Nice one. Thanks for reminding us. Prefer Che’s anti imperialism speech myself. Lot easier on the eye and ears. 😉
Red Butcher on said:
In recent years,
***snipped
it.
Morning Star Reader on said:
Well done, Red Butcher, I think you’ve managed to squeeze every bit of CIA nonsense in there, including Castro and the Bolivian communists betraying Che, more deaths than Stalin etc. etc. Looking forward to your article on “How the Latin American Death Squads Saved Millions of Lives through Healthcare and Farm Assistance without Injuring Anyone”.
Unlike the loony Libertarians who form your knowledge base, we over here tend to require somewhat more substance to back up long-winded posts such as yours. Why not start at the most basic level, say, by citing sources for your drivel?
brianthedog on said:
#3 Red Butcher I just love the moniker as it gives this piece that extra fillip which is more than likely cut and pasted from a well known US state department training manual.
It should be called ‘How to rewrite history for dummies’.
What a shower! What next a long turgid piece on Hugo Chavez as an evil dictator who had mass murdered more than Hitler, Mussolini, Bush and Blair put together?????
It must really still hurt that those hispanic and black Cubans whooped the arse of the US backed invaders at the Bay of Pigs and years later whooped the arse of the US backed apatheid South African fascists at Cuito Cuanavale.
The Cuban Revolution with the assistance of Che was the start of throwing off the yoke of over a century of US imperialism in the region and its effects are being felt and built on across huge swathes of south america today.
Jog on …..
jack ford on said:
Red Butcher forgot to mention how it’s well known that Che and Castro tortured kittens and ate babies as well as worshipping Satan.
jack ford on said:
Chomsky dealt put the crimes of communism in context in his book Propaganda and the Public Mind
“A book came out called “The Black Book of Communism” which is about the huge crimes of communism. We have to have the courage at last to face these crimes, previously ignored, as the new millennium opens, that’s the general drift, with only slight exaggeration. We have to have the courage at last to face these crimes, previously ignored, as the new millennium opens, that’s the general drift, with only slight exaggeration. The “Black Book” gives the shocking figure of 100 million deaths attributable to communism. Let’s say its right. Let’s not argue about the numbers.
The worst example of the killing, the biggest component of this alleged 100 million is the Chinese famine around 1958 to 1960. Maybe thirty million died in the famine… Sen [an eminent Indian economist] studied that and he points out although India used to have plenty of famines under the British, it hasn’t had famines like that since independence. So there was never a famine in India since the early 1950s in which huge numbers of people die as they did in China. Sen gives plausible reasons for it. He says this is related to India’s specific forms of socio-economic, political, and ideological development.
India is more or less democratic. It has a free press. Information comes back from the bottom to the top, and if there are signs of a famine, the central authorities will know about it and there will be a protest about it. In China no information gets back to the centre and any protest will be smashed so you get huge famines. These are crimes of communism, traceable to the nature of the system.
That’ s HALF of what Sen says. The other half of this inquiry, which somehow escapes notice, has to do with another comparison. He says China in the late 1940s began to institute rural public health and educational programs as well as other programs orientated toward the mass of the population. India, on the other hand, plays the game by our rules, and it didn’t do any of this. And there are consequences for example in mortality rates. These started to decline sharply in China from around 1950 until 1979. Then they stopped declining and started going up slightly. That was the period of the reforms. During the totalitarian period, from 1950 to about 1979 mortality rates declined. They declined in India too, but much more slowly than in China up to 1979
Sen then says, suppose you measure the number of extra deaths in India resulting annually from not carrying out these Maoist style programs or others for the benefit of the population, what you would call reforms if the term wasn’t so ideological. He estimates close to four million extra deaths every year in India, which means that, as he puts it, every eight years in India the number of skeletons in the closet is the same as in China’s moment of shame, the famine. If you look at the whole period, it’s about 100 million extra deaths in India alone after the democratic capitalist period enters.”
This is staggering. I fell out of my chair when I read it.
It means that the lack of an effective welfare state in India during the Cold War years indirectly caused as many deaths as can be ascribed to Communism during the entire twentieth century.
And that’s just India.
How many Americans have died in the past century for lack of affordable healthcare? Quite a few.
When conservatives and right wing liberals try to lecture us about the horrors of Communism we should throw this fact in their teeth from now on.
