WASHINGTON – The United Nations’ decision to open its doors for a Hollywood biopic about a Cuban mass murderer, Ernesto “Che” Guevara,” has drawn fire from opponents of the Castro regime who say the world body should be “embarrassed” for helping whitewash the communist assassin’s history.

Last weekend, the U.N. General Assembly served as a movie set for “Che,” the upcoming film about the life of Guevara, Fidel Castro’s most notorious associate. The film, slated for release later this year, is directed and produced by Steven Soderbergh, and stars Benicio del Toro as Guevara. “Che” is being distributed by River Road Entertainment and Focus Features, which in 2004 distributed “The Motorcycle Diaries” – another Guevara film considered to have idolized the Marxist warrior.

“Che” is only the second movie to have been filmed on the premises of the United Nations, which, prior to last year’s “The Interpreter,” had kept its Turtle Bay compound closed to Hollywood. According to the U.N. undersecretary general for communications and public information, Shashi Tharoor, “Che” filming was greenlighted by Secretary-General Annan and the president of the General Assembly, Jan Eliasson. The U.N. footage will be used to depict Guevara’s 1964 speech before the world body.

To some critics, the approval represents a violation of the United Nations’ stated principles of promoting world peace.

“It’s a real shame that the United Nations will be a party to the glamorizing of Che Guevara,” the Cuban-born director of the Free Society Project, Maria Werlau, told The New York Sun yesterday. “Che stood for the opposite of what the U.N. charter upholds. He was a ruthless and cold-blooded mass murderer whose warped sense of ‘justice’ led to the firing squad executions of scores of dissenters, without minimal due process.”

One of the Free Society Project’s initiatives is the Truth Recovery Archive on Cuba, which works to document the often nameless victims of the Castro revolution. According to the archive’s most recent count, at least 216 Cubans were slaughtered personally by Guevara or on his orders between 1957 and 1959. Guevara ran Havana’s La Cabana prison – the site of executions of thousands of dissidents and other opponents of Mr. Castro’s communist revolution – and often wrote about the expendability of human life in pursuit of the Marxist cause. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962,” Ms. Werlau, a scholar of Cuba’s history and economy, said, “he favored unleashing nuclear war in order to build ‘a better world from the ashes.'”

Guevara also killed while leading armed communist insurrections in Africa and Latin America, and died while fighting in Bolivia in 1967.

The son of one of Guevara’s victims, Rolando Castano, said yesterday that he was “not surprised” the United Nations would participate in Hollywood revisionism about Mr. Castro’s murderous deputy. Mr. Castano’s father was shot in the head by Guevara himself at the guerrilla’s personal desk at La Cabana, against Mr. Castro’s orders.

Most of the world, the Miami-based Mr. Castano said, does not know about the real Guevara, and wants to believe the idealized version of his life peddled by Hollywood, which sells him as a “revolutionary hero.”

Calls requesting comment at River Road Entertainment yesterday were not immediately returned. In an interview with a Hollywood publication, Mr. Soderbergh described Guevara as “a very complicated subject, because he’s one of the few figures that holds up the more you scrutinize him.”

“I don’t trust the U.N. at all,” Mr. Castano said, adding that the world body was run by “so many countries influenced by socialists, or communist activities” that the worshipful view of Guevara “is probably what they want to show – that’s what they want to see.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, except to counter with films about the real Guevara. “But none of the big guys in Hollywood who have money would promote or create such a movie,” Mr. Castano added.

Mr. Tharoor said yesterday in an email that Mr. Annan gave the go-ahead to the project because “We felt that it was in the U.N.’s interest for the depiction of this event to be filmed here, reminding viewers of the historic role of the organization as a forum for dialogue at the height of the Cold War and further familiarizing the movie going public with the U.N. The decision to approve the request was in keeping with the SG’s well-established policy of making the organization more accessible to the general public.”

A Cuban-American member of Congress who is highly critical of the United Nations, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, said yesterday: “If the U.N. secretary is in such an ‘open the U.N. doors mood,’ I hope that he will open the books on his financially scandalized oil-for-food mess.”

In the meantime, the congresswoman said many of her constituents “are widows and widowers” as a result of Guevara’s “evil deeds,” adding: “I hope the U.N. will open its facilities to other filmmakers who have a different point of view on Che.”