LSI I think
LSI I think
ISTj or Ti SLE
ENFJ
Beta! Similiar facial expressions to me and Betas I know. Not to mention he was a revolutionary
Ernesto “Che” Guevara: Ni-ENFj (Normalizing subtype) [ENFj-INTj or ENFj-ISTj]
Che Guevara.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eMLk1nQh5o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdKJ-jHU2UE
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opin.../#.WivFafkrLMU
“Fifty years on: Che Guevara was a violent, misguided revolutionary” by Ivo Vegter
Fifty years after his death, young hipsters and old socialists still lionise Che Guevara, who was killed on the orders of the Bolivian government on 9 October 1967. But the romantic image of the immortal revolutionary papers over nasty cracks in his legacy.
Yesterday, Kate Janse van Rensburg remembered “Che Guevara through the lens”. The article is styled as a coolly detached opinion about the significance of iconic images in documenting history; the image in this case, of course, being Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Guevara that adorns grafitti walls, protest posters and commercial merchandise to this day.
Janse van Rensburg says this image exists, for the most part, “...empty of Guevara’s revolutionary character and indifferent to the historical context in which it was born. Guevara was a communist and anti-imperialist, a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary.”
In that, she is entirely correct, except that she neglects to add an important adjective: Guevara was a violent communist revolutionary. He considered the capitalist class to be brutally oppressive of the poor people of the world, and believed that it could only be overthrown by armed revolt.
Like his modern followers, he entirely ignored the role governments played in the oppression and poverty he witnessed and described; that colonialism really was a government-led, militarily enforced system of cronyist mercantilism, and that its faults can better be blamed on these factors, than on the emergent system of private property, lawful contract, and free markets. On the contrary: the latter are highly correlated with prosperity.
When he became angry with the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, he ignored both the cause of the conflict – government seizure of private property – and the result: the overthrow of one government not by any company, but by another government.
The same is true for the Cuban revolution in which he would later participate: he never had the subtlety of mind to recognise that corruption and dictatorship were the enemy of prosperity and progress. Sadly, he did not live long enough to witness that communist dictatorship led to even worse outcomes for the Cuban people, and made the island much poorer than it was in the century leading up to the revolution.
Guevara believed in imposing strict discipline on the revolutionary movements he was involved with, and presided over summary executions of counter-revolutionaries. In this, he would mirror the experience of other socialist and communist countries: they invariably require brutal dictatorship and brutal silencing of dissent.
What struck me most about her article was the way in which a student of history noted the lack of historical context, and then promptly glossed over it herself. The piece leaves little doubt that she, too, views Guevara in a very favourable light. After all, while studying history at what she superfluously calls “the University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR)”, she is also a committed socialist, being “associated with the Movement for Socialism in Numsa and the Numsa Research and Policy Unit”. Her closing sentence says it all: “[The Korda photo of Guevara] remains alive with the potential for propelling us into action, for the good of humanity and the Earth.”
The problem with this view is that although Guevara might have been motivated by real injustice and genuine sympathy for the poor, and while he probably intended to act for the good of humanity, the effects of his interventions, and more broadly, his communist ideology, were not good for humanity. History ought to judge people not on their intentions, but on the outcomes of their actions. Did their ideologies produce peace and prosperity? If not, why should anyone lionise them?
Missing from Janse van Rensburg’s editorial is any suggestion that Che Guevara is historically a complex character and remains highly divisive, let alone the reasons for this. Those who idolise him often ignore his many faults, such as his early racism.
In 1952, he wrote in his famous diaries: “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meagre wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”
In his Congo Diary, which he wrote after his secret mission in 1965 to export the communist revolution there, he lamented the “human failure” of the resistance against the military dictator Mobuto Sese Seko. According to John Gerassi writing in the LA Times, “Che had described [Laurent] Kabila [who would overthrow Mobuto more than 30 years later] as a lazy, hard-drinking, womanising opportunist (albeit with great charisma) and his ragtag forces as superstitious, incapable of military discipline and too proud to listen to instructions.”
For all his support for the liberation struggles of black Africans against colonial powers, Guevara appears himself to have been a political opportunist, acting not out of a desire for justice for oppressed races, but exploiting their anger to spread communist revolution around the world.
Those who oppose Guevara perhaps make too much of his racism. In some ways, he merely reflected his time, when racist opinions were casually held and not widely condemned. (Ironically, that puts him in the same category as Cecil John Rhodes.)
They also wrongly associate him with the Cuban work camps where conscientious objectors and homosexuals were badly abused, but which were established after he had already left Cuba. That isn’t to say he wasn’t a homophobe. He certainly contributed to the culture of machismo that was prevalent throughout Latin America. However, in this, his views were also more likely just a product of his time, and it may not have occurred to him to question the moral basis of his prejudices.
Perhaps opponents of Che Guevara ought to moderate their attacks, and instead of attributing murderous zeal, blatant racism and implicit homophobia to him, should focus their criticism on the violence of his political methods and the dire consequences of the communism he promoted.
Socialist and communist states generally tend towards dictatorship and poverty, just as nationalism and mercantilism lead to corruption and oppression. By contrast, free-market capitalism has historically resulted in rising living standards, even for the poor.
By the same token, however, socialists like Kate Janse van Rensburg ought to be much more honest about the nature of the man and his ideology. He may be a romantic icon and a revolutionary martyr, but even if he thought he acted “for the good of humanity and the Earth”, that was not the consequence of the revolution he preached.
Unlike the communism that Guevara fought for, economic freedom has produced higher growth, higher income per capita, lower poverty rates, higher life expectancy, higher share of income earned by the poorest 10%, better political and civil rights, more gender equality and greater happiness, as evidenced by the charts starting on p.23 of the Economic Freedom of the World: 2017 Annual Report.
Korda’s photograph immortalised a violent and misguided communist revolutionary, and turned him into a romantic icon. He has indeed become like the celebrities whose posters adorn the walls of teenage bedrooms, free of historical context. However, one would expect a history student to take a more critical view of such a complex, divisive figure. Perhaps it is too much to expect a self-described socialist to learn from history.
from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg; pages 193-4:
You can tell a lot about a movement by its heroes, and here, too, the record reflects very poorly on the New Left. For all their prattle about “participatory democracy” it’s shocking how few democrats ranked as heroes to even the “peaceful” members of the movement. At Columbia, Berkeley, and campuses across America, the student activists plastered up posters of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Under Rudd’s leadership, the SDS formed quasi-official ties with Castro’s government. In Chicago and elsewhere, they chanted, “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!” Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims became a huge best seller.
Rather than call these regimes fascist—which I firmly believe they were—we’ll merely note the similarities between these Third World movements and regimes and the conventional fascist ones. Mao, Ho, Castro, and even the Panthers were all ethnocentric movements of “national liberation.” This is precisely how Mussolini and ****** depicted their causes. ****** promised to get Germany out from under the thumb of Versailles and “international finance capitalism.” Mussolini argued that Italy was a “proleterian nation” deserving, like Germany, its “moment in the sun.” Mao’s Cultural Revolution, his mixture of socialism and folk Chinese custom, fits perfectly in the fascist wheelhouse. What is Castro but a military dictator (note the constant uniform) who has burnished his leadership cult with socialist economics, nationalist rhetoric, and unending Nuremberg Rally populism?
That Che Guevara has become a chic branding tool is a disgusting indictment of both American consumer culture and the know-nothing liberalism that constitutes the filthy residue of the 1960s New Left. Ubiquitous Che shirts top the list of mass-marketed revolutionary swag available for sale at the nearest bobo chic retailer—including a popular line of children’s wear. Here’s the text for one ad promoting this stuff: “Featured in Time magazine’s holiday web shopping guide, ‘Viva la revolution!’ Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids’ sizes . . . Long live the rebel in all of us . . . there’s no cooler iconic image than Che!” [Jay Nordlinger, “Che Chic,” National Review, Dec. 31, 2004, p. 28.]