I believe something in the order of 190 000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1991 when the free market reforms began, driven off the land by debt and agribusiness. Is it any wonder that there is now a Maoist insurgency raging across rural India?
Capitalism without welfare is a killer literally. It caused immeasurably more suffering that communism ever did. Many of us would argue that the communist bloc consisted of Stalinist regimes that were not communist or socialist in the true sense of the word at all. But we don’t even need to get into that. We can simply say that one lesson of the twentieth century is that socialism always needs to be based upon democracy and the rule of law but the other is that market fundamentalism is the greatest threat to the world. That was true in the last century and it’s true now.
Zhou Enlai on said:
Aleida Guevara, daughter of revolutionary leader Ché Guevara spoke at Cuba Solidarity Campaign meetings in Britain in September, together with Luis Marron from the Cuban Friendship Institute, (ICAP)
She addressed a packed-out STUC on Friday 14 September 2012 as part of a UK-wide tour. Watch her here….
jack ford:
Red Butcher forgot to mention how it’s well known that Che and Castro tortured kittens and ate babies as well as worshipping Satan.
Bloody hell! Did they? 🙂
John Grimshaw on said:
#1 I’m also worried that whoever this “easy on the eye” lady is, her video is advertising Madame Maura’s tarot readings. Which is a clear example of capitalism. But maybe I should raise this on the other thread?
jim mclean on said:
I have long been of the opinion that Castro wanted rid of Che who was a bit of a nut really. Che killed more off the battlefield than on it, but to hell with it, cool T Shirts.
Viva Fidel, not too many problems with that guy.
To my own satisfaction, yes. To the satisfaction of others on this site, probably not. So probably not worth a Flame War.
Vanya on said:
There are far better versions of Hasta Siempre than the one Andy posted (to put it mildly).
Karl Stewart on said:
Must admit I’ve always been inclined a little bit towards Jim McLean’s viewpoint.
I was surprised to find out fairly recently that Guevara wasn’t a trotskyist, as I’d always thought that he and Castro had split along broadly similar political lines to Stalin/Trotsky (obviously minus the personal emnity, purges and mad show trials).
On discovering a book about che, spouting the lie that he was a trotskite, on some trot stall at NUS conference a few years ago we took great pleasure in quoting one or two lines from che about Trotsky-which are quite funny and easy to find on the internet.
God knows where this myth came from he was, if anything more of the Stalinist/Maoist type of communist. He was a absolute hero, who did more to further the cause of socialism than any of us can ever hope to.
An article by Tony Saunois written on the 40th anniversary of Che’ death. Tony has made a particular study of Che Guevara’s life and death by writing a book and articles on him. In this article TS explains that:
“While in Bolivia, Che carried a tome of Trotsky in his knapsack. According to some reports, the book was ‘Revolution Betrayed’. Indeed, Che was introduced to some of Trotsky’s writings earlier. The Peruvian former air force officer, Ricardo Napurí, who refused to bomb a left-wing uprising, in 1948, gave Che Guvara a copy of Trotsky’s book, The Permanent Revolution, when he met him in Havana in 1959. The Cuban revolutionary Celia Hart, whose father, Amando Hart, fought with Castro and Che Guevara, and who was a Cuban government minister, said that it was Che Guevara who first convinced her to study Trotsky. Her father also showed her some books by Trotsky in the 1980’s.
“It is evident that one of Che Guevara’s political features was his willingness to discuss and explore different ideas and opinions. Unfortunately, despite his reading of some Trotsky, by the time of his premature death, at the age of 39, Che had not been able to draw all the necessary conclusions to develop a coherent and rounded out alternative. To do so, in isolation, without contact, discussion, and exchange of ideas, along with a broader international revolutionary experience to draw on, would have required a massive leap in understanding which, alone, would have been extremely difficult. In time, had Che lived and experienced more international events and struggles of the working class, through further debate and dialogue, we can be confident that he would have drawn the right conclusions of the tasks necessary to achieve the international socialist revolution.”
Vanya on said:
The question of Che and trotskyism is complex, and muddied by those with an axe to grind, and by the fact that trotskyism took very different forms, with specifically latin american manifestations who we rarely encounter elsewhere, particularly the Posadists who led what at one time was the most significant geurilla group in Guatemala, and who rightly earned Fidel’s ire by putting out the line that Che (who at that time was in the Congo or Bolivia, can’t recall which, but very much alive) had been diaspeared because he wanted to side with China against the USSR. The Posadists were pro-China and saw the Maoists as unconscious Trotskyists.
