Was Che Guevara a hero or a killer? Please explain.?

Question

I know he was a revolutionnary and he apparently tried to help the poor. But some people say he was a murderer, egotistical, and was up to no good. I know he was a commie, which makes me already not like him so far though. Was he really a bad person or is this a myth?

Answer 1

It's true that war involves killing -- but communism involves killing during peacetime. That's what Che Guevara did. He terrorized and executed helpless people (including poor ones, by the way) who presented absolutely no danger to his power. He killed people merely for being teachers, doctors, academics, poets. He believed that the population of the United States (including the poor) should be incinerated by nuclear warheads for the sake of his revolutionary principle. Nuking the States, even beyond the possibility of a retaliation would not make the lives of Cubans or people in South America any better, and he knew it; he just wanted to kill because he was a blood-thirsty, heartless monster. The only difference between him and his admirers is that he actually had the spine to butcher people; while his admirers can only get off on the ideology of carnage. So to the first answerer -- though some killings may be justified, I doubt you would put George Washington and Adolph Hitler in the same category; and Che Guevara was more like the latter than the former.

Answer 2

I guess you have positive associations to the word "revolutionary", but negative associations to the word "communist." That is understandable but probably just based on the slogans you hear around you, that call one person bad and another good.

As to whether he was a hero or a murderer, well if you believe that killing can not be justified he was obviously not a hero. But it seems there was some heroic element in him, though you might also call that sense of adventure. Guevara travelled a LOT, and he fought in three different countries. He was instrumental in the Cuban revolution, but after its succes he left for Congo and later Bolivia. More than anyone else he was committed to the idea that a communist revolution, in order to succeed, would have to be worldwide. The Soviets had since a long time been content with having a sphere of power which they could control, they did not believe in a world revolution anymore, and the Chinese propably never believed it. Guevara has been an inspiring figure for what he tried to do and also because he failed and was killed by the CIA. He has become a symbol, though sometimes people don't even know what he should be a symbol for anymore. In his time he was a hero in my opinion, he tried to make the best out of a movement that was all but dead from the inside, that had been forced to choose between Moscow and Washington. The countless coups in Southern America which the CIA organized make his choice for Moscow understandable, albeit naive. He decided not to live in the palaces with Castro, but if he would have succeeded in Congo or Bolivia would he have lived in a palace there? We will never know. Guevara is young forever and therefore he can be adored forever. I do kind of admire him, but try not to dwell on it. Better mirror yourself to people that actually accomplished something and had to live with their success.

Answer 3

Che Guevara was a medical doctor, a physician, who wound up on the dark side of the force by fighting for communism.

Che executed, murdered, and terrorized anybody who wasn't a communist including priests, nuns, school teachers, and children to push his lame left wing agenda.

Che Guevara was betrayed to his enemies by a friend and fellow commie rat named of Fidel Castro.

Answer 4

Depends on your point of view. He fought against a corrupt regime in hopes of bringing a better life to the majority of people. Fighting often involves killing. If George Washington was a hero, then I guess Che was too.

Answer 5

In my opinion, he was no hero. My reason for this is his actions after they "liberated" Cuba. He did not stick around to help form the government and run the country justly and well. Instead he went off to south America to try to lead another revolution. He wasn't in it to help the oppressed, he was in it to fight the oppressors.

Answer 6

We Cubans equate him with Hermann Goring Hitlers 2nd in command. Please read the following article written in the New Republic about Che.....

Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers in Florida who are working on a documentary about Guevara, have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a former commander in the revolutionary army known as “El Catalán,” who maintains that many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés, a future interior minister of Cuba, were Guevara’s direct responsibility, because Valdés was under his orders in the mountains. “If in doubt, kill him” were Che’s instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written—adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.


