Exposing the Real Che Guevara Read online

  Yet Che managed to earn the Cuban version of a Purple Heart in his battle against the unmanned and unarmed rowboat. A bullet had pierced Che’s chin and exited above his temple, just missing his brain. The bullet came from Che’s own pistol. “Che’s military leadership was permeated by an indomitable will that permitted extraordinary feats,” writes New York Times contributor and Che biographer Jorge Castañeda.6

  “Extraordinary” is one way of putting it. Castañeda, also a Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton visiting professor, adds that “Che’s contribution to the [Bay of Pigs] victory was crucial.”

  Four years later, in the Congo while planning a military campaign against crack mercenaries commanded by a professional soldier who had helped defeat Rommel in North Africa, Che confidently allied himself with “soldiers” who used chicken feathers for helmets and stood in the open waving at attacking aircraft because a muganga (witch doctor) had assured them that the magic water he sprinkled over them would make .50-caliber bullets bounce harmlessly off their bodies. Within six months, Che had fled Africa, narrowly saving his life and leaving behind a military disaster.

  Two years later, during his Bolivian guerrilla campaign, Che made textbook mistakes for a guerrilla leader. He split his forces and allowed both units to become hopelessly lost. They bumbled around, half-starved, half-clothed, and half-shod, without any contact with each other for six months before being wiped out. Che’s forces didn’t even have World War II vintage walkie-talkies with which to communicate and were apparently incapable of reading compasses. They spent much of the time walking in circles, often within a mile of each other.

  “Che waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill,” reads the Time encomium honoring this “Hero and Icon of the Century.” The authoritative piece was written by Ariel Dorfman, who heads the Department of Latin American Studies at Duke University and previously taught at the Sorbonne. Professor Dorfman might have consulted Che Guevara’s former rebel comrade, Huber Matos, now living in Miami, who recalls that while attempting to coordinate an attack on Batista’s forces with him in 1958, Che admitted knowing “absolutely nothing” about military strategy. Amongst themselves communists are often quite candid. They coined the term “useful idiot,” after all. But even the famously dour Nikolai Lenin might have erupted in horselaughs if he could have seen the unbridled success of Che propaganda.

  Some Che biographers uncritically absorb the lies they are told by authoritative people and pass them on. Of the two most voluminous and best-selling biographies of Che, one was written by a contributor to Newsweek and the New York Times who is also a former Mexican Communist Party member and fondly recalls plastering Che’s poster in his Princeton dorm room. The other, written by a columnist for The New Yorker, was written mostly in Cuba with Castro’s full cooperation and with Aleida Guevara—a high-ranking Cuban Communist Party member—as a primary source.

  Che Guevara’s diaries were published by the propaganda bureau of a totalitarian regime, with the foreword written by Fidel Castro himself. Yet all Che “scholars” and the mainstream media take them at face value. Indeed, with regard to the unvarnished secrets of Che Guevara’s history, his scholarly biographers treasure these Havana editions as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. Might there be some embellishments or omissions in these Che “diaries”—in these documents that feature so prominently in the liberal media’s versions of Che’s brilliance and heroism? Not according to Che “scholars.” But as we’ll see in the coming chapters, Che’s early revolutionary colleagues, now in exile, along with the men actually on the scene of Che Guevara’s capture, have a very different story to tell.

  The book you’re holding relies on testimony from people who are now free to tell the truth without fear of Castro’s torture chambers and firing squads. Normally, eyewitnesses to a Hero and Icon of the Century would have to bat away the journalists, biographers, and screenwriters. Instead, for forty years, the mainstream press, scholars, and scriptwriters have shunned these invaluable sources. It appears that the journalists and scholars, no less than the screenwriters, do not want to entertain facts that conflict with the narrative they have jointly constructed with one of the century’s top manipulators of the intelligentsia, Fidel Castro.

