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

Episode Date: November 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! You can email Dr. Redcrow at: [e-mail] You can follow him on FB at: Facebook.com/thoreau.redcrow Help keep this show up and running by donating to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on Facebook by searching "Revolutionary Left Radio" This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, a left-wing revolutionary organization with chapters in both Omaha and Lincoln. Follow us on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/TheNebraskaLeftCoalition/ If you know anyone from Lincoln or Omaha who might be interested in joining our organization, please reach out to us on Rev Lefts FB or Twitter, or by messaging the Nebraska Left Coalition on FB. 

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Oppose the system any way you know how. Unite the left against the capitalist lies and liberate the proletarianist mind. Fight for all the working class. Five for equality. Fight against the right free to fascist ideology. To turn it up loud, Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Hello everyone and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio.

I am your host, Anne 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. 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 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. I'm extremely excited about it. We have Dr. Thoreau Red Crowe. 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 Gwerian 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 Guevar 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. And I even actually, 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, you know, credentials to speak on this topic, I mean, Che has been a, you know, 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 other, you know, 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, these 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 crope 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 Che. 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 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 Che 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 1928, 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 roddy 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 serves 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 of transition from, you know, group physician to, you know, 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 Batista'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 Chee. 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 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 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 Yakobo 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 U.S. planes 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 Chea 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 Che. Yeah, I mean, in my own, you know, research with armed guerrillas, I, you know, I do focus a lot on their childhoods and how that, how their, you know, 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 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 Nerudo was his favorite poet.

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, Ingalls, and Lennon. And, you know, he later referred to Das Kapital as sort of a moniker.

monument of the human mind that that book made 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 probably attribute to him later in life as well so Marx and Lenin 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 basically refuse to wear gloves and they sort of embrace the lepers that are there inside the brosarium. 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 Marxist 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 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 a major reason. 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-Dade? No, that was a year after him. year after. Did you have, yeah. Did you, do you know anything about Chey interacting with maybe Malcolm X or MLK? Was any of that? No. Yeah, he actually, his exposure 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 yeah that's super interesting um so let's let's pivot a little bit to cuba because i think this is where he 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 in 1959 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. It kind of had this image that it was the sultry island that, you know, Westerners or

Americans could go to to sort of be debauchous and then return back home, you know, to the mainland. You know, the mafia was definitely had roots, you know, 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 owned 46% of the wealth, almost 50% of the wealth, which, ironically, is very similar to our current economic situation. 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, Fugincio 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, you know, 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 went to Miami and said that in the beginning they made up the $20,000 number. And then 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. they say, oh, well, Batista only killed 4,000 Cubans or 2,000 Cubans 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 Chey'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 particularly in the, 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 and it looks like it's out of a saw movie, that if you then have that person executed afterwards,

that that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's good. You know, 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 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 Trujillo. And, you know, he goes on then to let out his life in Portugal and various other places. But, you know, he was sort of the epitome of what you would call, you know, sort of a dictator from, you know, a banana revolution.

public type nation where they um you sort of u.s backed and as long as he you know um 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 there's a famous photo there in cuba that they call the ugly american which sort of shows this you know american uh or i don't know 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 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 was higher than the other South American

nations well 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 fee per capita GDP is 333,000 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% illiteracy 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 and the Cuban Revolution generally calling it, you know, brutal and violent. And like, they're often marked up as these brutal killers and Chase specifically gets a lot of the heat as being like this 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 romanticize 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 are sort of right-wing Americans used 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, 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, 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 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 disgust at that hypocrisy. But, you know, earlier you were humanizing, 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 Che'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 Chee'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. For instance, 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 sort of snidly remarks like, oh, I'm so, you know, this must be how the entire proletary eat 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, 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 favorite meal was, you know, steak and 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, he, that, 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 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 gorillas left for Bolivia, Fidel had given them gifts of Rolexes to have, and one of the girls 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 onto 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. 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 Chee 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 Chee in person,

he had a lot of immediate respect for him just because of the way that Che carried himself and the sort of integrity that Che had that just kind of exuded out of him. Yeah, that's true. And when we get to that question, I'll address some of the wider how the heck 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 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, Chebe 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, piece together to create a person that, you know, was sort of brutally honest and non-naterialist in a very sort of almost Spartan way. And, you know, I think those 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 eschew that and say, you know, we just need to 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 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 that the word Che comes from, you know, for someone from Argentina, Chei 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 at the end of a sentence or at the beginning of sense 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 Raoul 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 Jagavara by 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 them,

