Exposing the Real Che Guevara Read online

  Mrs. Barbara Rangel-Rojas’s childhood memories of her grandfather’s televised murder could not have been easy to dredge up. I’m thankful she chose to include them in this book. The same applies to Guillermo Robaina’s recounting of his heroic brother Aldo’s death and Lazaro Pineiro’s recounting of his father’s murder and desecration by the Castroites. Mrs. Janet Ray Weininger, besides detailing her father’s martyrdom during the Bay of Pigs, went well above and beyond the call of duty in helping me in every way.

  Cuban scholar/researcher/public servant Salvador Diaz-Verson had Fidel and Che’s number from day one. How he kept his cool while reading the New York Times, listening to U.S. State Department “experts,” or watching Ed Murrow on CBS singing these covert communists’ praises, we can only guess. Mr. Diaz-Verson’s daughter, Sylvia, made all of her famous father’s papers and correspondence available for this book. She also recounted little-known but fascinating details of his life. I extend heartfelt thanks to Sylvia—for the invaluable info as well as for her custom made Che T-shirts and tasty pastelitos.

  Bay of Pigs vet Mr. Miguel Uria, who edits the superb Spanish-language Webzine Guaracabuya, enlisted as my part-time scout for this book, pointing me toward often obscure but invariably excellent primary sources. Miguel’s journalistic colleague, Hugo Byrne, also came through with many spicy details.

  Employing his computer wizardry, investigative zeal, and international network of Cuba contacts, Jose “El Tiburon” Cadenas of the authoritative Webzine La Nueva Cuba kept me well-informed on Cuba/Che news throughout the writing of this book.

  Mr. Marcos Bravo had early links to Castro’s July 26th Movement. As such he was in a great position to uncover much about Che Guevara’s strange psychology and his often stormy relationship with his revolutionary peers. Bravo’s work Ernesto Guevara: Un Sepulcro Blanqueado was enormously informative and our conversations filled in all the gaps. Many thanks, Señor Bravo.

  Charlie Bravo (no relation to Marcos), Miguel Forcelledo, and Carmen Cartaya were all “roqueros” in their day, Cuban youth who “dug” rock music in the sixties. Today when they see a Che T-shirt on a young headbanger or on Carlos Santana and Eric Burdon, they’re well past the point of rage or even annoyance. They can only laugh at the imbecility. In this book they explain why. A hearty high-five to these still rocking amigos.

  Cuban-American bloggers Valentin “El Barbaro” Prieto of Babalu Blog and Henry “El Conductor” Gomez of Cuban-American Pundits kept me abreast of late-breaking news in Cuba and of scoops in Miami, the capital of the Cuban exile. From Prince Charles to Johnny Depp, no Che T-shirt-wearing celebrity escaped these attentive bloggers’ notice and they knew just who to alert. Val and Henry’s spirit always inspires and their blogs always inform and entertain.

  So again, un fuerte abrazo, to all the amigos-collaborators mentioned above.

  Now for the dedication. Husband authors dedicating their books to their “loving and supportive wives” has become a sappy cliche—but please hear me out.

  Yes, this book is dedicated to my wife, Shirley. And for reasons well known to all our family and friends. Recently her husband was crippled and wheelchair-bound for months after a life-threatening accident, and his future looked uncertain. On top of managing a household of five and working full-time, this forced her to moonlight as nurse and physical therapist, to say nothing of the emotional stress.

  Then just as her husband was (literally) getting back on his feet and the doctor’s prognosis brightened—just as she kicked back, popped a cork, and was midway through a brief sigh of relief, Hurricane Katrina drew a bead on her hometown.

  Her sigh was cut short as she gulped once from her wineglass and scrambled to organize her families’ frantic evacuation to a neighboring state.

  She returned to find her home of twenty years utterly demolished, many of her lifelong possessions gone forever, and, yet again, a very uncertain future looming. Time for another sigh, but not of relief this time.

  During these minor distractions, her two sons somehow started college and her daughter graduated from same and was married. There was also the small matter, as I said, of holding down a full-time profession, as in: managing an entire department at a major bank. Banks, by the way, cannot afford the luxury of closing during crises, even (especially!) after the most destructive hurricane in American history.

