The only thing that kept Ernesto Che Guevera from joining the pantheon of monsters — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — who contributed mightily to world misery and suffering was his abysmal leadership and lack of organizational skill. But his ambitions were evident in this passage from a famous speech he gave early on:

“Hatred is an element of struggle, unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his limitations, making him an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”

Che’s brief, but blood-soaked, reign as the chief jailor at La Cabana prison in Cuba suggests that the world was fortunate, indeed, that he spent so much of his career engaging in quixotic jungle adventures that went nowhere. (Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he told the London Daily Worker that if the missiles had been under Cuban, as opposed to Russian, control, they would have been fired on American cities.) But by the time he was finally executed by the Bolivian military in 1967, he had failed utterly. Not a single Bolivian peasant, not one, had joined his guerrilla movement there. He was dispatched like a rabid dog.

Che’s hands were subsequently cut off so his fingerprints could be taken and held, and he was buried in a common grave. In 1997, his remains were located by an archeological team and returned to Havana where they are kept in a mausoleum. Castro made a big deal about his hero’s belated return, although there is considerable evidence that Castro actually had wanted Che out of the way because of his inconveniently anti-Soviet views.

So much for the facts, which are in shorter supply than Cuban consumer goods whenever the left takes up the subject of Che Guevara. In the great tradition of making lemonade when you are dealt a lemon, the left has turned his ignominious and early death into a glamorous martyrdom. At Chelives.com, which describes itself as a “leftist internet project,” the visitor is treated to a litany of fashionably Left causes before getting to the button marked “enter store.” That’s where you find the mugs, T-shirts, and posters that have the kind of shelf life that even a James Dean or Marilyn Monroe might envy.

At the Public Theater, Jose Rivera’s “School of the Americas,” gives us Che (John Ortiz) on the last two days of his life — reputedly drawn from interviews with the participants and other historic documents. His politics are abundantly in evidence, but not so his viciousness.