The Truth About Che Guevara [Remastered]

Stefan Molyneux

The real truth behind one of the most controversial, charismatic and popular rebels of the twentieth century.  Learn the truth on the 59th anniversary of Che Guevara's death.  Sources: https://fdrurl.com/che-sources  Originally released June 26, 2014.  0:00:00 Che Guevara’s Origins 0:02:10 Noble Roots and Family Chaos 0:06:52 A Troubled Childhood 0:13:39 Asthma, Instability, and Resentment 0:18:00 Violence Emerges Early 0:23:43 War, Politics, and Radical Ideas 0:33:20 Motorcycle Diaries and Militant Dreams 0:37:05 Cuba’s Revolution Begins 0:46:44 La Cabaña’s Brutal Reign 0:51:53 Cuba Before the Revolution 0:56:40 Terror Plots and Exile 1:00:50 Communism’s Propaganda Victory  Support philosophy! https://freedomain.com/donate/  GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/FREEDOMAIN2026

Transcript

00:00:00Hi everybody, this is Devan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio. I hope you're doing well. This

00:00:03is the truth about one of the most revered, iconic, and controversial rebels of the 20th

00:00:10century, the truth about Che Guevara. So who is the man? Well, his real name was Ernesto

00:00:18Guevara. He was nicknamed Che after he picked that up as a verbal tick in his South and

00:00:23Central American travels. It's sort of the equivalent of maybe y'all in the South or

00:00:27A in Canada. And he fought in the Cuban Revolution and occupied several high-ranking positions

00:00:35in Fidel Castro's government. His picture and image, one of the most widely recognized symbols

00:00:40of rebellion in the world today. And the photograph of him, which is often silk-screened on t-shirts,

00:00:47has been called the most famous photograph in the world. Let's hear what some famous leaders

00:00:53themselves had to say about the man. Nelson Mandela said, the life of Che is an inspiration

00:00:58to all human beings who cherish freedom. We will always honor his memory. Time magazine

00:01:05wrote, wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che Guevara

00:01:12guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence, and a perceptive sense of humor.

00:01:20Rage against the machine. We've considered Che a fifth band member for a long time now for the

00:01:26simple reason that he exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire.

00:01:32He was an amazing example of courage, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them.

00:01:39Christopher Hitchens, 1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che. His death meant

00:01:46a lot to me and countless like me at the time. He was a role model. Benicio Del Toro, the

00:01:54actor,

00:01:55said, Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked to talk. There's just something

00:01:59cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him. And you can

00:02:05find

00:02:05these and similar accolades all over the place. What is the truth about Che Guevara? Well, let's start

00:02:11with his deep, deep background. Che Guevara's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, had roots in Spanish and

00:02:18Irish nobility and was the great grandson of one of the richest men in South America, most of whose

00:02:22fortune was lost by his descendants. Also, actually quite the case with my own family tree as well.

00:02:29Ernesto's parents were born in America as their families fled in Argentine dictatorship to join the

00:02:35California gold rush in the 19th century. After returning from exile, his parents got married and

00:02:40settled down in Buenos Aires. Ernesto had a secular upbringing and was an atheist, which in the 19th

00:02:48century generally meant incredibly fertile ground for Marxism. As one authority figure was displaced by

00:02:55secular rationalism, another one tended to rush in to fill the vacuum, which was the belief in the virtue of

00:03:00the totalitarian state. His noble origins and the adventurous spirit of his ancestors influenced him

00:03:06greatly, but his father sought to prepare him for a working life. The only aristocracy I believe in

00:03:11is the aristocracy of talent, which is, I guess, a uniquely aristocratic way of viewing talent versus, say,

00:03:19work. Ernesto went to college to study architecture, but later dropped out to pursue entrepreneurial

00:03:25ventures. And of course, since Che ended up basically being the son of an entrepreneur,

00:03:30and himself an entrepreneur, it's a little confusing about some of the Marxism, but we'll get to that.

00:03:37A friend of Ernesto's convinced him he could become rich by growing and selling yerba mate,

00:03:42a plant used for the mate beverage consumed by millions of South Americans. After visiting

00:03:46Missionus, a yerba-growing province with plenty of cheap land, he became enthralled by the prospect of

00:03:52earning a fortune from the green gold. However, he couldn't invest in a plantation because his money was

00:03:59tied to a yacht building company he had started with a wealthy relative. So here you have landowner

00:04:05and fruit exploiter and worker exploiter combined with yacht building company. Not the greatest

00:04:11credentials for the father of a Marxist, unless the Marxism is purely reactionary.

00:04:17So Che's mother, Celia de la Cirna y Lusa, was born into an incredibly wealthy family with roots in

00:04:24Spanish nobility. Tragically, Celia's father committed suicide shortly following her birth after learning

00:04:30he had syphilis. He drowned himself, and there is some speculation that he got syphilis as a result

00:04:37of an affair. Celia's mother killed herself shortly thereafter, leaving baby Celia in the care of her

00:04:43older sister Carmen de la Cirna. So a very tragic upbringing for Che's mother, which as you can see

00:04:51as the story unfolds will have devastating consequences. Carmen was a feminist and a member of the Argentine

00:04:58Communist Party who later married a famous communist poet and journalist. So we have a Marxist feminist,

00:05:06which is usually two sides of the same coin, or at least socialist feminist. What kind of son is she

00:05:12going to raise? Through her sister's influence, Celia became a communist and a feminist herself,

00:05:18rejecting religion but retaining an affinity for the spiritual. In other words, all the benefits of

00:05:24religion without having to get up early on Sundays. During the 1920s and 30s, Celia held frequent meetings

00:05:30to discuss the development of the Argentine feminist movement. Ernesto, Che's father, was 27 years old at

00:05:38the time, and he met Celia soon after she graduated from the all-girls Catholic school of the Sacred Heart

00:05:44in Buenos Aires. They decided to get married, but Celia's family opposed her involvement with Ernesto,

00:05:51seeing through the young entrepreneur's desire to fund his Yerba Mate fever by tapping into the clan's

00:05:57great fortune. He needed money, he needed capital, he needed to expand his land holdings, and basically

00:06:03he was a himbo gold digger. At least that is what her family thought. Celia was yet to turn 21,

00:06:11and

00:06:11under Argentine law, she needed her family's permission to get married or to receive her inheritance.

00:06:17Ultimately, the lovers forced the consent of Celia's family by staging an elopement. The marriage was

00:06:22approved, but Celia had to sue her family to win her inheritance, only to receive a portion of it. Celia

00:06:30and

00:06:30Ernesto finally got married in a private ceremony on November the 10th, 1927, and immediately fled to

00:06:36Missiones. Ernesto wrote, together we decided what to do with our lives. Behind lay the penitences, the prudery

00:06:44and the tight circle of relatives and friends who wanted to impede our marriage.

00:06:52And just briefly to touch on South and Central America, there was great promise. Argentina in the

00:07:001920s had the same per capita income as the United States. There was great promise of economic growth

00:07:05and stability in South and Central America. Tragically, they got heavily infected with the

00:07:13viruses of socialism and particularly Marxism, which has resulted in many of the disasters that

00:07:18have occurred since, along with a fairly brutal U.S. foreign policy. After keeping it a secret for

00:07:24three decades, Celia finally revealed that she'd been three months pregnant when she married

00:07:29Ernesto. And they had to stage an elopement because

00:07:31a woman, of course, went to a Catholic school and so on. If you conceived a child out of wedlock,

00:07:36it would have brought great shame to her and her family had it become public knowledge.

