President Obama’s visit to Cuba is many things to many people. To the far-left in America, it is a victory dance on the grave of Cold War anti-Communism, which once embraced the likes of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson along with Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. To the Cuban regime, it’s a moment of triumphant vindication, which validates the Castro brothers’ 60-year narrative: An embattled island republic that stood up bravely against its domineering leviathan neighbor (the USA), through boycotts, CIA machinations and even the collapse of its Soviet ally, pioneering a new society despite it all. And now even the American president comes to its shores, as if to make reparation and apology.

To American progressives like CNN reporter Chris Cuomo (son of the left-wing New York governor Mario), Obama’s visit is some cross between a honeymoon and a homecoming. As Newsbusters reported, Cuomo covered the story from Cuba

wearing his father’s guayabera shirt, which was “given to him by Fidel Castro as a gift.” Cuomo, who was covering President Obama’s visit to Cuba, underlined that “it didn’t mean something to him [his father] because it came from Fidel Castro necessarily, but because it marked conversations going on decades ago that were the same as those today.”

The anchor summarized that for his father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, “the concern was the freedom of the people. What is the point of this communist regime if it is not to truly make everyone equal — not at the lowest level; not by demoralizing everyone; but lifting everyone up? My father, generations of politicians, have been fighting this. So, I wear this shirt as a reminder of that, and of my pop.”

Images can seal a narrative in place. Some horrifying war photos from South Vietnam may have sealed the fate of the American war for that country. And the image that comes to us from Obama’s visit to pay court to Fidel and Raul Castro is of the U.S. president standing with Cuban dignitaries, strategically posed against the backdrop of a building with a huge graffiti portrait of Che Guevara.

That photo wasn’t an accident. It has all the earmarks of a carefully managed photo op, to which Obama consented. It’s a “symbolic” shot, like an image of a U.S. politician in Israel kissing the Wailing Wall, or bowing to meet the pope. Such religious comparisons are only too apropos, since Communism in the 20^th century rose to the significance of a world religion, inspiring millions of zealots from Chile to Cambodia to spy on their own governments, betray their country’s interests, hijack labor unions, engage in violent revolutions — and then, once in power, to trample the rights to life, liberty and property of hundreds of millions of other people.

Since the United States was the single largest and most effective national opponent to Communism, the image of a U.S. president posing before an image of Che Guevara, on Cuban soil, is shocking to American sensibilities — and no doubt, deeply consoling to Marxists around the world, who remember that President Obama was formed by Marxist professors in anti-colonial ideology, as Dinesh D’Souza documented in his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage and the hit film Obama’s America. Here D’Souza is commenting on how accurate his warnings about Obama’s presidency proved to be, in retrospect:

But the image of a U.S. president posing before a heroic image of revolutionary Che Guevara is chilling on quite another level. The countless clueless college students who sport t-shirts with that iconic “Che” image probably don’t know much about the real Che Guevara. Nor would they wish to, since it would wreck whatever “progressive” gesture they are trying to impress upon their peers by wearing the t-shirt.

Conservative media were admirably quick to point out the real record of Che Guevara, a roving Argentinian revolutionary who came to Cuba to help Castro impose a one-party dictatorship on Cubans. Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard called Guevera “a mass murderer who has performed the neat trick of getting leftists worldwide to venerate him as some sort of idealistic free spirit.” Hemingway quoted in full a letter that Cuban exile musician Paquito D’Rivera wrote to guitarist Santana, who performed in the hagiographic film about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, then appeared at the Academy Awards wearing a huge crucifix over an image of Guevara. D’Rivera told Santana about

“The Butcher of the Cabaña,” the moniker given to the lamentable character known as Ché Guevara by those Cubans who had to suffer his tortures and humiliations in that nefarious prison.

One of these Cubans was my cousin Bebo, imprisoned there just for being a Christian. He recounts to me on occasion, always with infinite bitterness, how he could hear, from his cell, in the early hours of dawn, the executions without prior trials or process of law, of the many who died shouting, “Long Live Christ The King!”

The guerrilla guy with the beret with the star is something more than that ridiculous film about a motorcycle, my illustrious colleague, and to juxtapose Christ with Ché Guevara is like entering a synagogue with a swastika hanging from your neck; it’s also a harsh blow in the face of that Cuban youth from the ’60s, who had to go into hiding to listen to your albums which the Revolution, and the troglodyte Argentinian and his cohorts, dubbed as “imperialist music” (i.e. Rock & Roll).

The real Che Guevara belongs not in the gallery of youth rebels like James Dean and Jimi Hendrix (other favorite icons of vaguely rebellious youth), but in the solemn listing of bloodthirsty revolutionary tyrants, going back to the French Revolution, reaching up through Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. In World Affairs back in 2014, Michael J. Totten surveyed the growing number of books by historians exposing Guevara’s actual record of killing and repression, especially Humberto Fontova’s Exposing the Real Che Guevara. As Totten wrote:

La Cabaña is the old Spanish military fortress above the east side of Havana’s harbor that Che turned into a prison. Fontova calls it the Caribbean Lubyanka. Thousands of men and boys were executed against its walls with firing squads.

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” Che famously said. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail.”

Contrary to conventional firing squads, where all rifles but one are loaded with blanks, Che ensured every executioner in the squad fired live ammunition.

“As soon as [Castro and Guevara] seized power,” writes Fontaine, “they began to conduct mass executions inside the two main prisons, La Cabaña and Santa Clara … In the words of Jeannine Verdes-Laroux, ‘The form of the trials, and the procedures by which they were conducted, were highly significant. The totalitarian nature of the regime was inscribed there from the very beginning.’”

The body count is hard to pin down with accuracy, but Che himself admitted to ordering thousands of executions at La Cabaña during the first year alone. Those who managed to survive say he frequently delivered the killing blow himself in the side of the victim’s head with his pistol.

Totten also culled the following statements from Guevara’s own lips or pen:

“A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”

“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. This is a total war to the death.”

“If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City … We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims … We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm.”

After all those bloodthirsty statements, it’s not too surprising to learn that Guevara was also a racist. The Commentator reported back in 2013 the following excerpts from the revolutionary’s diaries:

“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese.”

“The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”

But stubborn facts like these about Che Guevara are easy for people to forget. What will last in the minds of the public is the image of an American president honoring a despotic regime, before the haunting image of the mass murderer who helped to pave the way.