (read nobody should know) the Guevara who threw up his arms and pleaded the Bolivian soldiers, “Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and I am worth more to you alive than dead.” The carefully constructed propaganda is so sophisticated as to sideline the not-so-brave pleading while amplifying the bold cinematic dialogue alone.
More than the propaganda, when Che pleads not to shoot him, what’s important is to recall his own principle that “It’s criminal to think of the needs of the individual.” Indeed, one can go on, uncovering some of his preaching on the importance of revolution over individual’s lives.
Che’s disappointment on being unable to bring socialism through nuclear war, too, is little known to the public. This was his reflection after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. “If the missiles had remained (in Cuba), we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
Che Guevara: The Racist
The contempt that Che held for blacks can give stiff competition to Hitler’s racism. Instances of his own conception of the blacks keep revealing throughout his works.
Perhaps one will be surprised to take note of this interesting view on blacks from The Motorcycle Diaries, the biggest fad among Communist youth:
“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. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely”.
Besides his apparent scorn for blacks, Che also reveals his poor understanding of what race is. Now this is his comparative study on blacks and Europeans:
“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.”
Post revolution in this 1959 speech, Che reveals what the revolutionaries have in stock for Afro-Cubans: “We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.”
Che: The Mass Murderer
The work Che Guevara Forgotten Victims by María C. Werlau documents the excesses committed by the revolutionaries under Che’s command. Most of the knowledge on the following section has been obtained from this work.
On January 3rd 1959, Fidel Castro appointed Ché Guevara Commandant of the imposing La Cabaña Fortress in Havana, built in the 18th century when Cuba was a Spanish colony, which was turned into a prison.
Che was also appointed as the Chief Judge of the Revolutionary Tribunals there. While death penalty was hitherto prohibited in Cuba as per Article 25 of the Constitution (of 1940), the new Revolutionary Council of Ministers gave legality to death penalty.
As we know, the left liberals of today are all vociferous about the abolition of death penalty; but we here have our revolutionary legend who along with the Castro brothers helped overthrow the authoritarian Batista regime only to replace it with an even more unimaginably cruel ‘government’, if we can call it one.
800-1000 prisoners were jammed into La Cabaña. Che’s subordinates in the tribunals have reported that he would admonish them: “Do not delay the proceedings. This is a revolution. Do not use bourgeois legal methods; evidence is secondary. We must proceed to convict.”
Several have testified that he would lecture them along these lines incessantly: “There is no need for much inquiry to execute anyone. We only need to know if they should be executed -nothing else.” Indeed, it is ironic that the “Butcher of La Cabaña” has become the symbol of hope and freedom across the world.
“It is logical that in times of excessive tension we cannot proceed weakly. We have imprisoned many people without knowing for sure if they were guilty. At the Sierra Maestra, we executed many people by fi ring squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.”
These were Che Guevara’s words from a speech reported by the official newspaper Revolución in May 1962.
Che’s cinematic dialogues were not restricted to Cuba. Upon being repeatedly questioned in the United Nations in 1964, Che blurted: “Executions? Yes, we have executed, we are executing, and we will continue to execute.”
Of course, we all know that Communism and executions go hand in hand, whether it is Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China. But Che defeats all his peers in his remorseless and public chest thumping on executing the ‘enemies’.
Che’s words are also so reflective and pinpoint accurate as far as the mindset that Communists harbor towards the opposition. This is what Che wrote to the Tri-Continental Conference, an anti-imperialist forum, in 1967:
“…we shall follow the perennial example of the guerrilla, (…) 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.”
Che Guevara : The Autocrat
Che has unfailingly exhibited most of the characteristic features that ‘revolutionary leaders’ sport, whether it be the unflinching arrogance, elimination by death as a solution towards opposition, and its legitimization by means of nothing but sheer power and autocracy. In 1959 he told Cuban leftist journalist José Pardo Llada: “We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.” And to think that the leftist student leaders in our central varsities use his image as a symbol of resistance against a perceived threat to their freedom of expression can make anyone frustrated to the core!
Being the star that he was, Che has thundered on Cuban television once in 1961 that “Cuban workers must get used to living in a collectivist regime and under no circumstances can go on strike.” After all, the Communists’ belief in democracy and democratic values is only a temporal policy, a means of achieving power. Once they start savouring the intoxication from power, people would slowly see their power being taken away, step-by-step. There will be the La Cabañas for every Communist regimes- sealed off from the outside world- were dissent and dissenters will be, borrowing George Orwell’s term, ‘evaporated’.
The influence of Che’s autocratic and inhumane decisions has continued to plague the Cuban population for decades after he was shot by a drunken Bolivian sergeant. Cuba still remains a Marxist-Leninist one party republic with reports of gross violation of human rights being recorded every year, especially with regards to torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, and extrajudicial executions (also known as “El Paredón“). And, on a lighter vein, it happens that the regime there has banned cow slaughter! Freedom of diet, people, Freedom of diet!