Truth Really Matters

Bang Phae In 1960, shortly after the successful communist revolution in Cuba, the architect Nicolas Quintana sought out Che Guevara (Fidel’s #2, after Raul) to complain.  Quintana’s dream of building a new National Bank was dashed and a young friend of his had been shot by a firing squad for distributing anticommunist leaflets.

Che responded, “Look, revolutions are ugly but necessary, and part of the revolutionary process is justice at the service of future justice.”

Quintana objected that this was just Thomas More’s Utopia; anything could be justified now for the sake of future  justice.  Che stared at him for a while, then said, “So.  You don’t believe in the future of the revolution . . . You have three choices:  You leave Cuba and there’s no problem from me; or thirty years in prison, or the firing squad.”  Quintana fled the island.

I pulled this anecdote from John Lee Anderson’s 2010 book, Che Guevara:  A Revolutionary Life.  I’ve long wondered who this character, Che, really was.  Clearly, he is universally admired by leftists – no one in history has adorned more t-shirts.  But why?  Let’s pull some nuggets from this thick biography.

Ernesto Guevara (Che was an acquired nickname), 1928 – 1967, an Argentine, suffered throughout his life from asthma, which was debilitating at times; he was trained as a medical doctor and had plenty of opportunities to make that a career.  Che was sexually immoral and promiscuous, discarded his first wife, and was shot dead in Bolivia while trying to foment a communist revolution there in 1967.  It is difficult to find any virtue in his life, unless you find virtue attached to bloody communist revolutions.

Fidel and Che shared much in common:  Both were from large families and spoiled, careless about personal appearance, and sexually voracious.  Relationships were subordinated to personal ambition.  Both were rich in Latin machismo, believed in the weakness of women, admired bravery and men of action, and despised homosexuals.  Both possessed iron wills and a strong sense of destiny.  Both desired to lead a revolution and both saw the United States as their chief obstacle and enemy.

Differences?  Fidel grew up as the leader of his peers, excelling in sports and student politics.  He admired Julius Caesar, Robespierre, and Napoleon.  He lied artfully.  Che saw politics as a means for social change, not caring for personal power, per se.  His ego was large, but not as enormous as Fidel’s.  Che recognized his physical shortcomings, his asthma and short, slight stature.  Che was content to listen while Fidel relished pulpit thumping.

Che admitted that he was a natural loner, but with “a sense of my historic duty.”  He only considered friends to be those who agreed with him politically.  He felt his gift to be the ability to influence others; he had no fear because of “an abolutely fatalistic sense of my mission.”  In a letter to his parents:  “We are the future and we know it, we build with happiness although we have forgotten individual affections.”

We see a thread common to Marxists for the last 150 years.  They profess to care deeply for humanity, but despise individuals; in fact, will happily crush individuals if necessary to achieve their goals.  Even as a medical doctor he had little interest in individual patients; he dreamed of finding cures or preventatives for the masses.  Politically, he eventually found Marx, then a revolution in Guatemala, then connecting with the Castro brothers in Mexico on the way to Cuba, developed the conviction that the ultimate cure for society’s ills was Marxism-Leninism and that guerrilla warfare was the way to achieve Utopia.  He argued that armed struggle would produce socialism which would lead to the end of injustice and the creation of a new man.

One of his comrades, Julia, observed that Che seemed to have respect only for “the dispossessed, a hungry worker, a malnourished peasant.  Even his parents didn’t seem to merit the same respect.”  Che did not even provide funds for his parents to travel from Argentina to visit him in Cuba.

Yet Julia reported a magnetism about Che – “When he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.”  Women found him charming, attracted in part by his asthmatic vulnerability, but also by his intensity and looks.

The Russians saw Che as the true ideologue of the Cuban revolution, that “in essence Fidel was a liberal bourgeois democrat, and we knew that his brother Raul was closer to the Communists . . . (but) Che seemed to be the most prepared theoretically of all the political leadership.”  In fact, the Russians were concerned that Che might be more Maoist, too eager to shed blood and risk wars to foster global communist revolutions.   “Peaceful coexistence” was anathema to Che.  Fidel, on the other hand, wanted to consolidate his hold on Cuba and insure his own political survival.  Ultimately, this led Che to leave Cuba for foreign revolutionary adventures.

