The Associated Press hacks up a feature article on Ernesto "Che" Guevara, managing to mention a very little about his penchant for murderous thuggery while giving ample time to people who praise him. Like soon-to-be-dead Fidel Castro.
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia – Fidel Castro insists Ernesto "Che" Guevara could never have been taken prisoner 40 years ago if his gun hadn't malfunctioned. But the retired Bolivian general who led the mission to capture him says the Argentine revolutionary was hardly a heroic figure in his final moments.
The man that Gen. Gary Prado remembers — sad, sick, hungry, dressed in rags and alone in the jungle — simply dropped his gun and surrendered, saying, "Don't shoot, I'm Che."
"He wasn't the figure of the heroic guerrilla," Prado recalled in an interview with The Associated Press Thursday night.
Decades after he gave up a comfortable middle class life in Argentina to foment armed rebellion, Guevara still inspires and infuriates people around the world.
He is an icon for fans who have made his death scene a tourist trap. His face is instantly recognizable, a one-dimensional image on posters and T-shirts that either celebrate or mock his revolutionary ideals.
Prado is bitter that Guevara still gets so much global attention four decades later. He's angry that Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales plans to honor Guevara but not the 55 soldiers who died putting down his attempted revolution in Bolivia.
Che "wasn't someone to inspire terror or anything, but simply to be pitied," he said.
Castro has put a noble spin on the death of his fellow revolutionary and close friend, calling Guevara "not a man who could have been taken prisoner" with a working gun.
"Wounded and without a weapon they were able to hold him and take him to a small town nearby, La Higuera," Castro told Spanish writer Ignacio Ramonet for the book "100 Hours with Fidel."
"The following day, October 9, 1967, at noon, they executed him in cold blood," Castro said.
Wikipedia says this:
He was appointed commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, and during his five-month tenure in that post (January 2 through June 12, 1959),[28] he oversaw the trial and execution of many people, among whom were former Batista regime officials and members of the "Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities" (a unit of the secret police known by its Spanish acronym BRAC). José Vilasuso, an attorney who worked under Guevara at La Cabaña preparing indictments, said that these were lawless proceedings where "the facts were judged without any consideration to general juridical principles" and the findings were pre-determined by Guevara.[29][30] It is estimated that between 156 and 550 people were executed on Guevara's extra-judicial orders during this time.[31]
Paul Berman says this about Che while reviewing the movie made about him by a fawning Hollywood, The Motorcycle Diaries:
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. 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.
Che built up a myth around himself as a hard driving revolutionary yearning for a glamorous death. It is somehow proper then that he ended by saying, "Don't shoot."
