Via the Standard, he’ll have you know that the Great Man didn’t just execute political prisoners willy nilly. He held trials, for god’s sake.

Well, sometimes.

“I’m getting uncomfortable,” Benicio del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie’s portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. “I’m done. I’m done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.”…

Mr. del Toro doesn’t deny that Guevara’s persona had some darker aspects. “We have to omit a lot of stuff about his life,” he said, “but we’re not omitting the fact that he’s for capital punishment, which is the essence of that.”…

“They didn’t do it blindly; they had trials,” Mr. del Toro said. “They found them guilty, and they executed them – that’s capital punishment.”…

Mr. del Toro grew agitated when these prisons were described as “concentration camps,” a phrase that [Cuban dissident Armando] Valladares freely employs…

“We can’t cover it all,” Mr. del Toro said. “You can make your own movie. You know? You can make your own movie. And let’s see. Do the research.”

The author, Sonny Bunch, already did the research; you’ll find it in the article, in the form of eyewitness testimony from Valladares and comments from Ron Radosh. My only criticism is that he lets Soderbergh off too easily: If it’s true that the director’s under no illusions about Guevara’s totalitarian impulses, why doesn’t that shine through in the film? Bunch makes it sound like a whitewash. Exit quotation: “Benicio del Toro is just one of the many accomplices of the Cuban tyranny.”