But the “cold-blooded killing machine” did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. (Castro had a clinically good eye for picking the right person to guard the revolution against infection.) San Carlos de La Cabaña was a stone fortress used to defend Havana against English pirates in the eighteenth century; later it became a military barracks. In a manner chillingly reminiscent of Lavrenti Beria, Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution. José Vilasuso, a lawyer and a professor at Universidad Interamericana de Bayamón in Puerto Rico, who belonged to the body in charge of the summary judicial process at La Cabaña, told me recently that

Che was in charge of the Comisión Depuradora. The process followed the law of the Sierra: there was a military court and Che’s guidelines to us were that we should act with conviction, meaning that they were all murderers and the revolutionary way to proceed was to be implacable. My direct superior was Miguel Duque Estrada. My duty was to legalize the files before they were sent on to the Ministry. Executions took place from Monday to Friday, in the middle of the night, just after the sentence was given and automatically confirmed by the appellate body. On the most gruesome night I remember, seven men were executed.

Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who gave comfort to those sentenced to die and personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke to me recently from his home in Puerto Rico. A former Catholic priest, now seventy-five, who describes himself as “closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former Cardinal Ratzinger,” he recalls that

there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants. The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen. Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the galera de la muerte. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions. After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him “the butcher” because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot. I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment. The day I left, Che told me we had both tried to bring one another to each other’s side and had failed. His last words were: “When we take our masks off, we will be enemies.”

How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of “over 500.” According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara’s biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about “the two thousand or so” executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. “He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure,” Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.

Which brings us back to Carlos Santana and his chic Che gear. In an open letter published in El Nuevo Herald on March 31 of this year, the great jazz musician Paquito D’Rivera castigated Santana for his costume at the Oscars, and added: “One of those Cubans [at La Cabaña] was my cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there precisely for being a Christian. He recounts to me with infinite bitterness how he could hear from his cell in the early hours of dawn the executions, without trial or process of law, of the many who died shouting, ‘Long live Christ the King!’”


Che’s lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. The contradiction between his passion for travel—a protest of sorts against the constraints of the nation-State—and his impulse to become himself an enslaving state over others is poignant. In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: “He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural.” He might have been describing himself. 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.

In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling—a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life. He also ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that year: “The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them.” This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.

The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others’ territory was central to Guevara’s politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people “who feel there is no place for them in the new society.” This predatory instinct reached a pinnacle in 1965, when he started talking, God-like, about the “New Man” that he and his revolution would create.

Che’s obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the formation of the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate six and a half million Cubans. In early 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarará, near Havana, at the mansion to which Che temporarily withdrew to recover from an illness. That is where the top leaders, including Castro, designed the Cuban police state. Ramiro Valdés, Che’s subordinate during the guerrilla war, was put in charge of G-2, a body modeled on the Cheka. Angel Ciutah, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War sent by the Soviets who had been very close to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, and later befriended Che, played a key role in organizing the system, together with Luis Alberto Lavandeira, who had served the boss at La Cabaña. Guevara himself took charge of G-6, the body tasked with the ideological indoctrination of the armed forces. The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new police state, with the rounding up of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series of executions. As Guevara himself told the Soviet ambassador Sergei Kudriavtsev, counterrevolutionaries were never “to raise their head again.”


“Counterrevolutionary” is the term that was applied to anyone who departed from dogma. It was the communist synonym for “heretic.” Concentration camps were one form in which dogmatic power was employed to suppress dissent. History attributes to the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, the captain-general of Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century, the first use of the word “concentration” to describe the policy of surrounding masses of potential opponents—in his case, supporters of the Cuban independence movement—with barbed wire and fences. How fitting that Cuba’s revolutionaries more than half a century later were to take up this indigenous tradition. In the beginning, the revolution mobilized volunteers to build schools and to work in ports, plantations, and factories—all exquisite photo-ops for Che the stevedore, Che the cane-cutter, Che the clothmaker. It was not long before volunteer work became a little less voluntary: the first forced labor camp, Guanahacabibes, was set up in western Cuba at the end of 1960. This is how Che explained the function performed by this method of confinement: “[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail ... people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree.... It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions there are hard.”

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.