The Argentine henchman of the Cuban revolution was a murderer and goon. He penned classically fascist apothegms in his journals: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.” Guevara was a better writer, but the same muse helped to produce Mein Kampf. Guevara reveled in executing prisoners. While fomenting revolution in Guatemala, he wrote home to his mother, “It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in.” His motto was “If in doubt, kill him,” and he killed a great many. The Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova described Guevara as “a combination of Beria and Himmler.”* Guevara certainly killed more dissidents and lovers of democracy than Mussolini ever did, and Mussolini’s Italy was undoubtedly more “free” than any society Guevara the “freedom fighter” was seeking. Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?
*Paul Berman, “The Cult of Che,” Slate, Sept. 24, 2004, www.slate.com/id/2107100/ (accessed March 15, 2007); Nordlinger, “Che Chic,” p. 28.
pages 70-1:
This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists. Yes, they were also nationalists, which in the context of the 1930s was considered a rightist position, but this was at a time when the “internationalism” of the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing. Surely we’ve learned from the parade of horribles on offer in the twentieth century that nationalism isn’t inherently right-wing—unless we’re prepared to call Stalin, Castro, Arafat, Chavez, Guevara, Pol Pot, and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, right-wingers. Stalin himself ruled as a nationalist, invoking “Mother Russia” and dubbing World War II the “great patriotic war.” By 1943 he had even replaced the old Coomunist anthem (“The Internationale”) with one that was thoroughly Russian. Moreover, historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/c...lt_of_che.html
Paul Berman: The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.
These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.
I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?
As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almodóvar-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison.
Search Order
by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?
What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?
What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."
A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.
From Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots who Idolize Him by Humberto Fontova; pages xix-xxx (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 heart-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 ****** 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-sixties 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 bit 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.” . . .
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.”
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.” 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.”* 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!”
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!” 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.
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.
“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.”
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 [2006] 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.
*Luis Ortega, Yo Soy El Che!, p. 179.
Pages 1-9 (Ch. 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!”
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.
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.
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,” 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!” 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.”
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.”
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 York’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.
The agents sprang from the bushes and captured Collier just as he located the dynamite stash. Che’s plot failed. [Edward V. McCarthy, “Conspiradores en Nueva York Vinculador a Fidel Castro,” Diario de las Americas, February 18, 1965.]
Had everything gone according to plan, Che Guevara would have destroyed America’s greatest monuments, killed hundreds if not thousands of visitors from around the world, and allowed the killers to slip into Cuba for safe haven. If the facts of the attack had become publicly known, President Johnson might have been forced to repudiate the Kennedy administration’s noninterference agreement with the Soviet Union following the Cuban Missile Crisis. The result could easily have been catastrophic. Of course, the plot had no effect, either on American security or on Che’s reputation. It fell to twenty-four-year-old Gladys Perez to wear the label “terrorist.” While being booked for felonious assault, Gladys said she had arrived from Cuba two years earlier. In Cuba, as a political prisoner, she had been tortured and raped. Asked by a court interpreter if she regretted her actions, Gladys snapped, “No! If Guevara were here now I’d kill him!”
The New York Times reported on December 14, 1964, that a young assistant district attorney asked that the handcuffed woman be committed for mental observation.
Consider the facts: A Cuban woman is imprisoned, tortured, and raped by communist goons. She seeks revenge on the chief executioner of the regime that tortured her, raped her, jailed and executed thousands of her countrymen, and brought the world a hair away from nuclear holocaust. The woman is committed for mental observation.
Immediately after he boasted of those very executions for a worldwide forum in the heart of their city and after he insulted his hosts as “hyenas,” fit only for “extermination,” New York’s media and high society fetes Cuba’s chief executioner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Their honored guest had twice plotted to incinerate and entomb the very New York now feting him. He was plotting more terrorism for New York during the very feting. Time magazine, headquartered in New York, then hails him as a “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.
Who needs “mental observation”?
Should, perhaps, a city that continues to adore a man who wanted to destroy it be corporately committed? In 2004, the New York Public Library was selling Che watches in its gift shop—not unlike the British Museum selling collector’s items bearing the image of Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Perhaps the library management can be forgiven for not knowing about Che’s plans for them. Less forgivable was their benefit gala in 2005, “An Affair in Havana,” which celebrated “Literary Havana.” Was the intention to celebrate Che’s book bonfire? Or was it to celebrate the sixteen librarians who today sit in Castro’s dungeons with twenty-five-year prison sentences for attempting to disseminate such subversive literature as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights? Even liberal columnist Nat Hentoff tried to make the library see reason, by calling it plainly “stupid,” to no avail. And just last year Manhattan’s International Center of Photography packed in the crowds for its exhibition titled “Che! Revolution and Commerce.”
“Tomorrow New York is going to be here,” Rudy Giuliani assured his stricken fellow citizens on 9/11. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before . . . I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us!”
New York-based Time, which places Ernesto “Che” Guevara among “The Heroes and Icons of the Century,” also hailed Rudy Giuliani as its “Man of the Year” in 2001 for being 9/11’s “crisis manager” and “consoler in chief,” and for “teaching us how to respond to a terrorist crisis.”
“We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation,” Che Guevara declared in his “Message to the Tri-Continental Conference” published in Havana in April 1967. “We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. This is a total war to the death. We’ll attack him wherever we find him. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him!”
And who was this imperialist enemy? “The great enemy of mankind: the United States of America!”
Among the many future luminaries who attended Havana’s Tri-Continental Conference was a promising young man, Abu Am-mar, who would later become known as Yasir Arafat. Also in attendance was a young Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, who became “the World’s Most Wanted Terrorist.” In 1967, Ramírez Sánchez was an eager recruit into Cuba’s terror training camps started by Che in 1959. Through these connections, one can trace a very straight line from Che to 9/11. “I’m proud of the path of Osama bin Laden,” Ramírez Sánchez told the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in an interview from a French prison in 2002. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed . . . I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States nonstop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief.” [“Carlos the Jackal: I’m Proud of Bin Laden,” Fox News, September 11, 2002: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2002/09...bin-laden.html ]
Che wrote the first draft of the attacks of 9/11. Can anyone read him and doubt if Che were alive today, he would be anything but elated by the toppling of the World Trade Center?
Historians of the Cuban Missile Crisis have firmly established that New York’s 9/11 explosions would appear like an errant cherry bomb if Che had succeeded in goading the Soviets and Americans into all-out war, which he tried to do. Only the prudence of Nikita Khrushchev stayed Che’s ambitions for a red apocalypse. Nor was the Black Liberation Army plot the only terror plot Che aimed at American citizens.
On November 17, 1962, the FBI cracked another terrorist plot by Cuban agents who targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and five hundred kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.
A little perspective: For their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts—all ten of them—that killed and maimed almost two thousand people, al Qaeda’s Spanish allies used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT. Cuban agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day.
Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly
women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.
Was this the handiwork of Che? All his biographers admit—grudgingly—that Che had a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery, including the DGI’s (Dirección General de Inteligencia) Liberation Department in charge of “guerrilla” training and foreign “liberation” plots. So it’s inconceivable that Che didn’t sign off on this early New York terror plot, much less that he opposed it.
The more you place Che’s rhetoric and actions side by side with the adoration of him by New York-based intellectuals, the more the adoration of Che appears to be less of a fashion statement and more of a death wish.
