It's mind boggling seeing the lambs led to slaughter by this empty posturing suit, a man who befriends and admires Louis-louis Farakhan and hangs posters of Che Guevera in his office and the blind sheep fawn over his empty rhetoric.
Maybe if Sean Penn portrayed Adolf Hitler in a movie, he'd win the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award.
For all I know, maybe he already has.
Nothing surprises me in what little I happen to learn about pop culture in this millennium.
Benicio del Toro, the "Latino Brad Pitt," won a recent Cannes Best Actor award for his portrayal of one Ernesto "The Butcher" Guevara. Sure, socialists prefer to call The Butcher by his popular moniker, "Che," but if you lost a family member or 10 to Guevara, you'll remember him as The Butcher.
Guevara was an Argentinian-born Stalinist revolutionary who fought with Castro in Cuba and in Bolivia, according to wikipedia.org and other references. He was, many say, championed as a hero despite his authoritarian and bloodthirsty ideology and crimes against humanity.
At the La Cabana fortress in Havana, Guevara had control over the so-called war criminals trials, which reportedly resulted in the execution of 600 civilian and military officials.
"Many individuals imprisoned at La Cabana, such as poet and human rights activist Armando Valladares, allege that Guevara took particular and personal interest in the interrogation, torture, and execution of prisoners," says wikipedia.org.
While today's Guevara faithful like to think of him as a man of the people, a revolutionary, a poor peasant raging against the machine, nothing could be further from reality. He was a child of wealth and opportunity and he did little to deserve either.
Under Castro, Guevara served in many prominent governmental positions, including president of the national bank, minister of industry, and "supreme prosecutor" over the revolutionary tribunals and executions of suspected war criminals from the previous regime (wikipedia.org).
Let's see if we've got this right, he was a banker, the leader of Cuba's industry and its supreme prosecutor? Shoot, I think Che Guevara might have been a Republican capitalist. Why do liberals continue to embrace his "legacy?"
I fully understand making a movie for artistic or entertainment value. But if one's purpose is to distort history, that is another matter entirely.
Paul Berman, a liberal author and journalist, wrote the following about Guevara for Slate Magazine: "(Guevara) presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's 'labor camp' system - the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.
"(Guevara) succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. These insurgencies accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin American democracy - a tragedy on the hugest scale," Berman wrote.
"The present-day cult of Che - the T-shirts, the bars, the posters - has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality."
Several few years ago, sitting a few feet away from the Gulf of Mexico, I was approached by a gentleman on vacation from Miami. He told me he was from Cuba, but left at the time Castro took over.
I told him I'd love to go to Cuba. He said I wouldn't. We talked briefly about Elian Gonzalez, who was in the news at the time. When I mentioned Guevara, he turned and laughed in disgust.
"You would have had to live there 40 years ago to understand," he said.
There is a reason why mothers would risk the life of their children across shark-infested waters in a raft straight from "Tom Sawyer" just to reach American shores.
Today, we have an American (Puerto Rican) actor portraying a murderous thug and winning an international film award for his efforts, and then dedicating the award to said thug. We also have a candidate for president whose Houston, Texas office displayed images of the butcher of Bolivia, Guevara.
Contrarily, no one's ever heard of people like Armando Valladares or Humberto Fontova. No one sports T-shirts with their likeness.
Fontova (
http://hfontova.com) is a Cuban scholar who holds a master's degree in Latin American studies and has published books on the region's politics, the most pertinent of which would be his latest: "Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him."
"One of the gems espoused by Guevara that Fontova mentions was, 'The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!' raved Guevara in 1961. Against those hyenas, there is no option but extermination."
Today's American youngsters buy up the Guevara T-shirts and flags not knowing that he would have loved to kill their grandparents. Useful idiots, indeed.
As you read this, I am again sitting along the Gulf of Mexico. If I encounter anyone from Cuba, I won't mention the Butcher of La Cabana.
Rory Ryan is publisher and editor of The Times-Gazette.
