Exposing the Real Che Guevara Read Online Free PDF

Americans know that the famous icon photo was actually spiked by the Castro regime when it was first scheduled to run in Cuba’s official paper, Revolución . Che’s image could have overshadowed the Maximum Leader’s at the time. In its place they ran a photo of Fidel sitting and chatting with two of his famous fans, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
    Castro, better than even his chums Ted Turner and Robert Redford, always understood the power of imagery. Since his high-school days, Castro was a keen student of Nazi pageantry. The official colors of Castro’s July 26 Movement’s flag and armbands are black and red with a splash of white, identical to the Nazi flag and armband. Coincidence? Perhaps.
    Seven years after Korda’s photo shoot, when Che was safely “sleeping with the fishes” and could pose no threat to the Maximum Leader, Castro dusted off The Picture and started plastering it all over Cuba. He called the international media with a sharp whistle and said, fetch. The result is the most reproduced and idolized print of the century.
    As his former comrades could have told you, “Fidel Castro only praises the dead.”
    Castro knows the continuing power of Che, and how to appropriate it for himself. According to UCLA professor David Kunzle, “There is no figure in 20th Century history that has produced such a body of fascinating, varied and compelling imagery as Che Guevara.” 7
    Here, at long last, we encounter a truth about Che—and, as we shall learn, a truth about Fidel. Several men who were Castro’s political prisoners in 1967 have revealed to me that their prison guards finally displayed that now-famous Che poster the week before Guevara was captured and killed. Fidel wasn’t exactly surprised by the news of Che’s death, having created the conditions for his death in Bolivia. He then oversaw and personally sold the media blitz for a martyred friend.
    And so today The Picture adorns T-shirts, posters, watches, skis, lava lamps, skateboards, surfboards, baseball caps, beer-huggers, lighters, Rage Against the Machine CDs, and vodka bottles. Last year supermodel Gisele Bundchen took to the catwalk in skimpy underwear stamped with Che’s face. Burlington put out a line of infant wear bearing Che’s face. Taco Bell dressed up its Chihuahua spokesdog like Che for its “Taco Revolution” ad campaign. “We wanted a heroic leader to make it a massive taco revolution!” says Taco Bell’s advertising director, Chuck Bennett. (This tribute, perhaps, is comic enough to be appropriate—as long as consumers can keep from thinking about how Che treated real dogs.) The TV shows South Park and The Simpsons have lampooned Che T-shirt wearers. Omar Sharif and Antonio Banderas have played Che in movies. Under the pseudonym John Blackthorn, Gary Hart wrote a novel titled I, Che Guevara . A video game, Guerrilla War, plays on Che’s (utterly bogus) military exploits.
    Ignorance, of course, accounts for much Che idolatry. But so do mendacity and wishful thinking, all of it boosted—covertly and overtly—by reflexive anti-Americanism. This book will expose you to many eyewitness accounts of Che Guevara’s cruelty, cowardice, and imbecility. The deeper investigation will be why he continues to receive so much adoration from media leftists and celebrities in the twenty-first century.
    This book will succeed in some degree, however, if it merely prompts Angelina Jolie to question if her tattoos, as her website claims, are really “a reflection of her personality.” If this is so, then Brad Pitt had better start watching his back.

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    New York Fetes the Godfather of Terrorism
    On the evening of December 11, 1964, Che was decked out in a long trench coat, his trademark beret with the red star cocked at a jaunty angle as he strode toward the United Nations to address the General Assembly. Security was tight for the event and cops swarmed on the scene. Cuban exiles infested nearby New Jersey and many were on