Pages 10-14 (Jailer of Rockers, Hipsters, and Gays):
Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western world. With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious ’60s. —Time MAGAZINE, MAY 1968
Christopher Hitchens recalls that “1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che. His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model.”
In 1968, “Up Against the Wall!” echoed from Paris to Chicago, from Milan to Mexico City. Charles De Gaulle was chased from office by student riots. “The Whole World Is Watching!” shrieked the student protesters who turned the Democratic convention in Chicago into an orgy of tear gas and billy clubs. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” was a favorite chant in places like Berkeley and Columbia Universities, alongside “Che Lives!”
In one large Western capital in particular, some youthful protesters were very brazen and disrespectful. They enraged and alarmed their government, which denounced them as “hippies” and “delinquents.” The government was horrified that these “antisocial elements” were “desecrating national symbols! Burning flags! Burning pictures of national heroes!” [Daniel James, Che Guevara: A Biography, p. 305.] These hippie groups grew long hair, dug rock and roll, and called themselves such names as “the Beats” and “the Psychedelics.” They were clearly a danger to national stability and would suffer severe disciplinary measures, especially as these “delinquents” and “bums” relished trashing the images of one national hero in particular. The rigidly authoritarian national hero these young rebels targeted was known as a stern and violent disciplinarian, utterly lacking in empathy or a sense of humor. He detested rock and roll music and constantly railed against “long hair,” “lazy youths,” and any sign of insubordination in general. He had written that the young must always: “listen carefully—and with utmost respect—to the advice of their elders who held governmental authority.” He preached constantly how students—rather than distracting themselves with idiocies like rock and roll music—must instead dedicate themselves to “study, work and military service.” [Ibid., p. 323.]
The reader has long since guessed that this is a description of Havana and Che.
Any shirkers of duty faced the full wrath of his notoriously brutal police. After all, in his own words, “The happiest days of [a] youth’s life is when he watches his bullets reaching an enemy.” And rather than indulge in frivolous pursuits during their summer vacations, students should volunteer for government service and toil there happily. Che went the Seven Dwarfs one better. For him, whistling while you work didn’t suffice. He wrote that youths should not just toil for their government “happily and with great pride,” but should actually “be chanting government slogans and singing government-approved songs” while in the act. [Ernesto Guevara, Que Debe Ser un Joven Comunista, 1962.]
And woe to those youths “who stayed up late at night and thus reported to work tardily.” Youth, in particular, should learn “to think and act as a mass.” Those who chose their own path were denounced as worthless lumpen and delinquents. In one famous speech, Che even vowed “to make individualism disappear from the nation! It is criminal to think of individuals!” [Jon Lee Anderson, Che: A Revolutionary Life, p. 470.]
This national hero even scorned the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” [Leo Sauvage, Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary, p. 126.]
In short, “tune in, turn on, drop out” wasn’t exactly Che’s thing.
It is for these reasons that longhairs and hippies burned, defaced, and ripped to pieces images of Che Guevara. Most galling to the police, to glorify Che’s death, Castro had declared 1968 Cuba’s “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla.” With Che posters blanketing the landscape, youthful angst and rage had the perfect target. And no young people ever had more cause for angst and rage than Cuba’s.
“These youths walk around with their transistor radios listening to imperialist music!” Castro raved to his usual captive audience in the Plaza de la Revolución as he announced the opening of his regime’s hunting season on Cuban hippies. “They corrupt the morals of young girls—and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There’s nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!” [Ibid., p. 258.] The famous Venceremos brigades of U.S. radicals and college students who visited Cuba to cut sugar cane and help “build Cuban socialism” started the following year. These starry-eyed leftists, with their hippie hair and hippie clothes, learned very quickly to display their Venceremos Brigade insignia prominently. A few, mistaken for homegrown Cuban hippies, had reported very disturbing encounters with Castro’s police. “These young American radicals in their ritual dress,” wrote French socialist Leo Sauvage at the time, “were about as safe among their Cuban ‘revolutionary brothers’ as they were in the streets of downtown Manhattan amidst the hardhats!”
Not that disillusionment was exactly widespread among U.S. radicals. But a few eyebrows were raised and a few troubled murmurs were overheard by the movement’s high priests. Susan Sontag herself sought to lay herself as a bridge over these (slightly) troubled waters in a Ramparts article in the fevered spring of 1969, wherein she admitted that “the Cuban Revolution presents in part an extremely uncomfortable challenge to American radicals.”
This challenge may have been “uncomfortable,” but it was hardly insurmountable. Sontag went on to explain that “although their awareness of underdevelopment inevitably leads to an increasing emphasis on discipline, the Cubans are safeguarding the voluntary character of their institutions.” Sontag’s mass of gibberish was titled “Some Thoughts on the Right Way for Us to Love the Cuban Revolution.” Sontag echoed the words used forty years earlier, when the New York Times’s Walter Duranty had commented on the “voluntary” character of the Ukraine’s collectivization.
Charlie Bravo was a notorious “delinquent”—in other words, a Cuban college student from the sixties who finds himself in exile today. “I’d loved to have seen these Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘antiauthority’ grandstanding in Cuba at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on them. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about—and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castro and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.”
Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker writer and Che biographer, calls Che “the ultimate emblematic figure of what might be called the Decade of Youth. . . . That was the last period in which young people around the world rose up in revolt against the established order.”
Historically speaking, order has rarely been as established as under the regime cofounded by Che Guevara. According to a former Che lieutenant, Dariel Alarcon, Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior (Ministry of Interior, Cuba’s version of the Gestapo and KGB, indoctrinated by Che and trained by the East German STASI) runs the country lock, stock, and barrel. It constitutes Cuba’s genuine government. Cuba’s National Assembly and everything else is all smoke-and-mirror Potemkin politics. [Dariel Alarcon, Benigno: Memorias de un Soldado Cubano, p. 253.]
And Alarcon should know. He was a dutiful officer of the ministry for almost twenty years. If ever a fascist military-industrial complex, a secret cabal, or a hidden government of ruthless, power-mad schemers and sadists such as those Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer constantly detect and decry in the United States actually ran a country, it’s in the very country Mailer and Chomsky constantly laud: the Cuba of Castro and Che.
Che’s two sons, Ernesto and Camilo, were no hippies. They attended a full five-year course at the KGB academy in Moscow. “Che played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery,” admits his biographer, Jorge Castañeda. [Castañeda, Compañero[/I], p. 146.] To this day a ten-story-tall mural of Che Guevara adorns Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior building. Che does live, as the face of the Cuban secret police.
Pages 17-22:
When he hosted the PBS special “The 60’s Experience,” Eric Burdon’s Che shirt shamed even Carlos Santana’s, even Johnny Depp’s. This was no measly T-shirt, either. It was a collared shirt, very elegant, with a huge image of the hip fellow who criminalized rock music on both front and back.
Eric was belting out the Animals’ classics on the show. So naturally he sang the incomparable “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”—the exact desperate refrain of Cubans when Fidel and Che took over.
And certainly the phrase “the last thing we ever do” hits home for the families of the one in three desperate Cuban escapees who never make landfall. According to Cuban-American scholar Armando Lago, this hideous arithmetic translates into seventy-seven thousand deaths at sea over the past forty-six years—families perishing like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst, gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally give out and they gulp that last lungful of seawater. Still others are eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. Sharks don’t dally at a meal.
Every year in South Florida, the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such stories. (Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct—say, if they could somehow pin them on George Bush—we’d have no end of books, movies, and documentaries.)
A consistently hot item on Cuba’s black market is used motor oil. Why? It is the poor man’s shark repellent, they say. Desperate people cling to small hopes.