Anderson, the biographer, reports that Ernesto’s father was never able to discipline his eldest son and his mother never tried.  To escape punishment, the boy would run off into the countryside until the parents were so worried they neglected the original offense.  Accordingly, the young Che grew ever more wild and disobedient.  How much trouble the world may have been spared if certain parents had lovingly disciplined their children!  How much of the current woke madness, whining, and anger might have been prevented by parents raising their children properly?

Ernesto engaged in dangerous behaviors, climbing trees, hanging by a railroad trestle over a canyon, exploring an abandoned mine shaft, shooting out streetlights with a slingshot, and participating in rock-throwing fights.  He once threw firecrackers through an open window into a neighbor’s formal dinner party.

Ernesto’s father was a serial adulterer, adding to the family’s misery.  His paternal grandmother was an atheist.  Mom was a nominal Catholic, and a voracious reader of fiction, philosophy, and poetry, stimulating her son’s varied interests.  It does matter what you expose your children to.  In his youth he tried reading Marx and Engels, but admitted later that he didn’t understand it.  At age 17 during a course he took in philosophy, he began writing his own “philosophical dictionary,” a 165-page notebook summarizing ideas on love, immortality, sexual morality, faith, justice, death, God, the devil, etc., with quotations from Hitler on Jewish conspiracies, ideas from Bertrand Russell on sexuality, thoughts from Freud on dreams, the libido, and narcissism, Nietzsche on death, and Jack London on society.  Future notebooks skipped Hitler and focused on Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Yes, it makes a difference in what young minds are immersed.

Later, at the age of 37, Che copied a portion of a book on Lenin which described him as one who “lived, breathed, and slept” socialist revolution and sacrificed everything to its cause.  This is much the way that Che’s comrades described him.

As Che grew up, observing the enormous economic influence and presence of U.S. companies in Latin America, he developed a strong hostility toward the U.S.  He didn’t see American foreign policy as merely bumbling and inconsistent, but as sinister and well-designed for evil and exploitation.

Che was tone-deaf to music and had to work hard to learn how to dance.  A close friend confessed that “dancing didn’t interest Che in the slightest.”  But he was a relentless seducer of girls and dancing helped him get close to his prey.

As a young man Che traveled around South America with a friend.  He was moved by an encounter in the mountains with a young couple, marooned; the miner had just been released from prison after joining a strike as a member of the outlawed Communisty Party.  Other strikers had been murdered.  Now he could find work only in a dangerous sulfur mine, he expected.

Che wrote in his journal that the couple “were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world.  They didn’t even have a miserable blanket to cover themselves, so we gave them one of ours . . . It was one of the times I felt the most  cold, but it was also the time when I felt a little more fraternity with this, for me, strange human species.”

In Peru he was disgusted at the tourists:  “blond, camera-toting, sport-shirted correspondents from another world . . . ignorant of the moral distance separating them from the living remnants of the fallen (Incan) people.”  He was aggravated that the Incan ruins had been stripped of anything valuable, such treasures long since relocated to museums in North America.  He felt connected to the conquered indigenous races, whose ancestors were put to the knife by Che’s forebears.

Che’s attitudes were typical of leftists past and present – self-righteous, self-absorbed, talking much but helping little or not at all, ultimately fostering bloody revolutions to bring in supposedly enlightened governments.  The Marxist sees all problems as requiring government solutions.  A biblical worldview sees all problems as resulting from the sins of individuals.  Repentance, trust in Christ, and obedience to God’s laws, seeing God’s laws as the blueprint of reality for God’s image-bearers – this is the only path to real solutions.  This, of course, won’t be realized on any large scale until the Millennium.

He became “Dr. Ernesto Guevara” at 25, in 1953, but declined to accept steady employment in a clinic conducting allergy research.  He and two friends set out on another road trip.  Guatemala beckoned, where a socialist government resisted influence by the U.S. and a huge American business, the United Fruit Company.

In Guatemala Che met a mysterious stranger who ‘prophesied’ that Che would have a bloody, yet glorious future in revolution and die for the cause.  Che embraced this vision:  “I feel my nostrils dilated, tasting the acrid smell of gunpowder and of blood, of the dead enemy; now my body contorts, ready for the fight, and I prepare my being as if it were a sacred place so that in it the bestial howling of the triumphant proletariat can resonate with new vibrations and new hopes.”  Not many 25-year-olds are so thoroughly possessed, and I mean that literally.