They apparently also had interesting theories about flying saucers.
Vanya on said:
#21 On the other hand, Ernest Mandel was invited to Cuba by Che, where he acted for a period as an economics adviser. It can hardly have escaped Che’s notice that Mandel was a trotskyist.
Che also worked with Charles Bettelheim, a French Maoist economist and author of the 3 volume Class Struggles in The USSR, a work that used to be popular with the SWP if I recall.
(Just realised that this is straying into territory being covered by the lengthy Chile thread).
Vanya on said:
#19 You do sometimes have interesting and useful things to say George, but the tone of your comments sometimes give the impression that your party is the CPGB ML rather than the CPB.
Trotskyists are frequently annoying and unhelpful, but you know what happens when you answer a fool according to his folly.
True enough Vanya. I only graduated a couple years ago and often slip back into silly student politics. Not particularly constructive.
As an RMT activist I work closely with asorted trots and all sorts of shades of red. We always tease each other like this, please realise im just taking the piss.
Vanya on said:
#24 Fair enough.
Perhaps the thing is to (a) learn from each other what’s useful and (b) realise we are in a new century and move on.
It’s sometimes easy to forget when you move straight from the NUS into labour movement activity just how little most of this stuff means to the vast majority of people in the real world.
After all it’s nice when you meet someone who is wearing a che t-shirt because they have an inkling of what he stood for. They sell them in Primark!
As far as the trots are concerned I’ve mentioned before my amusement at the fact that the SP now sell the things but when I was a student involved in the mills back in 1982-3 I was accused of being petit-bourgeois for wearing one 🙂
TRUE, as is often revealed on this blog there are no set definition of what constitutes a trot or any other variety of communist, with even those calling themselves after their favourite dead Russian taking different positions.
As I said I work with all sorts of different leftists in the labour movement and enjoy constructive work with the most hardened social democrat, green, trotskist…etc with the only exceptions being crazy sects such as the CPGB ML, AWL, the so called CPGB and others who you rarely encounter doing any serious organising anyway.
As you said different times, I am sure that the CPB’s position on the former Soviet Union would have been considered an expellable offensive once upon a time. The fact that some of what Trotsky said and wrote was actually true is another example.
The CPB has former Trots, former Maoists, former Greens, former Labour party and all sorts, many of whom still value their heritage. I joined the party because of this, because, at the end of the day, its best to work together on what we agree and put aside archaic differences-apart from some good natured joshing from time to time!
onlyoneteaminessex on said:
Amidst all the nonsense of “easy on the eye'” videos. Che t-shirts , student political posing, and the suchlike. Here’s the most beautiful (and indeed moving ) rendition of “Hasta Siempre”.
GeorgeW, I think what made the association between Guevara and Trotsky in my mind was the similarites between them as men, rather than written down ideological points.
Both flamboyant individuals, military skills, ruthlessness, a revolutionary impatience and at times a certain recklessness and adventurism, and perhaps a degree of arrogance towards others.
I’m generally less attracted to such figures – I tend to more admire the more modest, hard-working and less spectacular people, who work collectively and stay in post.
Which is why I’d side more with the early Stalin (not the post-Kirov dictator he became) than I would side with Trotsky and with Castro more than Guevara.
While there may be better versions oh Hast Siempre, the version I posted is the only one to be top of the pop charts in Spain and France, selling over a million copies in france alone
Vanya on said:
Does anyone know why the 2-part film about Che staring Del Torro misses out the middle bits?
IIrc The first part ends with victory in Cuba and the second with preparation for the mission in Bolivia.
Andy Newman on said:
or more easy on the eye:
red snapper on said:
Nice one. Thanks for reminding us. Prefer Che’s anti imperialism speech myself. Lot easier on the eye and ears. 😉
Red Butcher on said:
In recent years,
***snipped
it.
Morning Star Reader on said:
Well done, Red Butcher, I think you’ve managed to squeeze every bit of CIA nonsense in there, including Castro and the Bolivian communists betraying Che, more deaths than Stalin etc. etc. Looking forward to your article on “How the Latin American Death Squads Saved Millions of Lives through Healthcare and Farm Assistance without Injuring Anyone”.
