by Rick Lowe
Many people believe that Che Guevara is a hero of the Cuban Revolution who fought to help Fidel "free" the Cuban people from the authoritarian rule of Fulgencio Batista.
See this Wikipedia link for a brief biography of Che Guevara.
In his 2006 book titled THE CHE GUEVARA MYTH And the Future of Liberty, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, writes that:
"At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people’s lives and property, and to abolish their free will."
Strong words indeed, but what is very peculiar is that Capitalism, so despised by Guevara, has made him a hero.
The following statement attributed to Guevara in a conversation with a British communist daily about the Cuban Missile Crisis with America in the early 1960’s is most telling:
"If the (nuclear) rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression."
Llosa asserts that when Guevera had the opportunity to implement his economic vision Cuba went from one of Latin America’s most successful economies to "near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing". So we learn that the great "hero of social justice" was actually a failure as head of the National Bank of Cuba and the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform.
It also tuns out that he was not the genius of guerrilla warfare his fan club would like to assert. Apparently his guerrilla armies were crushed in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Haiti, not to mention his "disastrous" Congo expedition in the mid 1960’s.
It seems to this blogger that Guevera is really a mirage, particularly if accounts that the train driver "surrendered in advance" of his taking the city of Santa Clara when fighting Batista for control of Cuba are true.
I’m inclined to believe that he was no better – in fact he might be worse – than the dictator he and Castro chased form Cuba (Fulgencio Batista).
What do you think of Guevara? Is he a hero or just another exploiter of Cuba and her people?
