Critical reactions to The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there. Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it’s “a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more.” And Salon‘s Paul Berman laments that “the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. [He] was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction in Cuba. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system…that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.” Yikes…