In 1960, shortly after the successful communist revolution in Cuba, the architect Nicolas Quintana sought out Che Guevara (Fidel\u2019s #2, after Raul) to complain.\u00a0 Quintana\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Che responded, \u201cLook, revolutions are ugly but necessary, and part of the revolutionary process is justice at the service of future justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quintana objected that this was just Thomas More\u2019s Utopia<\/em>; anything could be justified now for the sake of future\u00a0 justice.\u00a0 Che stared at him for a while, then said, \u201cSo.\u00a0 You don\u2019t believe in the future of the revolution . . . You have three choices:\u00a0 You leave Cuba and there\u2019s no problem from me; or thirty years in prison, or the firing squad.\u201d\u00a0 Quintana fled the island.<\/p>\n I pulled this anecdote from John Lee Anderson\u2019s 2010 book, Che Guevara:\u00a0 A Revolutionary Life<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve long wondered who this character, Che, really was.\u00a0 Clearly, he is universally admired by leftists \u2013 no one in history has adorned more t-shirts.\u00a0 But why?\u00a0 Let\u2019s pull some nuggets from this thick biography.<\/p>\n Ernesto Guevara (Che was an acquired nickname), 1928 \u2013 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is difficult to find any virtue in his life, unless you find virtue attached to bloody communist revolutions.<\/p>\n Fidel and Che shared much in common:\u00a0 Both were from large families and spoiled, careless about personal appearance, and sexually voracious.\u00a0 Relationships were subordinated to personal ambition.\u00a0 Both were rich in Latin machismo, believed in the weakness of women, admired bravery and men of action, and despised homosexuals.\u00a0 Both possessed iron wills and a strong sense of destiny.\u00a0 Both desired to lead a revolution and both saw the United States as their chief obstacle and enemy.<\/p>\n Differences?\u00a0 Fidel grew up as the leader of his peers, excelling in sports and student politics.\u00a0 He admired Julius Caesar, Robespierre, and Napoleon.\u00a0 He lied artfully.\u00a0 Che saw politics as a means for social change, not caring for personal power, per se.\u00a0 His ego was large, but not as enormous as Fidel\u2019s.\u00a0 Che recognized his physical shortcomings, his asthma and short, slight stature.\u00a0 Che was content to listen while Fidel relished pulpit thumping.<\/p>\n Che admitted that he was a natural loner, but with \u201ca sense of my historic duty.\u201d\u00a0 He only considered friends to be those who agreed with him politically.\u00a0 He felt his gift to be the ability to influence others; he had no fear because of \u201can abolutely fatalistic sense of my mission.\u201d\u00a0 In a letter to his parents:\u00a0 \u201cWe are the future and we know it, we build with happiness although we have forgotten individual affections.\u201d<\/p>\n We see a thread common to Marxists for the last 150 years.\u00a0 They profess to care deeply for humanity, but despise individuals; in fact, will happily crush individuals if necessary to achieve their goals.\u00a0 Even as a medical doctor he had little interest in individual patients; he dreamed of finding cures or preventatives for the masses.\u00a0 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\u2019s ills was Marxism-Leninism and that guerrilla warfare was the way to achieve Utopia.\u00a0 He argued that armed struggle would produce socialism which would lead to the end of injustice and the creation of a new man.<\/p>\n One of his comrades, Julia, observed that Che seemed to have respect only for \u201cthe dispossessed, a hungry worker, a malnourished peasant.\u00a0 Even his parents didn\u2019t seem to merit the same respect.\u201d\u00a0 Che did not even provide funds for his parents to travel from Argentina to visit him in Cuba.<\/p>\n Yet Julia reported a magnetism about Che \u2013 \u201cWhen he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.\u201d\u00a0 Women found him charming, attracted in part by his asthmatic vulnerability, but also by his intensity and looks.<\/p>\n The Russians saw Che as the true ideologue of the Cuban revolution, that \u201cin 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.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cPeaceful coexistence\u201d was anathema to Che.\u00a0 Fidel, on the other hand, wanted to consolidate his hold on Cuba and insure his own political survival.\u00a0 Ultimately, this led Che to leave Cuba for foreign revolutionary adventures.<\/p>\n Anderson, the biographer, reports that Ernesto\u2019s father was never able to discipline his eldest son and his mother never tried.\u00a0 To escape punishment, the boy would run off into the countryside until the parents were so worried they neglected the original offense.\u00a0 Accordingly, the young Che grew ever more wild and disobedient.