Travelogue celebrates mass murderer.

ITEM: The New York Times, promoting a new film about "Che" Guevara and his place in history, reported on December 19: "The image of Ernesto Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who became known as Che and helped Fidel Castro seize control of Cuba in the late 1950s, has inspired countless T-shirts, tattoos, posters, and radical chic berets. Now, the early life of Che, as portrayed in 'The Motorcycle Diaries,' appears to be inspiring South American tourism. Carolyn Midland, 25, was so moved by the film that she quit her job and moved to Buenos Aires."

Earlier, in its September 24 review of the movie, New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott made the movie sound as if it is about nothing more than an exemplary instance of a young man who is in the process of maturing into a politically savvy adult: "'The Motorcycle Diaries' captures, with startling clarity and delicacy,... the quickening of Ernesto's youthful idealism, and the gradual turning of his passionate, literary nature toward an as yet unspecified form of radical commitment."

CORRECTION: That the New York Times would perpetuate the notion of Guevara as a romantic, populist icon is, sadly, in character with the paper that had so much to do with bringing Communism to Cuba in the first place. The grim facts about "Che" are much less pleasant than the rose-colored world painted by propagandists. The real Guevara, who rarely bathed and pushed hatred and class warfare, ran thousands of Cubans through firing squads; though he had no economic training, he was named by Fidel Castro to run Cuba's National Bank; and as head of industrialization after the Communist takeover, Che pushed centralization tactics that drove the economy into the ground.

A short historical review is in order, because the New York Times' omissions are as blatant a distortion of the truth as any outright lies. Indeed, the widely repeated jibe after the Reds took over Cuba was that Castro had gotten his job through the New York Times. This was hardly an exaggeration. As the former U.S. ambassador to Havana, Earl Smith, told a Senate subcommittee: "The United States government agencies and the United States press played a major role in bringing Castro to power. Three front-page articles in the New York Times in early 1957 by the editorialist, Herbert Matthews, served to inflate Castro to world stature and world recognition. Until that time, Castro had been just another bandit in the Oriente mountains of Cuba with a handful of followers who had terrorized the campesinos, that is, the peasants, throughout the countryside."

Matthews, for example, claimed that, "there is no Communism to speak of in Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement"; moreover, readers were told, Fidel's program was "anti-Communist." The New York Times in February 1957 trumpeted about what Castro would bring: "The program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba...."

Leftists claim to see in Guevara a symbol of youthful liberation. Yet, he represented the worst in totalitarianism, and even helped set up "labor camps" for young people who didn't toe the party line. As Latin American lawyer Mario Lazo summarized in Dagger in the Heart (1968), citing Guevara's own autobiography, Che "was a monster of cruelty, utterly ruthless and devoid of any trace of compassion. He always coldly rejected our appeals for the innocent victims of the infamous revolutionary courts. While in the Sierra Maestra he reveled in presiding over the 'trial' and execution of simple, illiterate peasants for being insubordinate, or those suspected of being 'defeatists' or informers.... Desertion was punishable by death upon capture. Youths unable to withstand the rigors of guerrilla life were ordered shot."

After the takeover, Che boasted of ordering "several thousand" executions. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," said Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

Americans cheering the movie about Che should understand that he hated the U.S. in particular. He famously called for "two, three, many Vietnams." Said Che: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine--this is what our soldiers must become." Guevara even pushed for nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.

He supported terrorism in this country as well. The Times, film idolaters, and sellers of cult merchandise won't remind you, but Guevara was also involved in an unsuccessful plot in 1965 to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, and Liberty Bell--conspiring with a violent group known as the Black Liberation Front. Some details appear in The Losers, the definitive 1969 book by Paul Bethel, former press officer for the U.S. Embassy in Havana--which recounts, for example, how these militants were trained by Cubans and North Vietnamese. Testimony revealed that the terrorists met with Guevara "at the Cuban mission to the United Nations and received instructions from him to carry out the sabotage...."

In its December 19 article, the New York Times goes on to promote "Che's Trail" in Bolivia for "hard-core Guevara enthusiasts," promoting a tour of his "last march" before being captured and killed in 1967. Che was unable to recruit a single Bolivian peasant, but he still has the Times on his side.