Ernie Lynch was passed away 40 Years ago!

[Cap'n Jib]

Probably known better as Che Guevara, El Che, Che or Ernesto Guevara. He has left an indelible mark on the political affairs of Latin America. Here are a few links.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=486548&in_page_id=181 1
http://www.che-lives.com/home/
http://www.che-mart.com/

Cuba had a celebration for him ….so what he’s dead. Well other countries had celebrations and the point of view is interesting….very interesting.


I watched two TV programs on his last days. The first night was a documentary done by a Mexican crew. Will admit to understanding 1 out of every 10 words. The three commentators were trying to have a speed talking contest. Graphics were well done though. The second night was much better as the crew was from Bolivia and my comprehension was up to 9 out of 10 words.

The Bolivian documentary actually interviewed Bolivian Guerrillas who served with Che. Keeping in mind that the entire band did not get above 44 individuals of which six were Cubans, this put a different slant on what I had read before.

Picture a former guerrilla fighter wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap. Are you with me here? I had a problem with verisimilitude at this point. How do I take this ‘freedom fighter’ seriously wearing that silly hat. What about all that stuff of throwing off the yoke of Yankee Imperialism? After a while I realized a had a fixation problem with the hat….ok a damn obsession if you will. Turned up the sound and did not look at the TV while he was talking.

He was 17 at the time and many were very young recruits. Idealistic and frustrated with the oligarchy controlling the lives of the poor. He talked about the hardships suffered during the guerrilla campaign as well as the ‘forgiveness’ afterwards by many of the people. It should be remembered that the Communist party did not support the violent solution being exported by Cuba. Now with the ascendance of Evo Morales some of the ‘reforms’ El Che endorsed have been implemented…..without violence!

Next they had interviews with the poor in the slums surrounding of the capital of La Paz. NOT good. Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America and without hope for the poor, there is nothing. Over 200 people were at the school site of Che’s death. Not much by some standards but further interviews of teens through out Bolivia, showed many identified what he supposedly stood for.

Other Latin countries had quiet celebrations for Che and shows he still has appeal. His death created a following that just might endure forever. Here in Panama the local trade union (Suntracs), which the government is trying to shut down, put up Che’s posters everywhere in response.


Not everyone is enamored with Che. See the following link:

http://www.therealcuba.com/MurderedbyChe.htm


Don't think we have heard the last of him!

[Cubafro]

CAP,
As usual you come with some interesting materials. I would like to comment and discuss more on this but it will have to wait until tomorrow I got to go at work now


CUBA

[KPunch2]

Thank you Cap'n for that article. Here are two more links of the man everyone calls 'Che'.

The Martyring of Che Guevara
Robert Scheer

The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable media attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts throughout the world. There were the standard snarky asides that many young people wearing those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was, but the journalists reporting the story seemed equally ignorant. Little was reported about Che's life and what led him to shun the comforts of a physician's lifestyle in Argentina to fight as a revolutionary in the rugged terrains of Cuba, the Congo and, finally, Bolivia--or why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the world's poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent.

One exception was the BBC, which bothered to send a reporter to Florida to interview Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA agent who was part of a team of CIA operatives and Bolivian soldiers who captured Che. "Mr. Rodriguez ordered the soldier who pulled the trigger to aim carefully, to remain consistent with the Bolivian government's story that Che had been killed in action in a clash with the Bolivian army," said the BBC report. Che's hands were then cut off and put in formaldehyde to preserve his fingerprints.

In his interview with the BBC, Rodriguez claimed that the order to kill Che came from the Bolivian government, and that he went along: "I could have tried to falsify the command to the troops, and got Che to Panama as the U.S. government said they wanted," he recalled, but he didn't. Clearly, the U.S. government was not unhappy with Rodriguez's role in the bloody affair, for he went on, as he boasts, to train the Nicaraguan Contras and advise the repressive Argentine military government in the 1980s. He showed the BBC reporter his CIA medal for exceptional service along with a picture of him with the first President Bush in the White House. George H.W. Bush, it should be remembered, had been the head of the CIA during some of the years that Rodriguez worked there and was not put off by the man's past deeds, including his part in Che's assassination.

So, what's the big deal? Che was a Cuban Communist, and it's a good thing that folks like Bush and Rodriguez were able to defeat him before he spread his evil message further--right? False, on every count.

First off, he was either an Argentine Trotskyite or an anarchist, but Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold. Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy. He was, like Trotsky in his dispute with Stalin, skeptical that the kind of socialism that truly served the poor could survive in just one country; hence, he died attempting to internationalize the struggle.

It also turned out that killing Che was a big mistake, as his message was spread more effectively by his execution than by his guerrilla activities, which were, after he left Cuba, quite pathetic. This is the case in Latin America, where political leaders he helped inspire are faring better than those coddled by the CIA. Daniel Ortega, whom the CIA worked so doggedly to overthrow, is the elected president of Nicaragua. Almost all of Latin America's leaders are leftists, some more moderate than Che (as in Brazil), and others as fiery as the guerrilla (in Venezuela), but all determinedly independent of yanqui control. Fortunately, they differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun. But all recognize that poverty remains the region's No. 1 problem and that the free-market model imposed by the United States hardly contains all the answers. Recall that the U.S. break with the Cuban revolution came before Castro's turn toward the Soviets, and that it was over his nationalization of American-owned business assets in Cuba ranging from Mafia-run casinos to the electric power grid.

These days, few politicians in the United States even seem to care about the subversive Cuban influences in our own backyard that once haunted them. The embargo on Cuba remains to mollify Florida's aging Cuban community, but what's important to Washington today is Mideast oil, not protecting the peasants of Bolivia from the likes of Che Guevara.

