Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] In Defense of Che Guevara: Analyzing his Life and Answering his Critics

Episode Date: May 10, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Nov 13, 2017 Dr. Thoreau Redcrow is an American academic with a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis with a concentration in Global Conflict. Thoreau is a researcher who specializes in studying armed guerrilla movements, and who has over a decade of experience studying the life and legacy of Che Guevara. His prior investigations into Che's biography have taken him to Cuba to speak to those who knew and fought alongside Che, as well as to other arenas around the world which have been influenced by Che Guevara's armed struggle. Brett sits down with Dr. Redcrow to discuss the Argentine Marxist revolutionary; including an entire segment of the podcast dedicated to debunking many of the right-wing and anti-communist lies about him. Topics Include: Che's childhood, the political context out of which Che emerged, the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, debunking lies and slander about Che, The Bay of Pigs, Anti-Imperialism, "Guevarism", Marx, Lenin, and much, MUCH more! ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

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Five for equality Fight against the right to free Fascist ideology to hit in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio starts now Hello everyone and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio I am your host and comrade Brett O'Shea And today we're doing an entire episode about Che Guevara

His life, his accomplishments, debunking lies about him Before I introduce the guest and get into the episode though I just want to let everybody know that The local organization that we have here in Omaha, the Nebraska Left Coalition, we just opened up a second chapter in Lincoln. Lincoln is a college town that the Cornhuskers play their games and their universities located in Lincoln. And we just opened up this brand new second chapter on the one-year anniversary of our organization,

doing a lot of good work, feed the people, solidarity networks. This podcast is part of that organizational effort. So if you know anybody in Lincoln or Omaha or anybody in the surrounding areas that wants to get involved with political action in their communities, please let them know. Reach out to me on Facebook through Messenger. We'll hook you up with the people, whether you're in Lincoln or Omaha. I know it's kind of obscure little towns to most people,

but, you know, the holidays are coming up. People might have cousins or family members all across the country. So if you do know anybody, just go ahead and reach out to us and let us know. We're recruiting heavily. We're trying to get a lot more people into direct action and revolutionary-oriented activism here in Omaha and Lincoln. All right, that's out of the way. I'm going to go ahead and get into this episode.

extremely excited about it. We have Dr. Thoreau Red Crow. He was on our Kurdistan Rojavan Revolution episode. That was very well received. We have him back on. So, yeah, I'm super excited about it. This is somebody that knows a lot about this topic, encyclopedic knowledge about this topic.

So Thoreau, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and maybe tell the audience about your educational and experiential background. All right. Well, it's nice to be here again. Like you said, I have my bachelor's in political science and my master's in PhD are both in conflict analysis with concentrations in global conflict. I did my doctoral dissertation on the PKK, and during that time I was based and embedded with them in Kurdistan during 2014 as they were fighting ISIS. But the reason why that's relevant to this topic is within that, within my doctoral dissertation, I included a Che Guevara component into my research. as I ultimately came to the conclusion that the PKK guerrillas I interviewed that they comprised a Guevarian archetype, which was a term that I created to describe sort of a post-jungean archetypal figure of an intellectual or literary-inspired personality that, you know, is poetically driven to participate in revolution and craft sort of a new person.

So, you know, in order to conduct that, I had to do a fairly extensive reading on pretty much everything that Che Guevart had ever. written. Personally, I've traveled throughout Cuba, which included being there during the 50th anniversary of the revolution in 2007. You know, while I was there, I was able to interview people who fought with Che personally, you know, numerous fighters, family members, different people that have been close, you know, to the topic of Che Guevara. I was able to visit his mausoleum and his museum in Santa Clara, you know, the city where he won the pivotal battle of the Cuban Revolution against Batista. I've even actually spoken to a few people that knew him during his time in Tanzania

because I lived in Tanzania in 2004. As I was there, I was studying Julius Saniere's form of African socialism called Ujama. And so I was there at the University of Dar Salaam. And there were a couple older professors there who had worked with Che personally during the time he was there in Tanzania during the mid-1960s before he ventured to the Congo. So beyond that, as far as my credentials to speak on this topic, I mean, Che has been a figure of personal fascination of mine for, you know, over a decade since I was a youth. You know, I've pretty much read every biography upwards of 25 of them on his entire life,

every book he's ever authored, every speech he's ever given. I would estimate, you know, easily in excess of 50,000 pages. I've also read the anti-Chi books, the sort of anti-Chi articles. as well as the pro ones. And so I think that gives me a unique sort of understanding on the topic. Yeah, and you're a humble guy, but I would go so far as to say, as insofar as we could get an expert on Che on this podcast, I would feel totally confident putting, you know,

throw a red crop against anybody as far as the knowledge of Che goes. This is somebody who's dedicated, you know, large chunks of your life to studying not only the, you know, objective biographies, but also the slander and the lies and the right-wing propaganda campaigns. against him so you really have a well-rounded understanding of all that is chay and it's an honor to have you on this podcast to talk about it because i think even on the left there's so much confusion about him when i posted about this this episode i got pushed back you know most people

were very excited about it but i got a lot of people regurgitating lies and slander about chay that you know that have come out of right-wing rumor mills and propaganda campaigns and it's extremely sad to see that. So I hope that this episode can serve as sort of, and we'll have a whole section dedicated to debunking those one by one. But I hope that this episode can serve as really bolstering up people's defense of Che and

knocking down the few leftists that still remain that have this propaganda inculcated into their heads about Chee. Because I think it's really harmful to have somebody that did so much for the liberation of human beings to be slandered in such horrific ways, even by

people that refer to themselves as left so I'm excited to have you on. If you were giving a brief overview, before we jump into the details, if you were going to give a brief overview of who Che Guevara was to somebody who might not know anything about him, what would that be? How would you approach that question? Yeah, I think one of the difficulties when you first start discussing Chee, you know, is the richness of his life, you know, on the widespread sort of legacy that he left, you know, basically as a transcendent sort of political figure, but then also a global symbol of revolution. And so I think that, you know, he's also been heavily commercialized and commodified,

so sometimes it's hard to separate these entities cleanly. So when you're talking about, Che, are you talking about the symbol or the person or what he's common to represent or what he means to people? But, you know, basically a Cliff Notes version of his biography, you know, he's born in 1988, and he's executed with help of the CIA in Bolivia in 1967 at age of 39. So that sort of gives you a kind of understanding of the historical time frame that he's operating in. He was Argentinian and Argentine, Marxist revolutionary, and most people would know him as being the sort of number two man behind Fidel Castro during the Cuban Revolution. The interesting thing about that is throughout his life, the sort of richness of occupations or roles that he served.

I mean, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, military theorist, economist, international ambassador of socialism throughout the world. And so, you know, I mean, hell, he was even a dentist during the guerrilla phase of the Cuban Revolution. He was known for, you know, being particularly unsympathetic as a tooth yanker because he would basically just rip the rotted deep out of, you know, fellow guerrillas when they needed it because he was the only one with any kind of medical knowledge and how to do it. And so, you know, he served so many roles throughout his life, too, that when you're talking about, Che, the person, it can be difficult because it's sort of what role at the time are you discussing. You know, biographically, you know, he meets Fidel Castro while living in Mexico in 1955.

and then he ultimately boards the grandma yacht with Fidel and Raul Castro. 82 of them board the yacht to basically invade Cuba to begin the guerrilla phase of the Cuban revolution in 1956. Less than 20 of them survived the initial landing as Batista's troops sort of capture most of them and execute most of them upon landing. And at the start of the campaign, he is the group's doctor, you know, because he had an MD and he had previously been a physician. And so Che tells this story about how he had to decide, you know,

in that first sort of pivotal battle when Batista's troops are firing upon them, you know, he drops the sort of bag of ammo and he drops his medical supplies and he has to sort of symbolically cite. Is he going to pick up the ammo? Is he going to pick up the medicine? And he ultimately picks up the ammo and uses that as sort of a symbolic example of his sort transition from, you know, group physician to guerrilla. You know, ultimately he leads the, you know, he's in charge of the pivotal battle of Santa Clara, which is the decisive battle

that defeated Batista in the Cuban Revolution. And so from there, he sort of goes on to become an international figure, which I'll talk more about, you know, during this discussion. Yeah, and one of the stories, you know, you hear from his time in the Cuban Revolutionary forces under Fidel's command was that he was extremely brave. He was one of the people that would constantly lead charges. And then after a battle, he would be the main person applying medical care to people. And then when they retreated to their places in between battles, he would help teach the soldiers underneath him how to read and write because illiteracy was rampant in Cuba at the time under Batisa's regime. He would teach them about Marxism. So he was basically like

their philosophy professor, their English teacher, or not English, but their language teacher, one of the bravest fighters and the medical doctor. And this earned Che the respect of everybody that fought alongside him and fought underneath him. I mean, people really, really genuinely, sincerely respected and loved Che. And if Chee said something, you know, they took that as word, not out of some cultish worship of him, but because he earned that respect through fighting on the ground with his fellow, comrades. And so I always think that's something that's really, you know, heartening and interesting about Che. How would you describe the surrounding political context that Che Guevar was born

raised and ultimately emerged from, maybe given a little background about, you know, the context out of which he arose might help understand him, too? Yeah, I think to understand the Che of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, you have to understand the wider sort of Latin American context of the time period. You know, for instance, the U.S. CIA had already overthrown the democratically elected leader Muhammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. And they had followed that up by toppling the Guatemalan president, Jakobo Arbinz, while Che was living in Guatemala. And this particular overthrow in Guatemala was at the behest of, you know, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. And he was a stockholder in the United Fruit Company.