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 composinos. I 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. You know, he won the Battle of Santa Clara, whereas 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 it. By doing that, that pretty much, you know, meant that Batista's forces wouldn't have enough arms to continue. 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% 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 and 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 Playa Giron, 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 on 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. 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, 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 USSR 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 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 administrator 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. you 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, it'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 in. 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, you know, take each every single, you know, 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 and 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 vegan

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, you know, a lot of 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, 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 as a Cuban exile writer, Roberto Fantova. and he, you know, has written several, 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 they, that the myths, they sort of, make up about Che, 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 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, 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 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 as a quote by, you know, John Lee Anderson, who I would say wrote the defendant. 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 were condemned you know by uh for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war such as desertion treason rape torture murder uh he talks about how his research span five years and included anticastro 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, they, they chant, you know, kill them or whatever. And I think the average American doesn't realize at this time, 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 rate me, this is the guy that tortured me. I mean, I don't know, you know, to expect a revolution after 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 George Bush's governor, a hundred, several hundred people were killed, you know, 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 Che could pardon these people that were given the death sentence if he wanted to. And he did.

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, 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 change jurisdiction because he was only in the one L'Aqabanao Fortress. The sort of right-wing or, you know, anti-fidel was a 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 Gravara over a course of three years and 105 at Lacobagna. So, and they're the ones that they're 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 that the right wing then takes these numbers and that 105 becomes, oh, Chee 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, Che 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. those 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 Guerra being caught doing this, you know, Che basically, you know, he basically requests to have his life ended quickly. And Chee basically takes out his gun, steps forwards, 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. You know, Yatimio had had his own sort of

revolutionary tribunal there, you know, within the guerrilla area that they were in. And, you know, Che 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-da, and the fact that he is very, in his own diary, remember, he's writing this for his own, you know, 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 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 Uttimio accepted his punishment and death, you know, that it 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 den 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 if anything, you know, what's surprising is that how few people were executed. Yeah, there's a lot of restraint there. And everybody that was killed was, you know, killed on good fucking reason. And, I mean, 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 here? 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 Che a racist? Yeah. This is actually probably one of the most sort of humorous or ironic ones because I could unequivocally say that probably Che Guevara 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, he had grown up basically around European transplants or Indian people. He hadn't really had much exposure, you know, 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 the 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.

that in the broader context of his entire life. So, for instance, a few months after that comment, he 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. And 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, they're, 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 Che becomes incensed that his friend isn't because he thinks it's normal. Oh, they're, you know, indigenous people that may have lights 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, five years after his remark, is a guerrilla fighter who's in a literary black guad hero or an Afro-Cuban named Julio Acosta,

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.

And 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, you know, 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 Khash de Jor 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 Pamba Villegas. He was Afro-Cuber, and 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, you know, still lives in Cuba to this day. He wrote a book called Pampo, a man of Chez guerrilla, and, you know, 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.

You know, and so for these reasons, you know, Nelson Andella himself went to Cuba after he was released from prison and said that, you know, that Che was a... 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 headwear based on Che Guevar. You know, I mean, Che, 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 Chea 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, 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 described Che is sort of, Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino, you know, 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 bases, right? And, you know, showing you how sort of pathetic the right-wing lies. Or a lot of times claim that not only was Chea Homovic, but he incarcerated AIDS patients, which if you think about it, it's pretty absurd because AIDS wasn't even discovered until 1981,

and Che 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, Che didn't even like people with AIDS when it wasn't even a disease that had been discovered yet. But basically, these UMAP camps or what they were, 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. their defense. So as part of that, everyone, they established mandatory military service. But Cuban homosexual men, they were, 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 UMAP basis. And so lots of other people served in these camps as well, people that had criminal records, things that couldn't serve the 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. But these things ultimately can't be put onto the feet of Che, because he wasn't even in the country when they were established. I mean, he had already left, 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, which I 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 face. 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 had don't ask don't tell until like 2010 so this

idea that oh why didn't the Cuban forces have integrated 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 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 chae 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 chay in his writings he talks about how he wants he wants society to become a gigantic school. And, you know, right at 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 guerrillas 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 czarism 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 they discover this book and all these documents and because all of these documents are harmful to their communist 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, C.C. 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. This book years in world history, hated books. You know, that's... Okay. Did Che in prison and execute anarchists? Yeah, 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 they were competing groups. The Cuban Revolution actually just wasn't the July 26th movement, but they were computing groups. You had the Cuban-comitist party.