\u00a0 How much trouble the world may have been spared if certain parents had lovingly disciplined their children!\u00a0 How much of the current woke madness, whining, and anger might have been prevented by parents raising their children properly?<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 He once threw firecrackers through an open window into a neighbor\u2019s formal dinner party.<\/p>\n Ernesto\u2019s father was a serial adulterer, adding to the family\u2019s misery.\u00a0 His paternal grandmother was an atheist.\u00a0 Mom was a nominal Catholic, and a voracious reader of fiction, philosophy, and poetry, stimulating her son\u2019s varied interests.\u00a0 It does matter what you expose your children to.\u00a0 In his youth he tried reading Marx and Engels, but admitted later that he didn\u2019t understand it.\u00a0 At age 17 during a course he took in philosophy, he began writing his own \u201cphilosophical dictionary,\u201d 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.\u00a0 Future notebooks skipped Hitler and focused on Marx, Engels, and Lenin.<\/p>\n Yes, it makes a difference in what young minds are immersed.<\/p>\n Later, at the age of 37, Che copied a portion of a book on Lenin which described him as one who \u201clived, breathed, and slept\u201d socialist revolution and sacrificed everything to its cause.\u00a0 This is much the way that Che\u2019s comrades described him.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t see American foreign policy as merely bumbling and inconsistent, but as sinister and well-designed for evil and exploitation.<\/p>\n Che was tone-deaf to music and had to work hard to learn how to dance.\u00a0 A close friend confessed that \u201cdancing didn\u2019t interest Che in the slightest.\u201d\u00a0 But he was a relentless seducer of girls and dancing helped him get close to his prey.<\/p>\n As a young man Che traveled around South America with a friend.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Other strikers had been murdered.\u00a0 Now he could find work only in a dangerous sulfur mine, he expected.<\/p>\n Che wrote in his journal that the couple \u201cwere a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t 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\u00a0 cold, but it was also the time when I felt a little more fraternity with this, for me, strange human species.\u201d<\/p>\n In Peru he was disgusted at the tourists:\u00a0 \u201cblond, camera-toting, sport-shirted correspondents from another world . . . ignorant of the moral distance separating them from the living remnants of the fallen (Incan) people.\u201d\u00a0 He was aggravated that the Incan ruins had been stripped of anything valuable, such treasures long since relocated to museums in North America.\u00a0 He felt connected to the conquered indigenous races, whose ancestors were put to the knife by Che\u2019s forebears.<\/p>\n Che\u2019s attitudes were typical of leftists past and present \u2013 self-righteous, self-absorbed, talking much but helping little or not at all, ultimately fostering bloody revolutions to bring in supposedly enlightened governments.\u00a0 The Marxist sees all problems as requiring government solutions.\u00a0 A biblical worldview sees all problems as resulting from the sins of individuals.\u00a0 Repentance, trust in Christ, and obedience to God\u2019s laws, seeing God\u2019s laws as the blueprint of reality for God\u2019s image-bearers \u2013 this is the only path to real solutions.\u00a0 This, of course, won\u2019t be realized on any large scale until the Millennium.<\/p>\n He became \u201cDr. Ernesto Guevara\u201d at 25, in 1953, but declined to accept steady employment in a clinic conducting allergy research.\u00a0 He and two friends set out on another road trip.\u00a0 Guatemala beckoned, where a socialist government resisted influence by the U.S. and a huge American business, the United Fruit Company.<\/p>\n In Guatemala Che met a mysterious stranger who \u2018prophesied\u2019 that Che would have a bloody, yet glorious future in revolution and die for the cause.\u00a0 Che embraced this vision:\u00a0 \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0 Not many 25-year-olds are so thoroughly possessed, and I mean that literally.<\/p>\n In Guatemala he picked up his famous nickname, Che<\/em>, which Argentinians might translate as \u201cHey, you.\u201d\u00a0 (I\u2019m underwhelmed.)\u00a0 He spent considerable time talking with his friends and local leftists about political theory, but \u2018talk\u2019 was his primary activity while the CIA worked to undermine the recalcitrant government.\u00a0 Che had to engage in some physical labor to earn some cash, on a road construction crew, but found he really disliked that.<\/p>\n When American mercenaries crossed the Honduran border, Che found he was thrilled and awed by the violence.\u00a0 Planes bombed and machine-gunned both military and civilian targets.