“I Hate the Sea” is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It’s about some young men Rafael met on the beach near Havana. For most people, the sea soothes, attracts, infatuates. It is a symbol of liberation, travel, vacation. “Water is everywhere a protection,” writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, trying to explain the lure, “like a moat. As a species we love it.” These young men Rafael met stared out to sea, cursed it, and spat into it. “It incarcerates us, worse than jail bars,” they said.
So perhaps Che Guevara succeeded in fashioning his “New Man” after all. In Cuba, Che’s totalitarian dream gave rise to psychic cripples beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: people who hate the sight of the sea.
Why Che’s Rocking Grandson Fled Cuba
“Che exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire,” boasted Rage Against the Machine lead guitarist Tom Morello in a Guitar World interview. “He was an amazing example, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them. Everywhere there was injustice, Che showed up. That’s a pretty good resume.”
Tom Morello might benefit from a chat with a fellow heavy-metal rock guitarist named Canek Sanchez Guevara—Che’s own grandson. Morello might learn a few things about the regime his “honorary fifth band member” cofounded, from which Canek Guevara was forced to flee in horror and disgust. Among the many reasons for Canek’s flight was his desire to play exactly the same kind of music without being brutalized by the penal system and police put in place by his grandfather, Rage’s “fifth band member.” Are you listening, Tom Morello? Carlos Santana? Madonna? Eric Burdon?
“In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” Canek said in an interview with Mexico’s Proceso magazine. “The regime demands submission and obedience . . . the regime persecutes hippies, homosexuals, free-thinkers, and poets. . . . They employ constant surveillance, control and repression.” [Proceso, Mexico, October 17, 2004.]
One day in 1991 leftist author and frequent Cuba visitor Marc Cooper was sitting on a Havana patio having coffee and chatting with the members of Cuba’s nomenklatura hosting him. Suddenly they heard frenzied footsteps. They turned around and there came Che’s grandson and a bandmate, stumbling, coughing, wheezing, and wiping their eyes. Finally catching his breath, Canek blurted that his rock band had set up to play in a nearby public square and had just started kicking out the jams when the police burst upon the scene, lobbing tear gas bombs and swinging billy clubs.
“But I’m Che’s grandson!”* Canek protested to the cops who grabbed him.
*Marc Cooper, “Che’s Grandson: Fidel’s an ‘Aged Tyrant,’” October 19, 2004, http://marccooper.typepad.com/marcco...randson_f.html
There is a delicious irony here. Canek’s grandfather had a major hand in training and indoctrinating Cuba’s police force. As far as these cops were concerned, they were dutifully carrying out Canek’s grandfather’s revolutionary mandate. Besides his affinity for rock music, Canek further tweaked the authorities by adorning his guitar with a big decal of a U.S. dollar bill. And he wonders why his grandfather’s disciples took such glee in pummeling him.
On other occasions the longhaired and punkish-looking Canek was jerked out of a movie theater line and subjected to a humiliating rectal exam by cops, presumably looking for drugs. But, all in all, Canek was immensely luckier than most Cuban “lumpen” and “delinquents.” The notorious peligrosidad predelictiva law (rough translation: “dangerousness likely leading to crime”) never got him shoved into a prison camp.
For what it’s worth, Canek Sanchez Guevara lives in Mexico today and fancies himself an anarchist, not a conservative, Yankee stooge. He’s adamant about distancing himself from those tacky and insufferable “Miami Cubans.” He believes Fidel betrayed the “pure” Cuban revolution of the early sixties inaugurated by his idealistic and heroic grandfather and replaced it with an intolerant and autocratic personal dictatorship.
Canek, born in Cuba in 1974, might be excused from knowing that Cuba had never, before or since, been as vicious and Stalinist a police state as it was in the sixties. Canek’s grandfather was actually more
ideologically rigid, more of a Stalinist than Fidel himself—only, to his eventual misfortune, far less shrewd.
The lumpen remaining in Cuba still have Che’s number. A one-time Argentine Communist Party member named Hector Navarro, also a TV reporter and law school professor, visited Cuba in 1998 to cover Pope John Paul II’s visit. “A group of young Cuban musicians were playing for us tourists on the beach at Santa Maria,” recalls Navarro. “So I went up to them and announced proudly that I was an Argentinean like Che!”
The musicians stared glumly at Navarro. So he tried again. “I even hung a picture of Che in my office!” he now proclaimed. More blank looks. So Navarro plowed ahead. “I’m from the town of Rosario itself—Che’s birthplace!”
Now the musicians went from blank stares to outright frowns. “I certainly wasn’t expecting this kind of thing,” says Navarro. “But I continued, requesting they play a very popular song in Argentina, titled ‘And Your Beloved Presence, Comandante Che Guevara!’ Now every one of them gave me a complete cara de culo (roughly, shitface). Only when I whipped out ten U.S. dollars and handed it to them did they start playing, but in a very desultory manner, and still with those sullen looks.” Meeting after meeting with actual Cubans kept colliding with Hector Navarro’s long-cherished fantasies of Cuban life. “I was in Cuba a month and a half,” says Navarro. But as a fellow communist he was allowed to venture outside the tourist areas.
“This was the most important trip of my life—otherwise I might have kept believing in socialism and Che. I finally saw with my own eyes and learned that Castro’s and Che’s version was no different from Stalin’s and Ceausescu’s.” [Hector Navarro, “Un Viaje a Cuba,” ContactoCuba.com, January 22, 2006]
Stalinist Hippies
Almost a decade before the Summer of Love, Castro, Che, and their henchmen sported beards, long hair, and rumpled clothes. Their early popularity in the United States clearly issued from this superficial, hirsute affinity with the precursors of hippies, the Beat generation. In April 1959, Fidel Castro spoke at Harvard the same week as the similarly bearded Beat icon-poet, Alan Ginsberg. Eight years before he was grandstanding at Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman was grandstanding in Havana, observing Castro on the stump and hailing him as resembling “a mighty penis coming to life!” (Many people in Miami and Cuba, by the way, would heartily agree.)
Any photo of Che, Fidel, Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and company entering Havana in January 1959, after their bogus guerrilla war in the Sierra, shows how they preempted the Haight-Ashbury look by a full decade. Jean Paul Sartre acclaimed them as Les Enfants au Pouvoir (the children in power). Raul Castro kept his blondish shoulder-length hair in a ponytail at the time. Camilo Cienfuegos’s full, dark beard was identical to Jerry Garcia’s a decade later. Except for his drab olive uniform, Che’s comandante comrade, Ramiro Valdez, with his little goatee, looked like Carlos Santana circa Woodstock.
And Che himself was a ringer for Jim Morrison with a fledgling beard. Morrison always affected that “faraway look,” too—that borderline scowl.
But no matter, by the mid-sixties in Castro and Che’s Cuba rock and roll was associated with the United States and regarded as subversive, even if the song’s performers lived in Liverpool or on Carnaby Street. “The government was always on the lookout for long hair,” recalls another former Cuban delinquent and lumpen, Miguel Forcelledo. “We called rock ‘midnight music,’ because that was the safest time to try and listen to it. Even government snitches have to sleep, especially as these swine usually awoke very early to start their snooping. We’d form underground clubs to tap into U.S. radio stations with a Russian-made short-wave radio someone would ‘borrow’ from a friend with government connections. But we were never completely safe. I was fifteen years old at the time but very lucky to get away with a brisk beating by the secret police and brief stint in jail. Many of my older friends wound up in the prison camps.”
