More on Che, and no, he couldn’t drive a motorcycle

Marxists never let the truth stand in their way, and apparently neither does Robert Redford, whose movie The Motorcycle Diaries pictures mass–murderer Che Guevara as a soul-searching romantic hero.

Today Val posts an article written by Agustín Blázquez, who actually knew Che.

“The problem with Guevara is that he is not a positive, life-enhancing myth, but a completely counterproductive one which feeds the worst and most destructive impulses in the Latin American mind –what I call ‘political sophomorism’ combined with an adolescent’s grasp of the world and a nihilistic yearning for martyrdom (and even some good old fashioned Argentine necrophilia). Remember that Guevara’s canonization began with that infamous shot of him dead, looking like Christ by Mantegna.

. . .

While, admittedly not as romantic as the myth, the reality about Ché is that he was unwanted by Castro and did not have any place to go. Castro sacrificed the inept Ché for his own personal and political benefit. He eliminated Ché from Cuba, enabling the creation of a false admirable myth that he must continuously, actively support in order to maintain and as a result make a lot of good propaganda and money for his regime. Castro turned a liability into an asset.

Ché has a long and documented criminal history. It was Ché, in the Sierra Maestra Mountains of Cuba, years before Castro’s 1959 triumph, who revealed his fascination with cruelty by asking to be the executioner who kept the troops in line.

At the onset of the revolution on January 1, 1959, Castro appointed Ché in charge of La Cabaña fortress in Havana. There, execution squads flourished under Ché’s command, assassinating, in mass, those perceived as enemies of the revolution. Ché ordered that women and children visiting his prisoners be paraded in front of the execution wall, gruesomely stained with blood and brain parts. All of this was well publicized in Cuba in order to spread fear throughout the population. The surviving ex-prisoners of the infamous La Cabaña fortress remember Ché as a “mass murderer.”

Portraying Che as he really was would get in the way of the artistic license, and where would that leave Sundance?

Oliver Stone, another one filmic fabulist, probably hasn’t noticed that three Cuban dissidents were freed from concentration camp, but then, Stone regards Cuban dissidents as ”nothing”.