On Monday, Che's death was marked, in the Bolivian village where he was killed, by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who proclaimed his movement "100 percent Guevarist and socialist," which hardly registers as a propaganda success story for those favoring CIA assassinations. They turned a failed--and flawed--guerrilla fighter into an enduring symbol of resistance to oppression.

Originally posted at Truthdig.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert...v_b_67881.html
-----
Che it Ain't So
John Ridley

There is a character in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de Souffle who speaks of the path to everlasting fame. "First you become immortal," he instructs, "then you die."

A prime exemplar of the "create a legend/resurrection" method of eternal iconography would be Ernesto (Che) Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary who was executed forty years ago today in Bolivia. Death transmogrified him into a symbol of revolution itself. Time has turned him into an empty Warholized emblem that adorns everything from T-shirts to ***** packs to bumper stickers and apparently even a soap with the slogan "Che washes whiter."

In death Guevara has certainly managed to whitewash his image. A cleansing aided by such personality cultisms as the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which portrays Guevara as a young, wide-eyed do-gooder who travels South America looking to right social wrongs. Romanticized and corporate pimped, for most who even know who Guevara was they have no idea what he stood for. They merely accept that he was the South American Martin Luther King.

He was not.

Guevara was a brutal, egotistical killer without the smarts to enact lasting economic reform nor the guile to achieve true insurgent victory. His most significant military achievement -- the taking of Santa Clara during Castro's Cuban revolution -- might have been more a matter of financial bribery than military strategy.

What is in little dispute is the savagery of his tenure as the commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison. Think of it as Cuba's Abu Ghraib. In a mere five months Guevara oversaw and personally signed off on the execution of as many as 500 people. Men, women, children. Not all merely loyalists to overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Also executed were political prisoners, dissidents, artist, intellectuals and homosexuals. A representative number of the left the revolution was supposed to be lifting up.

His bloody handiwork should come as no surprise. Before Guvera was a soap pitchman from beyond the grave, he was the "The Butcher of la Cabaña" who preached: "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

I'm sure Gandhi would have been proud.

As head of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, and President of the National Bank of Cuba, Guevara would institute popular reforms that would eventually lead to economic disaster. From the middle 1960s until the Soviet collapse Cuba was subsistent on their largess to a tune of $65 billion to $100 billion annually.

As a military leader Guevara was hardly more impressive. In the Congo he hooked up with a couple of bloody rebels, failed to inspire the people and accomplished little more than putting his own men through a shredder. It was a misadventure Guevara himself described as a "history of failure."

An expedition into Bolivia proved disastrous. Guevara completely misread the situation on the ground, could not incite a popular uprising, was completely abandoned by the Bolivian communists, their Soviet backers and even the Cubans.

Bolivian Rangers took him prisoner on the 8th of October, 1967. He whimpered as they came: "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead."

The Bolivian's figured otherwise. The next day Guevara was executed.

And thus began his ascendancy from abject failure to high icon. A populist, a revolutionary. A man who turned his back on material gains to give instead to the people.

And if you believe that, consider this: when Guevara was captured in Bolivia he was wearing a Rolex watch on his wrist.

Long live the revolution.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r...o_b_67729.html

[Cubafro]

I did found a link which may be interesting for those of you who are interested in that man EL CHE
http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/index.htm

I was a bit surprised while in CUBA because I remember when I went there the times before, people really loved him (apparently) and did respect his work, determination and all that. This time it looked like half-half, maybe considering the fact that there will maybe be a change in CUBA, with Fidel's enfermedad. I heard people treating him names as *******, perro, estupido, utopista...
All this I presume is the fact that people decided to change what was his point of view on the revolution at the beginning which wasn't such a bad thing I think. Anyways I'm pretty sure he did bad things, but also did good things but people are people and remember most bad things; even here I'm sure our governements killed and did such bad things. I still think and have a lot of admiration for this man .
Cap, again , nice thread
I keep :detective: for some links to share in here

CUBA

[Cubafro]

Originally Posted by KPunch2

As a military leader Guevara was hardly more impressive. In the Congo he hooked up with a couple of bloody rebels, failed to inspire the people and accomplished little more than putting his own men through a shredder. It was a misadventure Guevara himself described as a "history of failure."

What's funny in this part of ''throwing ****'' to EL CHE memory is that they didn't say that he was there to apparently give some space to FIDEL in CUBA and didn't have any help of cuban governement. He met the man called LAURENT-DESIRE KABILA who was not less than a robber, voyou in search of power and money and who finally became president of ZAIRE after throwing out MOBUTU SESE SEKO out with help of RWANDESE SOLDIERS and from what we know USA ....EL CHE said something that I won't forget, ''IF AFRICANS HAVE ONLY LEADERS THINKING ABOUT WOMENS AND MONEY, AFRICA WON'T GO FAR''!! This is so true. And yes he declared that was a failure, I guess it's not there that we can see a failure, when you look at CUBA now(economy,PIB for people)Politically I think it could have been bette if the man than I thought(as many cubans thought) was the one he showed us at the beginning (yeah I know I said good things about FIDEL and still do on some area)

Originally Posted by KPunch2

And if you believe that, consider this: when Guevara was captured in Bolivia he was wearing a Rolex watch on his wrist.

Long live the revolution.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r...o_b_67729.html

This guy who wrote this article would have say such bad things if they found CHE with a CALVIN KLEIN underwear. Is he cuban living in MIAMI? I wonder

Anyways KP good post hermano

CUBA