“Che guevara was an executioner”

T-shirts with the imprints of Ernesto Che Guevara © Klaus Honigschnabel (epd)

Interviewer: The last image of his body inevitably evokes associations with the crucified Jesus. Until today it is said again and again that Ernesto Che Guevara gave his life out of love for the people. The singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann sang about him as "Jesus Christ with a gun". What is the background of these constant comparisons with Jesus??

Michael Huhn (historian and staff member at the Catholic Latin American relief organization Adveniat): The point of departure is that, like Jesus, Ernesto Guevara died a violent death and claimed to have wanted good.

But in my opinion the parallels end there already. For he has certainly not given his life for the love of mankind, but conversely has taken the lives of very many people. He was an executioner. He ordered the execution of prisoners in the prison "La Cabana" in Cuba and ensured that those who carried it out had thus passed a test of courage – as he called it.

Interviewer: The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre even called him the "most perfect man of his time". What is behind this exaggeration?? Perhaps the desire for a new "modern Jesus"?
Huhn: Yes. Ernesto Guevara is ideal for someone who no longer prays but would like to worship. Sartre made it easy for himself insofar as he had dealt with Guevara's proclamation, but not with what he had actually done. So he could stand in front of his own Guevara icon, so to speak, and call him a modern Jesus.

This is the basic problem of Guevara worship, both in Latin America and in Europe, that people are hardly interested in the real life of Guevara anymore.

Interviewer: So Che Guevara was anything but a saint. He ordered death sentences, as you have already mentioned. What exactly was behind?
Huhn: He showed no mercy to those who were prisoners of the Cuban Revolution, because he believed that evil must be eradicated so that good can prevail.

He also had a certain ideal of masculinity, which is why he showed a deep hatred for homosexuals. He hunted homosexuals in Cuba.

Another basic problem was that he had a deep contempt for the so-called common people. His conviction was that the revolutionaries knew the way, and the uneducated poor peasants would only have to follow. If someone was not willing to follow, then he got his "just punishment" through Guevara.

Interviewer: The veneration that developed later clearly bears religious traits. How was it then with Che Guevara himself? Was he a religious man?
Chicken: I do not believe. I don't know what it was like in his early childhood and adolescence, but certainly not after that. He had a devotion for the ideal of a revolution. If you want to define the term "religious" very, very broadly, then he was manically revolutionary religious, so to speak. But in the sense in which we understand the word, he was certainly not religious.

He was an old Stalinist and Stalinism and religion go together very badly.

Interviewer: His thoughts and actions were dominated by a glorification of violence and death. Later, even the Red Army Faction refers to him. Why is that left out on anniversary days, like today?
Chicken: I believe because his violence was considered a "good violence" for a long time. It was self-evident that the first violence in Latin America was not the violence of the guerrillas, but the violence that the people endured from the powerful, from the big landowners and the military. From that, his violence seemed justified as counter-violence. Therefore there was little interest in looking at how violent he and his group were and what they achieved or did not achieve with their violence.

Fidel Castro had to call him off because it just got too bloody. But none of this is as powerful as the images, the famous photograph by Alberto Korda, or what Eduardo Galeano wrote in his books on Latin American history. The points of light, the highlights, they have stopped.

The interview was conducted by Hilde Regeniter.