00:07:41So, this accident may

00:07:44explain why, or help explain why, a committed communist and a feminist married an entrepreneur.

00:07:48Kind of the bourgeoisie enemy.

00:07:50Fleeing Buenos Aires right after the wedding was also necessary to hide the onset of Celia's pregnancy.

00:07:55When Che Guevara was born, they had a doctor

00:07:57friend falsify the date on the birth certificate. So,

00:08:01they could avoid a scandal.

00:08:05After arriving in Missiones, Ernesto used Celia's money to buy 500 acres of jungle land. And the

00:08:11couple built a roomy wooden house. This is basically a humid hell jungle space, as we'll see.

00:08:19They spent the next few months of Celia's pregnancy engaged in various activities such as fishing,

00:08:23boating, and horseback riding. As you can see, not a huge amount of work actually going on,

00:08:28which is somewhat necessary if you're an entrepreneur, if I remember correctly.

00:08:33Ernesto, Che's father, couldn't relax. To him, Missiones was a place full of, quote,

00:08:37ferocious beasts, dangerous work, robbery, and murderous jungle cyclones,

00:08:42interminable rains, and tropical diseases. I guess that means he would have fit nicely in Congress.

00:08:48In the spirit of his grandfather, he viewed the jungle as a gold mine that would restore his

00:08:52family's wealth, and he couldn't wait to start working on it. But as Celia's pregnancy advanced,

00:08:58they decided to return to civilization so she could give birth in a more comfortable and secure

00:09:02place. They ended up in the large city of Rosario, where Ernesto Che Guevara was born

00:09:07on May 14th, 1928. The date on his birth certificate was falsified to June 14th.

00:09:15The family immediately left for Buenos Aires to show off their son to family and friends,

00:09:18lying to everyone that he was born prematurely. According to one of Ernesto's sisters, the infant

00:09:24almost died from pneumonia 40 days after he was born. This, I would imagine, has something to do

00:09:29with the rigors of travel. Of course, in the 20s, in that place of the world, travel was pretty harsh.

00:09:38Ernesto Sr. now desired to get the Yerba Mate plantation off the ground, so the family

00:09:43returned to their Missione's homestead. Now, we mentioned it's sort of 500 acres of humid jungle

00:09:50hell. It's full of insects. Every single night, Che Guevara's father would creep into his infant's

00:09:56room holding a flashlight, while one of his workers used the burning tip of a cigarette to remove the

00:10:02mites burrowed into the baby's flesh. Now, this is also similar to, as we see from his later

00:10:09political writings, these early infant and toddler experiences have a very deep impression on people's

00:10:16ideology, particularly if they've not rigorously pursued self-knowledge. Hitler used to call Jews

00:10:23the lice burrowing into the flesh of the German population. This, of course, was babies used to

00:10:30be so tightly swaddled. These, like, sort of self-hugging baby burritos that they used to wrap

00:10:36the kids in, and the bandages and so on. The sheets would be full of lice, which would burrow into

00:10:41the

00:10:41children's flesh. And so, many years later, Che Guevara would claim, after having these mites burrowing

00:10:47into his flesh as a baby, that the oppressed masses, quote, would turn the wheel of history

00:10:51by awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected.

00:10:56In March 1929, Celia became pregnant with their second child. She hired a young nanny to take care

00:11:01of her son, who was less than a year old. This may indicate, you know, hiring a nanny when you're

00:11:07a kind of a stay-at-home mom and have servants may indicate that she was feeling overwhelmed and may

00:11:14have been suffering from postpartum depression. Pure theorizing, of course, but it certainly would

00:11:17fit what happened later. So, free of having to take care of young Che, young Ernesto, Celia started

00:11:24swimming daily in the nearby Parana River. When she was six months pregnant, she got caught by the

00:11:29river's current and nearly drowned. Two of her husband's workers happened to be nearby and saved

00:11:34her. Ernesto Sr. would later recall many such near-drowning experiences involving his wife.

00:11:38So, her mother, sorry, her father drowned himself and she herself was continually exposing herself

00:11:45to risk by drowning. That is pretty brutal. And of course, it's well known now, though it really

00:11:50wasn't at the time, that stress hormones while a baby is in the mother's womb can cause significant

00:11:57problems in fetal development. So, whether this had an effect on both the children or the resulting

00:12:02four children is probably quite considerable. By now, there was friction in the relationship between

00:12:07Che's parents. Celia was reckless and aloof, preparing to spend her time in isolation.

00:12:13Ernesto was paranoid and emotionally needy, who needed to have people around him. So, you get the

00:12:18usual codependent. She's fleeing. That causes her to pursue him more, which causes her to emotionally

00:12:23flee more, and this creates a pretty toxic cycle. The family moved back to Buenos Aires later the same

00:12:31year and settled down in the city's outskirts, since Celia was about to give birth. And Ernesto Sr.

00:12:37needed to take care of a business-related problem. One of the investors had withdrawn from his yacht

00:12:43building company while he was away. The company was also on the verge of bankruptcy due to the

00:12:48incompetence of Ernesto's second cousin and business partner. So, in December 1929, Celia gave birth to the

00:12:55second child, a daughter named after her. Ernesto lost his inheritance soon after the family returned

00:13:01to Buenos Aires. A fire destroyed the shipyard, and they couldn't get any insurance money because

00:13:06his cousin forgot to pay the premium. He wasn't terribly worried because they could rely on family

00:13:13and friends to survive financially, not to mention Celia's vast inheritance. But in this, and we've seen

00:13:19this when I've done a video on the truth about Karl Marx, there is a tendency of people who end

00:13:26up in

00:13:26Marxist circles to have families who rely upon manipulation, parasitism, and particularly sexual

00:13:32predation upon the working classes, servants and maids, and so on. On May 2nd, 1930, during the onset

00:13:41of the Argentine winter, Celia took two-year-old Ernesto swimming. The boy got sick the same night,

00:13:45and doctors diagnosed him with asthmatic bronchitis, which later developed into chronic asthma. This

00:13:50affliction followed Che Guevara for the rest of his life. Again, I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad

00:13:56for over five years, taking a two-year-old swimming during the onset of winter, not particularly smart,

00:14:03particularly in a time when there were very few effective antibiotics. So this began to really

00:14:11dominate family geographic decisions. The damp climate of Missionis made the family's return to

00:14:15the Yerba Mate plantation impossible. Ernesto Sr. blamed Celia for bringing about their son's

00:14:20misfortune, and the fallout of the incident strained the marriage almost to the breaking point.

00:14:25So Che's father saw his son's illness as a curse. He wrote in his memoir,

00:14:30Ernesto's asthma had begun to affect our decisions. Each day imposed new restrictions on our freedom

00:14:34of movement, and each day we found ourselves more at the mercy of that damned sickness.

00:14:40Not exactly floating on clouds, Florence Nightingale, Borg of empathy levels of concern for his son.

00:14:48In 1931, the Guevara's moved yet again, this time to Buenos Aires itself, where Celia would give birth

00:14:53to their third child, Roberto, a year later. This kind of chaos, this economic, financial, and career

00:14:59instability. Nobody really has a job. You just got to keep moving. You're always worried about money.