  Since Castro’s famous interview with Herbert Matthews of the New York Times in 1957, through all the fawning interviews with Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, and Andrea Mitchell, Castro always had the international media eating out of his hand like trained pigeons. The process cranked up several notches when CNN opened its Havana bureau in 1997. This was shortly after Ted Turner, during a packed speaking gig at Harvard Law School, bubbled to the crowd, “Castro is one hell of a guy! You people would like him!” (Another gushing accolade for Cuba’s Maximum Leader came from the gentleman known, at the time, as “Mr. Jane Fonda.” His praise was evoked by a recent hunting trip to Cuba. During Tom Hayden’s expedition with Castro, military helicopters drove thousands of ducks in front of their shotguns, allowing them to slaughter hundreds of hapless birds. Where was PETA on that one?) At any rate, Che lives on in part because he had Fidel Castro as a press agent.

  From Castro’s fervid devotion to democracy and well wishes for the United States in 1957, to his regime’s glorious achievements in health care and education, to Elian’s father’s heartfelt yearning for the return of his son, Castro’s every whopper has been respectfully transcribed and broadcast for half a century now—and by the same journalistic Torquemadas who wouldn’t allow an American president to finish a sentence without erupting in cynical snorts and rude interrogations.

  Much credit for the remarkable afterlife of Che Guevara goes, of course, to The Picture. To his credit, Guevara understood his role. He performed magnificently at his photo shoot in March 1960 for Alberto Korda. His “faraway eyes” and high cheekbones were perfectly highlighted. Today that’s often all it takes for media stardom. Few Americans know that the famous icon photo was actually spiked by the Castro regime when it was first scheduled to run in Cuba’s official paper, Revolución. Che’s image could have overshadowed the Maximum Leader’s at the time. In its place they ran a photo of Fidel sitting and chatting with two of his famous fans, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

  Castro, better than even his chums Ted Turner and Robert Redford, always understood the power of imagery. Since his high-school days, Castro was a keen student of Nazi pageantry. The official colors of Castro’s July 26 Movement’s flag and armbands are black and red with a splash of white, identical to the Nazi flag and armband. Coincidence? Perhaps.

  Seven years after Korda’s photo shoot, when Che was safely “sleeping with the fishes” and could pose no threat to the Maximum Leader, Castro dusted off The Picture and started plastering it all over Cuba. He called the international media with a sharp whistle and said, fetch. The result is the most reproduced and idolized print of the century.

  As his former comrades could have told you, “Fidel Castro only praises the dead.”

  Castro knows the continuing power of Che, and how to appropriate it for himself. According to UCLA professor David Kunzle, “There is no figure in 20th Century history that has produced such a body of fascinating, varied and compelling imagery as Che Guevara.”7

  Here, at long last, we encounter a truth about Che—and, as we shall learn, a truth about Fidel. Several men who were Castro’s political prisoners in 1967 have revealed to me that their prison guards finally displayed that now-famous Che poster the week before Guevara was captured and killed. Fidel wasn’t exactly surprised by the news of Che’s death, having created the conditions for his death in Bolivia. He then oversaw and personally sold the media blitz for a martyred friend.

  And so today The Picture adorns T-shirts, posters, watches, skis, lava lamps, skateboards, surfboards, baseball caps, beer-huggers, lighters, Rage Against the Machine CDs, and vodka bottles. Last year supermodel Gisele Bundchen took to the catwalk in skimpy underwear stamped with Che’s face. Burlington put
out a line of infant wear bearing Che’s face. Taco Bell dressed up its Chihuahua spokesdog like Che for its “Taco Revolution” ad campaign. “We wanted a heroic leader to make it a massive taco revolution!” says Taco Bell’s advertising director, Chuck Bennett. (This tribute, perhaps, is comic enough to be appropriate—as long as consumers can keep from thinking about how Che treated real dogs.) The TV shows South Park and The Simpsons have lampooned Che T-shirt wearers. Omar Sharif and Antonio Banderas have played Che in movies. Under the pseudonym John Blackthorn, Gary Hart wrote a novel titled I, Che Guevara. A video game, Guerrilla War, plays on Che’s (utterly bogus) military exploits.