And Che himself even talks about how at the time he's, you know, in the town there in Guatemala, as a U.S. playing. are strafing the town, and, you know, as the U.S. back forces ultimately topple Arbenz, and then, you know, Che tried to organize a defense of the town to no avail at that time. This is before he's met the down. Because of that, he gets marked for execution, and he has to hide in the Argentine embassy at that point. And so that sort of moment of being in Guatemala when Arbenz tried to, you know, when you tried to break up some of the large land holdings, which ultimately infringed on the United Fruit Company's holdings,

the fact that Che was there at that time, he saw the depths that U.S. imperialism would go to stop any kind of redistribution in Latin America. And so it's really, this is the sort of fire that forges Che there before he even met Fidel. And, you know, so when you are looking at the context of 1950s, you need to understand what the U.S. was doing at the time, and the true state of sort of international affairs

and how the U.S. viewed Latin America as its own backyard in an area where they could pretty much do whatever they want and establish any banana republic they wanted. And the Cuban Revolution is sort of an example of the first time that was pushed back against that. Yeah, and I know a lot of your research. It goes into the connection of one's childhood to their adult life. That's something that you've studied.

How would you describe the young Ernesto Guevara and what ultimately made him into the revolutionary Chei? Yeah, I mean, in my own research with armed guerrillas, I do focus a lot on their childhoods and how their childhood life affects their adult life. You know, if I was doing a biography of, you know, Che, I would say, you know, he was a bookish child. You know, at first his family's home had over 3,000 books, allowing him to read, you know, voraciously he was homeschooled the first several years of his life because he was asthmatic and his mother homeschooled him and so because of that he was fluent in

Spanish obviously and French and his family was you know upper middle class but their lifestyle sort of exhibited kind of an egalitarian informality I would say traveling artists all the different kids in the neighborhood would come to their home regardless of their economic class but what's really I think influential to Che as a young person is first, you know, the Spanish Civil War that takes place for, you know, 1940 or so. He's about 12, and his parents hosted veterans of the conflict in his home. And so he became very interested in the Spanish Civil War. And then in the years after that, why forces were defeated, you know, by Franco in Spain.

And so, Che personally, you know, he had battle maps in his room where he would reenact the battles in the backyard. He had built a model of Madrid with like little trenches in his backyard. him and his friends would, you know, reenact the battles by throwing nails to each other and stuff. You know, as a youth, you know, he was very sort of combative of authority. He held strongly anti-fascist views. For instance, he was the only student in his school that confronted this, you know, pro-Nazi teacher. This was during World War II. And one of the teachers there in Argentina was, you know, defending Nazi German.

He was the only sort of student that would stand up against that. You know, as an example of sort of his, you know, growing personality as a teenager, there was one anecdote where, you know, his friends ask him whether he wants to attend a street protest, you know, with them in Argentina. And he basically tells him, you know, that he's not going to attend and getting beaten up by the police unless they give him a revolver for self-defense. So he sort of already had, I think, an understanding of the force or the power of armed force and how sometimes sort of symbolic protest doesn't really. really do any good. You know, the main thing I think that influences his life as a youth is because he was asthmatic, he, you know, spent long hours, you know, reading books and literature. I mean, he devoured, you know, books, as I said, you know, Stevenson, Jack London, Jules Verne was his

favorite. He would read like Cervantes, Pablo Neruda was his favorite poet. He, you know, he would buy the books of all the Nobel Prize winners in literature, and he would, you know, read them as a young child. I mean, he read, you know, Budler, Dumas, Verlain Malermay, and the original French. So, you know, he was also, you know, very passionate about poetry. He wrote his own poetry. He read lots of poetry. He would write these notebooks. He did about seven of them. One of them was like 160 pages in length to give you an idea where he would write about these concepts like love, immortality, hysteria, sexual morality, faith, justice, God, the devil, fantasy, reason, neurosis. I mean, all of these different concepts. And he was

sort of analyzed them as a youth. I mean, he read the entire 25-volume contemporary history of the modern world, which was like an encyclopedic set out at the time. And so, you know, it was clear that he was obviously not your normal, typical young person. In fact, he reads most of these before he encounters communism or sort of Marxist literature. When he does, he actually first reads Marx, Ingles, and Lenin. And, you know, he later referred to Das Kapital as sort of a monument of the human mind that that book made a uh a large impression on him and then at the time as a youth you know he copies out this portrait of linen where he basically describes linen as somebody who lived breathed and slept socialist revolution you know and the irony there is that

that is a quote that people would often uh probably attribute to him later in life as well so marks and lennon are the two figures that sort of influenced them the most in the beginning And while he's at university there, he studies Lenin's, you know, imperialism, the high stage of capitalism, and the state revolution, he reads those works, and you can really see his understanding of imperialism, how it was influenced by reading those. One irony, I would say, is that, you know, as a young person, he actually, for somebody who goes on to be a guerrilla leader, I mean, he upheld Mahatma Gandhi actually as one of his heroes as a youth. And when Gandhi's assassinated, when he's 19, you know, Che was very angered by the assassination. And so one of my own theories, I've never seen any of the biographers talk about it was how much maybe that influenced his idea about how only, you know, armed revolution would be the only cause of redress in the sense that, okay, Hiro Gandhi was someone who wasn't using armed revolution. And in return for that, he gets assassinated. So it's an interesting sort of observation I had.

And his turn to medicine is, you know, his grandma gets ill. And so she's, like, paralyzing half of her body. And so he's at her bedside for the last 17 days of her life when he's a teenager. And so from there, he decides, okay, I'm going to be a medical doctor. But he then takes two sort of continental trips through South America and Central America in 1952, 1953. And, you know, this takes them through the very large U.S. own copper mines in Chile. And he, you know, while there, he meets this communist couple who only, owns, you know, just a blanket and he sort of writes in his motorcycle diaries about his observations

about how they're, you know, a representation of the proletariat. And then he goes and he lives at a leper colony in the Amazon. And while he's there working at the leper colony, you know, he talks about how, well, first he's upset with the sort of the religious nuns in the leper colony because they're trying to force religion on the lepers and telling them that maybe they deserve their fate. And he also doesn't like the fact that everyone wears gloves and won't touch them. And so him as a medical doctor, he knows that leprosy isn't contagious. So him and his friend, Alberto Granado, they, you know, basically refused to wear gloves and they sort of embrace the lepers that are there inside the bursarium. And he later talks

about how, you know, the solidarity that he witnesses amongst these lepers are the way that he thinks all of society should operate. And so I think that it's a very pivotal moment in his early life. Before he's sort of a marked his revolutionary, his idea of living around these people, he talks about how desperate they are, but how much solidarity they have for each other. And I think that sort of crystallizes in his own mind

the idea of how he imagines a society would look if it didn't have any capitalism within it. So, I think that's a pivotal moment. Yeah, and he very much walked what he talked all throughout his life. He has skewed money. He has skewed a promising career

as a doctor. to fight for the liberation of human beings. And I would even argue that he was, if not a full-on genius, that he bordered on it, depending on what your definition of genius is. I mean, he's certainly a Renaissance man of sorts. He has so many different talents and skills in so many locations. You mentioned he spoke French. Later in his life, there was a famous interview between an American and Fidel Castro,

and they were struggling to cross the language barrier. They were having a tough time, you know, crossing that barrier. and it turned out that the American reporter also spoke French, and Che walked in and started speaking fluently to the reporter in French, kind of surprising his comrades who, you know, some of them weren't even aware that he could speak French. So his talents would continually manifest in every context. You also mentioned his anti-imperialism,

which I think was, you know, a major reason why he respected Gandhi. He went on, I think it was in 1964, to give a blistering anti-imperialist, partially anti-imperialist, argument at the U.N. in New York City, I believe. So that's sort of anti-imperialism, always stuck with him. And it's also worth noting that he was angered at the death of Gandhi. And Martin Luther King, who is also, you know, known as a pacifist, died in 68. Was that a year before, a year before Che day?

No, that was the year after him. Yeah. Did you, do you know anything about Chee interacting with maybe Malcolm X or MLK? Was any of that known? Yeah, he actually, his exposure was. wasn't, he didn't have any with Martin Luther King that I know of, although he did send a letter to Malcolm X when he visited New York City and spoke at the United Nations. And Malcolm X talked in favor of the Cuban Revolution because he had previously met Fidel Castro when he had visited

New York City. So they actually did have some connection there. But that's super interesting. So let's pivot a little bit to Cuba because I think this is where he became known worldwide as the Cuban Revolution. So tell me about Cuba before the Cuban Revolution and how that affected the situation that Che and Fidel ultimately overthrew in 1959? Yeah, I think, you know, to understand the Cuban Revolution, you have to understand sort of what Cuba was prior to the revolution. You know, the sort of common trope that you hear repeated from the time frame, even back then, was, you know, that Cuba was America's whorehouse or that it was America's casino, that it was sort of the Las Vegas of the Caribbean, that it kind of had this

image that it was the sultry island that you know westerners or americans could could go to to sort of be debauchous and then return back home you know to the mainland um you know the mafia was definitely uh had roots you know in in cuba at the time and you had a situation where you know u.s companies own 70% of the land and resources there i mean 1% of the population own 46% of the wealth almost 50% of the wealth which ironically is very similar to our current I was about to say, that sounds familiar, which means, you know, some might argue, myself included, that we need our own sort of Cuban revolution here in the United States. But, you know, the United States at the time was, I mean, Cuba at the time was dominated by, you know, the company's U.S. sugar, United Fruit Company, Texaco. And you had a situation where, you know, Fujincio Batista, the sort of U.S. back dictator that was in Cuba at the time, he employed his own BRAC, secret.

police, which basically stands for a bureau of, for the repression of communist activity, secret police. And during this time, you know, it's estimated that he killed 20,000 people. Now, the Cuban exiles often claim, oh, no, it was more like 2,000 or 4,000. And the reason they, the justification they used for that is they say, oh, well, some of the guys who helped Fidel in the beginning, you know, later became anti-Fidel and go to into Miami and said that in the beginning they made up the 20,000 number. And then later, they were telling the truth. But the problem then becomes is that so many other sources at the time, I mean, JFK often cited the 20,000 figure in his own speeches. I mean, it was the United States media also, you know, repeated the 20,000 figure. And ironically, those who defend Batista think it somehow sounds better if they say, oh, well, Batista only killed 4,000 humans or 2,000 humans instead of 20,000, as if that somehow makes it better.