00:15:04This is quite common in the lives of people who end up with larger-than-life personalities, I suppose.

00:15:13Following medical recommendations, the family kept traveling back and forth between the dry climate

00:15:17of Cordoba province and Buenos Aires in the hopes of alleviating young Ernesto's condition, but there

00:15:23was no apparent pattern in the manifestation of his affliction, which may mean that it had some

00:15:28psychosomatic elements. Unable to attend to his business, and with no hope of improving his son's

00:15:34health, Ernesto Sr. started feeling unstable and unable to do anything.

00:15:41So a friend of the family recommended the dry climate of a spa town called Alto Gracia, so the

00:15:46Guevara's decided to move there indefinitely. And again, you're not going to have friendships forming

00:15:52and social networks forming and groups forming, which is a kind of an impediment to the healthy

00:15:58development of a child's empathy. Despair crept in on Ernesto Sr. He was unable to work while the

00:16:05family funds kept shrinking. He suffered from insomnia and felt isolated, further distancing himself

00:16:10from his children. And an emotionally absent father has been statistically quite closely tied to a lack

00:16:16of empathy in the child, in particular in the sons. Meanwhile, Celia became the fun-loving mother that

00:16:22engaged the three children in activities like hiking, swimming, and mule riding. She gave birth to their fourth

00:16:29child, Ana Maria, in January 1934. The financial situation of the Guevara's was becoming strained due

00:16:36to the fact that neither Ernesto nor Celia knew how to handle money in a practical manner. This is also

00:16:42true of a lot of people who end up on the left. They have parents who don't really seem to

00:16:45understand

00:16:46or manage the value of money very well. In other words, we were always broke, therefore money is bad.

00:16:53I fight with my girlfriend about money, therefore we should eliminate money. Because that's really the

00:16:59problem, right? They became famous for their extravagant lifestyle, giving dinner parties, going

00:17:03on frequent vacations, owning a car, and employing three servants. This is a kind of economic entitlement.

00:17:09No matter what the income, this is how we must live. And this kind of great Gatsby hollowing out of

00:17:16a debt-ridden lifestyle is pretty stressful and chaotic and catastrophic, I would say, for children's

00:17:21development. The family enjoyed all these luxuries despite constant financial difficulties. Ernesto

00:17:28Sr. wrote, they were really bad times for us. So full of economic difficulties. The children were

00:17:34getting bigger. Ernesto still had his asthma. We spent a lot on doctors and remedies. We had to pay

00:17:39for domestic health, help because Celia couldn't manage alone with the kids. There was school, rent,

00:17:44clothes, food, trips. It was all outgoing costs with little coming in. Now, again, the idea of moving

00:17:52somewhere and getting a job and just working on being stable for your kids doesn't seem to have

00:17:57really particularly come up a lot. Now, it's not just financial difficulties that were problematic

00:18:04in the Guevara's or among the Guevara's. The hot-tempered Celia and Ernesto defying absolutely zero

00:18:10stereotypes of South American or Spanish-based people started having regular shouting matches,

00:18:16the stories of which became well known in Alta Gracia. According to one of Shea's childhood

00:18:21friends, to escape his parents' arguments, the boy would flee the house and hide in the brushy

00:18:24countryside, only returning after things had calmed down. According to Celia's closest friends,

00:18:32the cause of the fights was Ernesto's infidelity. In an interview, one of Shea's cousins would

00:18:38later remark, everybody knew he was a ladies' man. Celia knew. At the time, though, a divorce was

00:18:44illegal in Argentina, so Ernesto and Celia decided to stay together despite their marital problems.

00:18:51Now, Shea's health did improve during his stay in Alta Gracia, but he still suffered from occasional

00:18:56asthma attacks. The young boy joined the local gangs of children, the Barras, and started riding

00:19:01bicycles and playing games like Trench Warfare with them. Guess that came in helpful later in Cuba.

00:19:08His violent side was already showing when he started organizing rock fights between warring

00:19:13Barras. Ernesto Sr. recalled that his son would get into frequent fistfights with his Barras rivals

00:19:18and would become uncontrollable with rage if he felt he had been unjustly reprimanded or punished.

00:19:25In an article published by one of Shea Guevara's cousins, it was revealed that Shea also delighted

00:19:33in torturing animals from a very young age. So, you know, I don't know. I don't know if he wet

00:19:40his bed.

00:19:41Arson and torture of animals, one of the three signs of sociopathy, according to my understanding.

00:19:47And you will see how this looks when somebody grows up in just a few minutes.

00:19:56So, when he got his asthmatic attacks, Shea would have to spend his days confined in bed,

00:20:01not even able to walk. He filled up the long hours with reading and playing chess. However,

00:20:06when the conditions subsided, he would be eager to go out and retest his physical boundaries.

00:20:11Unlike Robert Louis Stevenson and other people who had a lot of illness confinement as children,

00:20:16his language skills improved considerably as a result of reading and writing and making up your

00:20:21own stories and games and so on. Unlike Ernesto Sr., Celia, his mother encouraged her son's outdoor

00:20:28activities despite the dangerous consequences. On numerous occasions, the boy was carried home by

00:20:34his friends, hardly able to breathe. Because of her son's health condition, Celia tutored the boy at

00:20:40home, teaching him to read and write, as well as exposing him to poetry and philosophy. During this

00:20:45period, young Ernesto formed an incredibly strong bond with his mother, a bond that would last until the

00:20:50day he died. She was now his favorite parent. Or perhaps he could be called the substitute

00:20:57husband. So, moms who are not emotionally connected to the fathers, right, to their husbands, will often

00:21:03gravitate towards a boy as a substitute husband, kind of cling to him and use him for, as a way

00:21:10of getting

00:21:10back against the husband by showing intimacy and happiness and so on. And it's really, really toxic.

00:21:14And as we see, the edible complex described by Freud became quite fascinating for him later on in life.

00:21:22And if a man grows up to be the kind of man which we'll see Che Guevara grew up to

00:21:27be,

00:21:29then looking at how he was parented is really, really important, as I talked about in a recent

00:21:33video about Elliot Rodger. While Ernesto Sr. didn't participate much in his son's development, Celia had an

00:21:38almost symbiotic relationship with the boy that set him apart from the rest of her children. The home

00:21:43tutoring, however, wasn't meant to last. And this fusion between a needy and dysfunctional mother

00:21:49and a son, to the exclusion of the other children, often produces grandiosity on the part of the

00:21:56child. I can do everything. I'm smarter at everyone than anything. Everyone should do what I say,

00:22:01because she has such control and such a lack of boundaries with the mother.

00:22:07Alta Grazio's educational authorities eventually ordered the family to send their boy to school.

00:22:11In March 1937, nine-year-old Ernesto entered elementary school, starting at the second

00:22:16grade level. So, he's been homeschooled, really, for the first nine years of his life.