  Ignorance, of course, accounts for much Che idolatry. But so do mendacity and wishful thinking, all of it boosted—covertly and overtly—by reflexive anti-Americanism. This book will expose you to many eyewitness accounts of Che Guevara’s cruelty, cowardice, and imbecility. The deeper investigation will be why he continues to receive so much adoration from media leftists and celebrities in the twenty-first century.

  This book will succeed in some degree, however, if it merely prompts Angelina Jolie to question if her tattoos, as her website claims, are really “a reflection of her personality.” If this is so, then Brad Pitt had better start watching his back.

  1

  New York Fetes the Godfather of Terrorism

  On the evening of December 11, 1964, Che was decked out in a long trench coat, his trademark beret with the red star cocked at a jaunty angle as he strode toward the United Nations to address the General Assembly. Security was tight for the event and cops swarmed on the scene. Cuban exiles infested nearby New Jersey and many were on hand holding up placards, waving fists, and yelling “Assassin!” as Guevara prepared to make his grand entrance.

  As Che neared the U.N. entrance, a New York cop named Robert Connolly noticed a grim-faced woman racing down Forty-third Street. He alerted his colleague Michael Marino. The two cops tensed while watching the woman pick up speed as she neared the makeshift barrier erected specifically to protect Che at the U.N. perimeter. A large knife flashed in the woman’s hand.

  “Watch her!” bellowed Connolly. “She’s got a knife!” Connolly and Marino started sprinting toward her.

  “Arriba!” the woman yelled, closing on Che. Only then did Che’s bodyguards begin to react. She shrieked again, her little legs pumping furiously.

  The cops were closing on her when she turned, yelled “Arriba!” a final time, and waved the huge knife. They easily dodged her knife and gang-tackled her. After a few seconds of rolling and scuffling, the inflamed woman, Gladys Perez, was subdued.

  “I meant the officers no harm,” Gladys panted while being led away. “The knife was meant for the assassin Guevara!”1

  Officers Connolly and Marino were soon on their way to St. Clare’s Hospital for treatment of multiple scratches and gouges inflicted by the struggle. Gladys was telling the truth. Her knife did not touch the cops. The poor officers tangled only with the buzz saw of her teeth and fingernails as she struggled to get at Che.

  Unscathed, Che Guevara entered the halls of the General Assembly and started his speech. “Executions?” He paused for effect at one point. “Certainly, we execute!” he declared to the claps and cheers of that august body. “And we will continue executing [emphasis his] as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the Revolution’s enemies!” The Spanish word for death is muerte, and Che rolled the Rs deliciously. The trilling of “mueRRRRTE!” resonated grandly throughout the hall.2

  Che was merely proclaiming, of course, what the scholars of The Black Book of Communism would reveal—that fourteen thousand Cubans would be executed without anything smacking of due process by the end of the decade. For perspective, consider that Slobodan Milosevic went on trial for allegedly ordering eight thousand executions. The charge against Milosevic—by the same United Nations that applauded Che—was “genocide.” Che let the General Assembly’s ovation that greeted his “mueRRRRRTE! ” subside and proceeded to other favored themes. “The government of the United States is not the champion of freedom,” he said, “but rather the perpetuator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population!” More claps, more cheers. Yankee Imperialism was “a carnivorous animal feeding on the helpless.” Another ovation.3

  The Toast of Manhattan

  Che was in New York for eight days but could barely accommodate all the Beautiful People jostling to meet him. On Face the Nation, Che was softballed by the New York Times’s Tad Szulc. “The road of liberation will go through bullets,”4 Che said, firing rhetorical bullets through the softballs—and paying no price in reputation for this extreme display of belligerence.