But I think the preponderance of the evidence points to, you know, 20,000 victims. I mean, when you go to Cuba, you know, you can see the pictures there. of the torture chambers that Batista ran, they would oftentimes, I mean, you know, pardon my French for getting somewhat graphic, but I think it's important to at least talk about the reality, you know, the sort of sexual tortures of, you know, inserting, you know, hot irons into women's vaginas, I mean, rape, I mean, the kind of just very brutal torture that took place, you know, within, you know, Cuban police centers there. And it was often why once, Che's troops would take over a certain town, he would oftentimes go and clear out the sort

of torture center that was in the town. They did this particular after the battle of Santa Clara and then executed the police chief. And so people will say, oh, you know, look, they're executing the police chief. Well, yeah, but most people would probably agree that if someone's running a torture center, it looks like it's out of the Saul movie, that if you then have that person executed afterwards, that that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's good. And, you know, the oftentimes, even the U.S. media talked about how Batisto would leave victims along the side of the road. And there were sort of just, you know, a lot of the members of the July 26th movement, I mean, some of them would have their ears cut off. I mean, different kind of mutilations and things.

And so this idea that, you know, sort of Batista was going easy on those that were rebelling against them is, you know, completely false. Now, yes, he did go a little easy on Fidel Castro at first when he arrested him. early on several years before, but that was only because he was a prominent lawyer from a wealthy family, and he was afraid of sort of making a martyr out of him. Right. But when Batista comes back into power in 52, and throughout especially 56, 57, 58, I mean, his brutality really rams up during that time. And, you know, all you really need to know about Batista is when it comes time to flee Cuba

on, you know, January 1st, New Year's Day, he flees with the equivalent of $300 million. He runs off to Dominican Republic with the U.S. back dictator. you know, Raphael Trojillo, and, you know, he goes on then to let out his life in Portugal and various other places. But, you know, the, he was sort of the epitome of which you would call, you know, sort of a dictator from, you know, a Banana Republic type nation where they, he was sort of U.S. backed. And as long as he, you know, gave cuts to the mafia and sort of let them operate, I mean, the rampant prostitution that was being operated out of Havana, I mean, There's a famous photo there in Cuba that they call the ugly American,

which sort of shows this, you know, American, or I don't know if, you know, like a guy there, and he's like wearing a sombrero in his speedos or whatever. And it's kind of, and he came to sort of symbolize the idea that America was using Cuba as sort of its Las Vegas or its party place where, while so many, well, 40% of the population was illiterate, and, you know, a lot of times the defenders of Batista will say, oh, well, the GDP of Cuba at that time was higher than the other South American nation. So, yeah, and partly that is true, but the problem with GDP is if you have three people in a room and one has a million dollars and the other two have zero, the per capita GDP is 33,000 apiece, when only has all of the money. Yeah, and it's being propped up by, you know, U.S. capitalism 90 miles off its coast, which also helps.

Yeah, I mean, you know, this idea that, I mean, it wasn't all rampant poverty, but the fact that you did have, you know, 40% of literacy or even the most sort of supportive figures of Batista would even agree to 25 to 30%. And the fact that you had these bohillo shacks all throughout Havana and sort of rampant prostitution and things point to the fact that there was a simmering sense of rebellion that was brewing. And I think that the U.S. miscalculated that. And obviously because of the qualifications of Che and Fidel and those July 26th movement, they were able to overcome that. Yeah, and you'll hear a lot of criticism of Che and Fidel in the Cuban Revolution generally calling it, you know, brutal and violent. And like, they're often marked up as

these brutal killers. And Che specifically gets a lot of the heat as being like this, you know, unrepentant murderer who took joy in executions. That's not at all the case. But it's important to remember that what do you think a revolution is? Revolutions are messy. And when you're dealing with such a brutal, disgusting, immoral, you know, dictatorship as the Batista regime, a puppet dictatorship that the U.S. had large control over, I mean, to try to overthrow that is not going to be easy. It's not going to be lollipops and unicorns. You have to get rid of your enemies. And that is just a harsh reality of any revolution. And the same people that want to, you know, castigate Che and Fidel for employing violence in a revolution are the

very same people that are patriots and love the American Revolution and romanticizing. it as if it was all just dumping tea into harbors and writing beautiful things on paper when it was a violent war. That's what revolutions are. And so I think there's this real disparity between how certain Western countries and their revolutions are treated and then how communist, leftist, socialist movements and their revolutions are treated in the West, you know, broadly. Yeah, I mean, to that I think it's interesting.

It's sort of barometer that a lot of times Americans or sort of right-wing Americans use to judge Che. I mean, at the same time when the United States carves, you know, slave owners' faces into Mount Rushmore and has their faces on money, you know, to the extent that, you know, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson are literally able to rape slaves in a barn. And, you know, George Washington, you know, executed 10 French ambassadors at one point when he was younger before he was president, you know, and these kind of things. The fact that they don't use the same barometer when judging them that they use when judging them that they use when judging. you know, Fidel or Che or anyone else. I mean, when you consider the fact that 14 years prior to the Cuban Revolution, the United States had dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, you know, incinerated 300,000 Japanese people. Children and babies and infants. Yeah.

I mean, the fact that, you know, that they will then take the fact that Che and Fidel have war criminals shot against the wall, you know, and say, okay, look at how brutal this is. We're so much more civilized. we only, you know, firebombed Tokyo and bombed dresided into nothing. Now I'm not saying that the Germans or Japanese didn't do things to deserve that or that that wasn't, you know, that it wasn't within the bounds of war. But the criteria that Che and Fidel are judged by is much harsher than, you know, than they use for anyone else.

Absolutely. And the specific targeting of civilians in all of those cases, it was something that, you know, Che and Fidel never did. They never, you know, killed random people. They were fighting for the people. But you can drop a nuke and kill innocent men, women, and children and going about their daily lives. And then you'll hear a million, you know, right-wing or centrist, liberal Americans

popped a little head out of the ground to be like, well, if we didn't do that, then there'd been a ground evasion. And more, you know, the apologism on one side is just disgusting. And those same people will prop up these impossible standards against, you know, socialist revolutionaries. and it just infuriates me, but let's not stick too much on that because I think a lot of our listeners share are discussed at that hypocrisy. But, you know, earlier you were humanizing Chee talking about his childhood, and I think that's important because I think the human element of a lot of these historical figures often gets lost when we talk about them in retrospect. So what are a few anecdotal stories from Chee's life that you think help people understand the kind of person he was?

I think one of the benefits of having read so many different biographies and things are the kind of little anecdotal stories that people pick out about Chase's life and every time I read a biography there's certain ones that just stick out to me I mean a few of them just for me to sort of run over them quickly there's for instance there's one situation there's one time where he visits the Soviet Union and he's fed a meal on these really fancy plates with like fancy silverware and he's sort of snidly remarks like oh I'm so you know this must be how they're the entire proletary heat here, you know, and you sort of, you can see his sort of his even critique of the Soviet Union while he's there inside the Soviet Union, you know, this idea that he had sort of a brutal honesty, regardless of he was talking to, going back from his youth to his later adulthood, you know, for instance, when he was a global diplomat on behalf of Cuban Revolution, he would refuse to walk on the red carpets that they would lay out for him. So they would lay out the red carpet and he would walk beside it as just to sort of symbolize that I'm not using this.

And, you know, there's a story, you know, there's, for instance, there's a story where his wife, following the Cuban Revolution, they have, you know, these big vats of wine. And she takes some of one of the jars of wine home because, you know, as an Argentine, his favorite meal was, well, he liked wine a lot. And his steak salad and with a glass of wine. And so his wife sort of tries to take that home. And when he finds out that she has this big vat of wine, you know, he tells her, no, go back and redistribute it to everyone else. You know, that he, And then she comments how she had to sort of sneak just a few, you know, little amounts of it just so she could give it to him later. You know, this idea that the right wing likes to attack him as sort of being this ultra hypocritical materialist because he, when he was captured in Bolivia, he had a Rolex watch on his wrist. But what they don't say are the context of that situation. For instance, his Rolex that he owned in the start of the Cuban Revolution, he sold the gold band on it for it to be melted down and donated to the state coffers. So, yeah, he had the, it was a Rolex, but the actual, you know, it was the face of it, you know, the most of it wasn't gold. And two, when he was captured and executed, he had two Rolexes on him. But that was because when a few of the guerrillas left for Bolivia, Fidel had given them gifts of Rolexes to have.

And one of the rulers had recently been, you know, killed in an ambush and had told, hey, if I die, bring this watch home and give it to my child. So he was holding on to those watches, you know, in his pocket. And so the right wing will take this and say, oh, see, you know, this guy who's, you know, slothing through the forest with, you know, walnut-sized mosquito bites on him and everything must be this pampered individual who wanted to collect Rolex watches in his pockets. You know, I mean, it's so absurd. It is about it. But, you know, and because of that, in fact, the Rolex that he owned at the time is now in the possession of Felix Rodriguez, the CIA agent who relayed the orders to have him executed, who now lives in Miami. So that's one sort of interesting anecdote.

