USC, like every other college campus in America, has its own contingent of liberal students who can be seen around campus donning Che Guevara T-shirts. Whenever I see one of them, I always wonder whether they bought the shirt for ideological reasons or just because they recognize that Che's picture, the one where he's looking resolutely at something or another and wearing the famous black beret, is fashionable among college students.
Knowing a little about Che and what a savage monster he was, I've been inclined to think that, in fact, these students do not know the first thing about him and are only wearing the shirt because they think it's cool.
I found at least one piece of evidence to support this theory a couple of days ago when, flipping through the Garnet & Black magazine, I saw a guy wearing one of these shirts in the "Caught Red-Hot" section. In reference to his taste in clothing, he said he likes to represent people in history whom he thinks are important, and that he looks at "what they've done for their country."
At that point, I realized that this guy knows absolutely nothing about the person whose face he's wearing on his shirt. Like I said, though, most Che shirt-wearers probably don't -- or at least I hope they don't. So I thought I would use this space to let these people know just who this Che Guevara guy is whose memory they're so proudly honoring on their way to class.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a devout Stalinist and a ruthless murderer. In post-revolution Cuba, he was one of the chief architects of that country's labor camps that killed about 20,000 Cuban people. Samuel Farber, a member of the editorial board of the socialist Cuban magazine Against the Current, explains in the Summer 1998 issue of New Politics: "Clearly, Che Guevara played a key role in inaugurating a tradition of arbitrary administrative, non-judicial detentions, later used in the (Military Units to Aid Production) camps for the confinement of dissidents and social 'deviants': homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, practitioners of secret Afro-Cuban religions and non-political rebels."
As Jay Nordlinger points out in his Dec. 31, 2004, National Review column, Che was especially fond of personally executing prisoners in the La Cabana fortress he was in charge of by administering a gun shot to the back of their necks. La Cabana was a slaughterhouse where people could be put up against the wall in front of the firing squad for any number of "crimes," no matter how incidental.
Humberto Fontova reminds us in NewsMax of an interview given by a former prisoner of La Cabana, Pierre San Martin, to El Nuevo Herald in 1998. In the article, Martin recounts witnessing Che's execution of a young boy for attempting to save his father from the firing squad. For that mistake, Che put his pistol to the back of the boy's neck and fired it, nearly decapitating him.
Somehow, I don't think this is the "social justice" or "love for the people" Che fans have in mind when they buy his shirt. Che certainly never cared about the people. In response to the living conditions in Cuba post-revolution, Che wrote in "Man and Socialism in Cuba," "It is not a question of how many kilograms of meat are eaten or how many times a year someone may go on a holiday to the seashore" (so much for the worker's paradise). All Che cared about was power and the communist experiment.
If anyone still feels compelled to wear a Che shirt, you ought to consider buying the one that has the words, "I have no idea who this is," written below Che's picture. At least that way the people who do know who he is won't think you are so morally callous that you think it's fashionable to pay tribute to a man responsible for the deaths of thousands and a gulag system that, to this day, imprisons blacks, homosexuals, AIDS patients, people of faith and political dissidents for being the Communist society's undesirables.
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