UNESCO and a criminal named 'Che'

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Andy Garcia's "The lost city" portrays Che Guevara correctly. He was a thug, a criminal and responsible for thousands of executions.

We just learned that UNESCO is going to honor Che Guevarra.

That's an outrage and we can not take this one sitting down.

UNESCO wants to make "the life and works of Ernesto Che Guevara" the 2013 addition to the Memory of the World Register.

We remind you that UNESCO is supposed to be the intellectual agency of the UN.

My question is this: What life and works?

It would take me many pages to tell you about Che Guevara. My friend Humberto Fontova wrote a great book bout Che. Frankly, UNESCO should add Humberto's book!

I've chosen one story because it speaks volumes about the real Che.

Let's remember the story of a Cuban teenager who was executed by Che:

"Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Che's soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little "Rigo" pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his "prosecutors" that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn't possibly have been "a CIA agent planting bombs."
"FUEGO!" and the firing squad volley shattered Rigo's little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag.

"Certainly we execute!" boasted the man honored by UNESCO last week. "And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary!"

Those executions (murders, actually; execution implies a judicial process) had reached about 16,000 by the time of Che Guevara's statement, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of almost a million executions in the U.S. (This figure comes from "The Black Book of Communism," by the way, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of "right-wing Cuban exiles.")

Quite fittingly, Che's bloodthirsty boast was made on Dec. 9, 1964 while addressing the hallowed halls of the United Nations."

Our taxes fund the UN and UNESCO. Make sure that your congressman and US Senator know that you won't stand for this.

That's the man that UNESCO wants to remember!

P.S. We discussed this issue with Jorge Ponce, contributor to Babalu Blog, on Saturday's show.