The capitalist right wing is the primary architect of this carefully woven lie that Ernesto "Che" Guevara was some cold blooded killer, but there are many on the so-called "white left" who have also aided and abetted this reactionary narrative about a great revolutionary.
The basis of this lie is that Che supposedly ordered the murders of thousands of innocent people immediately after the victory of the Cuban revolution. Reactionary former Cubans (white people) in Florida, allied with the traditional capitalist right wing and liberal bourgeois, have fomented this lie in their consistent attempt to discredit the legitimacy of Guevara, Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Kwame Ture, Mao Tse Tung, Nguyen Al Thoc (Ho Chi Minh), Huey P. Newton, Kim Il Sung, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Qaddafi, and countless legitimate revolutionaries. Their intentions and benefits should be obvious. By discrediting revolutionaries, they discredit revolution which keeps you and I firmly within their control. The so-called white left's eagerness to embrace these lies is unfortunately also not difficult to understand. And, to be clear, when we say white left, we mean anyone of any nationality who accepts the logic of white supremacy in evaluating the revolutionary processes carried out by revolutionaries of color or on behalf of brown folks. What I mean is in order to properly judge these revolutions in the correct historical context, these revolutions can only really be judged by one thing. Did they improve the conditions of the majority of people who these revolutions were designed and carried out to uplift? This question cannot be confused with whether the leaders of these revolutions were perfect and/or whether their revolutionary processes were without contradictions. We know that Sekou Ture was correct when he said "the only people who don't make mistakes are people who don't do anything." The so-called white anarchist communities are famous for being completely confused about this one. They have no appreciable body of work as it relates to eliminating capitalist oppression of brown people on any large and consistent level anywhere on earth, but that does nothing to stop them from striking out against every single perceived error by legitimate revolutionaries. What a wonderful set up. You can believe a so-called ideology that permits you to disconnect from humanity and use that cowardice as some sort of front for an ideological and programmatic thrust to confront oppression while supposedly freeing you up to criticize every effort anyone has made, sincere or not, to organize people into a productive and collective society that isn't based on capitalist principles and practices. Don't get it twisted. I'm not against anarchism. I'm just against you. There are plenty of legitimate and genuine anarchists who are doing good work. And because they are doing good work, they understand the sacrifices of these revolutionaries I'm mentioning and they certainly respect their contributions to eliminating oppression despite their mistakes. Then there are the brown folks who accept the lies because their vision of revolutions in the countries of their birth are so clouded by personal trauma that they unwittingly accept imperialism's version of history. And, I don't say that being insensitive to their suffering. My family came through the middle passage of slavery and segregation in the Southern U.S. so I'm certainly cognizant of that trauma, but if you are in the U.S. today as a Vietnamese person for example, since I'm a student of history, you are going to have to come to me much stronger than just you are against Ho Chi Minh because something happened to some of your family members while he was alive. We would have to talk about what your family was doing? Who they represented? Just because its your family doesn't mean they were on the right side of history. And it also doesn't mean that young and new revolutionary parties are not going to make errors. Serious errors. It would be great if every struggle could be carried out with perfection, but that's not reality and every true organizer knows that. To look at single incidents and use them to discredit a process that has clearly done significant things to improve conditions for millions of people is unscientific and an assist to imperialism's efforts to discredit revolutionary struggle whether that's the intention or not. So, to summarize this section, I'm not against revolutionary anarchism, I'm against bourgeois anarchism that is actually soaked in white supremacy. I'm also not immune to the cries, sometimes with merit, against the people who have critiques of the Cuban, Vietnamese, etc., revolutions. I'm questioning how they use what happened to their families, without any context and/or analysis, to discredit a revolution that impacts an entire population.
