Mayor de Blasio apologized pretty quickly for quoting Che Guevara to a Miami audience full of Cuban-Americans, but he still doesn’t get it — and neither do the countless lefties who think Che is cool.
Encouraging airport workers to unionize in protest of poor conditions and wages, the mayor closed with a Spanish phrase he’s surely used in like circumstances: “Hasta la victoria, siempre” — “Ever on to victory.”
Expressing his regrets after an hour of furious criticism, Blas claimed he didn’t know Guevara had (famously enough) coined it.
More likely, a mayor who honeymooned in Cuba and spent much of his early life enamored of Latin lefties is ignorant of Che’s bloody record.
Fidel Castro’s right-hand man oversaw the murder of tens of thousands, most of them not tools of the old Bautista regime, but dissidents, journalists, businessmen and even fellow revolutionaries who grew disenchanted with the new government.
He created Cuba’s own gulag — concentration camps for political prisoners. Running the central prison after the revolution, he made torture routine. Where firing squads normally have just one gun with live ammunition, so that no member knows he was the killer, Che had all ammo live, so that every member would be an executioner. And when none of the squad managed a fatal shot, he gleefully pulled out his own gun and finished the job.
Another of his sayings: “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” In a letter to his father, he confessed, “I really like killing.”
He lost his life after years spent trying to...
