On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras....Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy....The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground...
Whether you like him or not, I think you'd have to be a really petty person not to recognize that Fidel Castro was an extraordinary political leader. So I'm not surprised that even some conservative bloggers are giving the old man his due. So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid. Let’s hear it for the middle-aged Cuban construction workers who held off the US forces for a while on Grenada. Let’s hear it for Elian Gonzalez. Let’s hear it for 49 years of defiance in the face of the US blockade. Hasta la victoria siempre! Which is basically how I feel. Fidel may be a flawed figure. His clumsy attempt to re-educate gays in the early sixties was pathetic...even though he did apologize later. His island remains a poor and sometimes oppressive place. Life for many Cubans is hard. But if you've ever visited Cuba like I have, and you want to see the greatest victory of Castro's Cuban revolution , all you've got to do is look at the happy faces of the Cuban children...
They are a beautiful mix of all races together... and unlike so many other poor children in Latin America.... they are well fed, healthy and educated. The Cubans may be poor, but they've sacrificed a lot of things to make sure that they have first-class medical facilities, and schools....and a literacy rate that is better than ours. Even as they struggle with shortages..... they pamper their kids. And all of that in a little country that has been strangled for half a century by the world's mightiest superpower. So when I see some illiterate gusano in Miami holding up a sign like this one...
I'm reminded that are many versions of freedom. And mine doesn't include the freedom for children and others to die of starvation and disease....or ignorance and poverty. Like they do all over Latin America. And in many so-called free and richer countries. But not in Castro's Cuba. In a world full of hollow words and promises that's a REAL achievement. So all I can say is ..... not bad old man. It has been quite a show. I'm think I'm going to miss you. And how you showed the yankees that small and poor doesn't have to mean weak....or meek. Good enough. Viva Fidel !!
It's a beautiful white building. But if its walls could talk they would scream. Or just run with blood. It's the Argentine Navy's Mechanic School. For years it was brutal torture centre and death factory.
An estimated 5,000 people are thought to have been tortured and killed there in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
Most were tortured and never emerged alive, their bodies dumped from planes into the nearby River Plate. If that were not grim enough, the building also served as a maternity centre where babies were taken from their mothers and given to childless police and military couples.
The mothers were then usually killed. I wonder if any of those poor people ever imagined that the building where they were so brutally tortured and then murdered would one day become a memorial to them. And not just to them but to the 30,000 or more people who were murdered during Argentina's Dirty War. I'm glad some of those dirty bastards are being punishedAnd the Nazi crimes of the Catholic Church continue to be exposed. I'm glad Argentinians are going to have a place to remember all those who disappeared into the fascist killing machine..... leaving only the memories of those who loved them ....and those black and white photographs to stare at us and horrify us forever. I'd like to think that if I ever visit Argentina again that's the first place I'd visit. But after that afternoon in that musky crypt in that leafy cemetery,I honestly don't know if I could. You see I HAVE to believe that humanity learned something from the Holocaust. That we're better than that now. That it could never happen again. But in a place like that you can't....
I never got a t-shirt or a mug of Che Guevara. But the dead revolutionary spent more time on the bedroom walls of my life than any other person. With the possible exception of Ayrton Senna...the dead racing car driver. I didn't know very much about him. Except that he was a rebel doctor who fought for poor people in Latin America...and was murdered by the CIA. Which made him a hero in my book. And that he had Irish blood in him ....which of course explained EVERYTHING. Later I found out that it was a little more complex than that. That he was an absolutist with a ruthless streak. A hopeless idealist who led himself, those that followed him, and countless other young Latin Americans he inspired, to disaster and death. Even if it was for a noble cause. So on the 40th anniversary of his death I was interested in what people had to say about my old dead hero At first I thought that this guy best summed up how I feel about him now. That Che is just an iconic image on a million t-shirts ...and his message has been overtaken by time. "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, and some other hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge - with the staccato singing of the machine-gun, and new cries of war and victory."
That was the harsh appeal of Che Guevara 40 years ago. Today, it sounds very similar to the message of Osama bin Laden.
And then I read what Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer, had to say about him and I changed my mind. I suspect that the young of the world grasp that the man whose poster beckons from their walls cannot be that irrelevant, this secular saint ready to die because he could not tolerate a world where los pobres de la tierra, the displaced and dislocated of history, would be eternally relegated to its vast margins.
More than 3 billion human beings on this planet right now live on less than $2 a day. And every day that breaks, 40,000 children — more than one every second! — succumb to diseases linked to chronic hunger. They are there, always there, the terrifying conditions of injustice and inequality that led Che many decades ago to start his journey toward that bullet and that photo awaiting him in Bolivia.
The powerful of the earth should take heed: deep inside that T shirt where we have tried to trap him, the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience.
I like to think that too. Because settling for a world where billions live in desperate poverty and 40,000 children die every day is just not on for me.
Just as I like to think if I had to have a hero he was a good one. Just like the movie was...
Let the world change you and you can change the world. Oh yeah. Forty years after he was murdered. Che still lives...