00:22:24All right. Elba Rossi di Oviedo Zelaya, and I apologize for all the mispronunciations,

00:22:29the school's headmistress and Che's third grade teacher remembered him

00:22:32as a mischievous, bright boy, undistinguished in class, but one who exhibited leadership qualities

00:22:37on the playground. Che Guevara later noted that Elba Rossi had been a strict disciplinarian and was

00:22:43always spanking him. In elementary school, Ernesto became famous for his exhibitionist behavior

00:22:49that shocked the adults and awed his peers. He ate chalk during class, drank ink out of a bottle,

00:22:56explored a dangerous abandoned mineshaft, and played bullfighter with a ram. This is sort of like Michelle

00:23:01Rhee, the Washington school superintendent who tried to reform the schools, who ate a bee that

00:23:06flew into her classroom just to get the kids' attention. As a kid, Ernesto also engaged in

00:23:12borderline criminal behavior. In the company of his bad friends, he went around Alta Gracia shooting

00:23:17out streetlights with a slingshot. To settle a score with a rival gang member, Ernesto shat on the ivory

00:23:23keys of a piano that belonged to his rival's parents. I guess they then played chop shits? Anyway.

00:23:30On another occasion, he shot burning firecracks through a neighbor's window and into a dinner

00:23:35party, scattering the guests and ruining the event. His parents' social status allowed him to get away

00:23:40with all of these transgressions. Now, the Spanish Civil War began in 1936 when young Ernesto was eight

00:23:49years old. And for more on this, you can, of course, read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. His mother's

00:23:55sister Carmen stayed with the family while her husband was deployed as a correspondent for a Buenos Aires

00:23:59newspaper. She read the letters. She got from him to the entire clan, bringing home the reality of

00:24:03the war in all its details and inspiring Ernesto Jr. to follow the unfolding events by marking the

00:24:09movement of the Republican and fascist armies on a map. And there was great hope for the left

00:24:16anarchists that the Spanish Civil War was going to bring to fruition the communist anarchist dream of

00:24:23a propertyless, stateless society. It generally descended into the usual totalitarian horror show.

00:24:29But we'll talk about that in another podcast or video. But the fact that his father was out there

00:24:36basically praising the war, writing about how wonderful it was and how exciting it was, these

00:24:39things have a very, very deep impression upon an eight-year-old boy. Now, of course, September 1939,

00:24:46World War II began in earnest after the British declared war on Germany for the invasion of Poland

00:24:52and Ernesto Sr. threw his energy into the pro-allies ASEAN Argentina group. He and his colleagues

00:24:58monitored suspicious activities in their community, fearful of a Nazi infiltration or a possible

00:25:04invasion. Ernesto Jr. was very enthusiastic about joining the youth wing of ASEAN Argentina.

00:25:13All the free time he had outside of his playtime and studies he spent collaborating with us,

00:25:18recalled his father. So Shea or Ernesto Jr. had sex for the first time with a servant girl from a

00:25:24friend's house when he was about 14. He and his friends continued to target women of low social

00:25:29status, primarily servants, for sex. This behavior continued into his adulthood. So basically this

00:25:37this preying upon the economic underclasses and then complaining about capitalists preying upon the

00:25:43economic underclasses is obviously just a matter of psychological projection, that he himself, just like

00:25:48Marx, preied upon women of low status sexually and then thought that the major problem was the United

00:25:54Fruit Company. According to one of his childhood friends from Alta Gracia, Yang Shea earned the nickname

00:26:01Fast Rooster when he, in the middle of having dinner with his friends, forced a servant girl to

00:26:07climb onto the table and had sex with her. After he finished, says the friend, he got rid of the

00:26:14poor devil and continued eating as if nothing had happened. So, I mean, just take a moment and picture

00:26:19this, that you're having, as a mid-teens, you're having dinner with some friends and a servant girl is

00:26:26basically thrown onto the table, is raped, is thrown off the table, and then the rapist sits down

00:26:33and just continues to eat as if nothing had happened. This is so astoundingly disturbed and disturbing

00:26:40behavior that it's almost impossible to comprehend. This is sort of like a layer of Dantean hell

00:26:47that pure psychopathy and sociopathy would be inhabiting. And this is, this rapist of the underclasses,

00:26:59of economic underclasses, is praised, and people wear his t-shirts. A few years later, Shea had a romantic

00:27:07relationship with his cousin, the daughter of his aunt Carmen. Quote, one day we were playing on a terrace of

00:27:12my

00:27:12house and Ernesto asked me if I was now a woman, recalled the cousin about the beginning of their relationship.

00:27:16Ernesto was so handsome. His cousin wasn't the only one who was attracted to him. The truth is, we were

00:27:22all a little in love

00:27:23with Ernesto, confessed a well-born girl from Cordoba. Because sociopaths, rapists, people who engage in

00:27:31physical assault as children and so on, if they're handsome and charming, then the world tragically and a future

00:27:37silk print industry is their oyster. In March 1942, Ernesto began attending one of the best state-run high

00:27:44schools, the Collegio Nacional de Influens in Cordoba. A year later, ending their 11-year stay in Altagracia,

00:27:51the Guevera clan moved to Cordoba.

00:27:55In high school, continuing his exhibitionist behavior, or no boundaries and sexual predation, Ernesto managed to earn

00:28:02himself several nicknames. As Shea's friend Alberto Granado recalled, they called him El Loco Crazy Guevera.

00:28:10He liked to be a little bit of a terrible lad. He boasted about how seldom he bathed, for example.

00:28:15They also called him Chancho, which is pig. He used to say,

00:28:18It's been 25 weeks since I washed this rugby shirt. How about a hug, comrade?

00:28:25During his teenage years, Ernesto took great interest in the works of Freud and Bertrand Russell. He was

00:28:30now reading everyone from the ancient Greeks to Aldous Huxley, Benito Mussolini on fascism, Joseph Stalin

00:28:35and Karl Marx on Marxism. He also enjoyed the works of Franz Kafka, whose novels had a profound

00:28:40impact on him, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, of course, was also a sexual predator who used his

00:28:46position at a university to engage in threesomes with Simone de Beauvoir, his wife, who actually

00:28:50kind of hated them. In 1945, the 17-year-old Ernesto decided to take a course in philosophy and became

00:28:57fascinated by the discipline. Not so much at practicing it, I guess just studying it. He began

00:29:02writing the first of several philosophical dictionaries where he quoted passages from his favorite

00:29:06authors. On love, patriotism, and sexual morality, he consulted Bertrand Russell's old and new sexual

00:29:12morality. Bertrand Russell, serial affair monger, not exactly a sexual predator, but not of the highest

00:29:21level of romantic integrity. He was also captivated by Freud's work, Dreams, Libido, Narcissism, and the

00:29:27Oedipus Complex. He quoted Nietzsche on death and Jack London on society. He was also interested in

00:29:33Hitler's thoughts on Marxism, which he found in Mein Kampf. The dominant figures of his later diaries were

00:29:37Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. So, pretty much rapist, parasite on the working class, and

00:29:49mass murderer. Can't go badly from here, right? Around the time he became involved with philosophy and

00:29:55psychology, his family and friends were noticing that he became a lot more withdrawn. He no longer sought

00:30:00constant attention, preferring isolation instead.

00:30:05In May 1947, Ernesto's paternal grandmother died after suffering a stroke, leaving her grandson

00:30:13inconsolable. Celia, his younger sister, recalled that she'd never seen Ernesto so grief-stricken.