  How easy it might have been to throw up her hands during this madhouse of heartbreak, turmoil, and travail. How tempting the Thelma and Louise solution must have looked. What an audience her tear-drenched breakdown—her victimization by that villain, fate!—might have drawn for Oprah!

  Instead, by merely allowing Calgon to “take her away” from time to time, and occasionally patronizing the product of some (moderately priced) vintners, she kept the whole thing going. And without any of the overt physical symptoms that warrant a camera close-up and teary hug by Ms. Winfrey.

  When we met during spring break in 1977, I sensed I was lucky—but I had no idea just how lucky. We met when I tottered over on my platform shoes—my bell bottoms billowing and my polyester collars flapping—and beckoned her to hit the disco floor during the song “I Will Survive.”

  Little did I dream, as we gyrated under that flashing ball, how aptly and enduringly the song’s title would define that hot disco babe’s spirit. This book would have been a sheer impossibility without her faith, companionship, gumption, undying support, and multifarious talents, which include still turning heads while strutting and spinning to Gloria Gaynor’s classic disco anthem—especially at a raucous French Quarter party celebrating a recent book.

  So there, I think a little sappiness is called for.

  INTRODUCTION

  The man in The Motorcycle Diaries, who loved lepers as Jesus did, who forded a river at great personal risk to show his compassion for them, is the man who declared that “a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” As we shall see, he set a spirited example of this principle. This is the man who boasted that he executed from “revolutionary conviction” rather than from any “archaic bourgeois details” like judicial evidence, and who urged “atomic extermination” as the final solution for those American “hyenas” (and came hearth-thumpingly close with nuclear missiles in October 1962).

  “If the nuclear missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City,” Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962. “We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims. . . . We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm.” This is the same man Time felt was worthy to be placed next to Mother Teresa.

  He cofounded a regime that jailed or ran off enough of its citizens to merit comparison to the regimes of Hitler or Stalin. He declared that “individualism must disappear!” In 1959, with the help of KGB agents, Che helped found, train, and indoctrinate Cuba’s secret police.

  Che, whose image writhes in an undisclosed location on U.N. Global Humanitarian Award Winner Angelina Jolie’s epidermis in the form of a tattoo, provoked one of the biggest refugee crises in the history of this hemisphere with his firing squads and prisons. On top of the two million who made it to freedom with only the clothes on their backs, an estimated eighty thousand Cubans have died of thirst, exposure, or drowning, or were ripped apart by sharks. They died attempting to flee Che Guevara and his legacy.

  Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is not exactly rare on the topic of Che Guevara. Do rock stars Carlos Santana and Eric Burdon know they are plugging a regime that in the mid to late sixties rounded up roqueros and longhairs en masse and herded them into prison camps for forced labor under a scorching sun? Many young prisoners were severely punished for “counter-revolutionary crimes” that often involved nothing worse than listening to the Animals. When Madonna camps it up in her Che outfit, does she realize she’s plugging a regime that criminalized gay sex and punished anything smacking of gay mannerisms? In the mid-sixt
ies the crime of effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked from Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped into prison camps. In an echo of the Auschwitz logo, between the machine gunners posted on the watchtowers, bold letters above the gate read, “Work Will Make Men Out of You.”

  Does Mike Tyson—who has been consistently and horribly stomped in fight after fight ever since his visit to Cuba—know that his record of defeat perfectly mimics the combat record of his tattoo idol? Do the A-list hipsters and Beautiful People at the Sundance Film Festival—do Tipper and Al Gore, do Sharon, and Meryl, and Paris—know that they stood in rapturous ovation not just for a movie, but for a movie that glorified a man who jailed or exiled most of Cuba’s best writers, poets, and independent filmmakers? Who transformed Cuban cinema into a propaganda machine?

