Around campus, I see more and more people wearing shirts emblazoned with the famous picture of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Leftist students seem to think he’s cool because he was a fervent revolutionary who helped install a communist state in Cuba and who fought for the ideals of social justice. He “stuck it to the man” and even died for his ideals.
My political sympathies definitely lie toward the left; I support a social welfare state. But I still can’t support Che. I think that if students knew more about the real person and not the glorified figure, they would not be as enthusiastic about him.
Ernesto Guevara was born in 1928 in Argentina. He was born into privilege compared to other Latin Americans. Not only was he born into one of the most developed Latin American countries, he was born into the upper middle class. Guevara had the luxury of attending the university, where he studied medicine and fell in love with Marxism.
Che is widely credited with inventing and refining guerilla warfare. History has shown how Che-inspired guerillas help out the poor and weak: by stealing their food, by forcing peasants to lodge guerillas, by killing peasants who want nothing to do with a revolution of ideals and just want to live their lives in peace.
Che was an incompetent commander. In the horribly executed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban-Americans sent a boat loaded with fireworks and a tape recording of battle sounds to western Cuba as a diversion. Che insightfully recognized this second front and proceeded to battle the capitalist pigs there. Castro must have been ecstatic to get rid of Che when he sent him to Congo. There, Che acquitted himself again horribly as a military commander. And again in Bolivia.
The battle for which Che is famous, decimating Batista at Santa Clara, was widely overblown. The U.S. Embassy, surprised by the New York Times’ account of “a bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles!” decided to investigate every single reliable lead and source from the Times. The result: after two years of “ferocious” battles, the death toll was 182. In fact, Che bribed Batista forces $100,000 to prevent battle as his column marched through Las Villas province.
After the revolution, Che took a cue from Stalin and had, by his own count, 2,500 of his officers executed. Che kidnapped them in the night, wives and children screaming in terror at the arrival of the death squads. Che taped their mouths to prevent them from speaking. Che buried the corpses in secret graves.
Guevara’s economic policies, conceived in 1960, were certainly not environmentally friendly. He supported rapid industrialization at any cost. Industrial waste was dumped into rivers upstream of farming areas. By 1963, his policies had failed and Cuba reverted to an economy dominated by sugar.
When his factory workers appealed for higher wages, he refused to bargain with them. Aren’t collective bargaining and labor rights supposed to be something the left stands for? Admittedly, his economic rationale was reasonable, but decidedly classical: more money in the economy, without a corresponding increase in manufacturing output, would lead to inflation, making everybody poorer.
The result of Che’s economic policy was a total embargo from the U.S. Che accused the U.S. of killing Cubans by withholding pharmaceuticals, a claim I find ironic. Che knew two things: that his country was reliant on the U.S. for drugs, and that his policies would lead to a full embargo (the U.S. had already embargoed Cuban sugar). His insistence on ideals over the health of thousands was what killed Cubans.
But you can attribute all his failures to inexperience. He was not an economist, nor a soldier. The point is that he fought and died for his ideals. Not exactly true. Che the Lionhearted did die, but neither courageously nor of his own will. Che’s words to his Bolivian captors and later executors: “Don’t shoot – I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”
At the very least, stop buying Che memorabilia. When you buy Che products, you are partaking in a capitalist system that Che did not support. Furthermore, you are helping someone get rich by selling socialism. Now that is ironic. Wearing Che T-shirts is a tacit acknowledgement of capitalism’s triumph over socialism. That’s not something Che would want to acknowledge.
who is the bloody writer barking against our beloved che ,you go to hell coward che was a good gentle man he tried tobring eqality between rich and poor and ur disagree with that
surely ur an idiot american so you dont has right to even speak his name, got it bloody american shepperd
Hey Babu, Shut up ya Commie Bastard! Ché was a piece of garbage parasite with No Balls! A hypocrite to the fullest. Also, learn how to spell!