The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Agitator to Capitalist Brand

November 7, 2005
Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The New Republic

Che Guevara, who did so much (or so little?) to destroy capitalism, is in the
current events the quintessence of a capitalist brand. Its likeness adorns coffee jars,
hoods, lighters, keychains, wallets, baseball caps, headdresses, flocks,
muscle shirts, sports t-shirts, fine handbags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and for
supposed those omnipresent t-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the
socialist dandy wearing his beret during the early years of the revolution, in the
moment when Che accidentally appeared in the photographer's viewfinder—and in the image
that, thirty-eight years after his death, still constitutes the logo of
revolutionary (or capitalist?) "chic". Sean O'Hagan stated in The Observer that
There is even a powdered soap with the slogan 'El Che washes whiter.'

Che's products are marketed by large corporations and by small ones.

companies such as Burlington Coat Factory, which aired a television commercial
presenting a young man in cargo pants wearing a Che t-shirt, or the
Flamingo's Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the anger.
from local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: 'I sell what the
people want to buy." The revolutionaries also joined this frenzy of
products—from 'The Che Store', which sells provisions, to the site that caters
"all their revolutionary needs" on the Internet, and the Italian writer Gianni Minà,
who sold Robert Redford the film rights to Che's diary about
his youthful journey around South America in 1952 in exchange for being able to access the
shooting of the film Motorcycle Diaries and that Minà could produce his own
documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his journey of
youth and now advises documentarists, and who was complaining recently in Madrid, according to
the newspaper El País, over a Rioja and a duck breast, about the US embargo
against Cuba makes it difficult to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building
in which Guevara was born in the city of Rosario, Argentina, a splendid property of
beginning of the twentieth century located at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos streets,
was until recently occupied by the retirement fund administrator and
Maximum AFJP private pensions, a daughter of the privatization of social security
Argentina in the 1990s.

The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand
is experiencing a renaissance —a particularly remarkable renaissance,
given that it takes place years after the political and ideological collapse of everything
what Guevara represented. This unexpected fortune is substantially due to Diaries of
Motorcycle, the film produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles.
of the three most important films about Che that have already been made or are currently in production
In the last two years; the other two have been directed by Josh Evans and Steven.
Soderbergh.) Beautifully filmed in landscapes that have clearly avoided the effects
erosive effects of capitalist pollution, the film showcases the young person on a road trip
discovery as their emerging social awareness stumbles upon exploitation
social and economic, which is preparing the ground for the reinvention of man to
who Sartre once called the most complete human being of our era.

But to be more precise, the current revival of Che began in 1997, in the thirtieth
anniversary of his death, when five biographies overwhelmed the bookstores and his remains
they were discovered near a runway at the airport in Vallegrande,
Bolivia, after a retired Bolivian general, in a revelation
spectacularly timely, it will indicate the exact location. The anniversary focused again
the attention in the famous photograph by Freddy Alborta of Che's corpse lying on
a table, skewed, dead and romantic, looking like Christ in a painting of
Mantegna.

It is common for the followers of a cult not to know the true story of their hero.
Many Rastafarians would renounce Haile Selassie if they had any idea of who he was.
reality.) It is not surprising that contemporary followers of Guevara, his new
post-communist admirers also deceive themselves by clinging to a myth—
except for the young Argentinians who chant a perfectly rhymed expression: "I have a"
t-shirt of Che and I don't know why.

Consider some of the individuals who have recently wielded or invoked the
portrait of Guevara as an emblem of justice and rebellion against the abuse of power. In
Lebanon, some protesters demonstrating against Syria at the grave of the former
Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri carried the image of Che. Thierry Henry, a player of
French footballer who plays for Arsenal in England, made an appearance in an important
gala evening organized by FIFA, the world football organization, dressed in a
red and black Che t-shirt. In a recent review published in The New York
In her review of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Manohla Dargis highlighted that "the
the greatest impact here may be that of the transformation of a black zombie into a virtuoso
revolutionary leader," and added: "I believe that Che truly lives, after all."