And even he, before you continue, even Rodriguez, who was a CIA agent when he caught Che and was slated to have him executed, he even said the way that Che faced his own death, which we'll talk about later, was stoic and respect, and he gained all his respect of Che, somebody that he hated and had been hunting for a long time. After meeting Che in person, he had a lot of immediate respect for him just because of the way that Che carried himself and the sort of intent. that Che had that just kind of exuded out of him. Yeah, that's true. And when we get to that question, I'll, you know, address some of the wider context of his capture. But, yeah, I mean, the last sort of anecdote I was going to say is there's a time where a university, this is post-revolution in Cuba, where a university asks him to come

and speak at the university. And he says, you know, sure, fine, I'll do it. And then when they ask him, well, how much would you like to be paid? You know, Che becomes incensed at the idea that he would even be paid or sort of, you know, remunerated in any way financially for, you know, because he was very big on the idea of moral incentives over material ones, which I'll talk about a little bit later. And so, you know, I think all of these sort of anecdotes pieced together to create a person that, you know, was sort of brutally honest and non-materialist in a very sort of almost Spartan way. And, you know, I think those

are sort of illuminating details about his life. I know after the revolution, he gained high level positions in the government, in Fidel's government, and when his family would come to visit him, you know, he would refuse allowing them to use state money to put them up in a fancy hotel or anything. He would, he would askew that and say, you know, we just need to, you know, go to a family's house or something. He wouldn't even do that. And then I think when he became, I think, minister of finance or some high-level position in the economy, he was supposed to write his signature out that's going to be printed on all the money in Cuba. And instead of writing, you know, Ernesto Guevara, he just wrote Che, you know, three letters. And that was kind of a symbolic

gesture towards the fact that he thought that the whole, the whole idea of money itself was absurd and taking it so seriously was absurd. And so he kind of, kind of, you know, gave it a little middle finger by just writing Che on all the money that was printed out all over the country. And I always thought those two anecdotes were also helpful in understanding how he thought about materialism in that sense. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting for those that may not know, you know, where the idea of the word Che comes from, you know, for someone from Argentina, Che is sort of used similar to the way that, like, A, is used for a Canadian. So it's kind of an interjection that you can say at the end of a sentence or at the beginning of sense. So like, hey, how's it going, Jay?

Or whatever, it's sort of, and he used that as a pattern of his speech. And when he met Fidel and Raul Castro in them, they noticed that he used this word, hey, all the time, which is a very common word for Argentines to use. And so from that, he became, you know, Jay Gavara, but based on that. That's interesting. I didn't know that. What would you say are a rundown of his major accomplishments throughout his life? Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a lot of them that I could go over.

But if I was just sort of going chronologically from the time he meets Fidel and then, you know, he's at first, he's named the best gorilla of them all by the instructor general bio. who trained them in Mexico. And this is despite having crippling asthma. So the fact that he was able to hike the mountains and everything that they trained in the best of anyone, you know, I think is fairly impressive. But, you know, during the Cuban Revolution, I mean, he set up factories to make grenades.

He built ovens of baked bread, taught new recruits, organized schools to teach literate Camposinos. He established health clinics. He did workshops to teach military tactics. He established a newspaper. He set up Radio Rebell Day, which was their radio station that they used to disseminate you know information against batista um you know he won the battle of santa claire where his men

were outnumbered 10 to 1 i mean he had about 340 troops roughly and batista had about 3,000 they derailed the ammunition train that was coming from havana that had you know massive amounts of ammunition in and by doing that that pretty much you know meant that batista's forces wouldn't have enough arms to continue um he you know if you want to look at the fact that what they did in Cuba, you know, he helped spearhead a nationwide literacy campaign within one year by the end of 1961. They had brought the literacy rate from 60 to 97 percent, if you look at their numbers. And so, you know, as Minister of Industries, he instituted agrarium reform. He broke up the largest states in Cuba. He put limits on how much land. You know, someone could own. He was the National

Bank president. As you kind of mentioned before, he traveled over 40 different countries on behalf of Cuban socialism. He trained the militia forces that repelled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Now, he wasn't there particularly where they landed on the Bay of Pigs invasion because the U.S. had sent sort of a decoy. They had sent sort of a boat with firecrackers and playing music on it and stuff. They had sent that to a different part of Cuba off the coast to make Cuba think that that's where they were invading.

And so Fidel had sent Che and his men to that region first. So he was actually not in the area where they, in Playagadron, where the Bay of Pigs was. where they landed, but he had trained the militia forces that ultimately repelled the invasion. You know, he brought the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba, which I think were influential in preserving the Cuban Revolution because ultimately Kennedy and the United States had to make a deal where the Soviet Union agreed to take their missiles out of Cuba in exchange or the U.S. taking theirs out of Turkey. So, you know, he composed a similar in guerrilla warfare, which is a book that's still being read

in, you know, West Point and studied by, you know, U.S. military advisors to this day and read by guerrillas all around the world. He created his own military theory, focalism or fochismo, his focal theory about, you know, rural guerrilla warfare. You know, I mean, also some of the things that he was correct on far ahead of his time. I mean, he warned the dangers of the IMF back in the 1960s, which, you know, now if you look at that, I mean, it's a common thing that people understand now, but at the time in the early 1960s, you know, most people didn't really understand what was going on. And so he, you know, he warned about how most of the developing world was going to be scammed into debt slavery at that time. He battled, you know, three U.S.

back dictators on three separate continents, if you want to look at it that way, Batista in Cuba, Mobutu, in the Congo, and Bariento, San Bolivia. And, you know, I think also what speaks to his brutal honesty is that he even spoke out against U.S. and eventually U.S.S.S.R. imperialism too where in 1965 where he sort of called out both of them as sort of being competing imperialisms and i think that sort of spoke to the fact that he wasn't just a blind ideologue and he was going to you know call things out as he saw them yeah and you know it's kind of it's kind of weird because he eventually left cuba to go you know engage in the socialist anti-imperialist struggle abroad but he was really competent and really good as an administrative

of government. It just wasn't, it didn't fit his personality type. It didn't fit what he wanted to do. And so he ultimately left Cuba to go to go continue the fight. But he was actually really competent and really good in that agrarian reform that you talked about earlier. They limited the amount of land that any one farm could hold to a thousand acres. And then anything above and beyond that would be expropriated by the government to be redistributed to the peasants or run as a state commune, which I thought was interesting. And then you mentioned Radio Rebel Day, which was a way that Fidel and Che and others realized how important it was to control the narrative and how important it was and how successful they have been with engaging

with media, international media, and how much that helped their cause. And so they established this little DIY radio program where they would just give reports from the front lines and kind of be able to control their own narrative. And in some ways, you know, that's been an inspiration to me and I think other leftist podcasts to try to take back our narrative from the corporate media and tell our own stories and not let them dictate how people think. And so there's a long history of that that I find particularly interesting and beautiful. So let's go into this section now, because this is very important, and this is something that I think a lot of listeners are ready for,

this section where we debunk lies systematically. We're going to go one by one. So Che is a very popular leftist figure, and he's also a polarizing one. So I figured we'd address some of the most common lies at the right wing and just even liberals and centrist and neoliberals and even some leftists like to spread about him. But before we address the specifics, take each every slander and go down the line

and address them methodically, what are some of the ways that the right wing and anti-communists more broadly, generally, attempt to smear the life and legacy of Che? Yeah, I think when understanding the ways that the right wing are sort of the shameless elements in the right wing attack a personal figure, I would say that you have to realize

they usually attack where a figure is strongest. So if they're going on about someone being a cannibal, that probably means they're a vegan and to the extent that they attack the opposite of what a person is. And so I think in the last, you know, several decades, especially, there's been a concerted effort by the, you know, right-wing establishment in the United States to just sort of knock Che down a few pegs because they've seen that his, you know, popularity has sort of stayed consistent

since 1967 since his death. And if anything, it's grown, I think, with a lot of the disenchantment that people have started to experience towards capitalism and globalization and things. And so you have to remember that there's sort of an entire anti-Chi industry that exists out there

of people who their entire almost career or sort of political basis of being is making up lies or libeles or smearing Che or writing sort of weekly columns or these sort of Cuban-American think tanks who exist solely to produce these websites, you know, about truth about Che or truth about Cuba, where they just sort of put, you know, every kind of bullshit argument they can make up or any kind of thing they can smear them with. And they use that to sort of attack, you know, Che's character.

And so there's, in my own research, I actually went ahead and had the unfortunate pleasure of reading through a lot of these, you know, blogs and books, and I read them, you know, one figure, who's, I would say, is sort of the epicenter of the sort of anti-Chi industry is a Cuban exile writer, Ramberto Fantova. And he, you know, has written several sort of screeds and books about where he claims to be giving you the real truth about Che, and it's basically everything about Che that exists, but flipped in reverse. So, you know, and once you sort of read through these, you know, obviously when you track down the sources and everything, it all falls apart. But it's good to keep these things in mind because it's only once you understand the ways

that the myths they sort of make up about Chee, once you understand those, you can then go about deconstructing them one by one. But what they're counting on is that the average, you know, American especially, doesn't have the time to read, you know, a couple thousand pages on Chee to know what the truth is. And so they just instinctively think, oh, the truth must be something. somewhere in the middle. So if one side is saying that he killed 100,000 people and the other side saying he killed five people, where he must have killed 50,000 people, they just assumed that, you know, that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. It's kind of part of that American

sort of, oh, I'm going to be reasonable and pick the middle ground. But obviously, you know, in certain situations, the truth isn't in the middle. Sometimes the truth is just the truth, and it's on one side or the other. And so once you understand there's sort of an anti-chae industry out there, then you can address the various lies about him, which I guess you're going to ask me about now. Absolutely. And you said, you know, the average American doesn't have time to wade through all the bullshit and figure out what's true and what's false.

