Zombie Revolutionary

Che instructed his Revolutionary Tribunals: "We don't need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

Shortly afterwards, Che's father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. "I'd like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing."

"If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City," Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962. "We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims. ... We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm."

In the halcyon post-revolution days, Che was made Governor of the National Bank, his face appearing on the two peso note. Magnum photographer Rene Burri - he took another defining photograph of Che, eyes blazing, cigar clamped in the side of his mouth - tells this story about the haphazard creation of Castro's first cabinet. 'One of Castro's aides asked, "Is there an economist in the room?", and, to everyone's surprise, Che stuck up his hand. Because they were all in awe of him, they voted him governor of the bank. It turns out Che had misheard the question. He thought the guy had asked, "Is there a Communist in the room?"'

'There is a sense, seldom articulated, that Che, for all his heroism and romance, was a wild card, and that even Castro realised this relatively early on,' says Lawrence Osborne. 'He had this Jack London-style attitude to revolution as one great big unending adventure, but none of the political maturity to deal with the practical realities of making the country work. He had this Castilian Spanish upper-class guilt about the working class and peasants that he never quite overcame. For all the noble impulses that drove him, and I think there were many, Che's whole life could be read as a foredoomed attempt to leave his own class.'

In his "Bolivian Diary," Guevara laments not recruiting a single peasant to his army. Some peasants thought that Guevara and his men — whose months in the jungle had left them with unkempt beards and tattered clothes — were wizards.

“If in doubt, kill him” were Che’s instructions.

Unfortunately, Cuba had no raw materials for heavy industry, and, as a consequence of the revolutionary redistribution, it had no hard currency with which to buy them—or even basic goods. By 1961, Guevara was having to give embarrassing explanations to the workers at the office: “Our technical comrades at the companies have made a toothpaste ... which is as good as the previous one; it cleans just the same, though after a while it turns to stone.” 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 to cover its needs and to re-sell to other countries.

In 1965 Ginsberg was deported from Cuba for publicly protesting against Cuba's anti-marijuana stance and its penchant for throwing homosexuals in jail, but also for an alleged remark referring to revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara as "cute."

The Observer: Just a pretty face?
Che Guevara: 39 Years of Hype
The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand
Following in Che's Footsteps
Unofficial Biography