A former publicist for the Rolling Stones named David Sandison wrote a book titled Rock & Roll People that features reverential interviews with such musical icons as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and the Sex Pistols. He also wrote a book titled Che Guevara, which is even more reverential toward its subject. To Sandison it must seem perfectly congruous, one book almost an extension of the other. “A legend!” Sandison gushes on the very cover of Che Guevara, “a hero to radical youth to this day.” In an interview Sandison prides himself on having “a great BS detector.”
“All over Cuba,” gushes David Sandison, “pictures of Che remind the Cuban people of their debt to this extraordinary man!”
Yes indeed, Sandison. Just ask those Cuban musicians who gave Señor Navarro a “complete shitface” at the mere mention of Che’s name, or Canek, subject of a spot rectal exam. Also ask the “Beats,” the “Psychedelics,” and assorted Cuban longhaired “lumpen,” who stomped and shredded every Che picture they could get their hands on.
pages vii-xi (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 who 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.
Pages xiii-xvii (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.
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.
“He read serious authors . . . Gandhi and Steinbeck and Faulkner and Mussolini. He was a voracious reader.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkUg-SHbIDA
Last edited by HERO; 01-18-2019 at 01:20 AM.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opin.../#.WivFafkrLMU
“Fifty years on: Che Guevara was a violent, misguided revolutionary” by Ivo Vegter
Fifty years after his death, young hipsters and old socialists still lionise Che Guevara, who was killed on the orders of the Bolivian government on 9 October 1967. But the romantic image of the immortal revolutionary papers over nasty cracks in his legacy.
Yesterday, Kate Janse van Rensburg remembered “Che Guevara through the lens”. The article is styled as a coolly detached opinion about the significance of iconic images in documenting history; the image in this case, of course, being Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Guevara that adorns grafitti walls, protest posters and commercial merchandise to this day.
Janse van Rensburg says this image exists, for the most part, “...empty of Guevara’s revolutionary character and indifferent to the historical context in which it was born. Guevara was a communist and anti-imperialist, a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary.”
In that, she is entirely correct, except that she neglects to add an important adjective: Guevara was a violent communist revolutionary. He considered the capitalist class to be brutally oppressive of the poor people of the world, and believed that it could only be overthrown by armed revolt.
Like his modern followers, he entirely ignored the role governments played in the oppression and poverty he witnessed and described; that colonialism really was a government-led, militarily enforced system of cronyist mercantilism, and that its faults can better be blamed on these factors, than on the emergent system of private property, lawful contract, and free markets. On the contrary: the latter are highly correlated with prosperity.
When he became angry with the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, he ignored both the cause of the conflict – government seizure of private property – and the result: the overthrow of one government not by any company, but by another government.
The same is true for the Cuban revolution in which he would later participate: he never had the subtlety of mind to recognise that corruption and dictatorship were the enemy of prosperity and progress. Sadly, he did not live long enough to witness that communist dictatorship led to even worse outcomes for the Cuban people, and made the island much poorer than it was in the century leading up to the revolution.
Guevara believed in imposing strict discipline on the revolutionary movements he was involved with, and presided over summary executions of counter-revolutionaries. In this, he would mirror the experience of other socialist and communist countries: they invariably require brutal dictatorship and brutal silencing of dissent.
What struck me most about her article was the way in which a student of history noted the lack of historical context, and then promptly glossed over it herself. The piece leaves little doubt that she, too, views Guevara in a very favourable light. After all, while studying history at what she superfluously calls “the University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR)”, she is also a committed socialist, being “associated with the Movement for Socialism in Numsa and the Numsa Research and Policy Unit”. Her closing sentence says it all: “[The Korda photo of Guevara] remains alive with the potential for propelling us into action, for the good of humanity and the Earth.”
The problem with this view is that although Guevara might have been motivated by real injustice and genuine sympathy for the poor, and while he probably intended to act for the good of humanity, the effects of his interventions, and more broadly, his communist ideology, were not good for humanity. History ought to judge people not on their intentions, but on the outcomes of their actions. Did their ideologies produce peace and prosperity? If not, why should anyone lionise them?
Missing from Janse van Rensburg’s editorial is any suggestion that Che Guevara is historically a complex character and remains highly divisive, let alone the reasons for this. Those who idolise him often ignore his many faults, such as his early racism.
In 1952, he wrote in his famous diaries: “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meagre wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”
In his Congo Diary, which he wrote after his secret mission in 1965 to export the communist revolution there, he lamented the “human failure” of the resistance against the military dictator Mobuto Sese Seko. According to John Gerassi writing in the LA Times, “Che had described [Laurent] Kabila [who would overthrow Mobuto more than 30 years later] as a lazy, hard-drinking, womanising opportunist (albeit with great charisma) and his ragtag forces as superstitious, incapable of military discipline and too proud to listen to instructions.”
For all his support for the liberation struggles of black Africans against colonial powers, Guevara appears himself to have been a political opportunist, acting not out of a desire for justice for oppressed races, but exploiting their anger to spread communist revolution around the world.
Those who oppose Guevara perhaps make too much of his racism. In some ways, he merely reflected his time, when racist opinions were casually held and not widely condemned. (Ironically, that puts him in the same category as Cecil John Rhodes.)
They also wrongly associate him with the Cuban work camps where conscientious objectors and homosexuals were badly abused, but which were established after he had already left Cuba. That isn’t to say he wasn’t a homophobe. He certainly contributed to the culture of machismo that was prevalent throughout Latin America. However, in this, his views were also more likely just a product of his time, and it may not have occurred to him to question the moral basis of his prejudices.
Perhaps opponents of Che Guevara ought to moderate their attacks, and instead of attributing murderous zeal, blatant racism and implicit homophobia to him, should focus their criticism on the violence of his political methods and the dire consequences of the communism he promoted.
Socialist and communist states generally tend towards dictatorship and poverty, just as nationalism and mercantilism lead to corruption and oppression. By contrast, free-market capitalism has historically resulted in rising living standards, even for the poor.
By the same token, however, socialists like Kate Janse van Rensburg ought to be much more honest about the nature of the man and his ideology. He may be a romantic icon and a revolutionary martyr, but even if he thought he acted “for the good of humanity and the Earth”, that was not the consequence of the revolution he preached.
Unlike the communism that Guevara fought for, economic freedom has produced higher growth, higher income per capita, lower poverty rates, higher life expectancy, higher share of income earned by the poorest 10%, better political and civil rights, more gender equality and greater happiness, as evidenced by the charts starting on p.23 of the Economic Freedom of the World: 2017 Annual Report.
Korda’s photograph immortalised a violent and misguided communist revolutionary, and turned him into a romantic icon. He has indeed become like the celebrities whose posters adorn the walls of teenage bedrooms, free of historical context. However, one would expect a history student to take a more critical view of such a complex, divisive figure. Perhaps it is too much to expect a self-described socialist to learn from history.
from Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg; pages 193-4:
You can tell a lot about a movement by its heroes, and here, too, the record reflects very poorly on the New Left. For all their prattle about “participatory democracy” it’s shocking how few democrats ranked as heroes to even the “peaceful” members of the movement. At Columbia, Berkeley, and campuses across America, the student activists plastered up posters of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Under Rudd’s leadership, the SDS formed quasi-official ties with Castro’s government. In Chicago and elsewhere, they chanted, “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!” Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims became a huge best seller.
Rather than call these regimes fascist—which I firmly believe they were—we’ll merely note the similarities between these Third World movements and regimes and the conventional fascist ones. Mao, Ho, Castro, and even the Panthers were all ethnocentric movements of “national liberation.” This is precisely how Mussolini and ****** depicted their causes. ****** promised to get Germany out from under the thumb of Versailles and “international finance capitalism.” Mussolini argued that Italy was a “proleterian nation” deserving, like Germany, its “moment in the sun.” Mao’s Cultural Revolution, his mixture of socialism and folk Chinese custom, fits perfectly in the fascist wheelhouse. What is Castro but a military dictator (note the constant uniform) who has burnished his leadership cult with socialist economics, nationalist rhetoric, and unending Nuremberg Rally populism?
