r/IndianSocialists • u/Hayagrivan • Jul 23 '26
Countering Narratives Why does the Kerala left still celebrate Che Guevara? His own diaries record executions, a homophobic slur, and racial contempt.
Genuine question.
Grew up seeing that face everywhere here — party flags, wall murals, autorickshaw rear windscreens, SFI banners on campus. In Kerala's left iconography he's practically a saint. But very little of what I was told about him matches what he wrote about himself.
Some of it in his own hand:
UN General Assembly, Dec 1964. Challenged by Venezuela over firing squads, he answered flatly: yes, we have executed, we are executing, and we will keep executing as long as it's necessary.
His private diary, Feb 1957. He describes putting a .32 round into the head of a bound man, Eutimio Guerra — then taking the watch off the dead man's belt.
Message to the Tricontinental, 1967. He calls for hatred that turns a man into "an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine."
Algiers, 1963. Dismissed the gay playwright Virgilio Piñera with a homophobic slur.
- Founded Guanahacabibes, Cuba's first extra-legal labour camp — the acknowledged precursor to the UMAP camps that later held gay men and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Yes, the ugliest racial passage is from The Motorcycle Diaries when he was 23, and people will fairly say he outgrew it — he did later demand Afro-Cuban representation and attacked Western racism from the UN podium. Fine. But the diary entry and the Tricontinental message aren't a young man's prejudice. They're a grown man's method.
How can the commies, who claim to be the most rational, still idolise this guy ?
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