In Guatemala he picked up his famous nickname, Che, which Argentinians might translate as “Hey, you.”  (I’m underwhelmed.)  He spent considerable time talking with his friends and local leftists about political theory, but ‘talk’ was his primary activity while the CIA worked to undermine the recalcitrant government.  Che had to engage in some physical labor to earn some cash, on a road construction crew, but found he really disliked that.

When American mercenaries crossed the Honduran border, Che found he was thrilled and awed by the violence.  Planes bombed and machine-gunned both military and civilian targets.  Che helped out in a medical brigade and in joining some night patrols.  When the mercenaries won, though, Che managed to cross the Mexican border, headed for Mexico City.

In letters home, Che expressed frustration that he had not done enough to help the revolution in Guatemala, confessing:  “I am a complete bum and I don’t feel like having my career interrupted by an iron discipline.”

In Mexico Che would earn living expenses as a night watchman, a photographer for an Argentine news agency, and as an allergy researcher at a hospital.  During this period, at age 26, he decided to commit fully to being a Communist.  He ran into Raul Castro, finding a deep ideological connection.  Both were committed to the use of war, not elections, to gain power and transform society wholly to socialism.  Fidel soon joined them and after much discussion invited Che to join his guerrilla movement.  Che accepted immediately.  He would serve officially as their doctor.

Fidel’s 1955 Manifesto #1 promised the restoration of democracy and justice in Cuba.  It was a call to turn Cuba into a modern, humane society.  (It’s 2025 now . . . it sure is taking a long time to reach that goal.)  The details included distributing land to the peasants, nationalization of public services, ambitious housing, education, and industrial programs, yada yada yada.

Che consumed texts on economics, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and others.  He reviewed Soviet and Maoist works, and sat in on meetings of the Mexican Communist Party.  He updated and polished up his notebooks.  Che was one of about forty in Fidel’s band.  They studied and trained together; nobody worked harder than Che.  His girlfriend, Hilda, got pregnant; they married and had a daughter whom Che called, “my little Mao.”

Fidel’s band found a boat to make a landing in the Cuban semi-wilderness known as the Sierra Maestra in December, 1956.  For all the verbiage spent about the noble peasants of the Sierra Maestra, Fidel and Che knew nothing of their hearts, minds, or their daily lives.  (Nothing changes about the Left.  From Marx to today’s Democrats, socialists neither know nor care about the individuals they lust to rule over.)  They had to tread carefully.  Joined by local rebels, a long and bloody adventure unfolded over the next two years.

Hilda received a letter from Che in January, 1957.  She was sick with worry, of course, and could not have been encouraged by Che’s accounts of having a rousing adventure, enjoying life as an unwashed, cigar-smoking, “bloodthirsty” guerrilla.  In his letter he asked nothing about his wife’s travails.

In the battles to come, Che was brave, even reckless, and hated cowards, eager to deliver punishment as an example to others.  Deserters were executed.  He was also eager to execute civilians who cooperated with the Cuban army.  The peasants, therefore, were caught between two implacable enemies.

Fidel wanted to avoid confrontation with the U.S. until after he had seized power.  He courted American media, even writing a column avowing that he was in favor of free markets and foreign investment and against nationalization.  He painted a rosy picture of a provisional government replacing Batista that would consist of middle-class professionals.  Fidel agreed with Hitler:  the bigger the lie, the more likely it would be believed.

Che was asked by an Argentine journalist why he was fighting in a land not his own.  Che replied that he considered his fatherland to be all of America, offering his blood “to help a people liberate themselves from tyranny.”  This is beyond ironic for a committed communist.

During the last weeks of 1958 as Fidel’s rebels took control over the country, Che acquired a lover, Aleida.  A few months later he divorced Hilda and married Aleida.

Che’s fame increased dramatically when the foremost Cuban poet, a communist in exile in Buenos Aires, published a poem comparing Che to the famous South American “Liberator” of the 19^th century, Jose de San Martin.  American officials in their embassy in Havana, however, saw him as the fearsome Rasputin of the new regime.

Che oversaw the show trial process which resulted in the execution of hundreds of people attached to the former regime.  Raul, notoriously, directed a mass execution of seventy captured soldiers, bulldozing a trench, lining them up, and machine-gunning them down.  There were no good guys, anywhere.  Batista’s regime was vicious and tyrannical, merely replaced by communists who exceeded his ruthlessness.  One can draw a parallel with the Russian czar and the Bolsheviks who replaced him.