That Che Guevara has become a chic branding tool is a disgusting indictment of both American consumer culture and the know-nothing liberalism that constitutes the filthy residue of the 1960s New Left. Ubiquitous Che shirts top the list of mass-marketed revolutionary swag available for sale at the nearest bobo chic retailer—including a popular line of children’s wear. Here’s the text for one ad promoting this stuff: “Featured in Time magazine’s holiday web shopping guide, ‘Viva la revolution!’ Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids’ sizes . . . Long live the rebel in all of us . . . there’s no cooler iconic image than Che!” [Jay Nordlinger, “Che Chic,” National Review, Dec. 31, 2004, p. 28.]
The Argentine henchman of the Cuban revolution was a murderer and goon. He penned classically fascist apothegms in his journals: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.” Guevara was a better writer, but the same muse helped to produce Mein Kampf. Guevara reveled in executing prisoners. While fomenting revolution in Guatemala, he wrote home to his mother, “It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in.” His motto was “If in doubt, kill him,” and he killed a great many. The Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova described Guevara as “a combination of Beria and Himmler.”* Guevara certainly killed more dissidents and lovers of democracy than Mussolini ever did, and Mussolini’s Italy was undoubtedly more “free” than any society Guevara the “freedom fighter” was seeking. Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?
*Paul Berman, “The Cult of Che,” Slate, Sept. 24, 2004, www.slate.com/id/2107100/ (accessed March 15, 2007); Nordlinger, “Che Chic,” p. 28.
pages 70-1:
This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists. Yes, they were also nationalists, which in the context of the 1930s was considered a rightist position, but this was at a time when the “internationalism” of the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing. Surely we’ve learned from the parade of horribles on offer in the twentieth century that nationalism isn’t inherently right-wing—unless we’re prepared to call Stalin, Castro, Arafat, Chavez, Guevara, Pol Pot, and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, right-wingers. Stalin himself ruled as a nationalist, invoking “Mother Russia” and dubbing World War II the “great patriotic war.” By 1943 he had even replaced the old Coomunist anthem (“The Internationale”) with one that was thoroughly Russian. Moreover, historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/c...lt_of_che.html
Paul Berman: The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.
These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. Václav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility—those days appear to be over.
I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba—will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Raúl Rivero?
As a protest against the ovation at Sundance, I would like to append one of Rivero's poems to my comment here. The police confiscated Rivero's books and papers at the time of his arrest, but the poet's wife, Blanca Reyes, was able to rescue the manuscript of a poem describing an earlier police raid on his home. Letras Libres published the poem in Mexico. I hope that Rivero will forgive me for my translation. I like this poem because it shows that the modern, Almodóvar-like qualities of impudence, wit, irreverence, irony, playfulness, and freedom, so badly missing from Salles' pious work of cinematic genuflection, are fully alive in Latin America, and can be found right now in a Cuban prison.
Search Order
by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?
What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I've written
the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"?
What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
"Castles with music box. I won't let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie."
A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
—the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.
- From Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots who Idolize Him by Humberto Fontova; pages xix-xxx (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 heart-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 ****** 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-sixties 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 bit 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.” . . .
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.”
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.” 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.”* 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!”
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!” 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.
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.
“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.”
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 [2006] 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.
*Luis Ortega, Yo Soy El Che!, p. 179.
Pages 1-9 (Ch. 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!”
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.
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.
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,” 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!” 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.”
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.”
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 York’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.
The agents sprang from the bushes and captured Collier just as he located the dynamite stash. Che’s plot failed. [Edward V. McCarthy, “Conspiradores en Nueva York Vinculador a Fidel Castro,” Diario de las Americas, February 18, 1965.]
Had everything gone according to plan, Che Guevara would have destroyed America’s greatest monuments, killed hundreds if not thousands of visitors from around the world, and allowed the killers to slip into Cuba for safe haven. If the facts of the attack had become publicly known, President Johnson might have been forced to repudiate the Kennedy administration’s noninterference agreement with the Soviet Union following the Cuban Missile Crisis. The result could easily have been catastrophic. Of course, the plot had no effect, either on American security or on Che’s reputation. It fell to twenty-four-year-old Gladys Perez to wear the label “terrorist.” While being booked for felonious assault, Gladys said she had arrived from Cuba two years earlier. In Cuba, as a political prisoner, she had been tortured and raped. Asked by a court interpreter if she regretted her actions, Gladys snapped, “No! If Guevara were here now I’d kill him!”
The New York Times reported on December 14, 1964, that a young assistant district attorney asked that the handcuffed woman be committed for mental observation.
Consider the facts: A Cuban woman is imprisoned, tortured, and raped by communist goons. She seeks revenge on the chief executioner of the regime that tortured her, raped her, jailed and executed thousands of her countrymen, and brought the world a hair away from nuclear holocaust. The woman is committed for mental observation.
Immediately after he boasted of those very executions for a worldwide forum in the heart of their city and after he insulted his hosts as “hyenas,” fit only for “extermination,” New York’s media and high society fetes Cuba’s chief executioner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Their honored guest had twice plotted to incinerate and entomb the very New York now feting him. He was plotting more terrorism for New York during the very feting. Time magazine, headquartered in New York, then hails him as a “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.
Who needs “mental observation”?
Should, perhaps, a city that continues to adore a man who wanted to destroy it be corporately committed? In 2004, the New York Public Library was selling Che watches in its gift shop—not unlike the British Museum selling collector’s items bearing the image of Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Perhaps the library management can be forgiven for not knowing about Che’s plans for them. Less forgivable was their benefit gala in 2005, “An Affair in Havana,” which celebrated “Literary Havana.” Was the intention to celebrate Che’s book bonfire? Or was it to celebrate the sixteen librarians who today sit in Castro’s dungeons with twenty-five-year prison sentences for attempting to disseminate such subversive literature as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights? Even liberal columnist Nat Hentoff tried to make the library see reason, by calling it plainly “stupid,” to no avail. And just last year Manhattan’s International Center of Photography packed in the crowds for its exhibition titled “Che! Revolution and Commerce.”
“Tomorrow New York is going to be here,” Rudy Giuliani assured his stricken fellow citizens on 9/11. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before . . . I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us!”
New York-based Time, which places Ernesto “Che” Guevara among “The Heroes and Icons of the Century,” also hailed Rudy Giuliani as its “Man of the Year” in 2001 for being 9/11’s “crisis manager” and “consoler in chief,” and for “teaching us how to respond to a terrorist crisis.”
“We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation,” Che Guevara declared in his “Message to the Tri-Continental Conference” published in Havana in April 1967. “We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. This is a total war to the death. We’ll attack him wherever we find him. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him!”
And who was this imperialist enemy? “The great enemy of mankind: the United States of America!”
Among the many future luminaries who attended Havana’s Tri-Continental Conference was a promising young man, Abu Am-mar, who would later become known as Yasir Arafat. Also in attendance was a young Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, who became “the World’s Most Wanted Terrorist.” In 1967, Ramírez Sánchez was an eager recruit into Cuba’s terror training camps started by Che in 1959. Through these connections, one can trace a very straight line from Che to 9/11. “I’m proud of the path of Osama bin Laden,” Ramírez Sánchez told the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in an interview from a French prison in 2002. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed . . . I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States nonstop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief.” [“Carlos the Jackal: I’m Proud of Bin Laden,” Fox News, September 11, 2002: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2002/09...bin-laden.html ]
Che wrote the first draft of the attacks of 9/11. Can anyone read him and doubt if Che were alive today, he would be anything but elated by the toppling of the World Trade Center?