Omar on said:
Red Butcher,
Unlike the loony Libertarians who form your knowledge base, we over here tend to require somewhat more substance to back up long-winded posts such as yours. Why not start at the most basic level, say, by citing sources for your drivel?
brianthedog on said:
#3 Red Butcher I just love the moniker as it gives this piece that extra fillip which is more than likely cut and pasted from a well known US state department training manual.
It should be called ‘How to rewrite history for dummies’.
What a shower! What next a long turgid piece on Hugo Chavez as an evil dictator who had mass murdered more than Hitler, Mussolini, Bush and Blair put together?????
It must really still hurt that those hispanic and black Cubans whooped the arse of the US backed invaders at the Bay of Pigs and years later whooped the arse of the US backed apatheid South African fascists at Cuito Cuanavale.
The Cuban Revolution with the assistance of Che was the start of throwing off the yoke of over a century of US imperialism in the region and its effects are being felt and built on across huge swathes of south america today.
Jog on …..
jack ford on said:
Red Butcher forgot to mention how it’s well known that Che and Castro tortured kittens and ate babies as well as worshipping Satan.
jack ford on said:
Chomsky dealt put the crimes of communism in context in his book Propaganda and the Public Mind
“A book came out called “The Black Book of Communism” which is about the huge crimes of communism. We have to have the courage at last to face these crimes, previously ignored, as the new millennium opens, that’s the general drift, with only slight exaggeration. We have to have the courage at last to face these crimes, previously ignored, as the new millennium opens, that’s the general drift, with only slight exaggeration. The “Black Book” gives the shocking figure of 100 million deaths attributable to communism. Let’s say its right. Let’s not argue about the numbers.
The worst example of the killing, the biggest component of this alleged 100 million is the Chinese famine around 1958 to 1960. Maybe thirty million died in the famine… Sen [an eminent Indian economist] studied that and he points out although India used to have plenty of famines under the British, it hasn’t had famines like that since independence. So there was never a famine in India since the early 1950s in which huge numbers of people die as they did in China. Sen gives plausible reasons for it. He says this is related to India’s specific forms of socio-economic, political, and ideological development.
India is more or less democratic. It has a free press. Information comes back from the bottom to the top, and if there are signs of a famine, the central authorities will know about it and there will be a protest about it. In China no information gets back to the centre and any protest will be smashed so you get huge famines. These are crimes of communism, traceable to the nature of the system.
That’ s HALF of what Sen says. The other half of this inquiry, which somehow escapes notice, has to do with another comparison. He says China in the late 1940s began to institute rural public health and educational programs as well as other programs orientated toward the mass of the population. India, on the other hand, plays the game by our rules, and it didn’t do any of this. And there are consequences for example in mortality rates. These started to decline sharply in China from around 1950 until 1979. Then they stopped declining and started going up slightly. That was the period of the reforms. During the totalitarian period, from 1950 to about 1979 mortality rates declined. They declined in India too, but much more slowly than in China up to 1979
Sen then says, suppose you measure the number of extra deaths in India resulting annually from not carrying out these Maoist style programs or others for the benefit of the population, what you would call reforms if the term wasn’t so ideological. He estimates close to four million extra deaths every year in India, which means that, as he puts it, every eight years in India the number of skeletons in the closet is the same as in China’s moment of shame, the famine. If you look at the whole period, it’s about 100 million extra deaths in India alone after the democratic capitalist period enters.”
This is staggering. I fell out of my chair when I read it.
It means that the lack of an effective welfare state in India during the Cold War years indirectly caused as many deaths as can be ascribed to Communism during the entire twentieth century.
And that’s just India.
How many Americans have died in the past century for lack of affordable healthcare? Quite a few.
When conservatives and right wing liberals try to lecture us about the horrors of Communism we should throw this fact in their teeth from now on.
I believe something in the order of 190 000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1991 when the free market reforms began, driven off the land by debt and agribusiness. Is it any wonder that there is now a Maoist insurgency raging across rural India?
Capitalism without welfare is a killer literally. It caused immeasurably more suffering that communism ever did. Many of us would argue that the communist bloc consisted of Stalinist regimes that were not communist or socialist in the true sense of the word at all. But we don’t even need to get into that. We can simply say that one lesson of the twentieth century is that socialism always needs to be based upon democracy and the rule of law but the other is that market fundamentalism is the greatest threat to the world. That was true in the last century and it’s true now.
