Exposing the Real Che Guevara Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1 - New York Fetes the Godfather of Terrorism

  Chapter 2 - Jailer of Rockers, Hipsters, and Gays

  Chapter 3 - Bon Vivant, Mama’s Boy, Poser, and Snob

  Chapter 4 - From Military Doofus to “Heroic Guerrilla”

  Chapter 5 - Fidel’s Favorite Executioner

  Chapter 6 - Murderer of Women and Children

  Chapter 7 - The “Intellectual and Art Lover” as Book Burner and Thief

  Chapter 8 - Academia’s Rude Surprise

  Chapter 9 - Brownnoser and Bully

  Chapter 10 - Guerrilla Terminator

  Chapter 11 - “The Brains of the Revolution” as Economic Czar

  Chapter 12 - Che in Africa

  Chapter 13 - Che’s Final Debacle

  NOTES

  INDEX

  SENTINEL

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2007 by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Humberto Fontova, 2007

  All rights reserved

  Insert credits: Joaquin Sanjenis, courtesy of Ricardo Nũnez-Protuondo: p. 1; AP/Wide World Photos / Jose Goita:

  p. 2 top; AP/Wide World Photos / Amy Sancetta: p. 2 bottom; AP/Wide World Photos / Dario Lopez-Mills: p. 3

  top; AP/Wide World Photos / Chris Pizello: p. 3 bottom; startraksphoto.com / Bill Davila: p. 4 top; AP/Wide

  World Photos / Keystone / Laurent Gilleron: p. 4 bottom; AP/Wide World Photos / Joe Cavaretta: p. 5; Emilio

  Izquierdo Jr. / photographer unknown: p. 6 top; Emilio Izquierdo Jr. / photographer unknown: p. 6 bottom;

  Barbara Rangel / photographer unknown: p. 7; Felix Rodriguez / photographer unknown: p. 8.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Fontova, Humberto.

  Exposing the real Che Guevara : the liberal media’s favorite executioner / Humberto Fontova.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-595-23027-0

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  PREFACE

  “These CubanS Seem to not have slept a wink since they grabbed their assets and headed for Florida,” Michael Moore writes in his book Downsize This!

  Some Cubans certainly “grabbed assets,” but not those who headed for Florida. Michael Moore might have profited from witnessing the scenes at Havana’s Rancho Boyeros airport in 1961 as tens of thousands of Cubans “headed for Florida” and “assets were grabbed.”

  My eight-year-old sister Patricia, my five-year-old brother, Ricky, and this writer, then seven years old, watched as a scowling miliciana jerked my mother’s earrings from her ears. “These belong to La Revolución !” the woman snapped, and then turned toward my sister. “That, too!” and she reached for the little crucifix around Patricia’s neck, pulling it roughly over her head. My mother, Esther, winced and glowered, but she’d been lining up the paperwork for our flight to freedom for a year. She wasn’t about to botch it now.

  For millions of Cubans, being able to leave your homeland utterly penniless and with the clothes on your back for an uncertain future in a foreign country was (and is today) considered the equivalent of winning the lottery. My mother, a college professor, bore the minor larceny stoically. My father, standing beside her, had just emptied his pockets for another guard as his face hardened. Humberto Senior was an architect. That look (we knew so well) of an imminent eruption was manifesting. Suddenly, uniformed men surrounded Humberto. “Señor, you’re coming with us.”

  “To where?” my mother gasped.

  “You! Keep your mouth shut!” snapped the miliciana. And Humberto was dragged off. “Then we’re not leaving!” said my mother as she tried to follow him. “If you can’t leave, we’re not leaving!” She started to choke up.

  My father stopped and turned around as the men grabbed his arms. “You are leaving,” he said. “Whatever happens to me—I don’t want you and the children growing up in a communist country!” It would be a few weeks before Castro admitted he was a Marxist-Leninist. At the word “communist,” my father’s police escort bristled and jerked him forward.

  “We’re not leaving!” yelled my mother.

  “You are!” yelled my father over his shoulder as he disappeared through the doors. As the doors snapped shut my mom finally broke down. Her shoulders heaved and her hands rose to wipe the tears, but her arms were promptly pulled down by the white-knuckled clutches of her terrified children’s little hands. So again my mom composed herself.

  “Papi will be out in a minute,” she smiled at us while wiping the tears. “He forgot to sign some papers.”

  Two hours later everyone was lining to board the flight for Miami. But Papi had not emerged from those doors. The agonized look returned to mother’s face. It was time for a decision. Cuba’s prisons were filled to suffocation at the time. Firing squads were working triple shifts. But her husband had made himself very clear.

  “Let’s go!” she stood and blurted. “Come on, kids. Time to go on our trip! Papi will meet us later . . .” she gasped and her shoulders started heaving again. Her children’s white-knuckled clutches returned to her hands, and we joined that heartsick procession to the big plane, a Lockheed Constellation.

