Este livro conta em detalhe a verdadeira história de Che Guevara, o psicopata louco transformado em ídola pela propaganda castrista e seus admiradores, os idiotas úteis. ( )

If you want to know what Fidel Castro and his brother Raul along with the Argentinian "doctor" Ernesto "Che" Guevara did to Cuba after Batista, you need to read this book. Having said that, the one major drawback of this book are the personal axes that author Humberto Fontova has to grind. Fontova, along with his siblings and mother were able to escape Cuba in 1961. His father couldn't leave with them at the time as he had been detained for questioning by Che and his henchmen. Usually those detained by Che were never seen by their families again. Luckily Fontova's father was released and able to join the rest of the family in Miami.

Most books about Che idolize him and tell us what a great liberator he was in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia. You won't get that in this book. Fontova tells us like it was with well done research and interviews with those who were there when this all happened.

Glad I have it on my shelf. I'll refer to it again and won't read another book that idolizes this brutal executioner by the name of "Che" Guevara ( )

Great book. Well referenced. Includes references from the very obscure Verde Olivo, the Cuban Military's official rag. ( )

This will not shed light on why men like Che, Castro and Mao are lauded by the Left while white guys like Hitler and Stalin are the epitome of Rightwingers. Mr. Fontova's book will highlight the obtusely celebratory idolatry of these tyrants. Mixing critiques of past biographers, recounting reports and interviews of victims and victimizers, and Che's diary itself, Exposing the Real Che Guevara, destroys the happy revolutionary symbolism now all too prevalent in our culture.

Mr. Fontova does a great job of showing how teens, actors and rock stars and left-leaning politicians behold and revere a mass murderer, Imperialist (his forays into Africa and Argentina were attempts at establishing Marxism in those countries), book burning and counterculture hating coward. ( )

I have a Cuban uncle who grew up in pre-Castro Cuba, so as a kid I thought that Che's full name was Che Fucking Guevara. Thus, unlike all my peers, I have always known Che to be a murderous butcher - not someone to look up to as a revolutionary icon. (If you want a revolutionary icon, look to George Washington.) I have always laughed when some pothead rocker wears a Che shirt. I then usually wonder aloud about how that shirt was brought to him by capitalism. It turns out that most of the folks who wear Che shirts are useful idiots, usually fairly well-off, and probably would have been shot by Che and his goons. And this is the story that Humberto Fontova tells us.

Fontova cites a lot of sources that standard biographers of Che have overlooked, and stayed away from those that shouldn't be used. Che biographers have put too much stock in pro-Castro sources, source interviews with folks stuck on Cuba, and written sources that have been edited by Castro's ilk. These biographers wouldn't do this if Che was Pinochet, but since the New York Times basically wrote Castro into the leadership of Cuba in 1959, they accept what he says at face value. I'd like to say these are the same guys who believed Stalin's trials were legit. Che wasn't a doctor, wasn't that good of a student, he was a horrible guerilla and military commander, a butchering savage, and the worst economics czar on the face of the earth. Fontova cites newspaper articles, interviews Cuban exiles and refugees (both so-called "Bastita gangsters" and ex-commies and revolutionaries), and basically tells the story right. The Cuban revolution was a press piece and bought and paid for by anti-Batistianos - then Castro, in a sense, betrayed the anti-Batista revolution and put a Soviet-style government in place. More people died in executions after Che's so-called battles than actually died in them. Most Batista army officers were bribed into surrendering their soldiers. Che blundered at every turn in every thing he did. He took the Western Hemisphere's third best economy and drove it into the dirt. He made a mockery of the advanced Cuban judicial system. He mucked up revolutions in the Congo and in Bolivia. He got whipped at the Bay of Pigs and during the Escambray Rebellion, only winning because the Cuban revolutionaries were sold up the river by the US (Kennedy and Johnson, mind you).

Fontova spends the most time and energy, however, detailing Che's hand in concentration camps and extra-judicial, as well as "judicial," executions. Che and Castro killed or imprisoned opponents, rockers (roqueros), smart-mouthed youths, those who owned property, those who knew they were commies, kids with long hair, homosexuals, and on and on and on. Che's tenure at La Cabaña prison was the worst, and Fontova details Che's evil activities fairly well here.

The book could stand to be a bit more scholarly rigorous, but it is meant for a popular audience. At least it does have endnotes and is fairly-well cited. I wish it had a bibliography for further reading. A big pet peeve, La Cabaña prison is consistently written as "La Cabana" - a mistake that surely is the fault of an editor unfamiliar with Spanish. In the end, the fact that Che and Fidel are lauded by the Left, left-leaning Hollywood/music types, and the "beautiful people" is funny. Funny, if it weren't so tragic a story. Che and Fidel were and are butchers - totalitarians no better than Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, or Mao. Period. ( )