You had Stalinist factions. You had Traski's factions. You had anarchists. You had Camilo Sintwegos. A lot of times the anarchists will say, oh, okay, well, Camilo Sanfegos, who was one of the, you had one of the, you had, you know, probably the number three or number four behind Che or Raul, 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 San Fuego. And he talked about he was, 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 San Fuego's 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 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 Chey 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 views evolved over his life, there isn't any record of him necessarily executing anarchists in mass or, you know, doing anything to that nature. Mr. Redcrow, did Chee want to nuke the United States? 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 J. Guevara because he would nuke you if he had the chance. You see right. 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, you know, interviewing Che as Che is 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 they had, 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's 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 and 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 so they say, okay, see, he would have a 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, Che hated books they use, and then this idea he hated music. I mean, Che was a person who listened to Beethoven. He loved classical music.

He believed that music was a very important. thing. They used the fact that right after the Cuban Revolution, you had a group called Raqueros or these sort of guys that were pro-American culturally, and there was a movement to sort of repress these guys, or they believed that they weren't, you know, healthy for the revolutionary spirit of the country because they were pro-American and 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.

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 banning. It was a situation where, 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 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 um they're so ubiquitous they're so pernicious i'm so sick of them i'm sick of hearing leftist regurgitate them so i hope that you know throw 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 mean, 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 they sort of 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 miscalculation 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, 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 man.

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, 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 despised Che? There's a big segment of Cuban-Americans in Miami

that a lot of this hatred comes out of. I had a Spanish teacher in college, actually, that came from that 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, like, 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 set foot 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, Anchea 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 intent. entire sort of political framework developed through the Cuban American National Foundation, where, you know, you have these certain members of the political class in 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 Pig soldiers, there was 1,100 Bay of Pig's Soldier captured, and he talks about out of those 1100, There were like 100 plantation owners, 67 landlords, 35 factory owners.

It was 112 businessmen. You know, 1079 were living off of inheritances. There were 200 ex-Patista 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. 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, 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, the Roselaitans, you know, Elena, she's a curious congresswoman. And 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, Raul Cantero. He was the grandson of Batista, you know, and so, you know, you have, you had certain figures like, you know, the terrorists, 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, 1976, 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 or you had guys like Orlando Bosch who 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-Consor 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 of 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 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'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 unpunished but

he's basically you know once he's cornered you have 1800 bolivian troops with you know US 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, that emphasis on education. And then the, you know, executioner, Mario Terran, 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 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 Che 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 guy's, you know, the executioner Tehran is kind of shaking.

And then he ends up shooting Chee 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 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 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 I think Che's response was good I should have died fighting you should have 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. We're going to skip some of the fluffier questions and get to a couple last essential questions before we wrap up. So if you could

to these quickly as you can. What are some places around the world today that you think Che's ideas are most impactful? 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 Nantes-Marcos, he conducted a motorcycle tour through Mexico that was based on, you know, 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 Jay'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. Absolutely. He's not meaning just male.

But, yeah, he's long about 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 Guever 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 physics or a pasturing 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 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 of the global south as the main foundation for revolution and you know he focused a lot on neo-colonialism 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 foco 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 Guavaresum that I think, you know, can be addressed. You 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, you know, 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 Trotskyist or Stalinist.

You know, that 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. That's true. 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 enmetism. 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 revolutionary is 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 Guevar, Revolutionary Life by John Lee Anderson, and you have Campanero the Life and Death of Che by Jorge Castaneda. You have Govera, 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 Fier, 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 Che's Parts, Parts 1 and 2, starring Benicio del Toro. As far as, you know, with regards to works by Guevara, 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 Chee 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 chagabar within that but yeah i've thought about whether i should write my own sort of book solely on chagovar and i think i obviously would be able

to write such a book if i wanted to um so it's possibly i guess in the future if it happens we we will promote the hell out of it on this show um thanks so thank you so much for coming on um 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 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 off his letters with Asta la Victoria Siempre, which is until victory, always. We've learned to To caret From the historic

Altura Where the sol of your bravura He put a a circle to the Here here it's clear

The intranable Transparency of your dear present Commandant, Che Guevara. Hey!

Hey! You know, You're going to the brisa with soles of the primeverra to plant the bandera

your sonrisa. Here, the clear the clara the intranial transparency of your

dear presence commandant Chegebara Your Honor Your Your Your

to a new company where they're the firm of your brother

Libertario. Here, here is the clear the clara the intrainable transparency of your

dear presentia as the command Che Guevara Here here here

the clara the enrable transparency of your Perid, prescences, Commandant, Che Guevara. As you, we're still to you,

and as we're saying us, and as final, we'll tell you, until, commandant. Here Here Here

The clear the clara The entrainable Transparency of your Commandant Che Guevara Here, it's clear the clara The extrana of transparency

of your, dear Presence Commandant Chegevara That's ola That ola is growing Every day that pass, that one, that's all right now more. It's the nature of imperialism, the bestialism, the bestialize to the men.