On October 9, 1967 the red beast Che Guevara was shot. He killed children, raped women, and stank terribly. There was nothing romantic about him.
Leftist propaganda sells the doctor-poet-idealist. The real Che was a capricious, bloodthirsty murderer and Castro’s chief executioner who turned once-prosperous Cuba into a concentration camp.
Ernesto Guevara was born into a family of wealthy landowners and came from a noble line of Spanish and Irish aristocrats. Even after becoming a revolutionary, the man later called a convinced communist was not ashamed to boast of such a distinguished origin.
He ordered a boy who looked no older than 14 to kneel. Hours earlier the teenager had screamed “Murderers, murderers!” while trying to stop Guevara’s men from executing his father. Now facing death himself, the boy stared Che in the face and shouted: “If you want to kill me, you’ll have to do it while I’m standing. Men die on their feet!” Enraged, Che drew his pistol, pressed the barrel to the back of the boy’s head, and pulled the trigger. The shot blew the child’s head to pieces.
That was not an exception. In the Sierra Maestra, Che volunteered to accompany the execution of peasant guerrilla Eutimio Guerra, accused of betrayal. When the assigned shooter hesitated, Che simply shot Guerra in the temple. In his diary he wrote that the man convulsed and died, then coolly noted: “Now all his belongings belong to me.” In a letter to his father he admitted: “I must confess… I realized that I really like killing.”
A 17-year-old Batista soldier captured by the rebels begged for his life, stammering that he had joined the army only to support his widowed mother. Che ignored him, had the boy tied, pushed to the edge of a freshly dug pit, and shot.
From January to June 1959 Che ran the fortress of La Cabaña as a killing factory. Walls shook with final cries of “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” and “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” followed by machine-gun bursts. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega (who knew Che from 1956) puts the number killed by him at 1,892. Daniel James in Che Guevara: A Biography records that Che himself admitted signing “several thousand” death sentences in Castro’s first year alone. CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, who interrogated Che before his execution, said Guevara confessed to sending “a couple of thousand” people to their deaths.
As soon as the revolutionaries took Havana, Che without a twinge of conscience appropriated one of the city’s most luxurious mansions — complete with yacht pier, huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, sauna and massage parlor — while personally overseeing the firing squads. He openly boasted he needed no proof of guilt, only proof that someone needed to be shot.
Later Castro made him Minister of Industry. The decision proved catastrophic. Even massive financial injections from the USSR could not keep the economy afloat under Che’s management; the country slid into ruin.
In 1960 he opened the Guanahacabibes forced-labor camp, explicitly modeled on Stalin’s Gulag, for “dubious individuals” who committed “crimes against revolutionary morality”—and anyone who questioned the regime. Most never returned.
Che’s own words from The Motorcycle Diaries: “Howling like one possessed, I will stain my weapon with blood and, mad with rage, will cut off the heads of the vanquished. I feel my nostrils flaring, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood…” His opponents say he savored that smell while shooting bound, blindfolded boys and men.
The phrase he never tired of repeating: the ideal revolutionary must be “a cold, calculating killing machine.”
Yet South African president Nelson Mandela once declared: “The life of Che is an inspiration for all people who value freedom. We will always honor his memory.”
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