00:30:17It must have been one of the great sadnesses of his life. His grandmother's death and his desire to cure

00:30:23his asthma influenced his decision to become a physician, and in 1948, he entered the University of

00:30:29Buenos Aires to study medicine. Ernesto's inner turmoil is very apparent in a poem he wrote when he was

00:30:3619. I know it! I know it! If I get out of here, the river swallows me. It is my

00:30:43destiny. Today, I must die.

00:30:46But no, willpower can overcome everything. These are the obstacles I admitted. I don't want to come out.

00:30:57If I have to die, it will be in this cave. The bullets. What can the bullets do to me

00:31:06if my destiny

00:31:06is to die by drowning? But I am going to overcome destiny. Destiny can be achieved by willpower.

00:31:12Die, yes, but riddled with bullets. Destroyed by the bayonets. If not, no. Drowned, no. A memory more

00:31:19lasting than my name is to fight, to die fighting.

00:31:27Now, his grandfather killed by drowning. He almost died by drowning, and so on. So a lot of these early

00:31:33childhood memories are still resonating in his mind. By the early 1950s, a deep-seated hostility

00:31:42towards the United States had already taken roots in Ernesto's mind. Now, you know, for those who don't

00:31:48know the intricate history of the expansion of Marxism and communism, there was to be a world

00:31:53revolution which was to be provoked by reminding the working classes of how badly they were being

00:31:59exploited by the bourgeoisie and capitalist classes, and the United States was a huge problem

00:32:04for a communist thought. Because according to communist thought, the communist economies,

00:32:09Marxist economies, Soviet economies, should be vastly outstripping, without the profit motive,

00:32:14vastly outstripping the capitalist economies in terms of wealth, growth, freedom, power, and so on.

00:32:19The United States was vastly outstripping the rest of the world economy after the Second World War

00:32:23for a variety of reasons, which is a huge problem for Marxist theory. So the fact that Marxists have a

00:32:28hostility towards the United States is as much ideological as it is out of some pretty legitimate

00:32:33criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. So Dolores Iona Martin, a childhood friend of Shea's, said,

00:32:40in his eyes, the twin evils in Latin America were the native oligarchies and the United States.

00:32:46He would disconcert both nationalists and communists by being anti-American without

00:32:50subscribing to either of their points of view. I was never able to convince him that the United

00:32:56States foreign policy was more often than not the bumbling creature of ignorance and error rather than

00:33:01the well-designed strategy of a sinister cabal. He was convinced of the dark princes of evil who

00:33:07directed every U.S. move abroad. The old thing, never ascribed to malignancy that which can be

00:33:16more accurately explained by incompetence. On January 4th, 1952, Ernesto set out on a motorcycle

00:33:23journey across South America that he documented in his famous motorcycle diaries. You may have seen

00:33:27the 2006 movie. He often boasted about his noble ancestry. In his diary, Ernesto wrote,

00:33:37the blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity

00:33:43thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of

00:33:49slave, the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with

00:33:55bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in a daily fight for survival, but their

00:34:01different ways of approaching life separate them completely. The black is indolent and a dreamer,

00:34:06spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink. The European has a tradition of work and saving,

00:34:12which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself,

00:34:17even independently of his own individual aspirations. So, kind of a racist as well.

00:34:24In the margin of his diary, Ernesto scribbled the following,

00:34:27I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves,

00:34:32I would be with the people. I know this. I see it printed in the night sky that I,

00:34:37eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed,

00:34:41will assault the barricades or the trenches, will take my blood-stained weapon and consumed

00:34:46with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands. So, it's a good thing he didn't release

00:34:54this on YouTube prior to going down to Isla Vista with guns and knives.

00:34:59And I see, as if a great exhaustion smothers this fresh exaltation, I see myself immolated in the

00:35:05genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa or

00:35:12confession. I feel my nostrils dilate, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, the enemy's

00:35:19death. I steal my body, ready to do battle and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which

00:35:25the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope.

00:35:32While he was to get his wish for all the power his shredded heart could desire.

00:35:39In June 1953, upon returning from his South American journeys, Ernesto contemplated his study,

00:35:44completed his study study, sorry, and obtained a medical degree. Now, of course, where did he get

00:35:48the money for this rambling around, this motorcycle journey? Well, from others, not from his own work.

00:35:57So, again, preying upon the working classes in one form or another is a consistent theme in young

00:36:03Marxists. Ernesto went on another trip immediately after graduating. His family kept funding these

00:36:08adventures as he was constantly unemployed. In December 1953, he stopped in Guatemala. There,

00:36:14he was introduced to his first wife, Hilda Gadea Acosta, a wealthy Peruvian economist and communist

00:36:20leader who had ties with high-ranking officials in the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

00:36:28Ernesto fled the company with Gaida in June 1954 after Arbenz was overthrown in a coup d'etat.

00:36:33In his mind, the U.S. had toppled the last Latin American revolutionary democracy.

00:36:40Gadea, as he wrote, it was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed

00:36:44struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of

00:36:50this. Although it could also be that his narcissism, his grandiosity, his capacity for violence saw the

00:36:59overthrow of a government and thought he would like to do that himself, to have the power that he saw

00:37:03other people taking. Guevara arrived in Mexico City in early September 1954 and started working

00:37:10in the allergy section of a hospital. In June 1955, through his Cuban contacts, Ernesto met Raul Castro,

00:37:17who subsequently introduced him to his older brother, Fidel Castro, a revolutionary plotting to overthrow

00:37:23the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista, also because he could not grow quite the beard he needed to be

00:37:30the bass player in ZZ Top. Many years later, declassified Soviet documents revealed Raul Castro

00:37:36as a reliable KGB contact since 1953. Now again, you've probably have some awareness of the history

00:37:44of communism, but the history of communism, to those who look at the history of the 20th century with any

00:37:49remotely objective eyes, is far more violent, egregious, and murderous than the history of Nazism.

00:37:54So it basically is being introduced to Hitler by Himmler, the idea that you are going to be

00:38:01introduced to Fidel Castro by a KGB agent, by a Nazi agent. In June 24, 1956, Che Guevara was arrested

00:38:09alongside other future guerrillas, and the card of the local KGB agent, Nikolai Leonov, was found in

00:38:14his wallet. During his interrogation by the police, he openly admitted his communism and declared his

00:38:19belief in the need for armed revolutionary struggle, not only in Cuba, but throughout Latin America.

00:38:25After learning she was pregnant with his daughter, Che Guevara finally married Gadea in September

00:38:3055. On November 25, 1956, Guevara Castro and the guerrillas set fail for Cuba to overthrow Batista's

00:38:39government, announcing themselves as pro-democracy and anti-communist freedom fighters. Great idea!

00:38:45They're communists, but they're going to announce themselves as pro-democracy and anti-communism,

00:38:49and you will see how long that lasted after they were able to seize power.

00:38:53The U.S. media would later explode with stories of bloodbaths and brave guerrilla warriors led by

00:38:59their fearless commander, Che Guevara. As is often the case, the reality of what happened is quite

00:39:04different. The stories of Che's military exploits are a fabrication. Castro had figured out a different

00:39:11way to take over Cuba. In a deal called the Miami Pact, he conspired with anti-Batista Cuban politicians

00:39:18and wealthy exiles to acquire a large fund that he later used to bribe military commanders in Batista's

00:39:25army, thus once again showing how non-armies are better at fighting armies than armies.