  Would Robert Redford—who was required to screen the film for Che’s widow, Aleida (who heads Cuba’s Che Guevara Studies Center), and Fidel Castro for their approval before release—think it appropriate for Robert Ackerman, who made The Reagans, to have to have gone to Nancy Reagan to get her approval? We can only imagine the shrieks of outrage from the Sundance crowd—about “censorship!” and “selling out!” Might Redford have employed a b of the lust for investigative reporting he portrayed so well in All The President’s Men to tell the truth about Che? (Whatever happened to “talking truth to power”?)

  Fortunately for Robert Redford, who lived in New York in October 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had the good sense to yank those missile launchers from the eager reach of the subsequently famous “Motorcycle Diarist,” as well as from the hands of the Stalinist dictator who so kindly gave Redford final benediction on his movie. Also fortunately for Redford and all those unbearably hip Sundance attendees, none were born in Cuba and thus forced to live with their hero’s totalitarian handiwork. Is Christopher Hitchens aware that one week after his selfless Che Guevara entered Havana, he stole what was probably the most luxurious house in Cuba and moved in after the rightful owner fled with his family to escape a firing squad?

  Che’s mansion had a yacht harbor, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon, and five television sets. One TV had been specially designed in the United States, had a screen ten feet wide, and was operated by remote control—exotic technology in January 1959. “The habitation was a palace right out of A Thousand and One Nights,” according to a Cuban who saw it. This was the same man who Philip Bennett, then a scribe at the Boston Globe, now the managing editor of the Washington Post, assures us “was aided by a complete freedom from material aspirations.”

  A traveling museum show titled “Che; Revolutionary and Icon” recently displayed in Manhattan’s International Center of Photography and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, plays up Che as a symbol of rebellion and anti-imperialism. “Che is politics’ answer to James Dean,” wrote the Washington Post’s David Segal about the exhibition, “a rebel with a very specific cause.” In fact, when addressing Cuba’s youth in 1962, Che denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” And as we’ll learn from his former comrades in the following pages, this world-famed anti-imperialist applauded the Soviet slaughter of young, idealistic Hungarian rebels in 1956. All through the appalling massacre, Che dutifully parroted the Soviet script that the workers, peasants, and college kids battling Russian tanks in Budapest with small arms and Molotov cocktails were all “fascists.” A few years later, when Cuba’s countryside erupted in a similar anticommunist (really, anti-Soviet imperialism) rebellion, Che got his chance to do more than cheer the slaughter of humble rebels from the sidelines. But these he denounced as “bandits.” We’ll hear accounts from some of the very few who survived that communist massacre.

  And what about Che the military strategist? One day before his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara—for the first time in his life—finally faced something properly described as combat. He ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to their last breath and last bullet. A few hours later, with his men doing just that, a slightly wounded Che snuck away from the firefight and surrendered with a full clip in his pistol while whimpering to his captors: “Don’t shoot! I’m Che, I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

  Yet on top of Hitchens’s “conclusive” assertion that Che was “no hypocrite” comes Benicio Del Toro’s remark that “Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked the talk. There’s just something cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him.”1

  Del Toro’s respect will surely come across clearly in his screen portrayal of his idol. The famously cagey actor based these comments (and his performance) on a screenplay based on Che’s diaries, which were edited and published in Cuba, which is to say, by the propaganda ministry of the longest-reigning totalitarian dictator of modern times. Benicio Del Toro’s director, Steven Soderbergh—hailed as immensely sharp and shrewd for depicting the treachery and guile of industrialists in Erin Brockovich, which he directed, along with the unmitigated evil of Joe McCarthy in Good Night and Good Luck, which he coproduced—based his Guevara movie mostly on books edited by Fidel Castro.

  Calling it “the theater of the absurd” somehow fails to describe the Che phenomenon.

  The New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson wrote an 814-page biography of Che titled Che: A Revolutionary Life. Anderson asserts that despite his exhaustive research, “I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent.”2 Yet hundreds of eyewitnesses to Che’s extrajudicial murders are only a cab ride away for Anderson in New York City. Guevara himself boasted that he “manufactured evidence” and stated flat out, “I don’t need proof to execute a man—I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”3 By which he meant the murdered man might have presented an obstacle to his Stalinization of Cuba. As Stalin himself put it: “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Interestingly, Che Guevara cheekily signed some of his early correspondence, “Stalin II.”