So, back to Che Guevara and what I mean by lies. I challenge anyone to demonstrate where Che had anything to do with any thousands of people dying in Cuba. In fact, I challenge anyone to show where Fidel or anyone else since the 1959 revolution had anything to do with any mass killing of this nature because despite what FOX, CBS, CIA, BBC, and all the other imperialist networks are pumping, there has never been any such thing in Cuba since the revolution. Cuba has one of the lowest state execution and imprisonment records in the world. So, when people call Che a mass murderer what they are referring to, in an alternative fact e.g. straight up lie sort of way - is the La Habana trials that took place in 1959/1960, immediately after the victory of the revolution. You have to realize that the people of Cuba, furious about the suffering they endured under the Batista regime, with the full support of the U.S. government, for years, wanted any and everyone even remotely connected to Batista to be murdered immediately. Actually, people were out hunting for these people and whomever they found was subjected to street justice. To prevent this from continuing, the new revolutionary Cuban government dispatched Che, who was newly appointed as the Minister of the Interior, to the La Habana stadium to oversee hundreds of trials for these people. Note that his roll was to oversee the trials which were actually administered by the people involved in the legal processes of revolutionary Cuba. So in truth, he didn't order the execution of anybody. And, if you study the history, as I have, you would know that every international monitoring agency reported that had Che not served in that roll, hundreds more people who were innocent would have been killed. Instead, the reports are that at most, a couple of hundred of people may have been tried and executed unduly through this process, but again, with the fervor of the time, this should be viewed as a positive by the government and not a strike against it. Especially since the government acknowledged their errors in every instance that they were able to confirm them and they compensated the families to the best of their ability. So, to ignore all of the true history around La Habana while labeling Che with this killer mantle is historically criminal. If you objectively evaluate Che's role in La Habana, his role as a military commander in the Cuban revolution, the Congolese mission in 1964, Bolivia in 1966 and 1967, and the role he played in establishing Cuba's military presence in Africa, this man unquestionably saved millions of lives. He placed his body in harms way to defend people, brown people, and he ultimately lost his life doing just that while his critics haven't risked a hang nail or a pimple for any brown people anywhere.
So, this is why millions of people turned out in 1997 when the Bolivian government was finally pressured into returning Che's remains to Cuba, 30 years after they brutally murdered him. Its also why several million Cuban's marched and expressed their extreme sorrow at the loss of Fidel Castro just a few months ago, but who are we, the people at the very bottom of capitalism's oppression, to question the unshakable correctness of the white left and right? Of course we expect nothing different from the right wing, but to you so-called revolutionaries who purport this nonsense, with friends like you we don't need enemies. All you do is revise a saying an old comrade said in the 80s: "Left or right, still white!"
The haters won't listen because they never do, but to everyone else, this should hopefully help you understand why the masses of oppressed people, who are not stupid, love Che and Fidel. And nothing the white left says or does will ever change that. And for those who would read this and call me racist, please make note that Che was without question a White man. And, I'm unquestionably defending him. Oh, and Fidel was White too by the way, but unlike some of you, we love and respect people based on what they have done, not who they are or how we subjectively perceive them.
The basis of this lie is that Che supposedly ordered the murders of thousands of innocent people immediately after the victory of the Cuban revolution. Reactionary former Cubans (white people) in Florida, allied with the traditional capitalist right wing and liberal bourgeois, have fomented this lie in their consistent attempt to discredit the legitimacy of Guevara, Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Kwame Ture, Mao Tse Tung, Nguyen Al Thoc (Ho Chi Minh), Huey P. Newton, Kim Il Sung, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Qaddafi, and countless legitimate revolutionaries. Their intentions and benefits should be obvious. By discrediting revolutionaries, they discredit revolution which keeps you and I firmly within their control. The so-called white left's eagerness to embrace these lies is unfortunately also not difficult to understand. And, to be clear, when we say white left, we mean anyone of any nationality who accepts the logic of white supremacy in evaluating the revolutionary processes carried out by revolutionaries of color or on behalf of brown folks. What I mean is in order to properly judge these revolutions in the correct historical context, these revolutions can only really be judged by one thing. Did they improve the conditions of the majority of people who these revolutions were designed and carried out to uplift? This question cannot be confused with whether the leaders of these revolutions were perfect and/or whether their revolutionary processes were without contradictions. We know that Sekou Ture was correct when he said "the only people who don't make mistakes are people who don't do anything." The so-called white anarchist communities are famous for being completely confused about this one. They have no appreciable body of work as it relates to eliminating capitalist oppression of brown people on any large and consistent level anywhere on earth, but that does nothing to stop them from striking out against every single perceived error by legitimate revolutionaries. What a wonderful set up. You can believe a so-called ideology that permits you to disconnect from humanity and use that cowardice as some sort of front for an ideological and programmatic thrust to confront oppression while supposedly freeing you up to criticize every effort anyone has made, sincere