Following the collapse of the Batista regime, Guevara served as commander of the La Cabaña prison, where he personally presided over the extrajudicial executions of hundreds-perhaps thousands-of former regime officials and opponents of Castro's dictatorship.
Former dissident Armando Valladares has documented Che's personal involvement in the tortu2e and execution of political prisoners. Lest one dismiss these atrocities as relics of a bygone era, a recent Amnesty International report reminds us that, "Cuban authorities continue to suppress any form of dissent by methods such as harassment, threats, intimidation, detention and long-term imprisonment." In short, the very methods Guevara helped pioneer.
In a July 2005 New Republic essay entitled "The Killing Machine," Alvaro Vargas Llosa offers a chilling description of Guevara's serial bloodletting in the name of communist revolution. Llosa's title is an allusion to Che's famous "Message to the Tricontinental," which contained this charming passage: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."
Llosa writes, "Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel...among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment." Guevara later supervised the construction of a constellation of hellish "labor" camps across Cuba, which were used to imprison dissidents and, not long after his death, homosexuals and AIDS patients.
During a 1960s tour of Stalinist nations, Guevara was said to have been most enchanted with North Korea, perhaps the most Orwellian state in human history. Having personally engineered the alliance between Castro's nascent dictatorship and the Soviet Union-the oppressor of hundreds of millions of people from Pyongyang to Prague-Guevara lamented the Soviet "betrayal" of Cuba following the Cuban Missile Crisis. He informed a reporter for the socialist newspaper, The Daily Worker, that, "If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York...."
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