The football hero Maradona proudly displayed the iconic tattoo of Che on his right arm.
during a trip where he met with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Stavropol, in the south
from Russia, some protesters who demanded cash payments of benefits
social welfare took over the central square with Che flags. In San Francisco, City
Lights Books, the legendary home of beat literature, invites visitors to a section
dedicated to Latin America in which half of the shelves are occupied by
Books of Che. José Luis Montoya, a Mexican police officer who fights crime.
related to drugs in Mexicali, she wears a Che headband because she does it
feel stronger. In the Dheisheh refugee camp, in the West Bank of
Jordan River, the posters of Che adorn a wall that pays tribute to the Intifada. A
Sunday magazine dedicated to social life in Sydney, Australia, lists the three
ideal guests at a dinner: Alvar Aalto, Richard Branson, and Che Guevara. Leung
Kwok-hung, the rebel elected to the legislative council of Hong Kong, challenges Beijing by
wear a Che t-shirt. In Brazil, Frei Betto, advisor to President Lula da Silva and
the person in charge of the high-profile program 'Zero Hunger' states that 'we should pay attention to'
less attention to Trotsky and much more to Che Guevara." And the most astonishing thing of all, in
this year's Academy Awards ceremony, Carlos Santana and Antonio
The band performed the main song from the film Motorcycle Diaries: Santana.
He presented himself wearing a Che t-shirt and a crucifix. The manifestations of the new cult.
of Che are everywhere. Once again the myth is exciting individuals whose
causes largely represent exactly the opposite of what Guevara was.

No man lacks some mitigating qualities. In the case of Che Guevara, those
qualities can help us measure the chasm that separates reality from myth. Its
honesty (I mean: partial honesty) means that he left written testimony of his
cruelties, including the very bad, though not the worst. His courage - which Castro described
like his way, in difficult and dangerous moments, to make things more difficult and
"dangerous"—means that he did not live to take full responsibility for the hell of
Cuba. The myth can say as much about an era as the truth. And it is thanks to this that...
to the very testimonies that Che provides of his thoughts and actions, and thanks
also to their premature disappearance, we can know exactly how deceived they are
many of our contemporaries regarding many things.

Guevara may have fallen in love with his own death, but he was much more
in love with someone else's death. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summarized his
homicidal idea of justice in its 'Message to the Tricontinental': 'Hatred as a factor of
struggle; the uncompromising hatred for the enemy, which drives beyond the limitations of being
human and turns it into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine.
the first writings are also seasoned with this rhetorical violence and
ideological. Although his ex-girlfriend Chichina Ferreyra doubts that the original version of
the diaries of his motorcycle trip contain the observation of 'I feel that my orifices
nostrils widen at the bitter smell of gunpowder and the blood of the enemy,
Guevara shared with Granado at that early age this exclamation: 'Revolution
"without firing a shot? You're crazy." On other occasions, the young bohemian seemed incapable of
distinguish between the frivolity of death as a spectacle and the tragedy of
victims of a revolution. In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where
he was a witness to the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote:
It was very fun here with gunfire, bombings, speeches, and other nuances that cut through.
the monotony in which I lived.

Guevara's disposition when he traveled with Castro from Mexico to Cuba aboard the
Granma is captured in a phrase from a letter to his wife that he wrote on January 28.
1957, not long after landing, published in his book Ernesto: A Biography of
Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: 'I am in the Cuban jungle, alive and thirsty for blood.'
This mindset had been reinforced by his conviction that Arbenz had lost the
power because they had failed to execute their potential enemies. In a letter
prior to his ex-girlfriend Tita Infante had observed that "If those had occurred
executions, the government would have kept the ability to strike back.
it is surprising that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into
Havana, Guevara will assassinate or supervise the executions in summary trials of
many people —proven enemies, mere suspects, and those who
they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In January 1957, as indicated in his diary from the Sierra Maestra, Guevara shot at him.
to Eutimio Guerra because he suspected that he was passing information:
I solved the problem by shooting myself with a .32 caliber pistol in the right temple,
with an exit wound in the right temple... his belongings came into my possession." More
yesterday he shot dead Aristidio, a farmer who expressed the desire to leave when the
rebels would follow their path. While wondering if this particular victim "was in
guilty enough to deserve death,
the death of Echevarría, the brother of one of his comrades, due to crimes not
specified: "I had to pay the price." At other times, I would simulate executions without
to carry them out, as a method of psychological torture.

Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers who are working in Florida.
In a documentary about Guevara, they have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a
former commander of the revolutionary army known as 'El Catalán,' who claims that
many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés (future minister of the interior of
Cuba) were directly the responsibility of Guevara, because Valdés was under
his orders in the mountains. "When in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. In
Eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple of dozen of
people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, toward where his column had marched as
part of a final assault against the island. Some of them were killed in a hotel, such as
Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas has written, another former revolutionary who would later become
journalist (adding that among the executed were known peasants
like little mosquitoes that had joined the army just to escape unemployment.

But the "cold killing machine" did not show its full rigor until,
immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of
the La Cabaña prison. (Castro had a good clinical eye for choosing the person
perfect for protecting the revolution against infection.) San Carlos de La Cabaña is a
stone fortress that was used to defend Havana against English pirates
in the eighteenth century; it later became a military barracks. In a way that
He evokes the chilling Lavrenti Beria, Guevara presided over the first half of 1959.
one of the darkest periods of the revolution. José Vilasuso, lawyer and professor at the
Interamerican University of Bayamón in Puerto Rico, which belonged to the group
the person in charge of the summary judicial process in La Cabaña recently told me that
Che directed the Purification Commission. The process was governed by the law of the mountain: tribunal
military de facto and not legal, and Che advised us to guide ourselves by conviction. This
We know that they are all murderers, so proceeding radically is the
revolutionary.” Miguel Duque Estrada was my immediate boss. My role was that of an instructor.
That is to legally professionalize the case and pass it to the public prosecutor's office, without a trial of its own.
some. Executions were carried out from Monday to Friday. The executions took place in the early morning,
shortly after issuing the ruling and declaring the appeal inadmissible (ex officio). The longest night
"Sinister that I remember, seven men were executed."

Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who brought comfort to those condemned to die
and who personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke with me recently
from his home in Puerto Rico. A seventy-five-year-old former Catholic priest who
it describes itself as "closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former"
Cardinal Ratzinger," Arzuaga recalls that

The La Cabaña prison remained overcrowded. Over 800 men crammed in a

space designed for no more than 300: Batista military or members of some of the
bodies of the police, some "snitches", journalists, businessmen or merchants. The judge
he didn't have to be a man of law; instead, he belonged to the rebel army, to the
just like the colleagues who occupied the tribunal table with him. Almost all the hearings
of appeal were presided over by Che Guevara. I do not remember any case whose
sentence revoked in those views. Every day I visited the 'death row',
where the prisoners remained since they were sentenced to death. Word spread
that I used to hypnotize the condemned before they went out to the firing squad and that is why they
things were made easier, without unpleasant scenes, and Che Guevara ordered that
no one was taken to the firing squad without me being present. I attended 55
executions until the month of May, when I left. That does not mean that it did not continue
fleeing. Herman Marks was an American, said to be a fugitive from justice. He
we called him "the butcher" because he enjoyed shouting "squad, attention, prepare,
"Aim, fire." I spoke several times with Che in order to intercede for
certain people. I remember very well the case of Ariel Lima who was a minor,
but he was inflexible. I can say the same about Fidel Castro, whom I also approached twice.
occasions with the same purpose. I suffered a trauma. At the end of May, I felt bad and I was...
he recommended leaving the parish of Casa Blanca, within whose limits it was located
The cabin that I had been attending to for the last three years. I went to Mexico for a
treatment. When we said goodbye, Che Guevara told me that we had taken away
Well, both trying to pull the other out of their field to attract them to their own. "We have
failed both. When we take off the masks we have been wearing, we will be
enemies face to face.