That's what we're here for. So let's go ahead and attack these specific allegations, which I've heard, again, even leftists vomit up. So I figured we'd go over them one by one. So let's just start out. Was Che a mass murderer? Yeah. I mean, this is obviously, I guess this would depend on.

on one's semantic definition for murder, right? And I guess whether, how closely you define the word murder versus kill. I mean, one thing I would use is a quote by, you know, John Lee Anderson, who I would say wrote the definitive biography on Che, which is over 800 pages. And he personally said, you know, that he couldn't find a single credible source pointing to a case where she executed an innocent. And he talks about, you know, all the persons executed by where we're condemned, you know, by, for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war, such as desertion, treason, rape, torture, murder.

He talks about how his research spanned five years and included anti-Castro Cubans and Cuban American exile community in Miami and elsewhere. From my own sort of research and from all the different biographies and people that have looked into it, there's varying accounts of how many people were executed under Che's sort of jurisdiction, if you want to call it that. the varying accounts basically differ between roughly 55 to 105 people at La Cabana Fortress. And this was a prison that the Cuban Revolutionaries took over following the Cuban Revolutionary. And because you had a situation where you had 20,000 victims of Batista, you had all of these sort of secret police and various torturers and things. Now, a lot of them fled and went to Miami where they still are today and sort of operate an entire anti-Fidel industry. But the ones that were captured or ones that weren't able to flee.

Yes, some of them were executed by firing squad, but there's sort of a famous news clip that took place in January of 1959 where there's roughly a million people in the main square of Cuba and Fidel's asking them, and he's sort of saying, and he yells out to them, what should we, you know, what should we do to these people? and they chant, you know, kill them or whatever. And I think the average American doesn't realize at this time that they were having revolutionary tribunals. Some of them took place in large stadiums where they would bring the victims in and they would say, okay, tell us about the different tortures and the various things that this police guy did you or that this torture did you. Yes, some of the trials were not that long in time frame, but when you have people there saying, this is the guy that raped me, this is the guy that tortured me. I mean, I don't know, you know, to expect a revolution after that.

that to give everyone a six-month trial is probably unrealistic, especially considering the fact that Batista would often just shoot people on the spot. But roughly, you know, when they use the term mass murder, and you have to look at the idea, yes, Che's role in Lacobania was he basically reviewed the death sentences of people that were convicted to death. So it was more similar to perhaps the role of like the governor of Texas would be, you know, for instance, when Georgia's governor, several hundred people were killed,

by the death penalty and no one would no one would probably argue oh george bush killed 150 people while he was governor of texas no i mean his idea was he could pardon them if he wanted in the same way chate could pardon these people that were given the death sentence if he wanted to however he yeah i mean there were a few cases where he actually did but oftentimes depending on the sort of notorious nature of their crimes he would oftentimes let the execution go through but um you know anderson the biography he talks about he attributes 55 people to being killed through this process. Castaneda, he talks about several hundred people, you know, maybe 200 to 700 nationwide. But the problem is, is you can't give all of those to

necessarily Che's jurisdiction because he was only in the one Lackabana Fortress. The sort of right-wing or, you know, anti-fidel's free society project or what they call the Cuban Archive, which would be the one to make the strongest case against Che. They themselves only attribute 144 executions ordered to, you know, by Graverrovert, over a course of three years and 105 at Lacobagna. So, and they're the ones that are sort of taking the Che is the worst but sure of all time argument. And even they're sort of only attributing 100 people. But the problem is is that the right wing then takes these numbers and that 105 becomes,

O'Ce killed 10,000 people. He killed 20,000 people, 100,000 victims. I mean, these absurd numbers, you know, if I had to sort of calculate it out, and even the, I think the archive project has even done this themselves, Jay personally, with his own hand, I would estimate probably killed less than 20 people in his entire life, if you want to sort of calculate that out. Now, some of these, what they do is they find the one, there's one very descriptive case where he did execute a guy named Uttemio Guetta, and he was a peasant army guide who was working with the guerrillas at the time, and he basically, you know, took 10,000 pesos to give up their position. And because of that, Batista's forces and the Air Force came in and they were able to bomb a bunch of these rebel positions and kill a bunch of villagers. and burn homes of rebel-friendly peasants and stuff.

And upon Guera being caught doing this, you know, he basically requests to have his life ended quickly, and Che basically takes out his gun, steps forward, and shoots him. And, you know, after he shoots them, you know, the right wing will oftentimes use this fact that he executed a guy personally himself, you know, following this betrayal of this guy being a spy and say, okay, see, he was a, you know, a personal executioner.

um you know you timio had had his own sort of revolutionary tribunal there you know within the uh the gorilla area that they were in and uh you know chay describes the murder you know with him being a physician he sort of describes it in a very matter of fact manner that i stepped forward i shot him in the head the bullet went through the right temporal lobe da da and the fact that he is very in his own diary remember he's writing this for his own you know um for for his own memory he's not writing this thinking that one day this diary is going to be printed and read all over the world and he's going to be a famous figure. So they use this fact that, oh, he executed a guy and described it in this kind of detail to say he's sort of some sadist or some some demented figure when I think

actually, you know, he then goes on and talks about Utemio and his betrayal as sort of an example of the redemption that the Cuban Revolution can offer people and the fact that, you know, in the same way that Utenio accepted his punishment and death, you know, that it was. was an example for, you know, people that had been guilty of the Batista regime to have redeemed themselves as well. And so, you know, like we said before, I mean, executions are a common factor of every guerrilla warfare going back to, you know, George Washington executing then people himself. And so executions for desertion or for rape or anything in wartime is a very common thing. And so, but the right wing sort of uses this fact as some sort of

so-called hypocrisy to say, okay, see, the left are all pacifists, but they like this executioner, this guy who killed thousands of people when really he probably personally killed, you know, maybe 10 or 15 people, and he oversaw the execution of 50 to 100 people from a regime that had killed 20,000 people. And so I think the one surprising thing actually is that the death count is so low when you consider the means and the things that, you know, when you consider the terror campaign that they were up against and the fact that the U.S. CIA was funding all of these different terrorist attacks in Cuba and blowing up different things and and if anything um you know the what's surprising is that how few people were executed yeah yeah there's a lot there's a lot of

restraint there um and everybody that that was that was killed was you know killed on good fucking reason and i mean you we can go all day pointing out the hypocrisies of americans calling out mass murder i mean this entire system is built on violence the entire Batista regime was built on violence and torture and sexual assault. So fuck them. I mean, that's what a revolution is. It's not pretty, but still they held back. They had a lot of restraint. The numbers are not that high. And there's no way around it in a lot of these cases. When you're talking about somebody that betrays you and lets Batista's regime come in and slaughter all of your comrades who have been dedicating their life to the revolution,

what do you want to do with that guy? Give him a pat on the back. Give him $5 and tell him to get out of of course not but all right let's just keep going i don't want to talk too much on these i just want to hit these rapid fire so i'm going to shut up a little bit next question was chay a racist yeah this is actually probably one of the most sort of humorous or ironic ones because i could unequivocally say that probably chagovar qualifies as one of the most anti-racist people of the entire 20th century and so the fact that he is branded as a racist i think really speaks to the fact, again, like I said, of the right-wing attacking where a figure is strongest. The only evidence for the so-called racism that they use is they take the fact that, you know,

like I said before, how Guevara writing in his diaries, he writes a passage in his motorcycle diary where the, you know, when he's 24 years old, he's encountering, you know, a group of black people for the very first time and during his motorcycle trip through South America. And he's, you know, describing, remember, he had grown up in Argentina and he had grown up basically around European transplants or Indian people. He hadn't really had much exposure to people of African descent in Argentina. And so his first time he comes to a slum in Venezuela and he writes sort of arrogantly in his diary, which Anderson talks about how it's sort of stereotypical of white Argentine arrogance.

He talks about how, you know, the people that he sees in these slums are all indolent and lazy and they waste their money on booze and they don't save their money like Europeans. And, you know, and he talks about this passage. Now, the right wing uses this to say, aha, see, he was a racist story of his entire life. When he was 24 years old, in a diary passage once, he made a racist statement, which no one would argue that that's not a racist statement.

However, you have to look at that in the broader context of his entire life. So, for instance, a few months after that comment, to fly back to Argentina, he then has to fly to my, he has to take a plane to Miami. There's some horses on the plane that have to be delivered to Miami, and he gets stuck in Miami for a month, and he has no job in Miami. He's sort of walking around Miami in the United States at that time, and he sees the racism that blacks are experiencing in Miami, and he suddenly, you know, he's sort of moved

by that. And by the end of his time in Miami, he describes himself as sort of a changed person and a changed man. And what you have to then is then look at the actions that take place throughout the rest of his life after that. So, for instance, the following year, when he's in Bolivia, him and his friend, you know, Kalika Ferrer, there, you know, you. you know, in Bolivia and Che witnesses some of the dark-skinned indigenous Indians are being sprayed with DDT to kill the lice before they let him in the Ministry of Peasant Affairs Building. And, and Chee becomes incensed at that.

His friend isn't because he thinks it's normal. Oh, they're, you know, indigenous people that may have lice on them. And Chee becomes very incensed with that. And so you start to see him developing his ideas on race. His very first student in 1957, you know, five years after, or five years after his remark is a guerrilla fighter who's, you know, in a literate. Black Guarro or an Afro-Cuban named Julio Acosta, you know, and Che teaches them the alphabet. And when he's killed in an ambush, you know, Che calls him his first pupil and the idea of this sort of noble Campasino of the Cuban Revolution, you know, this idea that in 1959 after the

Cuban Revolution, Che pushed for racially integrating the schools and universities in Cuba before they were integrated in the United States. You know, for context, you know, George Wallace and Alabama, you know, it wasn't until 1963 when he had forced busing. The schools weren't even integrated in the United States until 1971. So, you know, following 1950 in 1959 in the same year, you know, Che and Fidel pushed through this Law 270, which declared all beaches and other public places open to all the races. So for the first time in Cuban history, you know, clubs and businesses were open to people

of every race. You kind of spoke about it earlier, how Chey actually denounced racism in the United States on several notable occasions in 1961. You know, he talked about U.S. discrimination against blacks. in the KKK, and he sort of riled against it. Then when he goes to the United Nations in 1964, he denounces U.S. policy towards their own black population. And then he, you know, during this time,

he even calls out apartheid South Africa, which this is in the mid-1960s, when before it becomes the sort of Western Khazd'Jour that everyone is supporting, he's calling out apartheid at that time. You know, Che's friend and personal bodyguard, throughout the last eight years of his life was a guy named Harry Pumbo Villegas. He was after Cuban.

