Che Guevara died 57 years ago this month and yet, even now, he remains the epitome of revolutionary cool. You never know when he is going to pop up. I came across him recently in the lobby of a hotel in Kandy in the highlands of Sri Lanka. There he was with that determined, heroic look under a dashing beret with a red star badge. He was on a poster dominating the wall above the capitalist till where the luxury hotel took payment.
Guevara didn’t care. He took out his pistol, held the barrel at the boy’s neck and fired. The boy was almost decapitated
The famous photo was taken by a professional photographer, Alberto Korda, during a funeral in Havana in 1960. Thus began the spread of the famous image around the world. Today you have a choice of hundreds of different T-shirts. Gen Z have taken to Che for the same reasons that their grandparents did, as a symbol that they hate the system. But before they buy, they perhaps should be reminded of a few things about the man himself.
An Argentinian by birth, he went to Cuba in 1956 to join the revolution. He fought with Fidel Castro’s rebels in the jungle and, when the group took power in 1959, Guevara was made chief judge of the revolutionary tribunals and the first commandant of La Cabaña prison in Havana. This was his attitude to court procedure: ‘We do not use bourgeois legal methods; evidence is secondary. We must proceed to convict.’ Using no proper court procedure, he ordered the execution of at least 63 political prisoners during his five months in charge of La Cabaña and killed many more afterwards. Some of the executions were televised to make sure that everyone knew resistance meant death. He has been called ‘Castro’s executioner’. Fidel Castro probably chose him for this role because Guevara enjoyed killing and told his father so. He once wrote: ‘Crazy with fury, I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls into my hands. My nostrils dilate while savouring the acrid odour of gunpowder and blood.’
Stories of his cruelty and sadism abound. When he was running La Cabaña prison, a boy – about 14 years old – was shoved into a communal cell. He explained to the other prisoners that all he had done was try to defend his father, who had been arrested. A little later, the guards took the boy away. Then, outside, they saw Guevara ‘strutting around the blood-stained execution yard with his hands on his waist, barking orders’.
The boy was taken there. Guevara shouted at the boy, ‘Kneel down!’ The boy bravely refused, saying, ‘If you are going to kill me, you’ll have to do it while I’m standing.’ Guevara didn’t care. He took out his pistol, held the barrel at the boy’s neck and fired. The boy was almost decapitated.
Rosa Hernandez was the mother of a 17-year-old youth condemned to death. She went to La Cabaña prison and begged for a meeting with Guevara. Guevara agreed to see her. ‘Come right in señora. Have a seat,’ he said. He listened silently while she desperately pleaded the innocence of her son. Then Guevara picked up the phone and, right in front of her, gave the order that her son should be executed that night. Mrs Hernandez became hysterical with grief. She was dragged out by the guards.
Guevara was not kind to animals, either (and this might actually be a bridge too far for Che’s new fans). During his days as a guerrilla in Bolivia, he was riding a mule one day and was heard shouting, ‘Move it! Move it! Move it! Goddammit!’ He kicked the mule brutally, but it would move no faster. Then Guevara got off the mule and pulled out his dagger. He shouted, ‘I said move it! Move it! Move it!’ and, with each exclamation, he plunged the dagger into the mule’s neck until it fell down dead. One can only wonder at what sort of crazed egocentricity led to such behaviour.
One of Guevara’s jobs for Castro was founding Cuba’s first concentration camp: Guanahacabibes. The camp had the motto, ‘Work makes you men’ – which is grimly reminiscent of the sign above the entrance to Auschwitz: ‘Work sets you free’. Guevara said, ‘We send to Guanahacabibes people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals’. What were the ‘crimes against revolutionary morals’? They included drinking, practising a religion and homosexuality.
In 1962, the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and only removed them as a result of threats by the United States, which resulted in a deal. Guevara told the British Daily Worker newspaper soon after, ‘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 peaceful coexistence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims.’ He had the same kind of contempt for human life as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
For a time, Guevara had a role in managing Cuban industry. He visited a government shoe factory and demanded to know why the shoes were no good. People were refusing to buy them. The factory foreman said it was because the Russian glue holding the uppers to the soles was defective. Previously, they had used American glue which worked properly. Guevara had been the one who had banned use of the American glue.
The foreman invited Guevara to see for himself. He gave him a shoe from the assembly line. Guevara pulled at the sole, which came off in his hands. He demanded to know why this inferior glue had not been reported to the Ministry of Industries. ‘We did, repeatedly,’ replied the foreman, ‘but nothing happened’. Guevara ordered his men to arrest the foreman. He was never seen again.
Guevara’s role in reforming the Cuban economy was substantial. The biggest farms were expropriated with little or no compensation and were distributed to agricultural workers and cooperatives. Production quickly fell from around five million tons of sugar a year in the 1950s to 3.6 million in 1963. Guevara also sought to develop crops and industries apart from Cuba’s main crop, sugar. But this project failed and Cuba became desperately short of foreign exchange. Guevara’s policy was abruptly reversed.
Other roles he had in running the economy were head of the Department of Industrialisation and president of the National Bank of Cuba. Prior to the revolution, Cuba had been one of the most successful economies in the region, ranking seventh out of 47 countries in Latin America. By 2001, Cuba had sunk to being the third poorest. The average wage a few years ago was still only £30 to £40 a month. Even allowing for the subsidised food that people can obtain with their ration booklets, this is desperately poor compared with, say, Mexico and Brazil where the average wages were $500–$600 and $700–$800 respectively. Many residents in Cuba are rescued from even worse poverty by the $5 billion a year sent to them by expatriates. Even now, after some grudging relaxation in monopolistic state control, the government struggles to provide its people with essential foodstuffs, and there have been electricity blackouts.
Some argue that the Cuban economy has done badly since the Castro revolution because of American sanctions. But there has been no embargo on Cuban trade with Europe. After the revolution, Churchill continued to puff on his favourite Romeo y Julieta and La Aroma de Cuba cigars. Europe is Cuba’s biggest overall export market, followed by China. Sugar was and is an international commodity which can be sold around the world. For a long time after the revolution, the Soviet Union paid Cuba a price for its sugar so far above the market price that it amounted to a subsidy of $2.5 billion a year. But Cuba’s ability to produce sugar has collapsed. It was once the biggest sugar exporter in the world. Now it has to import it.
The truth is that Guevara was a loathsome man: a vain sadist and bloodthirsty killer who helped create a brutal dictatorship in which freedom of the press, freedom of speech and democracy were all crushed. He was explicitly opposed to all those things. He helped to set the Cuban economy on a path to poverty – a poverty which continues to this day. Anyone with his face on their T-shirt should be ashamed.
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