Historians of the Cuban Missile Crisis have firmly established that New York’s 9/11 explosions would appear like an errant cherry bomb if Che had succeeded in goading the Soviets and Americans into all-out war, which he tried to do. Only the prudence of Nikita Khrushchev stayed Che’s ambitions for a red apocalypse. Nor was the Black Liberation Army plot the only terror plot Che aimed at American citizens.
On November 17, 1962, the FBI cracked another terrorist plot by Cuban agents who targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and five hundred kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.
A little perspective: For their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts—all ten of them—that killed and maimed almost two thousand people, al Qaeda’s Spanish allies used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT. Cuban agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day.
Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly
women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.
Was this the handiwork of Che? All his biographers admit—grudgingly—that Che had a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery, including the DGI’s (Dirección General de Inteligencia) Liberation Department in charge of “guerrilla” training and foreign “liberation” plots. So it’s inconceivable that Che didn’t sign off on this early New York terror plot, much less that he opposed it.
The more you place Che’s rhetoric and actions side by side with the adoration of him by New York-based intellectuals, the more the adoration of Che appears to be less of a fashion statement and more of a death wish.
Pages 10-14 (Jailer of Rockers, Hipsters, and Gays):
Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western world. With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious ’60s. —Time MAGAZINE, MAY 1968
Christopher Hitchens recalls that “1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che. His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model.”
In 1968, “Up Against the Wall!” echoed from Paris to Chicago, from Milan to Mexico City. Charles De Gaulle was chased from office by student riots. “The Whole World Is Watching!” shrieked the student protesters who turned the Democratic convention in Chicago into an orgy of tear gas and billy clubs. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” was a favorite chant in places like Berkeley and Columbia Universities, alongside “Che Lives!”
In one large Western capital in particular, some youthful protesters were very brazen and disrespectful. They enraged and alarmed their government, which denounced them as “hippies” and “delinquents.” The government was horrified that these “antisocial elements” were “desecrating national symbols! Burning flags! Burning pictures of national heroes!” [Daniel James, Che Guevara: A Biography, p. 305.] These hippie groups grew long hair, dug rock and roll, and called themselves such names as “the Beats” and “the Psychedelics.” They were clearly a danger to national stability and would suffer severe disciplinary measures, especially as these “delinquents” and “bums” relished trashing the images of one national hero in particular. The rigidly authoritarian national hero these young rebels targeted was known as a stern and violent disciplinarian, utterly lacking in empathy or a sense of humor. He detested rock and roll music and constantly railed against “long hair,” “lazy youths,” and any sign of insubordination in general. He had written that the young must always: “listen carefully—and with utmost respect—to the advice of their elders who held governmental authority.” He preached constantly how students—rather than distracting themselves with idiocies like rock and roll music—must instead dedicate themselves to “study, work and military service.” [Ibid., p. 323.]
The reader has long since guessed that this is a description of Havana and Che.
Any shirkers of duty faced the full wrath of his notoriously brutal police. After all, in his own words, “The happiest days of [a] youth’s life is when he watches his bullets reaching an enemy.” And rather than indulge in frivolous pursuits during their summer vacations, students should volunteer for government service and toil there happily. Che went the Seven Dwarfs one better. For him, whistling while you work didn’t suffice. He wrote that youths should not just toil for their government “happily and with great pride,” but should actually “be chanting government slogans and singing government-approved songs” while in the act. [Ernesto Guevara, Que Debe Ser un Joven Comunista, 1962.]
And woe to those youths “who stayed up late at night and thus reported to work tardily.” Youth, in particular, should learn “to think and act as a mass.” Those who chose their own path were denounced as worthless lumpen and delinquents. In one famous speech, Che even vowed “to make individualism disappear from the nation! It is criminal to think of individuals!” [Jon Lee Anderson, Che: A Revolutionary Life, p. 470.]
This national hero even scorned the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” [Leo Sauvage, Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary, p. 126.]
In short, “tune in, turn on, drop out” wasn’t exactly Che’s thing.
It is for these reasons that longhairs and hippies burned, defaced, and ripped to pieces images of Che Guevara. Most galling to the police, to glorify Che’s death, Castro had declared 1968 Cuba’s “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla.” With Che posters blanketing the landscape, youthful angst and rage had the perfect target. And no young people ever had more cause for angst and rage than Cuba’s.
“These youths walk around with their transistor radios listening to imperialist music!” Castro raved to his usual captive audience in the Plaza de la Revolución as he announced the opening of his regime’s hunting season on Cuban hippies. “They corrupt the morals of young girls—and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There’s nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!” [Ibid., p. 258.] The famous Venceremos brigades of U.S. radicals and college students who visited Cuba to cut sugar cane and help “build Cuban socialism” started the following year. These starry-eyed leftists, with their hippie hair and hippie clothes, learned very quickly to display their Venceremos Brigade insignia prominently. A few, mistaken for homegrown Cuban hippies, had reported very disturbing encounters with Castro’s police. “These young American radicals in their ritual dress,” wrote French socialist Leo Sauvage at the time, “were about as safe among their Cuban ‘revolutionary brothers’ as they were in the streets of downtown Manhattan amidst the hardhats!”
Not that disillusionment was exactly widespread among U.S. radicals. But a few eyebrows were raised and a few troubled murmurs were overheard by the movement’s high priests. Susan Sontag herself sought to lay herself as a bridge over these (slightly) troubled waters in a Ramparts article in the fevered spring of 1969, wherein she admitted that “the Cuban Revolution presents in part an extremely uncomfortable challenge to American radicals.”
This challenge may have been “uncomfortable,” but it was hardly insurmountable. Sontag went on to explain that “although their awareness of underdevelopment inevitably leads to an increasing emphasis on discipline, the Cubans are safeguarding the voluntary character of their institutions.” Sontag’s mass of gibberish was titled “Some Thoughts on the Right Way for Us to Love the Cuban Revolution.” Sontag echoed the words used forty years earlier, when the New York Times’s Walter Duranty had commented on the “voluntary” character of the Ukraine’s collectivization.
Charlie Bravo was a notorious “delinquent”—in other words, a Cuban college student from the sixties who finds himself in exile today. “I’d loved to have seen these Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘antiauthority’ grandstanding in Cuba at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on them. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about—and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castro and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.”
Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker writer and Che biographer, calls Che “the ultimate emblematic figure of what might be called the Decade of Youth. . . . That was the last period in which young people around the world rose up in revolt against the established order.”
Historically speaking, order has rarely been as established as under the regime cofounded by Che Guevara. According to a former Che lieutenant, Dariel Alarcon, Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior (Ministry of Interior, Cuba’s version of the Gestapo and KGB, indoctrinated by Che and trained by the East German STASI) runs the country lock, stock, and barrel. It constitutes Cuba’s genuine government. Cuba’s National Assembly and everything else is all smoke-and-mirror Potemkin politics. [Dariel Alarcon, Benigno: Memorias de un Soldado Cubano, p. 253.]
And Alarcon should know. He was a dutiful officer of the ministry for almost twenty years. If ever a fascist military-industrial complex, a secret cabal, or a hidden government of ruthless, power-mad schemers and sadists such as those Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer constantly detect and decry in the United States actually ran a country, it’s in the very country Mailer and Chomsky constantly laud: the Cuba of Castro and Che.
