We Need To Talk About Che Guevara
Che Guevara was a homophobe, racist, and happily murdered people by his own hands. The fact that you can walk through London and see his image on pins, t shirts, and posters is a disgrace.
Walk through any tourist area in a major Western city, and you are likely to come across Che Guevara. Not the individual, of course. He is long dead, but you will see his face everywhere. Walking through Soho last week, it was almost as if I was on an episode communist ghost hunters; I could not escape him despite my valiant efforts to avoid a bar with his face on the wall or to walk through the area without seeing more than one individual adorning some kind of Che Guevara merch. Whether it was a pin, a hat, or a t-shirt, the 21st-century Western public loves to put this monster on a pedestal. So let’s talk about Che Guevara.
Che Guevara was not a misunderstood romantic. Nor was he some kind of progressive hero. He was a cruel and fanatical revolutionary who treated human beings as raw material who could be used and discarded in his quest for power and an abstract utopia. His own words and deeds show contempt for individual life and truth. He exemplifies the very worst evils of political power. Anyone putting his face on a t-shirt should be ashamed. Anyone putting a poster of him up in their bar should know that he would have killed them for the very act of owning and operating a bar - if it is a gay bar, then he would have imprisoned them for their sexuality and then killed them for their interaction with private ownership.
Worship of violence over human life
Guevara embraced killing not as a last resort, but as a necessary and ennobling tool of his revolution. In Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, he ordered and carried out summary executions of suspected “traitors” and peasants accused of minor offences, taking glee in denying them any due process.
After victory, he presided over “revolutionary justice” at La Cabaña prison, where firing squads executed scores of prisoners under his direct command following show trials that mocked any notion of law. Guevara himself dismissed the need for evidence, boasting that revolutionaries must not be slowed by “bourgeois legal methods” and that conviction comes first, proof second.
Guevara the repressive; Guevara the homophobe; Guevara the racist
One key aspect of the commercialisation of Che Guevara that angers me the most is that we see the same individuals who decry a poorly worded tweet, an edgy joke, or a mistaken past comment as the worst thing an individual could ever do, happily embracing Che Guevara. It is rare to see a video of any big left-wing group or conference without someone adorning an item related to Che Guevara. Yet, we should be unequivocal: Che Guevara was a homophobe and a racist.
Guevara was central to constructing the Cuban regime’s apparatus for crushing dissent and remaking society by force. He helped establish early forced labour camps such as Guanahacabibes, which served as a predecessor to the regime’s more widespread forced labour camps, the Military Units to Aid Production. At these camps, “undesirables”, religious minorities, homosexuals, and others deemed morally suspect were pushed into forced labour under harsh conditions, physical abuse, and mental abuse in the name of correcting “anti‑social” behaviour.
Guevara’s ideological framework for the “new man” under socialism explicitly excluded those he deemed sexually deviant. He referred to gay men as “sexual perverts,” viewing homosexuality as incompatible with revolutionary values. Both Guevara and Castro considered homosexuality “bourgeois decadence”, a corruption of capitalist society that had no place in their new order.
What a wonderful role model the homophobic, racist Che Guevara is for the modern progressive left.
The Commercialisation of Brutality
This brings us back to those t-shirts. What’s remarkable about the commodification of Guevara’s image isn’t that it’s hypocritical; although it certainly is, given that he would have sent most people wearing his face to a firing squad or a labour camp. What’s remarkable is how it idolises a man who, if he were of the right, would be considered one of modern history’s greatest monsters. What’s remarkable is how individuals can claim to be anti-racists and support LGBT+ rights while also wearing a t-shirt with the face of a racist and a homophobe on it.
Measured against any standard that prizes human life, liberty, and truth, Che Guevara stands condemned. He celebrated killing, ran prisons and firing squads, helped design forced labour camps, and crushed free institutions in pursuit of a totalitarian dream that reduced people to expendable cogs. That such a man decorates t-shirts, lapel pins, and student halls is not just an indictment of a lack of historical understanding, but of our own moral blindness today.
Harry Richer is the Director of Fighting for a Free Future, working for the Chairman, the Rt Hon Steve Baker. He has previously worked as the senior aide to Mr Baker and was intimately involved in all of Mr Baker’s national campaigns, including his work on the monetary system, Net Zero, and the Covid Recovery Group, acting as its Head of Research. He has also co-written multiple publications on Austrian School economics, including the 2024 Springer book, The Age of Debt Bubbles.