Che Guevara: Difference between revisions

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'''Che Guevara''' (June 14, 1928 - October 9, 1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia within popular culture.

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed. His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement in Guatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism–Leninism led him to posit that the Third World's underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neocolonialism, and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedy being proletarian internationalism and world revolution. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed. Many people also need to come to grips with the crimes against humanity that Che Guevara and his fellow guerilla soldiers committed against Cuban civilians to achieve victory and secure authoritarian rule under the Castro brothers. Learning the truth will debunk the mythology the regime uses to indoctrinate the Cuban people and hold them back from asserting their human rights.

As a 19-year-old volunteer for <em>Brigada 2506</em> (the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters), Cuban-born Felix Rodriguez infiltrated Communist Cuba weeks before what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, organizing underground freedom-fighters, planning the sabotage of key roads and bridges, staying a step ahead of the Castro’s secret police and their KGB coaches. Almost half of his band-of-brothers in the infiltration teams died in front of Soviet-armed firing squads, after KGB-tutored torture. Felix knew the odds. He volunteered anyway, along with hundreds of other young Cuban exiles of the time.

On the day he gained his U.S. citizenship in 1969, Rodriguez celebrated the honor by volunteering for combat in Viet-Nam. "I lost the country of my birth to Communism,” he explained. "I know freedom must be protected. And I feel I owe it to my adopted country."

Felix flew over 300 helicopter combat missions in Viet-Nam, and was shot down five times. He won the coveted Intelligence Star for Valor from the CIA and nine Crosses for Gallantry from the Republic of South Vietnam. Later he battled Communists in El Salvador using a helicopter "mobile strike unit" scheme he developed in Viet-Nam. He flew over 100 combat missions in Central America, captured the FMLF's top commander and helped crush those Communist-terrorists decisively. All this was volunteer work.

Castro <em>really</em> wants Felix Rodriguez’s head and has sent hit-team after hit-team, after hit-team (including one lent to him by his late chum Yasser Arafat) to murder Felix and his family in Florida. In May 1975, General Joaquin Zenteno, a Bolivian officer who worked with Rodriguez on Che’s capture, was murdered on a Paris street.

But enough about Cubans. Let’s come home for a second. Fortunately for Time magazine (headquartered in Manhattan) on Nov. 17, 1962  as the clock clicked down on a terror plot that would have possibly incinerated and entombed more people than Al Qaeda attack on 9/11, a man they vilify (J. Edgar Hoover) thwarted their “hero and icon” (Che Guevara). 

Many opponents of the regime co-founded by Che Guevara qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period over THIRTY TIMES as long in Che Guevara’s prisons and torture chambers as Michael Collins and Jerry Adams spent in British jails and internment camps.