  Lisa Howard—Hollywood actress, Mutual Radio Network host, and ABC noontime news anchorette—hosted Che in her Manhattan penthouse. Howard had also invited Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, to fete Che. Howard, a self-appointed matchmaker between Cuba and the United States, achieved nothing but the encouragement of even more spirited denunciations of her country.

  Such was Che’s New York social swirl that Malcolm X had to settle for a written message, which he read in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. “Dear Brothers and Sisters of Harlem,” Malcolm read without disclosing the messenger, “I would have liked to have been with you and Brother Babu . . . Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel.”

  “This is from Che Guevara!”5 an enraptured Malcolm X finally yelled as the room exploded in applause.

  Columnist Laura Berquist conducted two reverential interviews with Che Guevara for Look magazine, one in November 1960, another in April 1963. Look’s covers and interviews featured mostly movie stars. So a Che interview must have struck Look’s editors as a simply mahh-velous idea. Berquist traveled to Havana for her interviews and in 1960 brought back the following scoop: “Che denies he’s a party-line Communist.” She then suggested the proper characterization for him as a “pragmatic revolutionary,” to which Che smilingly agreed. “When he smiles he has a certain charm,” Berquist reported. Overall she found him “fascinating . . . cool and brainy.”6

  By 1963, with Cuba officially declaring itself to be a Marxist-Leninist state, a fact it celebrated with Soviet missiles and banners of Lenin, Berquist prudently shucked the “pragmatic revolutionary” label. But she still found things to admire in Cuba—the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for instance. They make up a network of government spy groups set up on every city block to promptly report any “counter-revolutionary” backsliding by their neighbors to the police. Depending on the severity of the infraction, penalties range from a cut in the weekly food ration, to a stint in a prison camp, to being riddled with bullets by a firing squad. The system is novel even for communist regimes, formerly in place only in East Germany where the STASI, who helped set it up in Cuba, grandfathered it from the Nazi Gestapo. Berquist seemed charmed by them. Their role, she reported in Look, was “to see that children are vaccinated, and learn to read and write. And that the local butcher doles out meat fairly.”7

  The day after Che’s “mueRRRRRRTE! ” oration at the United Nations, Laura Berquist arranged a splendid and celebrity-studded evening for Cuba’s mass executioner as guest of honor at the town-house of her friend, Bobo Rockefeller. In attendance were several black activists, beat poets, and assorted literary types—in short, the very people most passionate in their support of civil rights for all people, and opposed to the death penalty. Bobo Rockefeller hosted the classic scene from Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers six years before Tom Wolfe wrote the hilarious essay and book.

  Somehow, amidst all the media and social schmoozing, Che also found time for serious business. The details of his secret plotting were disclosed several months later when the New York Police Department uncovered a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. But for the joint work of New Yo
rk’s finest, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Che’s terror plot would have brought the terror of September 11 to America decades earlier. The main plotters were members of the Black Liberation Army, who sneered at Malcolm X as an Uncle Tom. These American radicals were in cahoots with a Canadian separatist radical and Canadian TV anchorette named Michelle Duclos. According to the head plotter, Robert Steele Collier, who also belonged to the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the plot was hatched on his visit to Cuba in August 1964 when he met with Che Guevara. Collier, along with Duclos, met Che again on his New York U.N. visit and buttoned down the details for the explosions.

  Everything seemed set. Duclos had brought in the thirty sticks of dynamite and three detonators through the Canadian border and stashed them. After the blasts, she’d provide the Black Liberation Army plotters brief refuge in her Canadian apartment until they slipped into permanent refuge in Cuba.

  But the plotters had been infiltrated by Raymond Wood, a black NYPD cadet. The NYPD alerted the FBI, the Canadian Mounties, and the U.S. Border Patrol, which tailed Duclos as she crossed from Canada and watched her stash the dynamite. The FBI then staked out the locale and watched Collier drive up, look around furtively, and slink out of his car.