Interestingly, the Worldhum contributing editor and interviewer, boasts an M.A. in History and boasts having “worked as a professional historical researcher, both at a large research company and as a private contractor.” The interviewees fancy themselves as “educators,” and extremely worldly ones at that.
“We hope CheSpotting will inspire people to travel,” they chirp about their website, which posts images of Che Guevara sent in from travelers. “After all,
Che would approve of that (italics mine). He would want people to get out there and see what is going on in the world.”
The souls of tens of thousands of people who attempted to travel from the nation co-ruled by Che Guevara are commemorated
here.
The crosses are mostly symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man celebrated on Che Spotting, or somewhere in that “cemetery without crosses” also known to non-Cubans as the Florida straits. The Cuban Archives project documented by scholars Maria Werlau and Dr. Armando Lago, estimate that around 77,000 Cubans have died agonizingly of thirst and exposure, drowning, or been ripped apart by sharks attempting to escape Cuba. (a nation that pre-Castro took in more immigrants per capita than even the U.S., most from Europe)
But numbers hardly convey the scope of the tragedy imposed on Cuba by the man celebrated by Worldhum. In March 1991, 17-year-old Orlando Travieso was armed with only a homemade paddle when Castro's police machine-gunned him to death. His crime was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine gunned to death for the same crime. Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro’s police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.
Angel Abreu and Jose Nicol were 3, Gisele Borges and Caridad Leyva were 4 and Cindy and Yolindis Rodriguez were 2 on July 17, 1994, when their mothers held them in a tight embrace on the broken deck of a sinking tugboat. Castro’s coast guard had deliberately rammed rammed the tugboat, then water cannoned the children from their screaming mothers arms and into a turbulent sea to drown. This manifestation of the Che regime's views on travel added 43 crosses to Miami's Cuban memorial.
Chespotting's “Jen” Paulus relates to her Worldhum interviewer how: “The huge Che image in Havana’s Revolutionary Square is what really did it for me! That impressed me!”
Graceland, some say, has a similar effect on some women, but these would never get such respectful treatment from the likes of Worldhum. That huge Che image that “did it” for Jen adorns the headquarters (including torture chambers) for Castro's KGB-trained Ministry of the Interior, an outfit always very close to Che's heart. "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che ordered his goons. "A man's resistance is always lower at night." Cuba's KGB and STASI- trained secret police outdid even their mentors, jailing and torturing more people, as a percentage of population, than did Stalin's NKVD and GRU, while murdering roughly twenty times as many people attempting escape from Cuba as the STASI murdered attempting escape from East Germany.
Prior to Communist rule, by the way, this attempted “escape,” by East Europeans and Cubans (and Indochinese) was known as “travel” and was perfectly legal. Indeed, the only regime in the Western hemisphere to criminalize travel, was the one co-founded by Che Guevara—which is to say: by the man celebrated by certain websites created to celebrate travel.
“Che the traveler is romantic,” says Chespotting's co-founder Kelly Westhoff. “He took that trip around the same time that Jack Kerouac was writing “On the Road,” which puts him in with the Beatniks. All of those guys are symbolic of a time in your life when you can just drop out and travel with nothing more than a few bucks in your pocket and have these life altering experiences that will influence you into your future.”
Many Cuban fans of Jack Kerouac indeed had their “lives altered” by Che Guevara, who denounced them as worthless “delinquents,” and “lumpen” as his STASI-trained secret police herded them at Soviet bayonet-point into forced labor camps—for the crime pf attempting a Kerouc-like lifestyle. The Soviet GULAG had been flooded during a Soviet decree that outlined a "struggle against individuals refusing to participate in collective effort and leading an antisocial and parasitic life." Che Guevara fully credits his inspiration for the Cuban camps in the cheeky signature he used in his early correspondence: "Stalin II."
Former political prisoner, Cecilio Lorenzo recalls some “life altering” experiences. “Among the guards favorite pastimes was to gallop up on one of their horses, throw a lasso over some prisoner whose attitude they didn't like, and drag him off. A friend of mine, 17 years old at the time, was dragged for over a mile down country roads and through brambles and thickets. He came back unconscious and covered in blood."
According to Che Guevara, one of the most heinous crimes against “revolutionary morals" was "laziness." "In a collectivist society, where man works for society," he explained," loafing must be considered a crime, just like robbery! Our struggle against loafers, absenteeism and parasitism has reached tremendous proportions!"
Indeed it had. As evidenced by the tens of thousands of youths in Cuba's forced-labor camps.