How many people were killed in La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo provides a figure of about
two hundred, similar to that provided by Armando Lago, an economics professor
retired who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-study
Years about the executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were
executed between the month of January and the end of June 1959 (the date when Che stopped
in charge of The Cabin). The secret cables sent by the Embassy of the United States
United in Havana, the State Department in Washington talks about "more than 500."
According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, a sympathetic Basque Catholic
from the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix
Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team responsible for the capture of
Guevara in Bolivia, he told me that he confronted Che after his capture regarding 'the
two thousand and something executions for which he was responsible throughout his life. He said that everyone
they were CIA agents and he did not refer to the figure," Rodríguez recalls. The highest figures
they may include executions that took place in the months following the date on which
Che stopped being in charge of the prison.

This brings us back to Carlos Santana and his elegant Che attire. In a
open letter published in El Nuevo Herald on March 31 of this year, the great musician of
Jazz Paquito D''''Rivera reproached Santana for his outfit at the awards ceremony.
Oscar added: "One of those Cubans was my cousin Bebo, imprisoned there precisely for being
Cristiano. He always tells me with bitterness how he listened from his cell in the
dawn the shootings without trial of many who died shouting 'Long live Christ the King!'.

The Che's thirst for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. The
contradiction between his passion for traveling—a kind of protest against limitations
of the nation-state—and its drive to become an enslaving state in relation to
other people is pathetic. When writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile,
Guevara reflected: 'He belonged to that special class of men to whom the species
produced from time to time, in those whose yearning for unlimited power is so extreme
that any suffering to achieve it seems natural." It could have been
describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania became
manifested in the predatory impulse to seize the lives and property of
other people, and to abolish their free will.

In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara tried unsuccessfully to impose
a species would unravel, regulating the relationships 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
Fighting masses agree to assault the banks because none of them have
a cent in the same." This idea of revolution as a license to reassign the
property as it suited him led the Marxist Puritan to take possession of the mansion
of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.

The impulse to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of

territory of others was central to Guevara's oppressive policy. In his memoirs, the leader
Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser recounts that Guevara asked him how many people there were.
abandoned his country due to agrarian reform. When Nasser replied that none,
He answered angrily that the way to measure the depth of change is through the
number of individuals 'who feel that there is no place for them in the new society.' This
predatory instinct reached an apotheosis in 1965, when it began to speak, like God,
about the 'New Man' that he and his revolution would create.

Che's obsession with collectivist control led him to cooperate in the formation of
security apparatus that was established to subjugate six and a half million
Cubans. At the beginning of 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarará,
near Havana, in the mansion where Che temporarily retreated to
recover from an illness. That is where the main leaders, including Castro,
they designed the Cuban police state. Ramiro Valdés, subordinate of Che during the
guerrilla warfare, was put in charge of the G-2, a body inspired by the Cheka. Angel
Ciutah, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War sent by the Soviets who had
was very close to Ramón Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky, and would later establish
friendship with Che played a fundamental role in organizing the system.
together with Luis Alberto Lavandeira, who had served the boss at La Cabaña. The boss himself
Guevara took charge of the G-6, the group assigned with the indoctrination.
ideological of the armed forces. The invasion backed by the U.S. of Bay of
Pigs in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new
police state, with the confinement of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series
of executions. As Guevara himself expressed to the Soviet ambassador Sergei
Kudriavtsev, the counter-revolutionaries would never 'raise their heads' again.