He basically accompanied Che everywhere that he went, even all the way to Bolivia. He survived the final attack in the end, and he still lives into Cuba and still lives in Cuba to this day. He wrote a book called Pombo, a man of Chez guerrilla, and he talks knowingly about Che. I mean, you know, Chez, he was a fan of the black musician Paul Robeson. He defended him at the UN. One of his leaders that he cited was Patrice Lamumba in the Congo. And so for these reasons, Nelson Mandela himself went to Cuba after he was released from prison and said that, you know, that Che was an example, you know, for everyone who loves freedom. And so this idea that is sort of a racist figure when, you know, he, you know, the Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, the reason why they wore berets after Chez's death, they adopted their headware based on Che Guevar.

You know, I mean, Chee, in 1965, he went to Africa. He toured all the different African nations, you know, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Tanzania, Congo, Benin. He met all the, you know, dozens of different African leaders. He offered to fight in Mozambique for the Frelimo against the, you know, white Portuguese. And perhaps the most biggest thing, or the most surprising factor that they would accuse Chaya being racist is he literally went to the African Congo, you know, to Congo in 1965. and he fought with a Afro-Cuban force of 130 Afro-Cubans, and he fought an entire force of mostly comprised of white South African mercenaries, white Cuban exiles backed by the CIA, and some Congolese.

So, you know, the idea that you would take a fighter who literally went to Africa and fought with an all-black army against white South African apartheid fighters and call him racist is, you know, it's almost, you know, absurd to the point that it's hard to believe. And once again, it's because people don't have the context of this situation. And ironically, the U.S. CIA themselves and their own personality report, they describe Che as sort of, Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino. And so they even have their own sort of racist, you know, depiction of him as being, wow, this guy's really, why is this guy so well read and intellectual for a Latino?

And meanwhile, you know, they wrote that in 1958 in their own CIA report. and then the U.S. is going to, you know, brand him as this sort of racist figure. But I think when you look at the evidence, the fact that he was hailed by Thomas Sankara, who's considered, you know, Africa's Che Guevara for his work in Burkina Faso, that, you know, it's pretty much patently absurd to accuse Jay of being racist, but the right wing loves to use that. It is absurd. So there you go, all my listeners.

You can now take that and put that in your pack to destroy, anyone left, right or center, who says Che was a racist. That is bullshit. Next question. Was Chey homophobic and did he really put gays into concentration camps? Yeah, see, this is another one that's sort of a fair, it's kind of a, it's more of a common sort of Bible that's come about more about recently. Usually the origin of this claim comes from the fact that they had UMAP basis, right? and, you know, showing you how, how sort of pathetic the right-wing lies. I'm saying that not only was Chey homo-hoevic, but he incarcerated AIDS patients, which if you think about it, it's pretty absurd because AIDS wasn't even discovered until 1981,

and Chey was killer in 1967. So just to give you an idea sort of of the way that they'll take any lie they can and just throw it against the wall, you know, I've even seen the right-wing arguing, like, Chee didn't even like people with AIDS when it wasn't even a disease that had been discovered yet. But basically, these UMA-P camps were or what they were, where the acronym stands for units for military aid and production. And the situation that took place in Cuba is following the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba decided that since they were under siege by the largest military power in the world,

that all males would need to take part in their defense. So as part of that, everyone, they established mandatory military service. But Cuban homosexual men, they had to be conscripted into service, but they weren't able to serve in the armed forces itself. So as part of their duty, they produced military equipment and supplies in these UMA bases. And so lots of other people served in these camps as well, people that had criminal records, things that they couldn't serve military. Now, Fidel years later, did apologize for the fact that there was some mistreatment because of the prevailing machismo that existed in Cuba of certain gay men that were in these centers and that were harassed and harmed and everything. thing. But these things ultimately can't be put on onto the feet of Che

because he wasn't even in the country when they were established. I mean, he had already left. He'd gone off to Africa, he'd gone off to Bolivia during the height of sort of the worst sort of elements of anti-homophobia that were in Cuba, Chea wasn't even in the country anymore or even alive as he was killed in 67. The only evidence of his views towards the gay people that he even has in any of his diaries, any of his speeches, he has one line in his diary as a young man where he remarks that this guy was nice to him and his friend despite being a homosexual and a first-rate bore. I mean, that's literally the only thing. And he's basically, colloquially, he's basically saying, this guy was really nice, you know,

to fight the fact that he was homosexual and he was really boring. Now, how much that makes one homophobic, you know, I mean, you could say that because this was from the same time when he made the racist remark as well, that that represents the pre-Marxist, you know, Guevara that existed at the time. But beyond that, there isn't any evidence in any of the biographies or any of the, you know, reputable reporting of Faye killing a single person for them being gay, of him making any statements about gay's being needing to be executed or or anything. Now, yes, there was a prevailing feeling in 1960s Cuba.

For instance, the United States didn't have, don't ask, don't tell until like 2010. So this idea that, oh, why didn't the Cuban forces have integrated? degraded, you know, fighting units, yes, because of the sign of the times at the time in 1960s, but to use that and then say, okay, well, he was homophobic. I mean, no army in the world in the 1960s allowed sort of gay men to openly fight, you know, in their military. Yeah, absolutely. That fucking infuriates me how little people know about it, but how confident they are

in their ignorance. Next question. Did Chey burn books or support censorship? Yeah, I mean, this is actually probably one of the more hilarious ones because when you look at the fact that Che in his writings, he talks about how he wants society to become a gigantic school. And, you know, at the revolution, one of the very first things he does is they give away free copies of the novel Don Quixote in mass to Cubans. You know, he himself had read thousands of books, you know, growing up, and he really loved reading and he felt that it was very important to the fact that he, The very first thing he would make gorillas do first is read before they could even fight or learn how to use a gun. Now, the source of this sort of libel of, you know, Che burned books is once again going back to, you know, the previous author Fontova that I mentioned is, you know, book.

And his evidence for this is he relates a story of a, there was a member of the Anti-Communist League in Cuba and that had collected up information on, you know, 250,000 supposed communists and sympathizers in Latin America during the 1950s. Now, Batista's secret police, the BRA secret police, they had these documents in their possession, like these folders of all these different communists that might exist throughout all of Latin America. Now, when Che and his men take over, they discover all of these papers and materials. And the fact that within them is a book there that's called Red Zorism. And it's this sort of, you know, absurd kind of conspiracy-laden book about how communism is trying to secretly take over the world and everything. and they discover this book and all these documents. And because all of these documents are harmful to their colonies, comrades throughout Latin America, they decide to burn these documents.

And so Che has these documents burned. And what the right wing does is they take this and they say, see, he was a book burner, as if he's like a, you know, some Nazi guy who's rounding up all the books in the library and burning. I mean, for an analogy, it would be the same as the U.S. capturing al-Qaeda handbooks or ISIS handbooks and then burning them in a fire because they just want to get rid of them. and they use that and they say aha see Che was a book burner he didn't want you to read books

I mean it's completely absurd one of the biggest book nerds and intellectuals burned books I mean it's patently absurd in world history hated books okay did Chee in prison and execute

anarchists yeah this is this is one that you commonly see I guess from the left this isn't as much of a right wing criticism and it usually goes back to the fact that there were competing groups the Cuban Revolution actually just wasn't the July 26 movement, but they were computing groups.

You had the Cuban, I mean, as part, you had different sort of Stalinist factions, you had Traski's fashions, you had anarchists, you had Camilo Sinsfugos. A lot of times the anarchists will say, oh, okay, well, Camilo Sanfuegos, who was one of the, you know, probably the number three or number four behind Che or Raoul, he dies in a plane crash. And they say, oh, we'll see, he was an anarchist and he died in a plane crash, especially so Fidel killed him when, no, I think the evidence points to the fact that he just died actually in an accidental plane crash. And in fact, Che had nothing against him. He dedicated his book, guerrilla warfare, to Camilo Sanfuegos. And he talked about he was the ideal person and the ideal gorilla. And he was the example of what the, you know, the perfect gorilla would be. So this idea that sort of Che and Fidel would take out Sanfuegos from being an anarchist or whatever, again, is absurd.