  Seeing the big plane, climbing aboard, and hearing the engines crank up excited me, and for a few minutes I forgot about my dad.

  “Volveremos! ” yelled a man a few seats in front of us. Others picked up the cry. Doug MacArthur’s famous “I shall return” had been picked up by Cubans, but in the plural. South Florida was alive with exile paramilitary groups, and no one expected that during the height of the Cold War the United States would acquiesce in a Soviet client state ninety miles from its border. The man who started the chant fully expected to be back soon, carbine in hand.

  But it was mostly women and children w
ho filled that huge plane, and soon their gasps, sniffles, and sobs were competing with the shouts and the engine noise.

  We landed in Miami and somehow found our way to a cousin’s little apartment. These relatives had left a few months earlier. From their crowded little kitchen Mom quickly dialed the operator for a call to our grandmother, still in Cuba. The connection went through and she immediately asked about my father. There was a light pause. She frowned, and then she dropped the receiver and fell to the floor.

  Her frightened children got to her first. “Qué pasa!” Patricia wailed. Our mother was not moving. While one aunt took her in her arms, another picked up the phone, raised it to hear, and somehow made herself heard over the din in that kitchen. Aunt Nena was nodding with the phone pressed to her ear. “Ayy no!” she finally shrieked.

  My mother had fainted. Aunt Nena came close when she heard the same thing over the phone. Our father was a prisoner at El G-2 in Havana. This was the headquarters for the military police. Prisoners went to El G-2 for “questioning.” From there most went to the La Cabana prison-fortress for “revolutionary justice.” But many did not survive the “questioning.” The Cuba Archive Project has documented hundreds of deaths at G-2 stations. This was a process that the Left is willing to call by its proper name—“death squads”—anywhere else in Latin America but Cuba.

  In a few moments, my mother regained consciousness, but I cannot say she revived. Penniless and friendless in a strange new country, with three children to somehow feed, clothe, school, and raise, Esther Maria Fontova y Pelaez believed herself to be a widow.

  A few months later, we were in New Orleans, where we also had relatives, with a little more room in their apartment (only three Cuban refugee families were holed up inside). From this little kitchen my mother answered the phone one morning. Her shriek brought Patricia, Ricky, and me rushing into the kitchen. But this was a shriek of joy. It was Papi on the line—and he was calling from Miami! He had gotten out.

  Mom’s shriek that morning still rings in our ears. Her scream the following day as Dad emerged from the plane’s door at New Orleans’ international airport was equally loud. The images of Mom racing across the tarmac, Papi breaking into a run as he hit the ground, and our parents embracing upon contact will never vanish, or even dim.

  Today my father hunts and fishes with his children and grand-children every weekend. Our story had a happy ending. But thousands upon thousands of Cuban families were not as fortunate. One of them was my cousin Pedro’s.

  That same year, 1961, Pedro was a frail, mild-mannered youth who taught catechism classes at his church in the La Vibora section of Havana. He always came home for lunch and for dinner. One night he didn’t show up, and his mother became worried. After several phone calls she became frantic. People were disappearing all over Cuba in those days. She called the local priest, and he promptly joined the search. Father Velazquez was a longtime friend of Pedro, who taught religion classes in his very parish, and quickly suspected something serious. This wasn’t like Pedro.

  The priest called the local first-aid station and tensed when told that, yes, in fact, the body of a slim, tall youth fitting Pedro’s description had been brought in. Father Velazquez hurried down to the station and had his worst fears confirmed. He quickly called my aunt with the news.

  The anguished screams from my grandmother when she answered that phone and the accompanying chorus from my mother and sisters still echo in my head. My aunt was silent, however; she seemed in a daze after hearing the voice on the phone informing her that her son’s—my cousin Pedro’s—corpse was at the station.

  Aunt Maria was a widow and her brother went instead. “He died of a heart attack,” he was told by the milicianos, the secret police bullies trained by the subject of this book. My uncle seethed but somehow controlled himself. His nephew’s body was bruised and banged up horribly. Technically, the milicianos were probably right. His heart did give out. This is normal under the oft-used interrogation techniques of Cuba’s police and militia. Pedro, a fervent Catholic activist, often spoke against the regime during his religion classes, and word of his counter-revolutionary commentary had quickly gotten out. The regime responded in the customary manner.

  Until her death in 1993 in New York, my aunt never recovered. Once at a demonstration in New York this saintly woman, a Catholic social worker in Cuba, was denounced as a “gusana! ” (worm) and “fascist!” by jeering student demonstrators, parroting the epithets of a totalitarian regime.

  If Cuban Americans strike you as too passionate, over the top, even a little crazy, there is a reason. Practically every day, we turn on our televisions or go out to the street only to see the image of the very man who trained the secret police to murder our relatives—thousands of men, women, and boys. This man committed many of these murders with his own hands. And yet we see him celebrated everywhere as the quintessence of humanity, progress, and compassion.

