---Humberto Fontova ---
(Britain bans Savage, welcomes Che's daughter)

And lest we get the wrong idea, Aleida Guevara will visit Home Secretary Smith's jurisdictional domain in order to promote, in her own words: "my father's ideals, his concerns and his ambitions. I believe that my father is a banner to the world!" adds Che's well-fed (in sharp contrast to most Cubans) daughter.

Fine. Let's have a look at Aleida's father's "ambitions," keeping in mind that "hate speech" is a buzz-term beloved by the likes of Jacqui Smith and, for them, has an extremely elastic application.

"Hatred is the central element of our struggle!" raved Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his 1966 Message to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. "Hatred that is intransigent ... hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine. ... We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! ... We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies' very home, to his places of work and recreation. We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. We'll attack him wherever we find him. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we'll destroy him! These hyenas (Americans) are fit only for extermination. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm! The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!"

No rational person would require any such elasticity of definition to classify Aleida's father's – this "banner to the world!" – speech.

"My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood," Aleida's father had raved as early as his "Motorcycle Diaries" (though this passage was somehow omitted from Robert Redford's heartwarming movie.) "Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"

Vencido, by the way, translates into English as "defeated" or "surrendered."

And Aleida's father made good on his boast. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" rarely reached Che Guevara's nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged or blindfolded men (and boys.) "The Black Book of Communism," written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy) estimates 14,000 firing squad executions in Cuba by the end of the 1960s, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of over 3 million executions in the U.S.

Aleida's father delighted in delivering the coup de grace to dozens of these. When office work (signing execution warrants) tore him away from his beloved execution pits, Che ameliorated his emotional deprivation by having a special window installed in his office so he could watch his busy firing squads at work, beaming at the spectacle. Among many others, Aleida's father invited Ernest Hemingway as a spectator to the slaughter.

Tragically for tens of thousands of Cubans, Aleida's father was in a position to convert his hate speech to action. By the mid '60s, the crime of a "rocker" lifestyle or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba's streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with "Work Will Make Men Out of You" in bold letters above the gate (the one at Auschwitz' gate read: "Work Will Set You Free") and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

The UMAP Prisoners Association in Miami has the names of hundreds of these imprisoned "delinquents" (as Che denounced them) who were bludgeoned, bayoneted and otherwise tortured to death while in these forced-labor camps, established under the direction of Aleida's father, the man Jacqui Smith's London will honor with a gigantic festival June 27-28..

"Gay bashing" seems to figure big in Jacqui Smith's definition of hate speech. But apparently when this bashing comes in the literal form, involving Soviet gun-butts and bayonets bashing a gay's head until he dies from massive cerebral trauma, it fails to fall under her definition of "hate speech."

In the process of these tortures and murders, Aleida's dad was helping his Cuban mentor establish a personal fiefdom that would prove quite enduring. This totalitarian endurance is what Jacqui Smith's London will celebrate next month.

Alas, when Aleida's father finally found himself up against armed and determined enemies in Bolivia, all that bloodthirsty bluster mentioned above vanished in a "poof." "Don't shoot," he whimpered to his U.S.-trained Bolivian captors as he dropped his fully loaded weapons. "I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"

His Bolivian captors viewed the matter differently. In fact they adopted a policy that has since become a favorite among Americans who encounter (so-called) endangered species on their property: "Shoot, Shovel and Shut up." Justice has never been better served.

I strongly suspect that in the process of "promoting her fathers' ideal's" Aleida Guevara (like Robert Redford and Stephen Soderbergh) will do Fidel and Raul Castro proud, while mounting no offense to Britain's "standards and values," as defined by her home secretary, Jacqui Smith.