St. Norbert Times

Issue date: 10/26/09 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: www.nohillaryclinton.com

Most people who idolize Che Guevara, whose face has been plastered on everything from coffee mugs to t-shirts, have only the most basic understanding of what he stood for. Che Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerilla leader who played a major role in the Cuban Revolution, which installed Fidel Castro as Prime Minister in 1959. That description, however, does not do Che's victims justice. While in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, and years before Fidel Castro's victory in 1959, Guevara requested to be the executioner who kept the revolutionary troops from dissenting. People began to notice Che's bizarre fascination with death and cruelty, and this was also the period when Che began talking about his desire to die a martyr.

Che Guevara founded Cuba's first labor camps, and those labor camps were eventually used to put homosexuals, AIDS victims, Christians and other dissidents in jail. Some Cubans, including many now living in the United States, don't call Che Guevara by his name. Instead, they call him the "Butcher of Cabaña" because he signed orders to execute prisoners at La Cabaña prison without fair trials, personally oversaw those executions and would routinely parade women and children past bloody firing-squad walls in order to dissuade the rest of Cuba from disagreeing with the revolutionary cause. Ex-prisoners who survived refer to Guevara as a "mass murderer."

When the revolutionary forces took control of Cuba in 1959, Che Guevara's ideology started to become clearer. He violently opposed the freedoms of religion, press, assembly and protest. He did not wish to allow free elections, and he completely banned the rock n' roll music genre from the country. Guevara once proclaimed that Cuba was "a people ready to sacrifice itself to nuclear arms, and that its ashes might serve as a basis for new societies." Fortunately, when Che Guevara tried to spread this ideology to other countries like Argentina, the Congo and Bolivia, he failed miserably. Less fortunate, however, was the untold number of idealistic youth in those countries that died for his personality cult.

Che Guevara was captured and executed by Bolivian Special Forces and CIA on Oct. 9, 1967, and Fidel Castro has worked tirelessly ever since to make Guevara a martyr. Based on my observations, Castro's efforts have been largely successful on college campuses. Not a week goes by that I don't notice a Che Guevara poster or t-shirt on our campus. I always give the people displaying his image the benefit of the doubt, because I'm certain most are naively caught up in the general notion of revolution and are not actually supporting Che's mission.

Even if you believe that Che Guevara did a great service for Cuba, you still should not idolize him. The hundreds (perhaps thousands) of victims of Che Guevara deserve a lot more of our respect than Che Guevara deserves. I urge you to walk around a Cuban neighborhood in Miami wearing a Che Guevara shirt and talk about him as a "hero." You'll be unpleasantly surprised by the reaction.

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