  That man, that murderer, is Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Cuba’S GreateSt Generation: the thousands of freedom-fighters who fought alone against a Soviet-lavished enemy and died forgotten in Cuba’s hills or defiantly in front of firing squads. To the others among their band of brothers who suffered the longest terms of political incarceration of the twentieth century. Few heroes remain as unsung by history as these.

  Cuba’s Greatest Generation also includes the parents who sacrificed all to see their children grow up free. These parents, who include mine, weren’t fleeing their homeland; they fled a disease ravaging it, desperate for their children to avoid the deadly infection.

  Those superlong “I’d also like to thank . . .” at the Oscars usually annoy. But believe me, there was nothing annoying about the many people who helped me with this project. During every visit and every phone call at whatever hour I found them a fount of fascinating information and relentless good cheer. Considering what some of them had been through I still marvel.

  Mr. Roberto Martin-Perez, for instance, qualifies along with his Cuban-American compatriots, Angel Del Fana and the late Eusebio Peñalver, as the longest-jailed political prisoners of the twentieth century. For thirty years Mr. Martin-Perez was holed up and tortured in various work camps and dungeons of Castro and Che’s extensive Cuban Gulag. Stalin let Alexander Solzhenitzyn off with less than a third the sentence Fidel and Che slapped on Mr. Martin-Perez, Del Fana, and Peñalver. But have you ever heard of them in the mainstream media? I aim to rectify such injustices with this book.

  Roberto and his jailed band of brothers could have escaped much of their suffering by simply wearing the uniform of common criminals or signing the confession their communist captors constantly thrust in their faces. The demand to confess to criminality only steeled these men’s resolution. They knew full well who were the genuine criminals and who needed to confess: their jailers, from the guards right up to the men at the top—Fidel and Che.

  You’d never guess his background from first talking to Mr. Martin-Perez. He smiles constantly. He laughs often and loudly. His lovely wife, Miami radio legend Ninoska Perez-Castellon, was also on hand to inform, direct, and amuse me with my every inquiry. Her radio colleague, Enrique Encinosa, has written as exhaustively and authoritatively as anyone regarding the Cuban people’s armed resistance to communism. Enrique’s info and insights, both those contained in his books and those expounded over lunch and dinner, contributed much to this book.

  In 1964, seventeen-year-old Emilio Izquierdo was rounded up at Russian machine-gunpoint and thrown in a forced labor camp with thousands of other youths. “Active in Catholic organizations,” read the charge against him. The prison camp system where Emilio suffered for years had been initiated in 1961 by the man honored as “Chesucristo” in posters and museum displays. Emilio was tremendously helpful with this project.

  From afar I’d always revered Mr. Mario Riveron, Mr. Felix Rodriguez, and their band of brothers in the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. Larger than
life heroes, these men put their lives on the line in the anti-Castro/Che fight from day one. Well over half of their brothers in the anti-communist resistance died in front of firing squads, often after torture. Señores Riveron and Rodriguez, along with hundreds of others, knew the odds. They volunteered anyway and stuck with the fight until the last day the United States was willing to wage it.

  Later Mr. Riveron and Mr. Rodriguez had key roles in tracking down and capturing Che Guevara in Bolivia. Their Bay of Pigs brothers-in-arms, Nilo Messer, Jose Castaño, Gus Ponzoa, and Esteban Escheverria, also contributed their first-person accounts to this book. What a thrill to hear the details of these men’s freedom fight firsthand. What a privilege to be allowed to record it. What an honor to now regard these men as friends.

  Misters Carlos Lazo, Serafin Suarez, and Enrique Enrizo were all career officers in Cuba’s Constitutional Armed Forces and all got in some licks at Che Guevara’s guerrilla band. Their side of the Cuban rebellion story is rarely—if ever—heard. I’m grateful that they took the time to recount it here.

  Mrs. Maria Werlau and Dr. Armando Lago labor daily and doggedly attempting to document every death caused by the Castro /Che regime. They require reliable sources and investigate them thoroughly. Their task would make Sisyphus cower, yet they persist. Their selfless and lonely project, titled The Cuba Archive, has been lauded by everyone from the Miami Herald to the Wall Street Journal. Many of their findings are featured in this book. If that wasn’t enough, both Mrs. Werlau and Dr. Lago were always available to this author with additional details or to direct him to a primary source. Many, many thanks to these new friends.

  Pedro Corzo of the Instituto de La Memoria Historica Cubana complements much of Mrs. Werlau and Dr. Lago’s work by producing excellent documentaries. These put a face to many of these faceless murders. Mr. Corzo’s films include interviews with the relatives of the murdered and with now-disenchanted associates of the murderers. His documentaries, Guevara: Anatomia de un Mito and Tributo a Mi Papa were particularly informative and moving. Manifold thanks to Mr. Pedro Corzo.