“If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish a peaceful coexistence.”- Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1962)
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| Guevara executed for trying to overthrow Bolivian govt on October 9, 1967 |
Che Guevara was captured during a guerrilla fight to topple the Bolivian government and create a communist dictatorship, similar to what he did in Cuba, and was executed in Bolivia 59 years ago today.
Unfortunately, his ideas did not die with him.
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.”
Guevara's claim to fame was his collaboration with Fidel and Raul Castro in establishing a totalitarian communist dictatorship in Cuba using violent tactics, including terrorism, and then attempting to expand this model throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
His efforts failed while he lived.
The Castro brothers executed tens of thousands of Cubans, locked up hundreds of thousands of Cubans, built a police state, with the assistance of the KGB, the East German Stasi, former Nazis, 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.
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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.
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| 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.
The visit by the Cuban delegation at the time did not go unnoticed in Mainland China. Dimon Liu was born in China and immigrated to the United States in 1965. She wrote about her early experiences growing up in the midst of the Great Leap Forward in 2017 and her first encounter with Cuba while still in China.
It was 1960, the height of famine during the years of Great Leap Forward. I was a child living in the southern city of Guangzhou in China. Meal time meant a little rice, and whatever we could scrape together. For nearly two years, we had no meat, fish or even cooking oil. We were starving.
All of a sudden, there was cane sugar from Cuba, and we school kids had to learn Cuban songs. We had been on rations even before the Great Leap Forward which began in 1958. Thirty jin (one jin is about 1.1 pound) of grains per month for an adult, and fifteen jin for a child above the age of seven. Two jin of meat and two ounces of cooking oil, also for a month. [...] People on our streets were dying of many infectious diseases, though no one dared to say anyone died of hunger.[...]
Frank Dikotter, the historian at the University of Hong Kong who wrote "Mao's Great Famine", a book about this period, said in a social media post that "the first thing the regime did in September 1960 was to procure an extra 100,000 tons of grain and ship it to Cuba," in order to help break the economic blockade imposed by Washington on the island. Dikotter added that "you can feed about 2000 people for a day with a ton of rice... Or over half a million people for a year."
Properly fed people rarely existed in China at that time, unless you belonged in the very small and exclusive club of Chinese Communist elite. For a child like me who received coupons for under 8 pounds of rice a month, you could have fed more than 2 million of us for a year; or about half a million Chinese adults for a year on a standard ration of 30 jin, or 33 pounds of rice per month for the amount of grain sent to Cuba.
Cuba was not the only place that China exported food to during those harrowing years.
Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and Chairman Mao Zedong dining in 1960
Two years later Mao Zedong criticized Khrushchev for backing down in the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and this was another irritant in a series of slights between the two communist powers that set the stage for the Sino-Soviet split.
Guevara shared the Chinese dictator's view on the withdrawal of the nuclear weapons.
Weeks after the world came perilously close to a nuclear holocaust in October 1962, Che Guevara was disappointed in Moscow’s loss of nerve in launching a first strike, and argued that Cubans were ready to make the ultimate sacrifice in a nuclear conflagration to end Capitalism.
“Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice. We have demonstrated our firm stand, our own position, our decision to fight, even if alone, against all dangers and against the atomic menace of Yankee imperialism.”
The Argentine went further declaring in November 1962 his continued willingness to engage in a nuclear holocaust to achieve the communist utopia which Guevara called “liberation”.
“We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims. In the struggle to death between two systems we cannot think of anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression.”
Guevara explained it more succinctly to London’s Daily Worker in 1962 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he also rejected the possibility of peaceful co-existence.
“If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish a peaceful coexistence.”
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 ideas are still toxic, and need to be buried along with him. For example, the barbarism visited upon the Israeli people by Hamas and Hezbollah, on October 7th and October 8, 2023 respectively, both receiving support from the Cuban dictatorship, demonstrates how the idea of resistance Guevara promoted remain an obstacle to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Che's so-called "achievement" with the Castro brothers was to replace an authoritarian dictatorship with a totalitarian communist one, all while claiming to be restoring democracy and the 1940 Constitution in Cuba.
The motorcycle diaries do not make up for this bloody legacy that for 67 years and counting continues to rob Cubans of their freedom, and spread totalitarian dictatorship to Nicaragua, and Venezuela, negatively impacting tens of millions of lives.
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