00:39:33Having secured their position in Cuba, the guerrillas invited U.S. media and started reporting manufactured

00:39:37stories of their fights with Batista's army. In 58, Washington decided to ban arms sales to Batista's

00:39:45forces, thereby announcing that the U.S. no longer supported his regime. Abandoned by both his

00:39:49soldiers and U.S. allies, Batista was forced to leave the country. Skeptical of the media reporting

00:39:56about the heroic Che Guevara-led violent insurrection, officials from the Cuban U.S. embassy

00:40:00used their local information networks to find out that the total number of combat casualties on both

00:40:05sides of this giant island-spanning bloody revolution was 182. Che's own diaries reveal that his

00:40:14forces' losses during a two-year civil war amounted to 20. Or I guess it's the rough equivalent of those

00:40:23who would have died through bee stings. As British historian Hugh Thomas puts it, quote,

00:40:28in all essentials, Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign fought in New York

00:40:33and Washington. What? During the rebels' advance, staunch anti-communists started disappearing from

00:40:40their ranks, fueling the growing fear that Soviet agents had infiltrated Castro's army and were now

00:40:45getting rid of any political or potential opposition. On January 24th, 1959, shortly after entering

00:40:52Havana, Che arranged for 3,000 books to be publicly burned. As it turned out, those books belonged to

00:40:58Cuba's Anti-Communist League, a private research organization who had accumulated information for

00:41:03250,000 Latin American communists, agents, and KGB contacts. So the reason for the burning was less

00:41:11censorship and hiding the agents of communism. The Cuban Revolution officially ended on January 1st,

00:41:191959. Despite promises of democracy, Cuba officially declared itself to be a Marxist-Leninist state only

00:41:27four years later. After the revolution ended, Che Guevara divorced his first wife and married and a member of

00:41:33Castro's army, Aleida March, with whom he had four children. In late January 1957, at the beginning of the

00:41:44revolution, Guevara wrote to his first wife,

00:41:47I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood. A few weeks later, on February 18th, 1957, he got

00:41:56to quench that

00:41:57thirst.

00:42:00Utimio Guerra, a rural guide helping out the rebels, was accused of treachery, and Fidel Castro ordered

00:42:06his bodyguard to execute him. Feeling uncomfortable about killing the man, the bodyguard tried to

00:42:12postpone the execution. Taking advantage of his comrades' hesitation, Che Guevara stepped out

00:42:17and fired a pistol, point-blank, in Guerra's temple.

00:42:25He wrote, he went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine.

00:42:31I'd like to confess, Papa, at that moment, I discovered that I really like killing.

00:42:43And what better a chance

00:42:46to satisfy his thirst for the blood

00:42:49of others than joining a communist revolution?

00:42:56Che Guevara wasn't known for his military prowess. In fact, he openly

00:42:59admitted to some of his comrades that he knew nothing about tactical military matters.

00:43:03However, Castro recognized Guevara's bloodlust as a valuable asset, and so the Argentinian physician

00:43:09quickly rose in ranks to become the regime's chief executioner.

00:43:16The Himmler to Castro's Hitler.

00:43:20While few died in combat, countless corpses trailed after the rebels' victories.

00:43:26Che Guevara kept executing captured soldiers and anyone suspected of supporting Batista.

00:43:33Damn, but Che has drowned this city in blood, recalled his comrade, Camilio Sinfurgus,

00:43:39about the city of Santa Clara, which the rebels captured on January 1st, 1959.

00:43:43Seems that on every street corner there's the body of an execution victim.

00:43:47This is basically a Marxist-Leninist combine harvester decapitating

00:43:52the unjustly conscripted victims of the Batista regime.

00:43:57I mean, these men were forced to fight, and he's executing them for traitery, for treachery.

00:44:05Ah, make up whatever you want. He just loved to kill.

00:44:08I mean, he was a wonderful serial mass murderer.

00:44:13In 1959, Guevara sought the help of Francisco Suetat de Miguel, a Soviet GRU,

00:44:20the main intelligence directorate, officer in establishing Cuba's secret police,

00:44:24and training his firing squads.

00:44:27In their book, Brothers in Arms, the Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder,

00:44:31Gus Russo and Stephen Moulton write,

00:44:34Cuitat insisted that all executioners use live ammunition.

00:44:38There would be no shooting of blanks by morally queasy gunners.

00:44:41He called it el compromiso sangriento, or the blood covenant.

00:44:46It rendered everyone complicit at the killing, thus assuring their loyalty through the bonds of guilt

00:44:51and promising remission through the grace of the Castros and Shea.

00:44:55So, if you don't know, so some firing squads, they put blanks in a few of the people's weapons

00:44:59so that not everyone, nobody really knows if they actually shot someone or not.

00:45:03They did not do this in Cuba.

00:45:06All Cuban military cadets were subsequently forced to enter into el compromiso sangriento

00:45:11as a prerequisite for graduation.

00:45:12So you had to murder someone in cold blood, almost certainly an innocent person, in order to graduate.

00:45:20This also makes people fanatically defensive of the regime.

00:45:24Because if another regime comes into power, you would be tried for war crimes for executing people

00:45:30who had not gone through any proper trial.

00:45:32So it makes you basically fight to the death for your existing regime to be bound into murdering others.

00:45:38Because you will probably be shot as a war criminal by any other regime that takes over,

00:45:42so you might as well fight to the death.

00:45:46Che Guevara's secret police would go on to commit countless atrocities

00:45:49often wiping out entire families.

00:45:54Ibrahim Quintana, a Havana mortician who escaped to Cuba in 1962, recalls,

00:46:00quote,

00:46:01The murder victim was always taken to a government first aid station.

00:46:07The reason for using the government aid station as an intermediary is so the government official

00:46:11there can make out a death certificate claiming the dead person was killed by means other than

00:46:16shooting.

00:46:17The government always orders the mortuary not to permit the family to see the body.

00:46:21In 80% of the cases where the body came in with a death certificate saying it had died

00:46:25of something other than shooting, we found one or more gunshot wounds in that body.

00:46:32Due to these falsified death certificates, the number of people killed by Che Guevara's secret

00:46:37police is unknown.

00:46:44From January 2nd until June 12th, 1959, Che Guevara stayed in La Cabaña Fortress, which he converted

00:46:52into a prison and used as a torture and execution ground.

00:46:55Many of the executed prisoners were children.

00:47:00There are numerous accounts of the brutality with which Che Guevara ran his prison.

00:47:05A Cuban political prisoner who was sent to La Cabaña remembered when a boy between the

00:47:11ages of 12 and 14 was thrown into the prison because he tried to prevent his father's execution.

00:47:20The boy was brought in front of the firing squad the same day.

00:47:24A former prisoner recalled, we simply couldn't believe they'd murder him.

00:47:30Then we saw Che Guevara unholstering his pistol.

00:47:35He put the barrel to the back of the boy's neck and blasted.

00:47:42The shot almost decapitated the young boy.

00:47:52A Cuban dissident who was in prison for 28 years said,

00:47:56There was something seriously wrong with Guevara.

00:47:58Castro killed, an ordered killing for sure he killed, but he killed, it seemed to us, motivated

00:48:02by his power lust.

00:48:04To maintain his hold on power, to eliminate rivals and enemies, along with potential rivals

00:48:08and potential enemies.

