Tomorrow marks the day there was no more Che: Oct. 9 is the 48th anniversary of Guevara’s execution in Bolivia.
In an upper-level Spanish class in my high school, we spent three class periods watching “Motorcycle Diaries,” a movie based on a young Ernesto Guevara’s trip through South America with a friend. While the movie showed his compassion for people in impoverished conditions, it didn’t show who he became afterward: Che Guevara.
Found on T-shirts and even posters at the recent poster sale, Guevara’s “rockstar” facade and rebel image appeal to young people today, Humberto Fontova, author of “The Real Che Guevara,” told the Collegian. His nickname, given by Fidel and Raul Castro, is the equivalent of “bro” or “dude” in Argentina.
Fontova frequently speaks at colleges and universities.
“In the course of these speeches, I noticed that no one really knows that much about him, especially the people who are wearing him on a T-shirt,” Fontova said. “Some people think he’s a rockstar, and other people say, ‘Well, he’s a revolutionary.’”
Guevara was actually the chief executioner and jailer for Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
“They jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s regime during the Great Terror in Russia,” Fontova said. “They murdered more political prisoners in their first three years in power than Hitler’s regime murdered in his first six years.”
Guevara and the Castro regime took 1,600 lives by firing squad from men and boys during the ’60s and ’70s, Fontova said.
“Guevara would take special delight in murdering political prisoners himself,” Fontova said, adding that he had a special window in his office to watch executions. “Often, he would walk out into the field and apply the coup de grâce, the final shot to the dead victims. Some of them were as young as 16 years old.”
Yet, this information is being ignored while teachers have their students act out scenes from a movie that makes him out to be a hero.
“It’s politically incorrect,” Fontova said. “There’s an aura of the Cuban Revolution that makes leaders appear saintly, that the Cuban Revolution was somehow different than the Russian or the Chinese. In fact, it was more repressed.”
Students hold him up as a role model, despite the fact that they would have been sent to the Military Units to Aid Production, labor camps that welcomed people with the slogan, “work will make men out of you.”
“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates,” Guevara said in 1961. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work, and military service. Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think of individuals. Individualism must disappear from Cuba.”
While alive, Guevara’s image was associated with Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors.
“They think he’s a musician, not knowing that in his regime, rock and roll fans, wanderers were jailed in mass by the 10,000s for the crimes of trying to listen to rock and roll music,” Fontova said.
Che Guevara was not a hero, and when he is discussed, especially in the classroom, his atrocities need to be shared.