\u00a0 Che helped out in a medical brigade and in joining some night patrols.\u00a0 When the mercenaries won, though, Che managed to cross the Mexican border, headed for Mexico City.<\/p>\n In letters home, Che expressed frustration that he had not done enough to help the revolution in Guatemala, confessing:\u00a0 \u201cI am a complete bum and I don\u2019t feel like having my career interrupted by an iron discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 During this period, at age 26, he decided to commit fully to being a Communist.\u00a0 He ran into Raul Castro, finding a deep ideological connection.\u00a0 Both were committed to the use of war, not elections, to gain power and transform society wholly to socialism.\u00a0 Fidel soon joined them and after much discussion invited Che to join his guerrilla movement.\u00a0 Che accepted immediately.\u00a0 He would serve officially as their doctor.<\/p>\n Fidel\u2019s 1955 Manifesto #1 promised the restoration of democracy and justice in Cuba.\u00a0 It was a call to turn Cuba into a modern, humane society.\u00a0 (It\u2019s 2025 now . . . it sure is taking a long time to reach that goal.)\u00a0 The details included distributing land to the peasants, nationalization of public services, ambitious housing, education, and industrial programs, yada yada yada.<\/p>\n Che consumed texts on economics, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and others.\u00a0 He reviewed Soviet and Maoist works, and sat in on meetings of the Mexican Communist Party.\u00a0 He updated and polished up his notebooks.\u00a0 Che was one of about forty in Fidel\u2019s band.\u00a0 They studied and trained together; nobody worked harder than Che.\u00a0 His girlfriend, Hilda, got pregnant; they married and had a daughter whom Che called, \u201cmy little Mao.\u201d<\/p>\n Fidel\u2019s band found a boat to make a landing in the Cuban semi-wilderness known as the Sierra Maestra in December, 1956.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (Nothing changes about the Left.\u00a0 From Marx to today\u2019s Democrats, socialists neither know nor care about the individuals they lust to rule over.)\u00a0 They had to tread carefully.\u00a0 Joined by local rebels, a long and bloody adventure unfolded over the next two years.<\/p>\n Hilda received a letter from Che in January, 1957.\u00a0 She was sick with worry, of course, and could not have been encouraged by Che\u2019s accounts of having a rousing adventure, enjoying life as an unwashed, cigar-smoking, \u201cbloodthirsty\u201d guerrilla.\u00a0 In his letter he asked nothing about his wife\u2019s travails.<\/p>\n In the battles to come, Che was brave, even reckless, and hated cowards, eager to deliver punishment as an example to others.\u00a0 Deserters were executed.\u00a0 He was also eager to execute civilians who cooperated with the Cuban army.\u00a0 The peasants, therefore, were caught between two implacable enemies.<\/p>\n Fidel wanted to avoid confrontation with the U.S. until after he had seized power.\u00a0 He courted American media, even writing a column avowing that he was in favor of free markets and foreign investment and against nationalization.\u00a0 He painted a rosy picture of a provisional government replacing Batista that would consist of middle-class professionals.\u00a0 Fidel agreed with Hitler:\u00a0 the bigger the lie, the more likely it would be believed.<\/p>\n Che was asked by an Argentine journalist why he was fighting in a land not his own.\u00a0 Che replied that he considered his fatherland to be all of America, offering his blood \u201cto help a people liberate themselves from tyranny.\u201d\u00a0 This is beyond ironic for a committed communist.<\/p>\n During the last weeks of 1958 as Fidel\u2019s rebels took control over the country, Che acquired a lover, Aleida.\u00a0 A few months later he divorced Hilda and married Aleida.<\/p>\n Che\u2019s 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 \u201cLiberator\u201d of the 19th<\/sup> century, Jose de San Martin.\u00a0 American officials in their embassy in Havana, however, saw him as the fearsome Rasputin of the new regime.<\/p>\n Che oversaw the show trial process which resulted in the execution of hundreds of people attached to the former regime.\u00a0 Raul, notoriously, directed a mass execution of seventy captured soldiers, bulldozing a trench, lining them up, and machine-gunning them down.\u00a0 There were no good guys, anywhere.\u00a0 Batista\u2019s regime was vicious and tyrannical, merely replaced by communists who exceeded his ruthlessness.\u00a0 One can draw a parallel with the Russian czar and the Bolsheviks who replaced him.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 These would not be Marxist-inspired uprisings of a proletariat, but rather Maoist-like rebel bands.\u00a0 He believed he and Fidel had \u201cdemonstrated 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.\u201d\u00a0 The chief enemy to overcome would always be the United States.