Last night I watched a DVD of the film "Che" about the notorious Cuban guerilla fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
You might wonder what I was doing watching a film like this, since I am fervently anti-Communist.
I don't feel that I have to cut my worldview off to other points of view. Hollywood is notorious for producing lefty, anti-American films like "Avatar", but that doesn't mean I can't watch them and just take their message with a grain of salt. I actually get a good laugh out of some of the wild junk the left produces.
"Che" was actually a great film. It was directed by Steven Soderburgh in a very artistic and stylish manner.
I admire Benicio Del Toro for his years of research he put into this film...interviewing people who knew Che personally. The results are obvious on film, as Del Toro literally becomes Che Guevara in the film. Del Toro, who is Puerto Rican, actually had to change his accent in Spanish to an Argentinian accent that was distinctly different from the others on the film, who had varying Cuban accents.
As a Spanish speaker, I noticed it and was impressed by his efforts.
It is difficult to applaud in any way the efforts of Che Guevara or those of Fidel Castro.
There is one thing I actually admire about both men and that is that they were real men. They saw their country was being ruined by the evil dictator Fulgencio Batista, and they decided to do something about it.
Batista had murdered over 20,000 Cubans by the time he fled the country with hundreds of millions in misappropriated gains. He would have been executed by Castros army if he had been caught, and deservedly so.
The dark side of the Cuban revolution is that Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were not really freedom fighters like all lefties always claim to be. They did not replace a dictator with freedom or democracy. They were just fighting so that they could gain control over power and become the new dictators, which is exactly what they did. Castro and Guevara executed thousands of people who had been loyal allies to Batista and went on to seize industries and redistribute land and wealth to the population.
Castros actions have set Cuba back 50 years. For every positive improvement Castro can argue, there are tons of negatives. Destroying capitalism hasn't improved things for Cuba. They continue to fall further and further behind the rest of the world. I've been there myself. I've seen it.
Del Toro and the movie do not romanticize Guevara. They show him doing negative things, like executing some of his own troops. But they do tend to steer away from that dark area of Cuban history in general.
Even though I don't approve of the end results of the Cuban Revolution, it was an interesting period in time and I enjoyed the depiction in this film of the lives of the characters involved.
They certainly changed the world. Just not in a good way.
