This Cuban is sick and tired of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. (That’s right, let’s use everyone’s full name from now on.) I hear there’s a new movie out about this A-hole, and it’s four hours long. Tell you what, wouldn’t give it four minutes of my time. When is Hollywood going to get over its self-hatred identity and its glorification of murderers and start making films about the American Heroes of our past, and about the ones currently in the desert today?
My father is spinning in his grave.
After having been raised in a Cuban military orphanage, my father fled Cuba for the USA because he had bigger dreams. Once here, the first thing he did was report to immigration the way they used to on Ellis Island and asked what he needed to do to become a US citizen. He then quickly mastered the English language, got a job, passed the US citizen test, married my mother and flourished in this country by starting his own business – something Castro and Che would have never let him do. My father never said he was a Cuban, or a Cuban American. He was simply an American. He was old school.
My father was tough; imagine Charles Bronson’s face in “Death Wish,” with Al Pacino’s voice from “Scarface.” I once witnessed a pit bull sink its teeth into the old man’s ankle. He then proceeded to pummel the dog and bite it right back, after he finished his can of beer.
The only time I ever saw my father almost shed a tear was when he was caught off guard by the sight of a young hippie in a Che Guevara t-shirt. A look of confusion and sadness washed over the old man’s Death Wish face at the site of Che. He grabbed me by the arm as if I were in trouble and in his thick Cuban Scarface accent said, “You see the face on his shirt?” I nodded a resounding yes. “I don’t ever want to see you in a shirt like that. That man was a murderer, a thief, a liar and not a Cuban.”
Years later my father would yank my brothers and I out school for an impromptu school trip, “Where are we going?” we asked, “To the airport to see an American hero.” Parked in an empty gravel parking lot we sat atop our station wagon near the San Jose Airport; my father with binoculars in his hands. We waited until a large plane came to a halt on the tarmac, its blue and white paint shining in the fat bloated sun. “There he is, take a look,” my father said, handing me the binoculars. I looked at the man now standing at the bottom of the airplane steps, handed the binoculars over to my younger brother and asked, “Who is he?” In awe my father said, “It’s President Reagan.”
I’ll never forget the juxtaposition of those two episodes in my childhood. One man made it as far as a t-shirt, the other to the White House. Yet Hollywood gave the greenlight to a four hour epic of Ernesto and for The Gipper a CBS movie of the week which was nothing more than a hatchet job on man who ended the Cold War and put millions to work. A film so scandalous CBS had to shuck it off like a VHS tape found in a Simi Valley garage sale and resold on craigslist.
Every four years Tinseltown insists upon making movies about the Kennedy’s. Imagine Senator Edward Moore “Teddy” Kennedy as “Aquaman” and soon-to-be Senator Caroline Bouvier Schlossberg Kennedy as “The Wonder Woman of Camelot” — no doubt in production at a lunch meeting somewhere at this very minute.
To raise the consciousness of America to a greater moral standard we must begin to make films about true heroes. If we creative members of the GOP don’t do something now for proven heroes, not only will they be forgotten by the young, we will be forced to sit through a hundred years of glowing President Barack Hussein Obama films no matter what he does, or doesn’t do. And trust me; these films are currently gestating in the minds of every squishy-Lib that has a “Pepsi style” Barack Hussein Obama bumper sticker on their car in Hollywood. God help us if James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr. ever gets 120 minutes of film time from Hollywood.
If we don’t make these films then it’s our fault, I blame no one but us. This is a movement and a light must be shone upon it. We need to seek out the like-minded power players in Hollywood and say, “Show me your balls, then show me the money and greenlight this movie.”
Today, if one uninformed celebrity is seen on ‘Access Hollywood’ wearing Che across their chest, then every misinformed teen wants to put one across theirs. Sarah Louise Heath Palin is not the new Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan must be the new Reagan. Let’s see Reagan t-shirts on the catwalks of Milan, up and down the mean streets of Melrose, on the lead singers of arena rock bands and at every red carpet event that’s touting the latest brilliant, genius filmmaker!
If celebrities are comfortable plastering a lying, murdering thief who wasn’t even Cuban across their chest, then we should be overwhelmed with pride to put a proven American hero across ours. Come on Big Hollywood, let’s put my old man to rest and put a spin in Ernesto’s grave. This is a call to cotton arms, I dare you to come out of your GOP closet and be seen.