Posted by Tina
Front Page Magazine has a wonderful article on juxtaposed responses to the new movie Che, starring Benicio del Toro. People at the Cannes Film Festival loved and applauded it but the Cuban residents of Miami were deeply offended. What a difference personal knowledge makes when it comes to history:
Ches Useful Idiot, by Humberto Fontova Front Page magazine
** Id like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara! announced Benicio del Toro this May, as he received a best actor award for his starring role in Che, a reverent new film about the communist revolutionary. **
** As the crowd at the Cannes Film Festival erupted in thunderous ovation, the Puerto Rico-born actor gushed that I wouldn’t be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you’ll have to pay your respects to the man!” *** But some stubbornly refuse to pay their respects. Thus, the actor received a much cooler reception when Che, directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh, had a private screening in Miami Beach this past Thursday. Cuban-Americans, including the mayor of Miami Beach, protested the 4-and-a-half hour glorification of the man they consider a Stalinist mass-murderer. *** Miami’s media proved equally unwelcoming. At a press conference after the screening in Miami Beach’s Byron Carlyle Theater, Marlene Gonzalez of the Spanish language America TeVe network asked del Toro about some glaring omissions in the movie. What of Ches role in ordering the executions of ordinary Cubans? And why no mention of the forced-labor camps established on the guerilla fighters orders? A suddenly hurried Del Toro denied that Che bore any culpability for these horrors. *** As protestors outside the Carlyle Theater brandished pictures of relatives murdered by Che Guevara, del Toro paid tribute to their murderer. Questions about Ches brutalities meticulously recorded in books like Exposing the Real Che Guevara he brushed aside as the embittered fabrications of Cuban exiles. **
Do yourself a favorread the entire article and then protest the movie “Che” by shunning it at the box office.