Read this argument then:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lt4rb/z/cc2l75x
So, was Che a murderer?
I would say that the answer here depends upon your conception of the charge of murder. Is killing a soldier in battle or an agent of the government you are at war with considered murder? Is the death penalty murder? Is shooting deserters, traitors, murderers, or rapists within your own ranks murder? If you answer yes to any of these, you may call Guevara a murderer. If you answer no, I would argue that there is no evidence to accuse Guevara of murder.
In Cuba, and in the Congo, and in Bolivia, Guevara was certainly both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of soldiers, police, and other agents of the governments against which he fought. Guevara, as a Marxist-Leninist, certainly believed in the necessity of violent struggle.
It is important, I think, to understand why Guevara held this belief. Prior to meeting with Cuban exiles in Mexico and joining the invasion of Batista's Cuba on the Granma with the Castros and other revolutionaries, Che Guevara had spent time living in Guatemala. In 1950, President Jacobo Árbenz was popularly elected on the promise of a land reform program, meant to remedy some of the ills of colonial and foreign domination of Guatemalan land and resources. Setting about this land reform, Árbenz's government began to seize unworked land owned by large landowners, compensating them at the values they had stated for their property on their taxes. This threatened the profits of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), who owned wide swaths of fallow land, the value of which it had been understating for decades to avoid taxation. The head of the CIA and Secretary of State in the U.S. both happened to be on the board of United Fruit (in addition to being brothers), and orchestrated a U.S.-backed campaign of terror and violence to overthrow the democratically elected government and replace it with a military dictatorship. Successive regimes maximized profits for multinational corporations while, in collaboration with the United States, violently suppressed dissent, as in the Mayan Genocide in the 1980s.
Guevara was in Guatemala City for the coup, and initially sought to resist it. However, he found workers' groups under-armed and under-prepared. Publicly known to be a leftist who had resisted the coup, Guevara fled the country. Just as the coup shaped his disillusionment with liberal democracies, the state of the working class convinced him that for progress to be secure, the workers and other lower classes must be armed. Guevara had not emerged from Argentina one day convinced that violence was the only way. He had seen a popular leader make some headway, and then seen him brutally overthrown and a repressive regime installed by the owning class. This disillusionment would be mirrored in much of Latin America two decades later, after the 1973 coup against the Chilean government of Salvador Allende.
However, I think that killing your enemies in war is generally understood by most people to be different from killing innocents in cold blood. It is this latter accusation that is implied when one calls Guevara a murderer.
Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Guevara was assigned for a time to oversee the prison at La Cabaña. His duties involved overseeing the executions of those convicted of war crimes at the prison. Because of this duty, Guevara is sometimes called the "Butcher of La Cabaña" in the Cuban ex-pat community. The revolutionary government claimed to be basing its trials for war crimes upon the international precedent set by the Nuremberg Trials. The process consisted of two tribunals, one of which tried civilians and one of which tried members of Batista's military. Only the latter could order an execution for those convicted of war crimes. Guevara's role, like that of governors in the United States, consisted of reviewing the verdicts, offering pardons, and setting execution dates. Guevara remained assigned to this role for several months, during which he oversaw between 55 and 105 executions.
On the popularity of the execution of war criminals, and on the role of Guevara in the process, historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II writes in Guevara, Also Known as Che,
Fidel launched a counterattack to the U.S. campaign in a speech he gave January 21 at the National Palace, comparing the crimes committed during the dictatorship with those judged at Nuremberg and asserting the people's right to see justice done and to carry out the executions. He asked for a show of hands: was justice meted out to the torturers? According to Carlos Franqui, who was editor of Revolución at the time: "Fidel's question was answered by an overwhelming 'Yes!' A private nationwide survey showed 93 percent in favor of the trials and shootings." Che was present at the gathering, but took no part in the demonstration.
...
Without a doubt Che was in favor of the summary trials, but the tales woven by Cuban exiles, in which he was the "Butcher of La Cabaña," presiding over most of the shootings in Havana, are flights of fantasy. Revolutionary Tribunals No. 1 and No. 2 did sit at La Cabaña, the first trying policemen and soldiers, the second (which did not pass death sentences) trying civilians. RT1, presided over by Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada, did pass the death sentence in some cases, at least two dozen of which were in January. Che did not sit on either tribunal, but did review appeals in his capacity as commander. He could have had no doubts as he ratified the sentences; he believed in the justice of what he was doing and over the previous years had become very tough-minded about such situations.
On the quality of polls in Cuba at the time, Carmelo Mesa-Lago argues in "Availability and Reliability of Statistics in Socialist Cuba (Part One") that before the Bay of Pigs (1961), they were generally free and objective. The above poll would have taken place in 1959.
Whether or not you believe Guevara was a murderer should depend upon your judgement of war and the practice of executing war criminals, rather than upon unfounded accusations that Guevara massacred innocents.
Che Guevara in mind and history
"Why Che?" This is a question many have asked, seeing images of the fallen revolutionary emblazoned upon murals, movie posters, and t-shirts. Guevara was young, ruggedly handsome, and a seasoned revolutionary leader when his image first exploded upon the global scene, and that enough secured him lasting fame. But it's something much more than that, which elevates el Che to an unmatched stature, inspiring intense love and intense hate.
In this New York Times review of two biographies on Guevara, the writer hits the nail on the head:
Three decades after he was captured and killed by the Bolivian Army on still another revolutionary mission, Guevara remains an icon of leftist idealism and subversive mystique, inspiring a mini-boom of recent biographies, film projects and post-cold-war nostalgia. From the tin-roofed barrios of Lima to the coffeehouses of Prague, he represents that most romantic of political contradictions -- a rebel who won yet continued to rebel.
I have written responses to questions on Guevara's military prowess and his successes and failures in his brief tenure in the revolutionary government of Cuba. A physician and a lover of learning, Guevara is perhaps the most responsible individual for unparalleled Cuban programs in medicine and literacy, as well as the driving force behind sweeping land reform (which sparked U.S. bombings and and an invasion, in an impotent echo of the 1954 Guatemalan coup). Had Guevara remained in Cuba, he could have been one of the leaders of its government, and might even be alive with Fidel Castro today. However, after assuring himself that Cuba was on the revolutionary track (I have also written on the course and goals of the Cuban Revolution), he went on to fight until death around the world.
Che Guevara is seen as a romantic symbol by many, and is hated by many. It is important, in the conflict that this creates, to remember that he was a man, and that he was, at the core of his being and until the very end, a violent communist revolutionary. All of his actions, from Cuba onwards, should be viewed in this light. He sought to use force of arms to overthrow the capitalist owning class, which he saw as brutally oppressing the peoples of the world, and replace it with Marxist-Leninist states that would build socialism and one day transition to communism. He did not seek to kill innocents or those he saw as oppressed, but he had no problem violently overthrowing oppressors and killing their soldiers, and believed that he was acting for the ultimate good of mankind. If he were to hear criticisms today, he might echo Fidel Castro, in saying, "History will absolve me."