or not, to organize people into a productive and collective society that isn't based on capitalist principles and practices. Don't get it twisted. I'm not against anarchism. I'm just against you. There are plenty of legitimate and genuine anarchists who are doing good work. And because they are doing good work, they understand the sacrifices of these revolutionaries I'm mentioning and they certainly respect their contributions to eliminating oppression despite their mistakes. Then there are the brown folks who accept the lies because their vision of revolutions in the countries of their birth are so clouded by personal trauma that they unwittingly accept imperialism's version of history. And, I don't say that being insensitive to their suffering. My family came through the middle passage of slavery and segregation in the Southern U.S. so I'm certainly cognizant of that trauma, but if you are in the U.S. today as a Vietnamese person for example, since I'm a student of history, you are going to have to come to me much stronger than just you are against Ho Chi Minh because something happened to some of your family members while he was alive. We would have to talk about what your family was doing? Who they represented? Just because its your family doesn't mean they were on the right side of history. And it also doesn't mean that young and new revolutionary parties are not going to make errors. Serious errors. It would be great if every struggle could be carried out with perfection, but that's not reality and every true organizer knows that. To look at single incidents and use them to discredit a process that has clearly done significant things to improve conditions for millions of people is unscientific and an assist to imperialism's efforts to discredit revolutionary struggle whether that's the intention or not. So, to summarize this section, I'm not against revolutionary anarchism, I'm against bourgeois anarchism that is actually soaked in white supremacy. I'm also not immune to the cries, sometimes with merit, against the people who have critiques of the Cuban, Vietnamese, etc., revolutions. I'm questioning how they use what happened to their families, without any context and/or analysis, to discredit a revolution that impacts an entire population.
So, back to Che Guevara and what I mean by lies. I challenge anyone to demonstrate where Che had anything to do with any thousands of people dying in Cuba. In fact, I challenge anyone to show where Fidel or anyone else since the 1959 revolution had anything to do with any mass killing of this nature because despite what FOX, CBS, CIA, BBC, and all the other imperialist networks are pumping, there has never been any such thing in Cuba since the revolution. Cuba has one of the lowest state execution and imprisonment records in the world. So, when people call Che a mass murderer what they are referring to, in an alternative fact e.g. straight up lie sort of way - is the La Habana trials that took place in 1959/1960, immediately after the victory of the revolution. You have to realize that the people of Cuba, furious about the suffering they endured under the Batista regime, with the full support of the U.S. government, for years, wanted any and everyone even remotely connected to Batista to be murdered immediately. Actually, people were out hunting for these people and whomever they found was subjected to street justice. To prevent this from continuing, the new revolutionary Cuban government dispatched Che, who was newly appointed as the Minister of the Interior, to the La Habana stadium to oversee hundreds of trials for these people. Note that his roll was to oversee the trials which were actually administered by the people involved in the legal processes of revolutionary Cuba. So in truth, he didn't order the execution of anybody. And, if you study the history, as I have, you would know that every international monitoring agency reported that had Che not served in that roll, hundreds more people who were innocent would have been killed. Instead, the reports are that at most, a couple of hundred of people may have been tried and executed unduly through this process, but again, with the fervor of the time, this should be viewed as a positive by the government and not a strike against it. Especially since the government acknowledged their errors in every instance that they were able to confirm them and they compensated the families to the best of their ability. So, to ignore all of the true history around La Habana while labeling Che with this killer mantle is historically criminal. If you objectively evaluate Che's role in La Habana, his role as a military commander in the Cuban revolution, the Congolese mission in 1964, Bolivia in 1966 and 1967, and the role he played in establishing Cuba's military presence in Africa, this man unquestionably saved millions of lives. He placed his body in harms way to defend people, brown people, and he ultimately lost his life doing just that while his critics haven't risked a hang nail or a pimple for any brown people anywhere.
So, this is why millions of people turned out in 1997 when the Bolivian government was finally pressured into returning Che's remains to Cuba, 30 years after they brutally murdered him. Its also why several million Cuban's marched and expressed their extreme sorrow at the loss of Fidel Castro just a few months ago, but who are we, the people at the very bottom of capitalism's oppression, to question the unshakable correctness of the white left and right? Of course we expect nothing different from the right wing, but to you so-called revolutionaries who purport this nonsense, with friends like you we don't need enemies. All you do is revise a saying an old comrade said in the 80s: "Left or right, still white!"
The haters won't listen because they never do, but to everyone else, this should hopefully help you understand why the masses of oppressed people, who are not stupid, love Che and Fidel. And nothing the white left says or does will ever change that. And for those who would read this and call me racist, please make note that Che was without question a White man. And, I'm unquestionably defending him. Oh, and Fidel was White too by the way, but unlike some of you, we love and respect people based on what they have done, not who they are or how we subjectively perceive them.
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