14ymedio, Maria C. Werlau, Miami, 9 September 2019 — Last Thursday, I went into the Barnes & Nobles bookstore at Miracle Mile, Coral Gables, to grab a coffee between meetings and lay eyes on some books, which have enamored me since childhood. To my astonishment, as I walked in from the back entrance, the first thing that caught my eye was a stack of books of Che Guevara in prominent display under a sign for “Reference books.”
I went straight to the book Che, a Revolutionary Icon (by Luis Enrique Martínez, New York: Charwell Books, 2018). Page after page tells a selective and glorified story of Guevara under subtitles such as “The legend is born,” “The messenger of love,” “A revolutionary adventurer,” “The price of glory,” “Che lives forever,” with many glossy photos from many phases of his life. I found no subtitles such as “The killing machine,“ “the butcher of La Cabaña,” “terrorist,” “aristocratic racist,” or other less laudatory labels also used to describe him.
A few brief sentences of the 187-page volume referred to his command at La Cabaña prison but fail to even mention any of the human beings executed there by his order (“just around two hundred”) and missing were photos of the execution wall.
There is no mention of the camp he created at Guanahacabibes, a remote peninsula in Cuba, to send his underlings at the Ministry of Industry for hard labor as “rehabilitation” punishment for all kinds of so-called transgressions. Missing too were references to his leadership in eliminating free press, destroying the economy, and installing a totalitarian dictatorship in Cuba, of his support for nuking the US during the missile crisis, or of his defiant declaration to the UN General Assembly that “we will continue to execute as long as necessary.”
The page at the end of the volume for “Suggested Reading” had a bibliography with just more adoring works and selective Che writings. This is what Barnes and Nobles offers under “Reference books.”
There is no mention of the camp he created at Guanahacabibes, a remote peninsula in Cuba, to send his underlings from the Ministry of Industry for hard labor as “rehabilitation” punishment for all kinds of so-called transgressions.
Missing too were references to his leadership in eliminating freedom of the press, destroying the economy, and installing a totalitarian dictatorship in Cuba, or his support for a nuclear attack on the US during the missile crisis, or of his defiant declaration to the UN General Assembly that “we will continue to execute as long as necessary.”
The page at the end of the volume for “Suggested Reading” had a bibliography with just more adoring works and selective Che writings. This is what Barnes and Nobles offers under “Reference books.”
I asked the employees if they had any books on Osama Bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin, Mao or other famous world figures known for their revolutionary views or for being leaders of non-democratic regimes. They were helpful but could not find any. All they knew about Guevara was that his image adorns lots of t-shirts.
So, I asked to see the manager and when Andy arrived, I explained to him, very politely, that Miami is the home of a large Cuban American community that is particularly sensitive to the misguided Che cult because many of them suffered directly from Guevara’s actions. I told him I was not in favor of censorship but that I knew children and siblings of men executed by Guevara who lived in Miami.
Plus, I said, I would have been just as upset had I found a glowing book on Osama Bin Laden displayed prominently at a B&N bookstore in my New Jersey hometown, that lost ten people on September 11th.
Andy was clueless, he told me he was born in Cuba but had left as a young child and knew nothing about Guevara. I politely asked him to at least consider moving the books to a less prominent location. When I walked back from the coffee shop to leave some minutes later, Andy was asking the young woman at the Customer Service desk near the display to move the stack of books to the other side of the table, not visible when customers walk in. She looked annoyed and made a sarcastic comment.
The next day I had a lunch date a block from the bookstore and decided to pass by to look at the books. To my dismay, they were in exactly the same place. Later, I phoned the store and asked to talk to the manager. Diane answered (Andy wasn’t there) and when I explained the situation she said she was close to someone whose relative had been killed by Guevara. She added she would move the books to less prominent location but didn’t feel comfortable removing them.
I did a search on the Barnes and Nobles website, for “Osama Bin Laden” and got 150 results, none of which seem to glorify the “terrorist” (a passionate and committed Islamist to his followers); most had to do with hunting and killing him.
A search for Adolf Hitler had over 400 results, many were Mein Kampf by different publishers and none of the books for sale seemed favorable to the murderer. A search on the “Angel of Death” Nazi, Josef Mengele also returned only critical works. The search for “neonazis” and “white supremacy” did not return volumes that justified or supported these ideologies or movements.
In other words, the personnel at B&N who select the books they sell seem to have a double standard when it comes to mass murderers, and as far as I have been able to find, have chosen only one book that pushes the cult of Che Guevara, “the killing machine,” to use his own words to describe.
Ironically, the book is authored by Luis Enrique Martínez, described as a freelance writer born in Venezuela who “now lives in London after leaving his home country where violence and crime had become so frequent … Che Guevara fascinated him from the time he was a boy when he had a poster of the revolutionary on his bedroom wall.”
Good grief! After Che’s “New Man” finally found a foothold in Venezuela, his “fascinated” fan left for London!!! The edition is from 2018, when the effects of Castro-Chavismo had been patently obvious for years. This Cuban neo-communist modality that Che helped to create was used to transfer the Cuban template to Venezuela.
Sadly, it seems that the adoring fan still fails to understand why the Che lovefest (and the Cuban Revolution) has real consequences.
For my part, I have no intention to shop at Barnes and Nobles unless the book is removed from sale. (I did buy the book grudgingly, as I needed to research it in order to write about it.)
I know that we cannot undo a multimillion dollar global advertising campaign that promotes the mythology of Che, but at least we can refuse to stand around with our arms crossed when a business or institution that we may or may not patronize glorifies a mass murderer.
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