"Don't Shoot! I'm Che! I'm worth to you more alive than dead!" This sniveling shout was heard by the two Bolivian soldiers when they confronted Che and his guerrilla charge Willi. Che immediately dropped his fully loaded weapons and started his whimpering. (That's two Bolivian soldiers against two armed guerrillas, by the way.)
The Bolivian commanders duly documented these details in the official reports of their anti-guerrilla campaign. These records, the worldwide media. from Madrid to Manila and from Buenos Aires to New York, treat in the same manner that Dracula treated a cross -- nay, in the manner the ACLU treats a cross.
Unsurprisingly, The New York Times had a correspondent in the Cuban city of Santa Clara for the teary commemoration at Che's mausoleum last year, where Raul Castro presided and a solemn message from Fidel was read. Castro referred to his regime's chief executioner as, "a flower that was plucked from his stem prematurely."
Nary a hint from these intrepid, investigative news agencies that Fidel Castro was himself the main agent of that "plucking."
And nary a mention, amidst all the adulation, of the one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara's life: the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically.
So allow me to spoil the party. Upon arriving in Havana on January of 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war, Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana's La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar Hitler's SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara had one ready made.
In 1961 a 20 year-old boy named Tony Chao Flores took his place at the execution stake, but he hobbled to it on crutches. He'd taken 17 bullets from their Czech machine guns when the Castroites captured him. On the way to the execution stake at the old Spanish fort turned to a prison and execution ground by Che Guevara, Tony was forced to hobble down some cobblestone stairs. Tony tumbled down the long row of steps and finally lay on the cobblestones at the bottom, writhing and grimacing. One of Tony's bullet-riddled legs had been amputated at the hospital, the other was gangrened and covered in pus. The Castroite guards cackled as they moved in to gag Tony with their tape.
Tony watched them approach while balling his good hand into a fist. Then as the first Red reached him BASH!! right across his eyes.
"I'll never understand how Tony survived that beating," says eyewitness Hiram Gonzalez who watched from his window on deathrow, screaming in helpless rage at the Communist guards. The crippled Tony was almost killed in the kicking, punching, gun-bashing melee but finally his captors stood off, panting and rubbing their scrapes and bruises. They'd managed to tape the battered boys mouth, but Tony pushed the guards away before they bound his hands. Their commander nodded, motioning for them to back off.
Now Tony started crawling towards the splintered and blood-spattered execution stake about 50 yards away, pushing and dragging himself with his hands as his stump of a leg left a trail of blood on the grass. As he neared the stake he'd stop and start pounding himself in the chest. His executioners seemed perplexed. The crippled boy was trying to say something. But his message was muzzled by the gag the gallant friend of George McGovern made obligatory for his thousands of execution victims.
Tony's blazing eyes and grimace said enough. But no one could understand the boy's mumblings. Tony kept pushing himself, shutting his eyes tightly from the agony of the effort. His executioners shuffled nervously, raised their rifles, lowered them. They looked towards their commander who shrugged. Finally Tony reached up to his face and ripped off the tape that George McGovern's sparkling dinner companion required for his condemned.
The 20 year-old freedom-fighter's voice boomed out. "Shoot me RIGHT HERE!" roared Tony at his gaping executioners. His voice thundered and his head bobbed with the effort. "Right in the CHEST!" Tony yelled. "Like a MAN!" Tony stopped and ripped open his shirt, pounding his chest and grimacing as his gallant executioners gaped and shuffled. "Right HERE!" he pounded.
On his last day alive, Tony had received a letter in jail from his mother. "My dear son," she counseled. "How often I'd warned you not to get involved in these things. But I knew my pleas were vain. You always demanded your freedom, Tony, even as a little boy. So I knew you'd never stand for communism. Well, Castro and Che finally caught you. Son, I love you with all my heart. My life is now shattered and will never be the same, but the only thing left now, Tony . . . is to die like a man."
"FUEGO!!" Castro's lackey yelled the command and the bullets shattered Tony's crippled body, just as he'd reached the stake, lifted himself and stared resolutely at his murderers. But Castro's firing squads usually murder a hero who is standing. The legless Tony presented an awkward target. So some of the volley went wild and missed the youngster. Time for the coup de grace.
Normally it's one .45 slug that shatters the skull. Eyewitnesses say Tony required . . . POW!-POW! . . . POW! three. Seems the executioner's hands were shaking pretty badly. But they finally managed. The man Time magazine's hails among the "heroes and icons of the Century" had another notch in his gun. Another enemy dispatched bound and gagged as usual.
Castro and Che were in their mid-30s when they murdered Tony. According to the authoritative "Black Book of Communism" their firing squads riddled another 14,000 bound and gagged freedom-fighters. Many (perhaps most) of their murder victims were boys in their late-teens and early 20s. Some were even younger. Carlos Machado and his twin brother Ramon were 15 when they spat in the face of their communist executioners and died singing their national anthem as lustily as they cursed Che Guevara's Internationale. Their dad collapsed from same volley alongside them.
Compare Carlos and Tony's death to Guevara's capture: "Don't shoot!" whimpered the arch-assassin to his captors. "I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"
Then ask yourselves: who's face belongs on T-shirts worn by youth who fancy themselves, rebellious, freedom-loving and brave?
