With his Che chic T-shirt, Carlos Santana seems to be implying that while he's happy to be attending the Academy Awards, he'd rather be off leading Cuban firing squads. (Here's a copy of the shot, since all photos will scroll off Yahoo after a while.)

As Jay Nordlinger once wrote:

Listen to what Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the Miami congressman, has to say about Che. I doubt the New York Public Library would trust it — but you can: "Guevara was an Argentinian loser who alleged he was a doctor even though he couldn't give a simple flu shot. What he was good at was killing people, and he became one of history's cruelest serial killers. He was Castro's primary henchman, murdering hundreds of innocent people without due process, usually finishing off the work of the mass-production firing squads with shots to the back of the neck. He was and will always be the most despicable, disgusting figure of the Castro killing machine, the foreigner who was made a serial killer of Cubans by Castro, and got great pleasure from his role."

Indeed, he did. Guevara, famous as he is — famous as his mug is — is little known. He was, as Diaz-Balart says, Castro's number-one revolutionary thug. He presided over those summary executions at La Cabaña — the old fortress that Guevara commandeered — and he very much enjoyed administering the coup de grâce. He also enjoyed parading people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which the victims were killed. Viva Cristo Rey! ("Long Live Christ the King!") they would sometimes yell.

Remember this, too: Guevara founded the labor-camp system, in which countless Cubans — judged "deviant" by the regime — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag; it is Che's legacy.

And it's oh so in at the increasingly politicized--and radicalized--Academy Awards!

Update: Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard on a new Miles Davis DVD that was built around documentary footage of his appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival in England. Santana appears fairly prominently in new footage on the disc, to offer a rocker's take on Miles Davis' music. I left this bit about him on the cutting room floor, to keep the article a managable length:

There’s a classic “shut up and play” moment (to paraphrase the title of Laura Ingraham’s recent book), when Santana, discussing how incredible and wonderful and universal pop music of the 1960s was, says:

Isle of Wight was a pure result of consciousness-revolution music. “Hell no, we won’t go to Vietnam” and “we shall overcome”. The sixties—the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—was the most important decade of the 20th century.

Why?

Because it gave birth to questioning authority, particularly if it’s not enlightened by God. Are you listening, George Bush?

Is the president listening to God, or to Santana? If it’s the latter, to coin a phrase that’s probably been uttered a few times at the ranch in Crawford, the odds are slim and none, and Slim just left town. And both Santana and the DVD's director know it—but that doesn’t stop them from preaching to the choir and alienating half of the disc’s potential audience.

So are Che and Castro enlightened by God? Is it possible for their victims to question their authority--which most definitely flows from the barrel of a gun, one that was more than likely being aimed at the base of your skull by the man whose T-shirt Santana chose to wear the Academy Awards?

As the Professor would say, not for peace, merely on the other side.

(Post title via Frank Zappa, incidentally.)