"Counter-revolutionary" is the term used for anyone who deviated from

dogma. It was the communist equivalent of "heretic." The concentration camps were a
the way in which dogmatic power was used to suppress dissent. History has
attributes to the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, the captain general of Cuba at the end of the century
nineteen, having employed for the first time the word "concentration" to describe the
policy of surrounding the masses of potential opponents—in their case, supporters
of the Cuban independence movement —with barbed wire and fences. What
ironic (and appropriate) that the revolutionaries of Cuba more than half a century later
they continued with this local tradition. At first, the revolution mobilized volunteers to
to build schools and to work in the ports, plantations, and factories—all of them
exquisite photographic opportunities for Che the stevedore, Che the sugarcane cutter,
Che, the fabric manufacturer. It wasn't long before voluntary work became
became a little less voluntary: the first forced labor camp,
Guanahacabibes was established in western Cuba around the end of 1960. This is how the
What explained the function performed by this confinement method: “A
Guanahacabibes sends the people who should not go to jail, the people who have committed
violations of the revolutionary morality to a greater or lesser degree...it's hard work, not work
bestial

This camp was the precursor to systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the
province of Camagüey, dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics,
Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other scum of that sort, under the flag
from the Military Units for Production Aid (UMAP). Packed in buses and
trucks, the "misfits" would be transported at gunpoint to the fields of
concentrations organized on the basis of the Guanahacabibes model. Some never
they would return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and the majority would remain
traumatized for life, like the overwhelming documentary by Néstor
Almond trees Improper behavior will show the world a couple of decades ago.

In this way, Time magazine seems to have erred in August 1960 when it described
on the division of labor of the revolution with a cover note introducing Che Guevara
like the 'brain,' Fidel Castro as the 'heart' and Raúl Castro as the 'fist.' But
the perception revealed Guevara's crucial role in making Cuba a bastion of
totalitarianism. Che was in some way an unlikely candidate for purity.
ideological, given its bohemian spirit, but during the training years in Mexico
and in the resulting period of armed struggle in Cuba emerged as the ideologue
a communist madly in love with the Soviet Union, largely to the annoyance of
Castro and others who were essentially opportunists willing to use anything
the means necessary to gain power. When the aspiring revolutionaries were
arrested in Mexico in 1956, Guevara was the only one who admitted he was a communist and
that I was studying Russian. (She spoke openly about her relationship with Nikolai Leonov from the
Soviet Embassy.) During the armed struggle in Cuba, it forged a strong alliance with the
Popular Socialist Party (the communist party of the island) and with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez,
an important player in the conversion of Castro's regime to communism.

This fanatic disposition turned Che into an essential part of the 'Sovietization' of the
revolution that had repeatedly bragged about its independent character. Very little
after the bearded ones came to power, Guevara participated in negotiations with
Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet Deputy Prime Minister, who visited Cuba. He was entrusted with the
mission to promote Soviet-Cuban negotiations during a visit to Moscow
the late 1960s. (It was part of a long journey in which Kim's North Korea
Il Sung was the country that impressed him the most.) Guevara's second trip to Russia, in
August 1962 was even more significant, as it sealed the agreement for
convert Cuba into a Soviet nuclear beachhead. He met with Khrushchev in
Yalta to finalize the details of an operation that had already begun and that
involved the introduction to the island of forty-two Soviet missiles, half of the
which were armed with nuclear warheads, as well as launchers and some
forty-two thousand soldiers. After pressuring their Soviet allies about the danger that
the United States could discover what was happening, Guevara obtained
guarantees that the Soviet navy would intervene —in other words, that Moscow
I was ready to go to war.

According to Philippe Gavi's biography of Guevara, the revolutionary had bragged that "his
the country is eager to risk everything in an unimaginable atomic war
destructive capacity to defend a principle." Just after the crisis ended
of the Cuban missiles —when Khrushchev reneged on the promise made in Yalta and
he negotiated an agreement with the United States behind Castro's back that included the removal
about the American missiles in Turkey —Guevara told a communist newspaper
If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and
directed against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our
defense against aggression.
the forms: "As Marxists, we have argued that peaceful coexistence between the
Nations does not include the coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited.

