Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

This first appeared on October 9, 2009. RK

Che Guevara's Whacking -- A Glorious Anniversary
By Humberto Fontova

Forty two years ago today, Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying "What goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here.

"When you saw the beaming look on Che's face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” ..”you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara." …Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter.

A Rumanian journalist named Stefan Bacie…. got there just in time to hear the command of FUEGO!....Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che's soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little "Rigo" pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his "prosecutors" that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn't possibly have been "a CIA agent planting bombs."

"FUEGO!" and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo's little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. Remember the gallant Che Guevara's instructions to his revolutionary courts: "judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail." And remember Harvard Law School's invitation and rollicking ovation to Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath......

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