00:48:09For Castro, it was a utilitarian slaughter, that's all.

00:48:14Guevara, on the other hand, seemed to relish it.

00:48:19He appeared to revel in the bloodletting for its own sake.

00:48:23You could somehow see it in his face as he watched the men dragged out of their cells.

00:48:31Child rapist.

00:48:33Sexual sadist.

00:48:36Adult mass murderer.

00:48:38Raised by a feminist.

00:48:43A priest tasked with performing confessions and last rites claimed Che Guevara personally

00:48:47ordered 700 executions by firing squad in the six months he spent in La Cabaña.

00:48:54Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA agent who assisted in tracking down Che Guevara in

00:48:59Bolivia and was the last person to question him, claims that Che, during his final talk,

00:49:04admitted to a couple thousand executions in which he shrugged off as imperialist spies and CIA agents.

00:49:17The Black Book of Communism, a joint effort by French scholars who documented the human cost of communism in the

00:49:2320th century,

00:49:25puts the number of people executed by Che's firing squads in the first year after the revolution at 14,000,

00:49:33which is the equivalent of over 3 million executions in the United States based on population figures.

00:49:42This is the man loved by Nelson Mandela, admired by Christopher Hitchens.

00:49:48Remember, Christopher Hitchens had huge problems, huge problems with Mother Teresa,

00:49:54but licks the eyeball-dripping blood-soaked boots of this mass murderer.

00:50:00Three million Americans slaughtered by a mass murderer.

00:50:07And can you imagine people wearing the T-shirts of this monster?

00:50:15In 1960, Che Guevara opened a forced labor camp in the

00:50:23Guanahasabibis Peninsula, similar to the Siberian Gulags style and only scorching hot.

00:50:28In Guevara's own words,

00:50:30we only sent to this camp those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail,

00:50:36people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals,

00:50:39to a lesser or greater degree, because remember, morals are so important to mass murderers.

00:50:43It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions.

00:50:46There are hard.

00:50:48By doubtful cases, he means homosexuals and anyone who rejected the regime's ideology.

00:50:55In an article for the Independent Institute,

00:50:57Alvaro Vargas Losa writes,

00:51:00This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement starting in 1965 in the

00:51:05province of Camuguay of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics,

00:51:11Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests,

00:51:13herded onto buses and trucks.

00:51:15The unfit would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the

00:51:23Guanahasabibis mold.

00:51:25Some would never return.

00:51:27Others would be raped, beaten or mutilated, and most would be traumatized for life,

00:51:32as Nestor Almendros' wrenching documentary, Improper Conduct, showed the world a couple of decades ago.

00:51:42The man ordered the mass murder of homosexuals.

00:51:47Can I get a hell no?

00:51:521957, it was reported that Cuba had a large middle class.

00:51:57And, quote,

00:51:57The average wage for an eight-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark,

00:52:04France, and Germany.

00:52:06The report went on to say,

00:52:08Cuban labor received 66.6% of gross national income.

00:52:12In the U.S., the figure is 68%.

00:52:14In Switzerland, 64%.

00:52:1744% of Cubans were covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time.

00:52:23You have a country here, basically a first world country, a country with a great future,

00:52:27where the supposed oppressed working classes are getting more of the gross national product

00:52:33than in Switzerland, and almost as much as in the United States.

00:52:39A Shea biographer writes,

00:52:41In 1958, Cubans owned more televisions per capita than any other Latin Americans,

00:52:45and more than any other continental Europeans.

00:52:48And Cubans owned more cars per capita than the Japanese in half of the countries of Europe.

00:52:54In short, Cuban workers had purchasing power.

00:52:57In 1958, Cuba had the hemisphere's lowest inflation rate, 1.4%.

00:53:02The U.S. rate that year was 2.73%.

00:53:04The Cuban peso was historically equal to the U.S. dollar, completely interchangeable, one-to-one.

00:53:10So you have an economy that is on parallel, almost,

00:53:15and in some ways exceeding the strongest economy in the world at the time.

00:53:21In 1959, Castro appointed Che Guevara as Minister of Industries,

00:53:25because he was a doctor who liked murdering children,

00:53:29effectively allowing him to take control over the Cuban economy.

00:53:32The results were so catastrophic that even massive Soviet subsidies weren't enough to keep the country afloat.

00:53:37As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises has pointed out,

00:53:43without price, you really can't figure out where goods and labor and services should be directed in the economy.

00:53:50You know, price is a signal, right?

00:53:51When a price gets bid up, it means there's a higher demand.

00:53:53That's where stuff should go.

00:53:54Without price, you can't possibly push an economy.

00:53:57Economy has to be a pull economy based on price.

00:53:59You can't push stuff out, which is why central planning always fails,

00:54:04and fails disastrously, murderously, and for generations to come.

00:54:11Fontova writes, quote,

00:54:12By late 1964, the Minister of Industries had so badly crippled Cuba's economy and infrastructure,

00:54:17had so impoverished and traumatized its workforce that the Russians themselves were at their wit's end.

00:54:22They were subsidizing the mess, and it was getting expensive, much too expensive for the paltry geopolitical return.

00:54:28So basically, when the Soviets are complaining that your economy is inefficient,

00:54:36well, I don't really know what to say other than, you know, it's like Charles Manson saying,

00:54:41bad, you man, you bad.

00:54:44René Dumont, a French socialist economist, tried to counsel Castro as the Cuban economy was spiraling out of control.

00:54:50The Cuban revolution has gone further in its first three years than the Chinese in its first ten, he said,

00:54:56regarding the economic havoc.

00:54:58But no luck, no listening.

00:55:01Again, the grandiosity, the bloodlust, the control freak sociopathy of Che Guevara and Castro

00:55:08was above and beyond moral, economic, or basic empathetic reality.

00:55:13In 1964, the Russians gave an ultimatum to Castro.

00:55:17Che Guevara has to go.

00:55:18The Soviets simply refused to bankroll Che's harebrained fantasies any longer, writes Fontova.

00:55:25In December 1964, Guevara tried to retaliate by giving his famous anti-Soviet speech in Algeria,

00:55:30but he was quickly brought back under control after he returned to Havana.

00:55:35Castro's intimidation was enough to scare his executioner into submission.

00:55:40In other words, Castro probably said,

00:55:41If you keep acting against me, I'm not going to give you children to shoot.

00:55:46Okay, what do you need?

00:55:49On November 17, 1962, the FBI upended a terrorist plot created by Cuba's CIA equivalent,

00:55:56Direction General de Intelligencia, which Che Guevara established after the Cuban Civil War, ended.

00:56:01Cuban agents were targeting Macy's, Gimbal's, Bloomingdale's, and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal train station

00:56:08with 500 kilos of TNT.

00:56:12They were planning to set off all that explosive power the day after Thanksgiving.

00:56:17For comparison, Al-Qaeda's 2004 Madrid attacks used a total of 100 kilos of TNT.

00:56:26So, when you see pictures of Che Guevara, a complete terrorist,

00:56:31bombing and destroying innocent civilians, far worse than Al-Qaeda, far worse than Osama bin Laden.

00:56:39On February 18, 1965, the FBI and the NYPD cracked another terrorist plot that Che hatched

00:56:45with the help of the Black Liberation Army.