Zhou Enlai on said:
Aleida Guevara, daughter of revolutionary leader Ché Guevara spoke at Cuba Solidarity Campaign meetings in Britain in September, together with Luis Marron from the Cuban Friendship Institute, (ICAP)
She addressed a packed-out STUC on Friday 14 September 2012 as part of a UK-wide tour. Watch her here….
Remembering Che – Elaine Smith MSP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdLH8qNqwDI
Remembering Che – Dr Aleida Guevara, Che’s eldest daughter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPml7sTMVHM
Taken from http://www.scottishcuba.org/
Charles Dexter Ward on said:
Did Che or did he not advocate a nuclear attack on the United States?
John Grimshaw on said:
H’mmmm!?
John Grimshaw on said:
Bloody hell! Did they? 🙂
John Grimshaw on said:
#1 I’m also worried that whoever this “easy on the eye” lady is, her video is advertising Madame Maura’s tarot readings. Which is a clear example of capitalism. But maybe I should raise this on the other thread?
jim mclean on said:
I have long been of the opinion that Castro wanted rid of Che who was a bit of a nut really. Che killed more off the battlefield than on it, but to hell with it, cool T Shirts.
Viva Fidel, not too many problems with that guy.
Pinkie on said:
Can you substantiate that, Jim?
jim mclean on said:
Pinkie,
To my own satisfaction, yes. To the satisfaction of others on this site, probably not. So probably not worth a Flame War.
Vanya on said:
There are far better versions of Hasta Siempre than the one Andy posted (to put it mildly).
Karl Stewart on said:
Must admit I’ve always been inclined a little bit towards Jim McLean’s viewpoint.
I was surprised to find out fairly recently that Guevara wasn’t a trotskyist, as I’d always thought that he and Castro had split along broadly similar political lines to Stalin/Trotsky (obviously minus the personal emnity, purges and mad show trials).
Not a massive Guevara fan to be honest.
George W on said:
Karl Stewart,
On discovering a book about che, spouting the lie that he was a trotskite, on some trot stall at NUS conference a few years ago we took great pleasure in quoting one or two lines from che about Trotsky-which are quite funny and easy to find on the internet.
God knows where this myth came from he was, if anything more of the Stalinist/Maoist type of communist. He was a absolute hero, who did more to further the cause of socialism than any of us can ever hope to.
Jimmy Haddow on said:
http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/2877
An article by Tony Saunois written on the 40th anniversary of Che’ death. Tony has made a particular study of Che Guevara’s life and death by writing a book and articles on him. In this article TS explains that:
“While in Bolivia, Che carried a tome of Trotsky in his knapsack. According to some reports, the book was ‘Revolution Betrayed’. Indeed, Che was introduced to some of Trotsky’s writings earlier. The Peruvian former air force officer, Ricardo Napurí, who refused to bomb a left-wing uprising, in 1948, gave Che Guvara a copy of Trotsky’s book, The Permanent Revolution, when he met him in Havana in 1959. The Cuban revolutionary Celia Hart, whose father, Amando Hart, fought with Castro and Che Guevara, and who was a Cuban government minister, said that it was Che Guevara who first convinced her to study Trotsky. Her father also showed her some books by Trotsky in the 1980’s.
“It is evident that one of Che Guevara’s political features was his willingness to discuss and explore different ideas and opinions. Unfortunately, despite his reading of some Trotsky, by the time of his premature death, at the age of 39, Che had not been able to draw all the necessary conclusions to develop a coherent and rounded out alternative. To do so, in isolation, without contact, discussion, and exchange of ideas, along with a broader international revolutionary experience to draw on, would have required a massive leap in understanding which, alone, would have been extremely difficult. In time, had Che lived and experienced more international events and struggles of the working class, through further debate and dialogue, we can be confident that he would have drawn the right conclusions of the tasks necessary to achieve the international socialist revolution.”