In January 1959 Che laid out his vision for the future in a speech in a Havana conference, envisioning violent uprisings throughout Latin America, and beyond to the rest of the world.  These would not be Marxist-inspired uprisings of a proletariat, but rather Maoist-like rebel bands.  He believed he and Fidel had “demonstrated that a small group of men supported by the people and without fear of dying can overcome a disciplined regular army and defeat it . . . to make agrarian revolutions, to fight in the fields, in the mountains, and from there to the cities.”  The chief enemy to overcome would always be the United States.  “Today, all the people of Cuba are on a war footing and should remain so.”

This summary, as I see it, is what lies behind the symbolism of the Che t-shirts, whether witting or unwitting:  a love for violent destruction of the present order in favor of communist dictatorships in which the young rebel must see himself as part of a new ruling elite; all of this coupled to a hatred of the United States and its founding principles – a nation under God, promoting individual freedom, responsibility, and biblical morality.  In short, Che and his admirers are simple-minded minions of the ultimate rebel, Satan, who despises all true virtue and every good thing that God would provide His image-bearers.

Che’s focus on agrarian-based, violent revolution as opposed to a theoretical urban-based proletariat uprising, puts him much more in sync with Mao than with Marx, more sympathetic to the Chinese over the Soviet model.  The Soviets would worry about this at times, recognizing that Che would love to see a Soviet war against the U.S. to take them down quickly, enabling revolutions to spread more easily.  Fidel and Raul, along with the Soviets, were much more cautious about stirring up the U.S., always worried about holding onto what they had already stolen.

Like today’s leftists, Che despised free speech and freedom of the press.  He stated that press freedom in Guatemala had been a principal cause of the socialist regime’s fall there.  Accordingly, he insisted that such freedoms should be restricted in Cuba.

Che toured the world, representing the Cuban government, hobnobbing with communist leaders and seeking economic support for Cuba.  Fidel appointed Che to lead industrial development in Cuba, about which the young rebel knew less than nothing – Marxist presuppositions always point you in the wrong direction.  Communes rather than property ownership of small businesses, for example; sugar plantations and cattle ranches would become state-run cooperatives.  Seizure of American-owned properties was eagerly embraced and educational curricula were to be state-designed, including at the university level.

Eventually, Che determined to establish and even lead foreign revolutionary adventures.  Fidel and Raul were glad to see their zealous comrade leave.  Che organized a band to stir up trouble in northern Argentina.  That failed miserably.  He traveled to the Congo to help start trouble there.  That failed, too, and he was forced to flee for his life.  Finally, he led a band in Bolivia, where he was soon caught and executed by the Bolivian army.  He was buried in a secret location to inhibit efforts to make him a martyr and enshrine him, as was done with Lenin.

An ignominious end at the age of 39 for a demonically-influenced (if not possessed), wasted life.

I recently read a summary comparison of Communism and Christianity published by S. Michael Houdmann in the Sept. 3, 2024 newsletter of The Berean Call.  I’ll briefly encapsule his summary . . .

Marxism is about the material; Christianity focuses on the spiritual.  Communism puts the material first; indeed, it is determinedly atheistic.  Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount taught that we should put God’s kingdom and His righteousness first, and God will provide the less important material necessities.  Yes, we have to work, but we are to do so fairly and wisely, and God will bless our efforts.

Marxism is utopian, insisting that man is perfectible and can perfect society.  The Bible teaches, in sync with reality, that men are sinful, and that repentance and faith in Christ produce forgiveness, humility, and foster love and respect for one another.  We must always be on guard against temptations – greed, lust, laziness – and must build institutions that distribute power; for example, America’s 3-branch government and federalist system that distributes power all the way down to local communities.  People cannot be trusted with too much power!

The protection of private property recognizes man’s desire to work hard if it benefits himself and his family.  Marxist collectivism destroys motivation and morale, as has been demonstrated many times throughout history.  The rule of law, specifically the biblical admonition that the rich should not be favored over the poor with respect to law, prevents corruption.  A centralized Communist Party facilitates complete corruption.

Finally, I’ll mention that if you’re looking for heroes to admire, review the list in Hebrews chapter 11.  Those are examples meant for Christians to emulate, if need be.  Some of those heroes were martyrs, of course.  Yet their cause was just.  Che’s wasn’t.  If martyrdom is not imminent for you, use your time to send treasure on ahead to Heaven.  Share the Gospel.  Give away a Gospel tract.  Then another.  Encourage a Christian.  Love your wife.  Teach your children.  Make your life count for good.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com