00:56:47Raymond Wood, a black NYPD cadet, managed to infiltrate the organization

00:56:51and uncover a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument.

00:56:57If Che's plan was successful, he could have triggered a nuclear war between the United States

00:57:01and the Soviets, who backed Cuba.

00:57:04So, kind of a dangerous, deranged, and evil bastard.

00:57:10The world's most wanted terrorist, Ilish Ramirez Sanchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal,

00:57:14was trained in one of Che's guerrilla camps.

00:57:17In an interview he gave after 9-11, Sanchez claimed,

00:57:20Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed.

00:57:24I follow news of the September 11th attacks on the U.S. non-stop from the beginning.

00:57:27I can't describe that wonderful feeling of relief.

00:57:32The man trained in one of Che Guevara's guerrilla camps.

00:57:36After his disastrous economic policies and the terrorist attacks he plotted against the U.S.,

00:57:41Che Guevara fell out of favor with Moscow.

00:57:43Not only did he cost the Soviets a lot of money, but they also feared that his continued aggression

00:57:47towards the U.S. may provoke an all-out nuclear war.

00:57:55Dariel Alassan Ramirez, a former Cuban guerrilla, accused Fidel Castro of siding with the Soviets

00:57:59to eliminate Che Guevara, who Moscow considered, quote,

00:58:03a very dangerous personality for their imperialist strategies.

00:58:07Castro supposedly yielded for reasons of state, given that Cuba's survival depended on the help of Moscow.

00:58:15However, at the time, Castro had already secured his position in Cuba, so he no longer needed his bloodhound.

00:58:22In fact, the dictator was already planning to kill off Che Guevara soon after the Cuban revolution ended.

00:58:27Know what I'm going to do with Che Guevara?

00:58:29I'm going to send him to Santo Domingo and see if the Dominican Republic dictator kills him.

00:58:35In November 1966, Che Guevara was sent to Bolivia to organize local communist insurgents

00:58:40and topple the existing government.

00:58:41Unlike Batista, the Bolivians fought back and cornered Che.

00:58:46On October 7, 1967, without any support from Cuba,

00:58:51Che was captured, interrogated, and executed by a firing squad two days later.

00:58:56The operation was supervised by the CIA.

00:59:03A far worse murderer per capita.

00:59:06A far greater sadist than Osama bin Laden.

00:59:11And yet, people mourned his death on the left.

00:59:18Not only did U.S. media outlets run manufactured stories about the Cuban revolution, but Fidel Castro's regime was also

00:59:24the publisher of the vast majority of Che's personal work.

00:59:26The Che Diaries, the secret papers of a revolutionary, and the reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.

00:59:32This is all Soviet-style, Nazi-style propaganda.

00:59:38During the Cuban Revolution, Carlos Lazo, a Cuban Air Force lieutenant serving under Batista, managed to acquire Che Guevara's notebooks

00:59:45and diaries after scattering Che and his guerrillas.

00:59:47The documents found by Lazo vastly differed from what Castro's regime published, as you can imagine.

00:59:54While historians rely on Lazo's documents, most of Che Guevara's biographers stick to the information provided by the Cuban government.

01:00:01In fact, John Lee Anderson, the author of what is considered the Bible on Che's life, wrote his book under

01:00:06the supervision of Castro's regime,

01:00:09and often used Cuban agents as sources of information.

01:00:14The thousands of Cuban exiles in the U.S. were ignored by both media and biographers.

01:00:22It's like going to Goebbels for the history of World War II.

01:00:29Fidel Castro, a well-known master of propaganda, used Che Guevara's manufactured story as an advertising campaign for his regime.

01:00:36The millions of people wearing Che's face on their t-shirts, hanging posters of him on their walls, and considering

01:00:41him being a hero, are a testament to Castro's success.

01:00:52So, the initiation of force, which is the violation of any basic moral system, is foundational to Marxism, to socialism,

01:01:00to communism.

01:01:00You cannot understand why the mythology of Che, the charismatic revolutionary hero and advocate and savior of the working class

01:01:11when he raped and murdered thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

01:01:15You can't understand why these evil doctrines continue if you don't understand that the great battle in the 20th century

01:01:27and into the 21st century

01:01:29is between free and voluntary trade and coercive central planning.

01:01:35Between economic actors trading for mutual benefit without coercion and centralized economic oligarchs using the force of the state to

01:01:45organize and enforce their economic doctrines.

01:01:49Spontaneous self-organization on a voluntary and peaceful basis versus, which is the free market,

01:01:54versus violent, coercive, indebted, and destructive central planning from those who hold a monopoly of political, economic, and coercive power.

01:02:08This is the only two battles.

01:02:09This is a big battle that's going on.

01:02:10Now, two aspects of that fell away.

01:02:14Two aspects of central planning fell away.

01:02:16Fascism and national socialism, or Nazism.

01:02:19Communism has won.

01:02:20Communism has won for a variety of reasons we can get into, but mostly to do with propaganda and the

01:02:26unwillingness of people to take a moral stand on these egregious evils

01:02:30and to openly promote violent, murderous sociopaths as cool guys that actors like.

01:02:40But communism has won.

01:02:42Most of the original ten planks of the Communist Manifesto have already been implemented throughout the West.

01:02:47Communism absolutely won the propaganda battle of the 20th century.

01:02:52And now the only argument is the degree to which we should be communist.

01:02:56And the free market is always demonized.

01:02:59Central planning, government planning, government control, central banking is always considered to be the salvation of the economy.

01:03:08And anything that goes wrong is blamed on voluntary free trade.

01:03:11And anything that goes right is based upon the actions of central planners, right?

01:03:17So you've heard the myth, which is completely false, that George Bush deregulated the economy.

01:03:21And that's why the economic crash of 2007, 2008 happened.

01:03:25And you hear this stuff over and over.

01:03:26It's all lies.

01:03:27It's all propaganda.

01:03:28Bush expanded the regulations of the financial industry, not deregulated.

01:03:32It's just something people make up.

01:03:33Like, when there's huge disasters in the economy, the central planners need to find a scapegoat, right?

01:03:39And they can't blame ghosts.

01:03:40And there's a shortage of vampires, so they have to blame the free market, right?

01:03:45And so in the same way that a plantation owner whips the slaves when the slaves don't produce enough for

01:03:50his liking, right?

01:03:51Those who suffer under the state are always blamed for the evils that result from state power.

01:03:57And evils will always result from state power.

01:03:59It's inescapable.

01:04:00So this is just generally part of the propaganda machine that occurs, which is really foundational to the success of

01:04:08the incredible victory of communism in the 20th and 21st century.

01:04:14Hopefully, people are waking up to it now.

01:04:15And we are reminding ourselves that voluntary free trade is where we need to go as a society, that central

01:04:21planning, coercion, and the initiation of force, which is at the root of all government economic policies,

01:04:26is morally repugnant, morally evil, and economically incredibly destructive.

01:04:33Thank you so much for watching.

01:04:35Please take down those goddamn posters.

01:04:36Please don't wear shirts that make you look like you're wearing this.

01:04:41And recognize that being the poster child for evil is something we should recognize.

01:04:47And the only red that makes any sense on a Che Guevara t-shirt or poster is the blood, the

01:04:55endless blood, the bottomless pit of blood of his innocent victims.

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