Note to His Admirers: Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still dead, and his ideals are toxic.

 "I'd like to confess, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing." Ernesto "Che" Guevara, in a letter to his father after executing an unarmed man.  

Che Guevara executed for trying to overthrow Bolivian govt on October 9, 1967

 

Ideas have consequences and those ideas are sometimes represented in iconic images. This is the case of the image of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his toxic philosophy of political action that others seek to emulate.  He embraced hatred and dehumanization of the other as the means to carry out what he thought necessary actions.

“Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.”

Hamas terrorists launched indiscriminate rocket attacks on October 7, 2023 across Israel then invaded the Jewish nation beating, killing innocent people, raping women, kidnapping civilians, and parading the naked, battered body of a young woman they had murdered through the streets and spitting on her. These are war crimes. Over 1200 Israelis were killed, and 251 civilian hostages taken in this act of terrorism.

Leticia Martinez, head of communications for Miguel Diaz-Canel posted a message celebrating a “Free Palestine” in the midst of the terrorist attacks on October 7th over her social media.

She was not alone.  

In the midst of this barbarism and evil, official Cuban journalist  Pedro Jorge Velázquez , who goes by the pseudonym  El Necio on X.cites Che Guevara's visit to Gaza in 1959 as an inflection point that turned Palestine into a world cause, and posts photos of the Argentine guerilla with Middle East leaders during a visit there at the start of the Cuban dictatorship. 

He lies about Israel calling it a "Zionist colonization" without recognizing Jewish people as indigenous to this their ancestral lands. He claims that Guevara is the inspiration for the "resistance" i.e. terrorist barbarism taking place today, and concludes his rant with "Che Lives."

The only truth to what El Necio argues in his social media post is the role that Che Guevara plays in inspiring barbarism and cruelty against the innocent that over 65 years later has failed to provide Palestinians their nation state, and left them in a worse state than in 1959.

Guevara's claim to fame was the role he played alongside Fidel and Raul Castro in installing a totalitarian communist dictatorship using violent means, including terrorism, in Cuba then attempting to spread this model using violent means to Africa and Latin America. His efforts failed.

Castro executed thousands of Cubans, locked up hundreds of thousands of Cubans, built a police state, with the assistance of the KGB and the East German Stasi, and imposed revolutionary terror to consolidate power. Credible and conservative estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll against Cuban nationals ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000. In the beginning executions were televised in Cuba to terrorize the populace. This is the model the Palestinian leadership chose to emulate. They chose poorly.

Che Guevara addressing the United Nations on December 11, 1964

 Che Guevara, speaking to the United Nations on December 11, 1964, did not mince words: "We must express here something that is a well-known truth and that we have constantly asserted before the entire world: executions? Yes, we have executed individuals; we are currently executing others, and we will continue to do so as long as required. We know what the outcome of a losing struggle would be, and the worms must know what the outcome is today in Cuba." 

 

In addition to the Hellscape in the Middle East, Ernesto "Che" Guevara laid the groundwork for much of the additional misery in Latin America today.

Guevara with a Cuban delegation visited Mainland China and met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other high ranking Chinese officials in November 1960 to discuss conditions in Cuba and in Latin America, and the prospects for communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere.

Guevara meets Mao Ze Dong in November 1960.

Mao Ze Dong caused the deaths of an estimated 45 million Chinese people in his communist project through famine and mass executions.  He is the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, and someone Guevara stayed allied to, even after the Castro regime cooled relations with Beijing siding with Moscow.

Months after the world came perilously close to a nuclear holocaust in October 1962, Che Guevara was disappointed. The Argentine declared in November 1962: "What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.”

Ernesto Guevara was executed  summarily on October 9, 1967 in La Higuera, Bolivia after he and his band of guerrillas were captured trying to overthrow the legitimate government there and install a Castro style dictatorship. His legacy at the time was already one of blood and terror that should be lamented not celebrated.

Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still dead, his ideals are still toxic, and need to be buried along with him. The barbarism visited upon the Israeli people by Hamas and Hezbollah, both receiving support from the Cuban dictatorship, demonstrates how the cult of violence and hate Guevara promoted are an obstacle to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.