Guevara distanced himself from the Soviet Union in the last years of his life. He did so because of the
wrong reasons, blaming Moscow for being too ideologically soft
diplomatically, and making too many concessions—unlike Maoist China, to the
which he came to see as a refuge of orthodoxy. In October 1964, a memo written by
Oleg Daroussenkov, a Soviet official close to him, quotes Guevara saying: 'They
we asked the Czechoslovaks for weapons; and they rejected us. Then we asked the Chinese for them;
they said yes in a few days, and they didn't even charge us, stating that one doesn't sell
"arm a friend." In reality, Guevara was resentful about the fact that Moscow was
requesting from other members of the communist bloc, including Cuba, something in exchange for their
colossal help and its political support. His final attack against Moscow came in Algeria, in
February 1965, at an international conference in which he accused the Soviets of
adopt the 'law of value,' that is, capitalism. Its break with the Soviets, in
synthesis, it was not a cry in favor of independence. It was a scream in the style of Enver
Hoxha in favor of the total subordination of reality to blind ideological orthodoxy.

The great revolutionary had an opportunity to put his economic vision into practice—his
idea of social justice— as the director of the National Bank of Cuba and the Department
from the Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform at the end of 1959, and, since
in early 1961, as Minister of Industry. The period in which Guevara was in
the bulk of the Cuban economy witnessed the near collapse of the
sugar production, the failure of industrialization and the introduction of
rationing—all of this in what had been one of the four economically
most successful in Latin America since before Batista's dictatorship.

His task as the director of the National Bank, during which he printed banknotes that carried
the firm 'Che,' has been synthesized by his assistant, Ernesto Betancourt: 'I found in the
An absolute ignorance of the most elementary principles of economics.
Guevara's perceptual powers regarding the world economy were very good.
expressed in 1961, during a hemispheric conference held in Uruguay, where
predicted a growth rate for Cuba of 10 percent 'without the slightest fear,' and, for
1980, a per capita income higher than that of 'the U.S. today.' In fact,
Around 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, the Cubans were under a
diet consisting of a serving of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month;
four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and
four eggs per month.
The land reform took land from the rich, but gave it to the bureaucrats, not to the
peasants. (The decree was drafted in Che's house.) In the name of the
diversification, the cultivated area was reduced and the available labor diverted towards
other activities. The result was that between 1961 and 1963, the harvest was halved:
just about 3.8 million metric tons. Was this sacrifice justified for the
Promotion of Cuban industrialization? Unfortunately, Cuba lacked raw materials.
raw materials for heavy industry, and as a consequence of the redistribution
revolutionary, it did not have a solid currency with which to acquire them —or even
acquiring basic products. By 1961, Guevara was having to give explanations.
embarrassing to the workers in the office: "Our technical comrades in the
companies have produced a toothpaste... as good as the previous one; cleans
exactly the same, even though after a while it turns into a stone.
1963, all hopes of industrializing Cuba were abandoned, and the revolution
she accepted her role as a colonial supplier of sugar to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil
to meet their needs and to resell it to other countries. During the three decades
Next, Cuba would survive based on a Soviet subsidy of roughly $65.
one billion and $100 billion.

Having failed as a hero of social justice, does Guevara deserve a place in the
history books like a genius of guerrilla warfare? His greatest military achievement in the
fight against Batista—the takeover of the city of Santa Clara after ambushing a train
with heavy reinforcements - is seriously questioned. Numerous testimonies indicate that
the train conductor gave up in advance, perhaps after accepting bribes. (Gutiérrez)
Menoyo, who led a different guerrilla group in that area, is among those who
they have criticized the official history of Cuba regarding Guevara's victory.) Immediately
After the triumph of the revolution, Guevara organized guerrilla armies in Nicaragua.
the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti—all of which were crushed. In 1964,
sent the Argentine revolutionary Jorge Ricardo Masetti to his death by persuading him that
mount an attack against his homeland from Bolivia, right after democracy
representative government had been restored in Argentina.