\u00a0 \u201cToday, all the people of Cuba are on a war footing and should remain so.\u201d<\/p>\n This summary, as I see it, is what lies behind the symbolism of the Che t-shirts, whether witting or unwitting:\u00a0 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 \u2013 a nation under God, promoting individual freedom, responsibility, and biblical morality.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Che\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Like today\u2019s leftists, Che despised free speech and freedom of the press.\u00a0 He stated that press freedom in Guatemala had been a principal cause of the socialist regime\u2019s fall there.\u00a0 Accordingly, he insisted that such freedoms should be restricted in Cuba.<\/p>\n Che toured the world, representing the Cuban government, hobnobbing with communist leaders and seeking economic support for Cuba.\u00a0 Fidel appointed Che to lead industrial development in Cuba, about which the young rebel knew less than nothing \u2013 Marxist presuppositions always point you in the wrong direction.\u00a0 Communes rather than property ownership of small businesses, for example; sugar plantations and cattle ranches would become state-run cooperatives.\u00a0 Seizure of American-owned properties was eagerly embraced and educational curricula were to be state-designed, including at the university level.<\/p>\n Eventually, Che determined to establish and even lead foreign revolutionary adventures.\u00a0 Fidel and Raul were glad to see their zealous comrade leave.\u00a0 Che organized a band to stir up trouble in northern Argentina.\u00a0 That failed miserably.\u00a0 He traveled to the Congo to help start trouble there.\u00a0 That failed, too, and he was forced to flee for his life.\u00a0 Finally, he led a band in Bolivia, where he was soon caught and executed by the Bolivian army.\u00a0 He was buried in a secret location to inhibit efforts to make him a martyr and enshrine him, as was done with Lenin.<\/p>\n An ignominious end at the age of 39 for a demonically-influenced (if not possessed), wasted life.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll briefly encapsule his summary . . .<\/p>\n Marxism is about the material; Christianity focuses on the spiritual.\u00a0 Communism puts the material first; indeed, it is determinedly atheistic.\u00a0 Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount taught that we should put God\u2019s kingdom and His righteousness first, and God will provide the less important material necessities.\u00a0 Yes, we have to work, but we are to do so fairly and wisely, and God will bless our efforts.<\/p>\n Marxism is utopian, insisting that man is perfectible and can perfect society.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We must always be on guard against temptations \u2013 greed, lust, laziness \u2013 and must build institutions that distribute power; for example, America\u2019s 3-branch government and federalist system that distributes power all the way down to local communities.\u00a0 People cannot be trusted with too much power!<\/p>\n The protection of private property recognizes man\u2019s desire to work hard if it benefits himself and his family.\u00a0 Marxist collectivism destroys motivation and morale, as has been demonstrated many times throughout history.\u00a0 The rule of law, specifically the biblical admonition that the rich should not be favored over the poor with respect to law, prevents corruption.\u00a0 A centralized Communist Party facilitates complete corruption.<\/p>\n Finally, I\u2019ll mention that if you\u2019re looking for heroes to admire, review the list in Hebrews chapter 11.\u00a0 Those are examples meant for Christians to emulate, if need be.\u00a0 Some of those heroes were martyrs, of course.\u00a0 Yet their cause was just.\u00a0 Che\u2019s wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 If martyrdom is not imminent for you, use your time to send treasure on ahead to Heaven.\u00a0 Share the Gospel.\u00a0 Give away a Gospel tract. \u00a0Then another.\u00a0 Encourage a Christian.\u00a0 Love your wife.\u00a0 Teach your children.\u00a0 Make your life count for good.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1960, shortly after the successful communist revolution in Cuba, the architect Nicolas Quintana sought out Che Guevara (Fidel\u2019s #2, after Raul) to complain.\u00a0 Quintana\u2019s 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, \u201cLook, revolutions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":1186,"menu_order":424,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4266","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4266"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4268,"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4266\/revisions\/4268"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/truthreallymatters.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n