The head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida is, amazingly, telling the people of Galway to not erect a Che Guevara Memorial statue.
Florida, I should note, is roughly 4,000 miles away from Galway.
And Che, if you aren’t aware, has Irish roots with the Lynch family (of Galway).
Now, my beef with Ros-Lehtinen is not in her hatred of Che. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Some think he’s a terrorist, others a freedom fighter.
So be it.
My concern with Ros-Lehtinen is her ‘moral’ position as it concerns the Che statue.
If Ros-Lehtinen takes the stand that Che is a monster, she is obligated, morally, to also take the same stance with the American equivalent of Che (if we are to compare Che to another figure in a negative way).
Say, for example, former President Andrew Jackson, who is, undoubtedly, guilty of genocide/ethnic cleansing against the original inhabitants, the Cherokees, of what is now southeastern North America.
Many Cherokees, in fact, once called modern-day Florida, the state which Ros-Lehtinen represents, their ancestral homeland.
If Ros-Lehtinen wants to put an end to the proposed Che statue, and if she wants to take the ‘moral high ground’ card, she should stick to her ‘morals’ and change every single Jackson city, town, and county to a name other than JACKSON. We should also destroy all Andrew Jackson statues across the USA.
Her crusade to stop the Che statue from going up would then make a bit more sense.
More importantly, as concerned Americans, we should tell Ros-Lehtinen to mind her own business and work on domestic issues before minuscule, foreign ones.
Doesn’t she have bigger things on her plate to worry about other than the erection of a statue for a rebel who fought against colonial oppression in a country that has a history of rebels who fought against colonialism?
craigconsidinetcd.com 
There is a small army of Reich-wing ex-Cuban gusano hucksters who make their living and ease their bitterness by spreading unfounded fantasist nonsense in an attempt to smear Che Guevara. Often times they will rely on CIA killers, Miami ex Cuban Mafia, predatory plutocrats, and former Cuban Oligarchs for their drivel.
Luckily, If you are truly interested in the life of Che Guevara you can read the 800 + page ‘Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life’ by Jon Lee Anderson. It is seen as the comprehensive and definitive work on the iconic legend.
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There’s no question that Che Guevara opposed racism, but his calls for using violence and bloodshed to achieve Fidel’s goals for the developing world almost fell flat because there were very few Guevara-inspired insurgencies in former European colonies in Africa. For example, even though Che Guevara offered support to independence movements in Angola and Mozambique in their fight against Portuguese colonial rule, such offers were initially declined by FRELIMO and MPLA, but after Guevara was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967, the Cubans supplied the FRELIMO movement with arms.
Notwithstanding the fact that she is no longer in Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was born to maternal grandparents who were Sephardic Jews, which endeared her to speak on behalf of Israel and Holocaust survivors. The influx of Cuban emigres into southern Florida transformed Miami from a place of economic stagnation into a vibrant, dynamic metropolis, yet Florida was a haven for exiled Cubans before Castro’s rise to power, as evidenced by Jose Marti’s exile in Tampa and Cuban leaders Gerardo Machado and Carlos Prio Socarras fleeing to Miami after being overthrown.
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