A revisionist biography has highlighted Guevara’s involvement in countless executions of “traitors” and counter-revolutionary “worms”, offering a fresh glimpse of the dark side of the celebrated guerrilla fighter who helped Fidel Castro to seize power in Cuba.
“Attacking an almost legendary figure is not an easy task,” said Jacobo Machover, author of The Hidden Face of Che. “He has so many defenders. They have forged the cult of an untouchable hero.”
The Argentine-born Guevara has become ever more fashionable, his prerevolutionary adventures as a medical student dramatised to great acclaim in the film The Motorcycle Diaries and his bearded visage an icon of chic on T-shirts and even bikinis.
Machover, a Cuban exiled in France since 1963, blames the hero worship on French intellectuals who flocked to Havana in the 1960s and fell under the charm of the only “comandante” who could speak their language.
They turned a blind eye to anything that did not fit in with their idealised image of Guevara. A prolific diarist, Guevara nevertheless wrote vividly of his role as an executioner. In one passage he described the execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide.
“I fired a .32calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple,” was Guevara’s clinical description of the killing. “He moaned for a few moments, then died.”
This was the first of many “traitors” to be subjected to what Guevara called “acts of justice”...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2461399.ece
