Harry´s Blog

Here’s jazz critic and libertarian Nat Hentoff confronting Che: “Years ago, at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, I asked the revolutionary Cuban icon Che Guevara, who professed not to understand English, ‘Can you conceive of any time in the future when there will be free elections in Cuba?’

“Not waiting for the translator, Guevara laughed heartily at my simple-mindedness. ‘In Cuba?’ He said, and moved on.
- Nat Hentoff: “Who Speaks for Liberty in Cuba?”, The Village Voice,Feb. 3, 2004

“During an interview with the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker a few weeks after the crisis, Guevara still fuming, stated that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.
- Jon Lee Anderson: Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, 1997, p. 545

The Economist calls Che “a fighter against freedom and democracy” and continues
“The wider the cult spreads, the further it strays from the man. Rather than a Christian romantic, Guevara was a ruthless and dogmatic Marxist, who stood not for liberation but for a new tyranny. In the Sierra Maestra, he shot those suspected of treachery; in victory, Mr. Castro placed him in charge of the firing squads that executed “counter-revolutionaries”; as minister of industries, Guevara advocated expropriation down to the last farm and shop. His exhortation to guerrilla warfare, irrespective of political circumstance, lured thousands of idealistic Latin Americans to their deaths, helped to create brutal dictatorships and delayed the achievement of democracy.”
- Economist.com, Oct 11th 2007

Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes in The New Republic: “Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people’s deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.” His earlier writings are also peppered with this rhetorical and ideological violence. Although his former girlfriend Chichina Ferreyra doubts that the original version of the diaries of his motorcycle trip contains the observation that “I feel my nostrils dilate savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood of the enemy,” Guevara did share with Granado at that very young age this exclamation: ‘Revolution without firing a shot? You’re crazy.’ At other times the young bohemian seemed unable to distinguish between the levity of death as a spectacle and the tragedy of a revolution’s victims. In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: ‘It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in.’ Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers in Florida who are working on a documentary about Guevara, have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a former commander in the revolutionary army known as ‘El Catalán,’ who maintains that many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés, a future interior minister of Cuba, were Guevara’s direct responsibility, because Valdés was under his orders in the mountains. ‘If in doubt, kill him!’ were Che’s instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written-adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.”
- Alvaro Vargas Llosa. “The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand”, The New Republic, July 11, 2005

The “Wrong Impression”

by Herbert Kuhner

I was impressed with Fidel decades ago when he was photographed in the mountains reading a book, of all things. My suspicions about Fidel and Che began during the summary executions.

However, I do not want to give the (wrong) impression that I favor “our fiends,”
the assassins of the right.

Here are segments from my Advisor in the Sky:

“The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia,
trains Latin American soldiers in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. Graduates of the SOA are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses
in Latin America. Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates
are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama,
Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru,
Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.
Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses
that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero
and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians.”
- School of the Americas Watch Online

Augusto Pinochet oversaw execution, torture and rape
after his Chilean coup in 1973.
The number of his mortalities equals those of 9/11.
And the United States supported a bevy
of right-wing Latin-American dictators,
mostly under Republican administrations.

Remember the four nuns who were raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980!
Reagan’s Secretary of State Al Haig explained it in Congress this way:
“They drove through a ‘legitimate’ road block.”(!?)
No, we’re not exactly babes in the woods.
We’ve been coddling right-wing dictators down in South America for years,
and we’ve engaged in our share of hanky-panky.
Remember the mining of Nicaragua City Harbor in 1984!
That of course was okay, since the government consisted of a bunch of commies.
Ditto for Salvador Allende!

As far as maiming, murder and rape were concerned, the Contras took the cake.
Their spokesmen gave gory accounts of how they dealt
with the peasants and villagers they came upon in their forays.
- consortiumnews.com

Here’s Saddam on Conservative icon Ronald Reagan:
“Reagan and me, good.
I wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president.”
- Reuters Online, June 20, 2005

Yeah, and a lot of other people have nostalgia for those days.
Here’s Ron, the compassionate conservative:

“We were told four years ago that 17 million people
went to bed hungry every night.
Well, that was probably true.
They were all on a diet.”
- Ronald Reagan, TV speech, October 27, 1964

“Because Vietnam was not a declared war,
the veterans are not even eligible for the G. I. Bill of Rights
with respect to education or anything.”
- Ronald Reagan, in Newsweek, April 21, 1980