Particularly disastrous was the expedition to Congo in 1965. Guevara allied with two
rebels—Pierre Mulele in the west and Laurent Kabila in the east—against the unpleasant
Congolese government, which was supported by the United States, by mercenaries.
South Africans and Cuban exiles. Mulele had taken possession of Stanleyville before
to be repelled. During his reign of terror, as V.S. Naipaul has written, he killed
all those who could read and everyone who wore a tie. Regarding the other
Guevara's ally, Laurent Kabila, was merely a sloth and a corrupt individual.
at that time; but the world would discover in the 90s that he was also a
killing machine. In any case, Guevara spent much of 1965 helping the
rebels in the east before leaving the country in an ignominious manner. A short time
Afterwards, Mobutu came to power and established a decades-long tyranny. (In the countries
Latin Americans, from Argentina to Peru, the revolutions inspired by Che had the
same practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.
In Bolivia, Che was defeated again, and for the last time. He misinterpreted the situation.
local. An agrarian reform had taken place a few years earlier; the government had
respected many of the institutions of the peasant communities; and the army was
close to the United States despite their nationalism. "The peasant masses do not us
"they do not help at all" was Guevara's melancholy conclusion in his Bolivian diary. Still
worse, Mario Monje, the local communist leader, who did not have the stomach for a war of
guerrillas after having been humiliated in the elections, led Guevara towards a
vulnerable location in the southeast of the country. The circumstances of Che's capture in the
break of Yuro, shortly after meeting with the French intellectual Régis Debray and the
Argentinian painter Ciro Bustos, both arrested while leaving the camp.
they were, like a large part of the Bolivian expedition, a matter of amateurs.

Guevara was certainly bold and brave, and quick to organize life based on
military principles in the territories under his control, but he was not a General Giap. His
The Guerrilla Warfare book teaches that popular forces can defeat a
army, which does not require waiting for the necessary conditions to be met since
unfocused insurrection can provoke them, and the combat must take place
mainly in the field. (In his recipe for guerrilla warfare, he also reserves
for women the role of cooks and nurses.) However, Batista's army did not
it was an army but a corrupt bunch of thugs lacking motivation and not much
organization; the guerrilla hotspots, with the exception of Nicaragua, ended up all in
ashes for the foquistas, and Latin America has become 70 percent urbanized in
these last four decades. In this regard, Che Guevara was also a cruel delusional.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Argentina had the second highest rate of
largest growth in the world. By the 1890s, real income of the
Argentine workers were superior to Swiss, German, and French workers.
By 1928, that country ranked twelfth in the world in terms of its GDP per capita.
capital. That achievement, which the following generations would ruin, was largely due to
Juan Bautista Alberdi.

Like Guevara, Alberdi liked to travel: he walked through the pampas and the
deserts from north to south at the age of fourteen, heading towards Buenos Aires. Like Guevara,
Alberdi opposed a tyrant, Juan Manuel Rosas. Just like Guevara, Alberdi had the
opportunity to influence a revolutionary leader in power—Justo José de Urquiza,
who overthrew Rosas in 1852. Like Guevara, Alberdi represented the new government in
world tours, and died abroad. But unlike the old and new favorite of the
left, Alberdi never killed a fly. His book, Bases and starting points for the
organization of the Argentine Republic, was the basis of the Constitution of 1853 that limited
the state opened trade, encouraged immigration, and ensured property rights,
thus inaugurating a period of seventy years of astonishing prosperity. Not
interfered in the affairs of other nations, opposing his country's war against
Paraguay. His appearance does not adorn the abdomen of Mike Tyson.
This work was originally published in English by The New Republic magazine under the
The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand
in its editions of July 11 and 18, 2005.

Translated by Gabriel Gasave

Alvaro Vargas LlosaHe is a Senior Associate Academic at the Center for Global Prosperity
in The Independent Institute and editor of Lessons from the Poor.