“When I learn that thousands of Palestinian children are no longer able to fill their parent’s hearts with joy with their smiles, this hurts badly, it destroys me. I’ve never seen an enemy with so much horrific villainy, brutality and cowardice. The Zionist entity has scored a new record in its crimes against humanity with—of course—the sponsorship of the U.S.” (Che Guevara’s daughter Aleida Guevara addressing a Palestinian memorial service in Beirut, Nov. 30th.)
Interestingly, perhaps the gushiest ode (among so, so many others) to her father Che-- the ode that ranks Che Guevara among Time magazine’s “Heroes and icons of the Century” alongside Mother Theresa and Anne Frank—this accolade was penned by Jewish novelist and professor Ariel Dorfman.
No record exists on whether Dorfman and Aleida Guevara have ever met.
And speaking of villainy, brutality and cowardice (traits that Aleida attributes to “‘Zioinists” and Dorfman mostly to her fathers’ enemies) perhaps a review of Che Guevara’s own behavior is in order:
“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” a former Cuban political prisoner told this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
As commander of the la Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.
Even as a youth, Ernesto Guevara’s writings revealed a serious mental illness. Take these macabre musings from Guevara’s famous Motorcycle Diaries, somehow overlooked by Robert Redford while he was directing the movie version of the book.
“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”
The Spanish word vencido, by the way, translates into “defeated” or “surrendered.” And indeed, “the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” rarely reached Guevara’s nostrils from anything properly describable as combat. It mostly came from the close-range murders of unarmed and defenseless men – and boys.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro and Che’s theft of their humble family farm; all refused blindfolds; and all died sneering at their Communist murderers, as did thousands of their valiant countrymen. “Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Cristo Rey! Abajo Comunismo!” “The defiant yells would make the walls of La Cabana prison tremble,” wrote an eyewitness to the slaughter, Armando Valladares.
Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched, and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”
“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. Remember Che Guevara’s instructions to his revolutionary courts: “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” And remember Harvard Law School’s invitation and rollicking ovation to Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath.
Not that the victims of this Stalinist bloodbath were exclusively men and boys. In their refusal to discriminate among potential victims, the Castroites were well ahead of the Taliban. On Christmas Eve 1961, a young Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. They found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Che’s term for Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight his theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.
The term “hatred” was a constant in Che Guevara’s writings: “Hatred as an element of struggle”; “hatred that is intransigent”; “hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him a violent and cold-blooded killing machine.”
The one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara’s life was the mass-murder of defenseless innocents. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally
And did Aleida mention “cowardice”?
Perfect, because her father’s pathetic whimpering while dropping his fully-loaded weapons as two Bolivian soldiers approached him on Oct. 8 1967 ("Don't shoot!" I'm Che!" I'm worth more to you alive than dead!") proves that this cowardly, murdering swine was unfit to carry his victims' slop buckets.