Interviews with Carlos Alberto Montaner

Che Guevara was in La Cabaña, the big political prison of Havana where most of the firing squad executions took place. There were executions all throughout the Island, but in Havana they happened in La Cabaña and El Che directed that military camp for the first months of the revolution, and he did participate in the shootings. He felt a profound contempt towards his enemies and he made a virtue out of cruelty. It’s something that happens to some revolutionaries, the Robespierre mentality. Cruelty against the enemy of the revolution is the virtue of the motherland. El Che participated in that way of acting and he said it.

That’s what sets him apart from others. There are phrases that Che wrote and declared publicly that were terrible. There is a phrase by Che that says, “A revolutionary must be a perfect killing machine” because to him there was no contradiction. There was an ethical and moral justification for killing and murdering anyone who opposed the revolutionary process; it was perfectly normal. So yes, El Che was in fact a true murderer during the first months and in his biography one should note of the hundreds of people that he executed, if not him directly via the firing squad.

Carlos Alberto Montaner is an exiled Cuban author and journalist. He was born in Havana in 1943. Soon after the revolution of 1959, he was imprisoned by the Castro regime on charges of participating in terrorist attacks and working with the CIA. Montaner, who was 16 years old at the time, emphatically denied the charges. He later escaped from prison and from Cuba.

In the 1960s, Montaner began writing a weekly column that was soon appearing in almost every Latin American country. In 1970, he moved to Madrid and began writing works of fiction and nonfiction. In 1972 he established a publishing house, Editorial Playor. His most widely acclaimed books include “Informe Secreto Sobre la Revolución Cubana,” published in 1975; “200 Años de Gringos,” published in 1976 on the occasion of the bicentennial of the United States and analyzing the reasons the United States has developed differently than Latin American countries; and “Fidel Castro y la Revolución Cubana” (1984).

It has been estimated that 6 million people now read his weekly columns, and he has lectured frequently throughout the hemisphere about the defense of liberty, economic development, and the important role of culture in the evolution of societies. He is also a regular commentator on CNN’s Spanish-language broadcasts.