I saw a post by a blogger espousing the movie The Motorcycle Diaries and I just had to comment. In his post, he calls it “perhaps one of the greatest films ever made”. My comment is below:

Whether or not The Motorcycle Diaries is a good film or not I can’t say; I haven’t seen it and I don’t intend to either. The film helps to propel the unmerited iconic status of “El Che Guevara” forward. I’m not sure why the youth of America is intent on making the man into a symbol of freedom when he was anything but. He helped Fidel Castro establish a communist government in Cuba where people suffer to this day. He was also known to have murdered and tortured between 500 – 1700 people in Cuba during his time there.

I suggest that anyone that thinks that El Che is a hero of freedom read the entry for Che Guevara in the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara), the Slate article “The Cult of Che – Don’t Applaud the Motorcycle Diaries” (http://slate.msn.com/id/2107100/) or go speak to a Cuban American that was alive during that time; they’ll tell you what a great man he was.

The youth of America probably thinks its really clever wearing the shirts with El Che’s face on it. They probably think that they are standing up to the corporate mindset in America. Unfortunately, most of these people have no idea of the icon they wear on their shirt. I’d like to ship them off to Cuba to live as the people do to open their eyes to the stupidity of their actions.

Interestingly enough my mom actually had direct contact with Che in Cuba. She recently told me a story about Che’s apparent lack of cleanliness. She was working at a newspaper in Cuba where Che would come in to do whatever it is that he did. There were several times where he would walk past my mom and leave an aromatic trail of “dirty man and ass” behind him. I thought that was a comical anecdote.