“Happy” Birthday, Che Guevara

By Humberto Fontova

Friday, June 21, 2013

June 14th marked Ernesto Che Guevara’s 85th birthday. Yet amazingly, no celebrations were reported by the Obama campaign precinct-captain who in 2008 decorated her Houston office with his famous visage.

And this precinct-captain was not your usual bubble-headed Che Groupie who seemed to recall the awesome dude opening for the Foo Fighters at Lollapalooza. No, this Che fan was middle-aged woman born in Cuba where she lived during a period when Che Guevara was Cuba's chief executioner and second in command. At the time, Cuba had the highest political incarceration and execution rate on earth, far surpassing that of their Soviet mentors and suitors. Chile’s much-reviled Pinochet regime never even approached it.

Pictures subsequently surfaced of Obama campaign worker Maria Isabel at several Obama campaign functions; arm in arm with Barack, in a bear hug with Michelle Obama, and apparently, very heavily involved in the Obama campaign. Some background on her hero:

Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico City that fateful summer of 1955 everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.

Che was a Revolutionary Ringo Starr. By pure chance, he fell in with the right bunch at just the right time and rode their coattails to fame. His very name "Che" was imparted by the Cubans who hob-knobbed with him in Mexico. Argentines use the term "Che" much like Michael Moore fans use "dude." The Cubans noticed Ernesto Guevara using it so they pasted it to him. And it stuck.

Today his famous photo by Alberto Korda is reputed to be the most reproduced print in the world, emblazoned on everything from infant wear to super model Gisele Bundchen’s derriere. Even the Pope, on his visit to Cuba in 1998, spoke approvingly about Che's "ideals." Che owes all this hype and flummery to the century's top media-manipulator Fidel Castro, who also dispatched him deliberately to his death. As those who know him have always said: "Fidel only praises the dead."

In 1957 this worldwide symbol of “’anti-imperialism” (who often signed his letters as “Stalin II”) appalled some of his fellow Cuban rebels by applauding the Soviet invasion of Hungary with its wholesale slaughter of Hungarian freedom-fighting guerrillas. All through the horrifying Soviet massacre, Che dutifully parroted the Soviet script that the workers, peasants and college kids battling Russian tanks in Budapest with small arms and Molotov cocktails were all: "Fascists and CIA agents!” who all deserved prompt execution.

Che’s genocidal fantasies included a continental reign of Stalinism. And to achieve this ideal he craved, "millions of atomic victims"–most of them Americans. "The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!" raved Ernesto Che Guevara in 1961. "Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination. We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! We must keep our hatred against them [the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysms!"

"If the nuclear missiles had remained in Cuba,” Che confided to the London Daily Worker shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City."

Other than his competence at murdering bound, gagged and blindfolded men and boys, Che Guevara failed spectacularly at everything he attempted in his life. First he failed as an Argentine medical student. Though he's widely described as a medical doctor by his hagiographers (Castaneda, Anderson, Taibo, Kalfon) no record exists of Ernesto Guevara's Medical degree. When Cuban-American researcher Enrique Ros inquired of the Rector of the University of Buenos Aires and the head of its Office of Academic Affairs for copies or proof of said document, Ros was variously told that the records had been misplaced or perhaps stolen.

In 1960 Castro appointed Che as Cuba's "Economics Minister." Within months the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba's gold reserves, was practically worthless. The following year Castro appointed Che as Cuba's Minister of Industries. Within a year a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria and Japan, a huge influx of immigrants and the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society, all who were grateful to leave with only the clothes on their back.

His pathetic whimpering while dropping his fully-loaded weapons as two Bolivian soldiers approached him on Oct. 8 1967 ("Don't shoot!" I'm Che!" I'm worth more to you alive than dead!") proves that this cowardly, murdering swine was unfit to carry his victims' slop buckets.