Vanya on said:
The question of Che and trotskyism is complex, and muddied by those with an axe to grind, and by the fact that trotskyism took very different forms, with specifically latin american manifestations who we rarely encounter elsewhere, particularly the Posadists who led what at one time was the most significant geurilla group in Guatemala, and who rightly earned Fidel’s ire by putting out the line that Che (who at that time was in the Congo or Bolivia, can’t recall which, but very much alive) had been diaspeared because he wanted to side with China against the USSR. The Posadists were pro-China and saw the Maoists as unconscious Trotskyists.
They apparently also had interesting theories about flying saucers.
Vanya on said:
#21 On the other hand, Ernest Mandel was invited to Cuba by Che, where he acted for a period as an economics adviser. It can hardly have escaped Che’s notice that Mandel was a trotskyist.
Che also worked with Charles Bettelheim, a French Maoist economist and author of the 3 volume Class Struggles in The USSR, a work that used to be popular with the SWP if I recall.
(Just realised that this is straying into territory being covered by the lengthy Chile thread).
Vanya on said:
#19 You do sometimes have interesting and useful things to say George, but the tone of your comments sometimes give the impression that your party is the CPGB ML rather than the CPB.
Trotskyists are frequently annoying and unhelpful, but you know what happens when you answer a fool according to his folly.
George W on said:
Vanya,
True enough Vanya. I only graduated a couple years ago and often slip back into silly student politics. Not particularly constructive.
As an RMT activist I work closely with asorted trots and all sorts of shades of red. We always tease each other like this, please realise im just taking the piss.
Vanya on said:
#24 Fair enough.
Perhaps the thing is to (a) learn from each other what’s useful and (b) realise we are in a new century and move on.
It’s sometimes easy to forget when you move straight from the NUS into labour movement activity just how little most of this stuff means to the vast majority of people in the real world.
After all it’s nice when you meet someone who is wearing a che t-shirt because they have an inkling of what he stood for. They sell them in Primark!
As far as the trots are concerned I’ve mentioned before my amusement at the fact that the SP now sell the things but when I was a student involved in the mills back in 1982-3 I was accused of being petit-bourgeois for wearing one 🙂
George W on said:
TRUE, as is often revealed on this blog there are no set definition of what constitutes a trot or any other variety of communist, with even those calling themselves after their favourite dead Russian taking different positions.
As I said I work with all sorts of different leftists in the labour movement and enjoy constructive work with the most hardened social democrat, green, trotskist…etc with the only exceptions being crazy sects such as the CPGB ML, AWL, the so called CPGB and others who you rarely encounter doing any serious organising anyway.
As you said different times, I am sure that the CPB’s position on the former Soviet Union would have been considered an expellable offensive once upon a time. The fact that some of what Trotsky said and wrote was actually true is another example.
The CPB has former Trots, former Maoists, former Greens, former Labour party and all sorts, many of whom still value their heritage. I joined the party because of this, because, at the end of the day, its best to work together on what we agree and put aside archaic differences-apart from some good natured joshing from time to time!
onlyoneteaminessex on said:
Amidst all the nonsense of “easy on the eye'” videos. Che t-shirts , student political posing, and the suchlike. Here’s the most beautiful (and indeed moving ) rendition of “Hasta Siempre”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Cec-bzj0Y
Vanya on said:
#27 Not wrong there mate, just listened to it.
Karl Stewart on said:
GeorgeW, I think what made the association between Guevara and Trotsky in my mind was the similarites between them as men, rather than written down ideological points.
Both flamboyant individuals, military skills, ruthlessness, a revolutionary impatience and at times a certain recklessness and adventurism, and perhaps a degree of arrogance towards others.
I’m generally less attracted to such figures – I tend to more admire the more modest, hard-working and less spectacular people, who work collectively and stay in post.
Which is why I’d side more with the early Stalin (not the post-Kirov dictator he became) than I would side with Trotsky and with Castro more than Guevara.
andy newman on said:
While there may be better versions oh Hast Siempre, the version I posted is the only one to be top of the pop charts in Spain and France, selling over a million copies in france alone
Vanya on said:
Does anyone know why the 2-part film about Che staring Del Torro misses out the middle bits?
IIrc The first part ends with victory in Cuba and the second with preparation for the mission in Bolivia.
George W on said:
31 I dunno, good point.
I like the first film better, just because of the happier ending. The second is probably the better film, but sadder ending.
There was talk of making another film at some point.
http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/steven-soderbergh-has-one-more-che-guevara-movie-in-mind/