Che was a brute, a racist, and a mass murderer. He may not have killed as many people as Stalin or Khomeini, but he was hardly heroic.
Mass murderer? Did he even execute prisoners of war? He's as much a mass murderer as General Grant.
I don't know if he executed POWs, but it's a demonstrable fact that he gloried in murder.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thor-halvorssen/an-open-letter-to-urban-o_b_1895353.html
The article discusses the "murder" of Eutimio Guerra. This is ludicrously hypocritical. Guerra had committed a very serious military offence - he had sold out his unit, giving their position away to the Cuban air force for money. A British or American soldier would probably have been executed for the same offence at the time. Calling that murder is idiotic and calling the person who carried it out a butcher is a lie. Indeed, Guevara himself was executed. Are the CIA mass murdering butchers?
The article also talks about Guevara's alleged terrorist plot to blow up a railway station in the US, a plot he's supposed to have made in 1962. This attack would have presumably been a reaction to the actual American bombings that did take place inside Cuba and killed hundreds of Cuban civilians. Unlike the CIA, Guevara thought better of his terrorist campaign.
Look, I don't want to whitewash this. Guevara killed people. Guevara killed innocent people, probably. He killed political opponents, people who helped the fascist government of Cuba during the Revolution. Note that your article overestimated the death toll at La Cabana by ten times. He shot both outright war criminals and collaborators after brief, dodgy trials with loose rules of evidence (because no other sort of court was possible). So did virtually every liberator in history, from Washington to Eisenhower. We can condemn all those for their identical and mostly unavoidable crimes together, and stop this silly pretence that Guevara and Guevara alone was some Stalinist butcher. On the other hand, and unlike those other two great generals, he educated and fed millions, so there's that.
Now, the Cuban government has since collapsed into dictatorship - because absolute power corrupts ect, and also because Fidel was always a bit of a tyrant - but for a few years Cuba was actually a shining light of liberation.