  “Certainly we execute,” boasted Che, while addressing the U.N. General Assembly in December 1964. “And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary.” According to The Black Book of Communism—not the work of embittered exiles in Miami, but the labor of French scholars, and published by Harvard University Press—the revolution’s firing-squad executions had reached fourteen thousand by the beginning of the 1970s. Given Cuba’s population at the time, the slaughter was the equivalent of over three million executions in the United States.

  Despite this extrajudicial bloodbath, while visiting Havana in 1984, Jesse Jackson was so smitten by both his host and the lingering memory of his host’s late sidekick that he couldn’t contain himself. “Long Live Fidel!” bellowed Jackson to a captive crowd at the University of Havana. “Long live our Cry of Freedom!—LONG LIVE CHE!”4

  This is the same Jesse Jackson who wrote a 224-page book against the death penalty. Even better, Che, far from reciprocating Jackson’s fond sentiments, regarded blacks as “indolent and fanciful, spending their money on frivolity and drink.” Che wrote this passage in his now-famous Motorcycle Diaries—one of the touches that Robert Redford and Walter Salles somehow left out. Black rapper Jay-Z might keep it in mind before donning his super-snazzy Che shirt for his next MTV Unplugged session where he raps: “I’m like Che Guevara with a bling on!”5 Mike Tyson might want to laser off his tattoo, lest he be seen as “indolent and frivolous.”

  What about Che the intellectual? “For Ernesto Guevara everything began with literature,” writes Jon Lee Anderson. Yet Che’s first official act after entering Havana (between executions) was a massive book burning. On Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s direct orders, more than three thousand books were stolen from a private library and set ablaze on a busy Havana street. Around the same time, Che signed death warrants for authors and had them hunted through the streets like rabid animals by his secret police. We’ll hear the whole story straight from these authors’ families.


  At the same time Sartre was hailing Che’s towering intellect in summer 1960, Time magazine put him on its cover for the first time. Their feature story attributed “vast competence and high intelligence” to Guevara, who had recently been promoted to Cuba’s economic minister after showing a certain acumen for numbers as Cuba’s chief executioner.

  Within a year of that appointment, a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria and Japan, a huge influx of immigrants, and the third-highest protein consumption in the hemisphere, was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society.

  Che responded to the unexpected economic crisis in classic manner. He opened a forced-labor camp at Guanahacabibes—Cuba’s version of Siberia, but featuring broiling heat rather than cold—and filled it to suffocation by herding in Cuba’s recalcitrant laborers at bayonet and machine-gunpoint.

  The economic crisis fostered by Che forced the Soviets to pump the equivalent of eight Marshall Plans into Cuba. The original $9-billion Marshall Plan, applied by the United States to a war-ravaged continent of 300 million, promptly lifted its economy. All this wealth invested by the Soviets in a nation of 6.4 million—whose citizens formerly earned more than the people of Taiwan, Japan, and Spain—resulted in a standard of living that repels impoverished Haitians more than forty years later.

  Che’s incompetence defies not just the laws of economics, but seemingly the very laws of physics.

  Concerning Che’s military exploits, the liberal media lay it on even thicker and heavier. “One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting,” blared a New York Times headline on January 4, 1959, about the final “battle” in the anti-Batista rebellion in the Cuban city of Santa Clara. “Commander Che Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men,” continued this article on the front page of the world’s most respected newspaper of the time. In fact, as you’ll see in the coming pages, the rebel victory at Santa Clara, where Che supposedly earned his eternal fame—like all others in which he “fought”—was accomplished by bribing Batista commanders. Total casualties on both sides did not exceed five. Che spent the three days of the Bay of Pigs invasion three hundred miles from the battle site braced for what he was certain was the real invasion. He’d been lured away by a rowboat full of fireworks, mirrors, and a tape recording of battle, a literal smoke-and-mirrors show concocted by the CIA for that very purpose.