

Massamoord, ontvoering, slavernij, marteling, corruptie, dat zijn NA de revolutie van 1959 zo wat methoden geweest van van politicus Guevara. Zijn beleid kenmerkte zich door een volstrekt afwijzen van de economische methode van het op basis van vrijwilligheid uitwisselen van waarden. Hij verkoos de politieke regulerende methode van excessieve onderdrukking en massaal geweld. Mensen ware compliant, or else. Cubanen met intiatief vluchtten of stierven. Het land viel terug tot een armoedige landbouwnatie.
Gisteren werd in mijn bijzijn iemand met een Guevara t shirt gevraagd: “noem mij eens één ding wat hij goed heeft gedaan”. De jongen lachte wat en riep: “jao, vrijheidstrijd hé”. Ik vroeg toen: “wie dan, wie heeft hij bevrijd?” Naar mijn smaak gaf hij wel een juist antwoord: “zichzelf”.
Functioneel zaten Ernesto en Heinrich op dezelfde post. En blote billennazi’s met habsburgse kinnetjes zijn niet sexy. Ché wel. Of is het socialisme nog steeds sexy?
Is “Socialisme” of “Coca Cola” het sterkste merk? Is dat het succes van de main stream media? Wel een dure campagne! -h
“I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners,” said Arzuaga. “I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that, at the end of May 1959, I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment.”
How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Vilasuso told me that 400 people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Guevara ceased to be in charge). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of “over 500.”
Which brings us to Carlos Santana and the chic Che gear he wore to perform at last year’s Academy Awards ceremony. In an open letter published in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald last year, the great jazz musician Paquito D’Rivera castigated Santana for his Oscars costume and added: “One of those Cubans [at La Cabaña] was my cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there precisely for being a Christian. He recounts to me with infinite bitterness how he could hear from his cell in the early hours of dawn the executions, without trial or process of law, of the many who died shouting, ‘Long live Christ the King!’ ”
Che Guevara’s lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. His megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over people’s lives and property. This obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate 6.5 million Cubans.
The first forced labor camp, Guanahacabibes, was set up in western Cuba at the end of 1960. Said Guevara: We “only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail … people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree.”
This camp was the precursor to the systematic confinement of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS patients, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Afro-Cuban priests. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” were transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten or mutilated; most would be traumatized for life.
The great revolutionary also had a chance to put into practice his economic vision as head of the National Bank of Cuba and of the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform at the end of 1959 and, starting in early 1961, as minister of industry.
This period saw the near-collapse of Cuba’s sugar production, the failure of industrialization and the introduction of rationing — all this in what had been one of Latin America’s four most economically successful countries since before the Batista dictatorship. By 1963, all hopes of industrializing Cuba were abandoned, and the revolution accepted its role as a colonial provider of sugar to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil. For the next three decades, Cuba would survive on a Soviet subsidy. article Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The New Republic