But the idea that there was a consolidation process following that, well, yes, certain political parties of the various factions they had to all come with under the umbrella of the human Cuban Communist Party. It was a single-party state. So you couldn't have all of these different factions. And so because that wasn't allowed, you know, there's this idea that, oh, they repressed anarchists or they repressed Trotskyists. In fact, there's one time where Chase specifically actually defended not harming a group of Trotskyists, I believe, that he'd said, yeah, you know, I don't like what they're doing, but spare them or leave them alone or whatever. And so, although he didn't necessarily agree with him and his eye and his views evolved over his life. There isn't any record of him necessarily executing anarchists in mass or, you know, doing anything

of that nature. Mr. Red Crow, did Chee want to nuke the United States? This is a, this is a one that is commonly thrown out by the right wing as well. Like, oh my God, how could someone in the U.S. like Jay DeVarra? Because he was, he would nuke you if he had the chance. You see right all the time. Well, the story behind that is as we've spoken about, you know, Cuba had nuclear armed ballistic missiles within Cuba, the U.S. had already invaded at the Bay of Pigs, and they were threatening to basically invade again. Well, the Soviet Union comes in, they strike the deal with the U.S., and they take the nuclear missiles out. Well, a reporter goes down to Cuba and is there, and he's interviewing Che, as Che's very upset, and he's walking back and forth

in his office pacing with his cigar in his mouth, and he's upset. And the reporter, you know, is talking to him and asked him, what, you know, what happened with the nuclear missiles, and basically, Chase says, you know, if the U.S. had invaded us, we would have shot the nuclear missiles at New York City, right at the heart of the U.S., because we believe that we have the right to defend ourselves. You know, it's basically what he was saying is if a country is going to invade you and you have nuclear missiles, you have the right to use them. But he said, but we don't have the missiles anyway, so it doesn't matter at this point.

And they take that comment, the fact that he was commenting after the fact in not having any nukes of saying, if we were invaded, we would have shot nukes at the U.S. because they would have deserved it, and they say, okay, see, he was on some sort of mission to bring about nuclear holocaust, you know, and. And so they say, okay, see, he would have nuclear United States. Well, no. I think any nation would reserve the right to use nuclear weapons if they're being invaded by another nation. In fact, you know, there are certain nations that even have a specific policy about, you know, that mutual destruction if invaded.

And so this idea that he reserved the right to use nuclear weapons if invaded again, I think that's a natural right of every nation that has them. All right. Last rapid fire question. Did Che hate and ban rock music? yeah there's a once again they use this idea i mean this idea that you know chay hated books they used and then this idea he hated music i mean chay was a person who listened to beethoven he loved classical music he he he liked he believed that music was a very important thing they used the fact that right after the cuban revolution you had a group called rackeros or these sort of guys that were

pro-american culturally and there was a movement to sort of repress these guys or to or they believe that they weren't, you know, healthy for the revolutionary spirit of the country because they were pro-American and in their cultural values. I mean, this happened in the Soviet Union as well where they sort of said certain music isn't revolutionary. We shouldn't have it. And so because of that, you know, they said, well, we don't want our people listening to this music. We weren't you listening to Cuban music. We weren't using revolutionary music instead of, you know, the Beatles or whatever that was going on at the time. They used that fact to say, oh, he banned rock music. There was no formal banding. It was a situation where, you know,

You know, the Cuban state at that time was trying to promote what they consider revolutionary values as opposed to sort of Western capitalist values. And that's where you get that sort of criticism. Well, that's good. So that's the end of this section. I'm going to touch on a few more things later that you, that we put into the outline for this section. We're going to touch on that as we go on. But I think that's a good rapid fire segment of just deconstructing these fucking lies. They're so ubiquitous.

They're so pernicious. I'm so sick of them. I'm sick of hearing left. regurgitate them. So I hope that, you know, Thoreau equipped you with a lot of ammunition to fire back against that slander because it's so absurd. But now that we've, to be fair, because on this show, unlike Fox News, we are fair and balanced. Now that we've debunked many of the lies spread about Che, are there any legitimate criticisms that can be made about him in your view? And if so, what are they?

Yeah, I think there's a, I mean, there's obviously several. Nobody is perfect and there's things you can criticize. I think some legitimate things you could talk about is he had sort of an idealist. He had a combination of an idealistic street and he was a severe disciplinarian and the yin and yang of his personality. His idealism led him to believe that, you know, the masses could be brought into the socialite mindset very quickly. And I think some of that was a miscalculation. For instance, right after the Cuban Revolution, he believed that people would be okay, you know, using their day off to do volunteer work. So because he liked to use his day off to go cut sugar cane he figured well everyone else would like to do that too or he felt that people would

work extra hours only for simply a certificate and rather than any extra pay or anything because he was trying to get rid of the idea of material incentives and he wanted everybody to adopt moral incentives instead and I think it might have been a miscalation in that sense to assume that everyone else had developed the sort of same revolutionary consciousness that he had developed at that time so some of those programs ended up not working very well because he was I think trying to too quickly force people to develop a certain mindset that they hadn't had time to properly, you know, inculcate or develop. Also, you could make the criticism that he was, you know, a severe disciplinary. He was harder on his own men than he was on those that he

captured. For instance, a lot of times those that he would capture, he would release them right away, maybe take their boots in the uniforms and let them go, but he was very harsh on his own men, much harsher than he would be, you know, on the opponent. And there's a rationale that he talks about in guerrilla warfare behind that because you're trying to win over your opponents through your mercy but also you're being harder on your own men but because of that he was very harsh in the sense that you know there was the penalty for sort of stealing food or anything might be a you know might be put up for revolutionary tribunal or possible execution in these kind of things and he was very sort of hard on his own men so that would be another criticism you could make

what would you say to those Cuban American exiles in Miami many of whom despise Che there's a big segment of Cuban Americans in Miami that a lot of this hatred comes out if I had a Spanish teacher in college actually that came from that, you know, Cuban American exile community and would actually take, and this is a Spanish class, but he would take time to talk shit against Che. And as a young college student, I was kind of confused by it. I had these socialist impulses, but, you know, I was kind of, I didn't know enough to battle against it. And, you know, he very much made it about, you know, my family lived there. I know firsthand what it's like. And so it very much repressed any ability on my part to push back against it. But what would you say to that, say to or about the Cuban American exiles in Miami? Yeah, I think that, you know, obviously first when you're talking about the different generations, I mean, most of the younger exiles, they only know what their grandparents told them or some of them maybe have never said put in Cuba or they do, you know, occasionally go back.

But, you know, first of all, you know, asking sort of the children of a wealthy, you know, former Cuban exile is, you know, for the truth on Chey or Vidal. I mean, it's like asking Hamas to tell you the story of Hanukkah. I mean, you're probably not going to get a very accurate depiction. And so the idea that, you know, you have the situation where there is an entire sort of political framework developed through the Cuban American National Foundation, where, you know, you have these certain members of the political class. Miami, especially in southern Florida, where they were directly connected to the Batista regime, and they're still in power now. And, you know, for instance, when Fidel captured the Bay of Pigs soldiers, there was 1,100 Bay of Pigs soldiers captured, and he talks about out of those 1,100, there were like 100 plantation

owners, 67 landlords, 35 factory owners, was 112 businessmen, you know, 179 of them were living off of inheritances, there were 200 ex-Batista soldiers in there. So this idea that a lot of the, you know, when you're dealing with the sort of bitter Cuban exile community, a lot of times you're dealing with those remnants of the Batista regime itself or people that joined the revolution and then later didn't believe in socialism and so left. And so, you know, you have ranks of the BRAC, the sort of, you know, you have ex-Cuban mafia, these sort of CIA contract killers that are in Miami still. There's these several prominent families. And I know this well because I lived myself in South Florida for, you know. you know, over a decade during my master's in Ph.T. And, you know, you have these families like the Diazbo Larts, who, you know, the patriarch of their family,

he was in the Batista's government. Now they're in Congress, DeRos Latins, you know, Elena, she's a curious congresswoman. Gloria Estefan, you know, most people don't realize her father was Batista's bodyguard. You have, you know, the ex-Florida Supreme Court Justice, Rao Ocantantero. He was the grandson of Batista, you know, and so, you know, you have, you had certain figures like, you know, the terrorist Luis Prasara Carillas, who's considered, you know, South America's Osama bin Laden, I mean, he blew up, you know, a Cubana flight 455 in 1967, and he, you know, was the talk of the town in Miami, and you could go anywhere in Miami, and he was hailed as a hero, where you had

guys like Orlando Bosch, who, you know, blew up hotel lobbies in Cuba as part of an anti-fidel effort. You know, you have guys like Felix Rodriguez, who's still hailed as a hero there despite the fact that he was part of, you know, he was the point man for Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal, and he helped train Central American death squads and stuff. And so, you know, you have the group Alpha 66, which is basically an armed terrorist movement that the U.S. used against Cuba. And you have all these people that exist in Miami, and they corrupt the political culture there. And they're the ones that the U.S. relies on to tell you the sort of, you know, 4-1-1 on Cuba.

And so there probably isn't a more corrupt political, you know, body. in the United States and the fact that you're allowing, you know, the defeated remnants of the Batista regime to set the agenda on how the U.S. behaves towards the nation of Cuba, I think is definitely problematic and it's easy to see why that would be an issue. Yeah, it's like if we had a revolution here and then like the Bushes and the Clintons and the children of the Goldman Sachs CEOs all fled to Britain, that's what it would be like and their telling of the story and their feelings about what happened in the United States. It would, it's, it's, it's, It's kind of an analogy there.

It's like the richest and most powerful families that operated well under the Batista regime aren't going to be happy that that regime was toppled. Yeah, it's true. So how did Che ultimately die? I think this story says a lot about him. I think it humanizes him. I think it says a lot about his integrity and his personality.

