Stop praising Che
Allow me to register my complete and utter lack of shock over the fact that the Daily Wildcat has yet again demonstrated its extreme left-wing bias. Your coverage of the Gallagher Theater’s showing of “”The Motorcycle Diaries”” was chock-full of glowing coverage of the so-called “”revolutionary”” Che Guevara. (“”Che inspires students 41 years after death,”” Oct. 10, 2008) You completely left out the portion of his life that involved the mass slaughter of ideological opponents after the Cuban Revolution. But hey, don’t let the fact that he was a mass-murderer under whom thousands were executed get in the way of glorifying yet another left-wing “”martyr.””
My mother was born in Guantanamo, Cuba, in 1959. Unlike most of the typical “”revolutionaries”” who aspire to be like Che, and claim him to be some kind of martyr and claim to understand communism, my mother, as well as my grandmother, both know what it was like to live under the iron fist of a communist dictatorship. My mother was actually born on the kitchen table in her home because the guerrillas controlled the local hospital and my mother’s family was afraid to leave the house. Guerrillas like those, and many others, were under the command of men like Guevara and Castro; men who would kill someone just because they disagreed with the “”revolutionary”” communism du jour.
After all, Guevara said, in 1967: “”We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move.”” Furthermore, Guevara believed in dealing with his opponents via extrajudicial punishment: “”To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”” I challenge every single so-called “”revolutionary”” who adores Guevara to prove to me those quotes are not openly advocating for the murder of ideological opponents.
Until you’ve actually lived under a communist dictatorship and known what it really is to be oppressed, like my dad’s family did in Poland and my mom’s family did in Cuba, stop claiming you know what it means to be a “”revolutionary”” or trying to glorify mass murderers.
Kevin Rand Wos
political science sophomore