Was Che Guevara a bad person, what did he do wrong?

Question

I say he was a great man

Answer 1

He fought for great values but he missed the plot.He was crude, and quite impossible to deal with as a politician.You could have never rationalised with him, he was a virtual war monger and war student. He took communism a bit too serious [and china is critical of it today], and together with Castro by attempting to export their revolution to Venezuela and Bolivia they left Cuba alienated from much of Latin American society.

A comparison to him and Castro would be to Castro's credit.But no, he fought for great human values.He simply never knew how to put those values in place.Life for him was war.He failed to understand that even the poorest man in the world sometimes deserved a measure of peace.

Answer 2

I have mixed feelings about him. In general, however, I like him. A lot.

The information on what he did later, when he worked with Castro, is hard to wade through. So much of it comes from CIA sources, and other Anti-Castro sources that it's hard to tell what is accurate and what is not. All of the people who say he was a mass murderer and megalomaniac who put hundreds of people to death had something to gain from saying that about him, even if it was only gaining brownie points with the US after fleeing Castro's Cuba. And for every person who says he was a monster, there's one who says he was a good man. It's hard to decide.

What I do know from reading his journals when he was younger ("The Motorcycle Diaries") is that he was committed to the idea that the indigenous people could, and should be treated better than they were being treated. I have lived in South America, and I can tell you that the divide between the haves and the have-nots makes the divide in the US look non-existent. Povert is widespread, as is racism. He saw room for improvement in the lot of the common man, and whatever else you want to say about him, he acted to bring about that change. That's why I respect him. Revolutionaries who can accomplish things without bloodshed are rare. I am not sure what matters most--the desire to change, and the willingness to do something about it, or the lives that get caught in the cross-fire. I believe human life is important, and not to be squandered. But I believe that about human dignity, too.

Answer 3

Che was a totalitarian. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

Answer 4

Everyone looks at him as this great liberator, but in fact he was a tyrannical maniac. He was completely narcisistic and didn;t do anything for others that wouldn't better himself. He killed people. He was Fidel Castro's boy. Most of the people wearing his shirts or hanging his posters have no idea of what he truly stood for.

Bad person.

Answer 5

Not a totally understood personality: some say he is supreme liberator, but some say he is a cunning, diabolical, tyranny master, a Castro follower! It seems, he is certainly a man with leadership qualities and image!

Answer 6

He was not a very well liked individual by many people. Follow the link below and you can read all about him and make up your mind from facts.

http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/guevara01.html