If you could just quickly go over how he died and how he faced his own death, I think that would be enlightening. Yeah, I mean, the area of Bolivia that he was in during his last battle, there's only about 22 of his fellow guerrillas left because his group had become split up and the other half had been caught in an ambush the week before. And so ironically, the villager who turns him in that gets him almost ambushed, he had pulled

a worm out of that villager's child's eye, you know, a few days prior. So he had cured the child of blindness. And then the father then for money, you know, turns him into the government troops. And so it's sort of another irony there that, you know, no good deed goes on punitive. But he's basically, you know, once he's cornered, you have 1,800 Bolivian troops with, you know, U.S. forces as well. They had newly discovered technology, like infrared technology, which people didn't even know it was out at the time to basically spot Chase forces at, you know, at nighttime and in the dark. And they were using helicopters and things, and his 22 men are ultimately surrounded. He's wounded during the last battle, and he's captured.

and so they take him to a schoolhouse. And while he's sitting there in the schoolhouse, you know, there's several anecdotal stories about what's going on during that time because they capture him one day and he stays overnight and he's executed the following day on October 9th. And for instance, one of the stories I think is telling from that time is a schoolteacher of the schoolhouse that he's in comes there and gives him a bowl of soup and he tells her, you know, I can't believe that you have to teach children on these dirt floors here in this little schoolhouse when the, you know, dictators of this country are driving around

in Mercedes and then they're living in the high life. and everything. And so it kind of shows, you know, even at the end, when, you know, Felix Rodriguez, the CIA agent asks him if he has any messages for his wife and children, you know, he basically says, tell my wife to remarry. And then he tells, and then he says, tell my kids to keep studying, you know, once again, that emphasis on education. And then the, you know, executioner, Mario Tehran, who's picked, he was actually drunk at the time, the guy that they used to kill him. And they, you know, several other guys named Mario had been killed in ambushes. against Chase's forces. So they, you know, they figure he'd be a good guy to do it. So he walks

into the schoolhouse. Jay's actually sitting on the ground and Chase stands up, you know, to make sure that he's standing during the execution. And he basically says, you know, shoot coward. You're only going to kill a man. And the guys, you know, the executioner Tehran is kind of shaking. And then he ends up shooting Che nine times. And that's basically, you know, where you have the execution that takes place. And, you know, I think, as you said earlier, Felix Rodriguez talks about how he faced his death bravely now some of the right wing will oftentimes say oh see he was a coward he was captured and not killed in battle but i you can hardly blame someone for not wanting to die in battle when they think that they may still be released or traded in exchange or that they can

escape or you know this idea that it somehow makes it unmanly that he was captured rather than killed in battle i think is absurd as well but yeah and when when rodriguez announced that he was going to be executed uh i think chae's response was good i should have died fighting you should killed me when I was out there. So that just blows up that entire bullshit. And a lot of the people sitting back in their comfy little bourgeois suburbs talking about how Che should have done this or that facing his own death, you have a gun pointed at your head, you face your own imminent death and see how you act.

Chee faced his own death with extreme stoicism and a courage and integrity that I hope to God I can meet my own death with. Yeah, it's true. So we're over 90 minutes. skip some of the fluffier questions and get to a couple last essential questions before we wrap up. So if you could answer these quickly as you can, what are some places around the world today that you think Che's ideas are most impactful? Well, I think obviously, you know, he has impacts in areas all around the world, but if I had to pick out some specific ones, I would say, you know,

the Zapatistas in Chappas, Mexico. You know, Subcoma Nte-Marcos, he conducted a motorcycle tour through Mexico that was based on Guevara's own tour through South America, you know, the FARC in Colombia, obviously, the PKK in Kurdistan, he's a symbolic figure for them, and they use him in their education towards their guerrillas and their concept of creating a new human based on Chase's idea of a new man. I think that, you know, anywhere where that there's basically a U.S.-back dictator, which over the years there's been lots of them, you know, throughout Latin America and through the global south, any time you have those situations arise, Jay becomes a prominent figure because he's an example of one of those times where the people

were able to rise up themselves and defend their own destiny. I think Chey's concept of a new man is like an inverted notion of Nietzsche's Ubermensch. It's like a man that's self-sacrificial and works hard for the betterment of the community. So I think I much prefer Chez's new man to Nietzsche's Ubermensch personally. That's kind of exciting. You know, I would actually remember he means that in the general neutral sense too. So, I mean, he's using man as in person, you know, but he's not meaning just male. But, yeah, I mean, he's, you know, the new human or the new person.

Yeah, that's a great point. So I know you consider yourself a Gueverist. So how would you describe the tenets of Gueverism? And how does it differ from, like, traditional Marxism or Leninism? And I think that's one thing that's interesting about Guevara and his ideas is they're sort of a syncretic mix of a lot of different things. I mean, Marx was always his baseline, and he himself was writing a biography on Marx later in his life that he never got to finish. But, you know, there was a, he commented that, you know, someone ought to be a Marxist with the same naturalness naturalness that one's a Newtonian in physics

or a pasturian in biology. So this idea that he believed that basically Marxism was a universal truth that didn't even need to be debated anymore. When he was asked whether he was communist himself or whether the Cuban Revolution was he always defined it as Marxist. So Marx was always his sort of his baseline. But I would say he was a combination of old Marx and young Marx, that he had an element from the economic manuscripts of 1844, his focus on alienation and his idea of moral incentives, I think, points to that. He was sort of a combination of lots of different variants. He had an anti-imperialism, and he viewed the sort of periphery or the global south as the main foundation for revolution. And, you know, he focused a lot on neo-colonialism,

and monopoly capitalism, those kind of things. So his proletarian internationalism, you could say even hence to sort of Trotsky's writings or his ideas, but his fochismo is similar to sort of Maoism's protracted people's war and his belief that the agrarian proletariat should take precedence over the urban one. So, you know, there's lots of different elements within Gueverism that I think, you know, can be addressed. I know, for instance, there's always a debate on left book, you know,

was Che Stalinist or was Marxist or Leninist? And people have these debates. There's actually a little bit of evidence for every one of those claims. And it depends on what part of his life you're talking about. In his early life, he was definitely influenced by Marx, Lenin, and then even Stalin. And then, you know, at near the end of his life, when he's in Bolivia, he has two books at that time with him by Trotsky that he's reading as well. So, you know, throughout his life, because of his unorthodox beliefs, he was accused at various times by different factions of being a Maoist or he took China's side in the Sino-Soviet split. And so because of that, he got criticism

for that as well. And he oftentimes never got along with the communist parties, especially even the one in Bolivia as well. So, you know, there's a flexibility there that you can use with Che to say that he had little bits of parts of all of them that I think make it enough to sort of call one Aguvarist. And although he would probably dispute that term and say that he was just a Marxist until the end. Just as Marx disputed the term that he was a Marxist in his life. So Che was extremely intelligent and articulate, and this makes him very quotable. So what are your three favorite quotes by Che? I think one that I really like is, you know, going back to the idea of alienation. There's one where he talks about I'm not interested in dry economic socialism.

We're fighting against misery, but we're also fighting against alienation. He talks about, you know, if we're not preoccupied with the, you know, repercussions of the spirit, then, you know, communism will only be a method of distributing goods, but it won't be a revolutionary way of life. This idea of the spirit, this sort of almost quasi-Higelian idea of focusing on, you know, the in-material as well as the material. I also really like his famous quote, again, you know, at the risk of seeming ridiculous. Let me say that the true revolutionaries guided by a great feeling of love. That's obviously a popular common one.

and then his last words to his children in the farewell letter that he writes that is read upon his death where he tells them above all, you know, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world. He calls this the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary. Yeah, if you tremble with injustice, or if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, you're a comrade of mine. That's something that touches my heart. Yeah. Lastly, what are some books or various media sources that you would recommend? I mean, you've gone through them all for people to check out if they want to look more into Che's life.

What are some really good, objective sources that people can go towards to learn more? I would say that, you know, the three primary biographies, Che Guevara, Revolutionary Life by John Lee Anderson. Then you have Campanero, the Life and Death of Che, by Jorge Castaneda. You have Gover, also known as Che, by Paco Ignacio Taibo. Those are probably the three best biographies. When it comes to analysis, I would recommend Michael Lois, the Marxism of Che Guevara, or Peter McLaren's Che Guevara, Apollo Fierre, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. As far as films, if that's more your thing, if you like feature movies,

I would recommend Motorcycle Diaries starring, you know, Gail Garcia-Barnal, or Chez Parts, Parts 1 and 2, starring Benicio del Toro. As far as, you know, with regards to works by Guevera, I would recommend everyone read his essay, Socialism and Man. Definitely his 1965 speech at the Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers, where he sort of outlines his disputes with the United States but also with the Soviet Union and his 1967 last letter called The Message to the Tri-Continental, where he talks about how it's just as noble to die for any other nation as it is from the nation that you come from yourself.

And book-wise, if you're looking to read books by him, I'd recommend, you know, guerrilla warfare, episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, which are his own diaries or a book called Che Guevara Speaks, which has a compilation of his different writings. I know Che parts one and two are on Netflix streaming right now, so if you have access to that, you can watch that for free or however low-cost Netflix streaming is. Then I would also say that I'm waiting on that book about Chey from Dr. Thoreau Red Crow. Is that ever going to happen? Yeah.

I mean, I obviously, you know, within my own doctoral dissertation, I have a component, you know, dealing with Che Guevara within that. But, yeah, I've thought about whether I should write my own sort of book solely on Che Guevara. and I think I obviously would be able to write such a book if I wanted to. So it's possibly, I guess, in the future. If it happens, we will promote the hell out of it on this show. Thanks. So thank you so much for coming on.

You're a fucking jewel. I love having you on this show. You're an absolute fountain of wisdom. I'm so happy to give you a platform to talk to thousands of people so that they can hear, you know, all the wisdom that you've accrued over your lifetime. Do you have any last words on this issue? Anything you want to say to wrap this beautiful episode up into a tight little bow? I think I would use the words of U.S. intelligence specialist Thomas Hughes, who he wrote a memo right after Che was killed to the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, and he tells him, you know, we predict that Rivera will be eulogized as the model revolutionary who met a heroic death. And I think it's ironic that we can give the United States the last word on that issue and how accurate it were.

Absolutely. Well, thank you, brother, so much for coming on. It's always an honor. Really appreciate it. All right, thanks. And I guess I'll sign off in the same way that Chase always signed all his letters with Asta la Victoria Simpre, which is until victory, always. Thank you for listening. Rev Left Radio is 100% listener funded.

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