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Che Guevara is an icon, but those who idolize him, idolize a lie, a myth. Che was not a "freedom fighter." He was a killer who enjoyed killing. He was, after all, Fidel Castro's executioner.
How many people Che executed is debatable. As Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him, writes:
A Cuban prosecutor of the time who quickly defected in horror and disgust named Jose Vilasuso estimates that Che signed 400 death warrants the first few months of his command in La Cabana. A Basque priest named Iaki de Aspiazu, who was often on hand to perform confessions and last rites, says Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad during the period. 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 year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track him down in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk, admitted to "a couple thousand" executions. But he shrugged them off as all being of "imperialist spies and CIA agents.
Why did Che kill so many?
Power. Simple power.
Guevara had witnessed the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, and felt that Arbenz would still be in power if he had only killed more people. He did not want the same result in Cuba, so executions were the rule.
Che would often execute people without so much as a trial. Fontova relates Che being confronted for his behavior, and Che's response:
Che ordered 27 Batista soldiers executed as "war criminals." Dr. Serafin Ruiz was a Castro operative in Santa Clara at the time, but apparently an essentially decent one. "But Comandante" he responded to Che's order. "Our revolution promises not to execute without trials, without proof. How can we just....?"
"Look Serafin" Che snorted back. "If your bourgeois prejudices won't allow you to carry out my orders, fine. Go ahead and try them tomorrow morning--but execute them NOW!"
The Batista soldiers would get a trial, after facing Che's firing squad. Che often liked to finish the job with a .45 at five paces, shattering the skull of the condemned. And he liked killing.
Prior to the revolution in Cuba, and shortly after landing in Cuba with Fidel and Raul Castro, Che wrote his wife. In the letter, he said, ""I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood." Another account has the wording a little different, with Che writing, ""Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty."
The sentiment is the same. Che was looking forward to killing.
Fontova described the first time Che killed for Fidel:
Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra who he accused of being an informer for Batista's forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard, Universo Sanchez. To everyone's surprise, Che Guevara -- a lowly rebel soldier/medic at the time (not yet a comandante -- volunteered to accompany Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm. Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.
Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the first execution of a Castro rebel by Castro's rebels. Suddenly without warning Che stepped up and fired his pistol into Guerra's temple. "He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine." Che wrote in his Diaries.
Shortly afterwards, Che's father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. "I'd like to confess, papa', at that moment I discovered that I really like killing."
His enjoyment of murder is illustrated by his remodeling of his office at La Cabana. If Che couldn't be five paces away, he still wanted to watch. He had a wall removed that overlooked the area where executions were carried out.
He also loved to make the condemned families watch the executions. For example, a mother lobbied Che for mercy on her young son. Che responded by picking up the phone. He ordered the execution to be carried out immediately. He had this mother watch her son executed, so she could stop worrying about her son.
In 1997, Pierre San Martin, a Cuban who was jailed by Che, recalled an incident that happened in 1959. A 12-14 year old boy, beaten and bloody, had been thrown into the cell with him. The boy said he was there for simply defending his father. The boy was trying to keep his father from being executed. He failed.
Later, the guards came for the boy:
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. We all screamed for them not to commit this crime and we offered ourselves in his place. 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 unholstered his pistol and shot him in the nape of the neck so that he almost decapitated him.
There are so many stories to tell about Che that illustrate his joy of killing. Yet the myth continues. The useful idiots who wear the Che t-shirts, like Carlos Santana or Johnny Depp, believe the myth, and continue the lie.
Che was not a freedom fighter or a revolutionary. He was a killer who enjoyed killing.
He was a monster on the scale of Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin.