Che’s two sons, Ernesto and Camilo, were no hippies. They attended a full five-year course at the KGB academy in Moscow. “Che played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery,” admits his biographer, Jorge Castañeda. [Castañeda, Compañero[/I], p. 146.] To this day a ten-story-tall mural of Che Guevara adorns Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior building. Che does live, as the face of the Cuban secret police.
Pages 17-22:
When he hosted the PBS special “The 60’s Experience,” Eric Burdon’s Che shirt shamed even Carlos Santana’s, even Johnny Depp’s. This was no measly T-shirt, either. It was a collared shirt, very elegant, with a huge image of the hip fellow who criminalized rock music on both front and back.
Eric was belting out the Animals’ classics on the show. So naturally he sang the incomparable “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”—the exact desperate refrain of Cubans when Fidel and Che took over.
And certainly the phrase “the last thing we ever do” hits home for the families of the one in three desperate Cuban escapees who never make landfall. According to Cuban-American scholar Armando Lago, this hideous arithmetic translates into seventy-seven thousand deaths at sea over the past forty-six years—families perishing like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst, gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally give out and they gulp that last lungful of seawater. Still others are eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. Sharks don’t dally at a meal.
Every year in South Florida, the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such stories. (Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct—say, if they could somehow pin them on George Bush—we’d have no end of books, movies, and documentaries.)
A consistently hot item on Cuba’s black market is used motor oil. Why? It is the poor man’s shark repellent, they say. Desperate people cling to small hopes.
“I Hate the Sea” is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It’s about some young men Rafael met on the beach near Havana. For most people, the sea soothes, attracts, infatuates. It is a symbol of liberation, travel, vacation. “Water is everywhere a protection,” writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, trying to explain the lure, “like a moat. As a species we love it.” These young men Rafael met stared out to sea, cursed it, and spat into it. “It incarcerates us, worse than jail bars,” they said.
So perhaps Che Guevara succeeded in fashioning his “New Man” after all. In Cuba, Che’s totalitarian dream gave rise to psychic cripples beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: people who hate the sight of the sea.
Why Che’s Rocking Grandson Fled Cuba
“Che exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire,” boasted Rage Against the Machine lead guitarist Tom Morello in a Guitar World interview. “He was an amazing example, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them. Everywhere there was injustice, Che showed up. That’s a pretty good resume.”
Tom Morello might benefit from a chat with a fellow heavy-metal rock guitarist named Canek Sanchez Guevara—Che’s own grandson. Morello might learn a few things about the regime his “honorary fifth band member” cofounded, from which Canek Guevara was forced to flee in horror and disgust. Among the many reasons for Canek’s flight was his desire to play exactly the same kind of music without being brutalized by the penal system and police put in place by his grandfather, Rage’s “fifth band member.” Are you listening, Tom Morello? Carlos Santana? Madonna? Eric Burdon?
“In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” Canek said in an interview with Mexico’s Proceso magazine. “The regime demands submission and obedience . . . the regime persecutes hippies, homosexuals, free-thinkers, and poets. . . . They employ constant surveillance, control and repression.” [Proceso, Mexico, October 17, 2004.]
One day in 1991 leftist author and frequent Cuba visitor Marc Cooper was sitting on a Havana patio having coffee and chatting with the members of Cuba’s nomenklatura hosting him. Suddenly they heard frenzied footsteps. They turned around and there came Che’s grandson and a bandmate, stumbling, coughing, wheezing, and wiping their eyes. Finally catching his breath, Canek blurted that his rock band had set up to play in a nearby public square and had just started kicking out the jams when the police burst upon the scene, lobbing tear gas bombs and swinging billy clubs.
“But I’m Che’s grandson!”* Canek protested to the cops who grabbed him.
*Marc Cooper, “Che’s Grandson: Fidel’s an ‘Aged Tyrant,’” October 19, 2004, http://marccooper.typepad.com/marcco...randson_f.html
There is a delicious irony here. Canek’s grandfather had a major hand in training and indoctrinating Cuba’s police force. As far as these cops were concerned, they were dutifully carrying out Canek’s grandfather’s revolutionary mandate. Besides his affinity for rock music, Canek further tweaked the authorities by adorning his guitar with a big decal of a U.S. dollar bill. And he wonders why his grandfather’s disciples took such glee in pummeling him.
On other occasions the longhaired and punkish-looking Canek was jerked out of a movie theater line and subjected to a humiliating rectal exam by cops, presumably looking for drugs. But, all in all, Canek was immensely luckier than most Cuban “lumpen” and “delinquents.” The notorious peligrosidad predelictiva law (rough translation: “dangerousness likely leading to crime”) never got him shoved into a prison camp.
For what it’s worth, Canek Sanchez Guevara lives in Mexico today and fancies himself an anarchist, not a conservative, Yankee stooge. He’s adamant about distancing himself from those tacky and insufferable “Miami Cubans.” He believes Fidel betrayed the “pure” Cuban revolution of the early sixties inaugurated by his idealistic and heroic grandfather and replaced it with an intolerant and autocratic personal dictatorship.
Canek, born in Cuba in 1974, might be excused from knowing that Cuba had never, before or since, been as vicious and Stalinist a police state as it was in the sixties. Canek’s grandfather was actually more
ideologically rigid, more of a Stalinist than Fidel himself—only, to his eventual misfortune, far less shrewd.
The lumpen remaining in Cuba still have Che’s number. A one-time Argentine Communist Party member named Hector Navarro, also a TV reporter and law school professor, visited Cuba in 1998 to cover Pope John Paul II’s visit. “A group of young Cuban musicians were playing for us tourists on the beach at Santa Maria,” recalls Navarro. “So I went up to them and announced proudly that I was an Argentinean like Che!”
The musicians stared glumly at Navarro. So he tried again. “I even hung a picture of Che in my office!” he now proclaimed. More blank looks. So Navarro plowed ahead. “I’m from the town of Rosario itself—
Che’s birthplace!”
Now the musicians went from blank stares to outright frowns. “I certainly wasn’t expecting this kind of thing,” says Navarro. “But I continued, requesting they play a very popular song in Argentina, titled ‘And Your Beloved Presence, Comandante Che Guevara!’ Now every one of them gave me a complete cara de culo (roughly, shitface). Only when I whipped out ten U.S. dollars and handed it to them did they start playing, but in a very desultory manner, and still with those sullen looks.” Meeting after meeting with actual Cubans kept colliding with Hector Navarro’s long-cherished fantasies of Cuban life. “I was in Cuba a month and a half,” says Navarro. But as a fellow communist he was allowed to venture outside the tourist areas.
“This was the most important trip of my life—otherwise I might have kept believing in socialism and Che. I finally saw with my own eyes and learned that Castro’s and Che’s version was no different from Stalin’s and Ceausescu’s.” [Hector Navarro, “Un Viaje a Cuba,” ContactoCuba.com, January 22, 2006]
Stalinist Hippies
Almost a decade before the Summer of Love, Castro, Che, and their henchmen sported beards, long hair, and rumpled clothes. Their early popularity in the United States clearly issued from this superficial, hirsute affinity with the precursors of hippies, the Beat generation. In April 1959, Fidel Castro spoke at Harvard the same week as the similarly bearded Beat icon-poet, Alan Ginsberg. Eight years before he was grandstanding at Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman was grandstanding in Havana, observing Castro on the stump and hailing him as resembling “a mighty penis coming to life!” (Many people in Miami and Cuba, by the way, would heartily agree.)
Any photo of Che, Fidel, Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and company entering Havana in January 1959, after their bogus guerrilla war in the Sierra, shows how they preempted the Haight-Ashbury look by a full decade. Jean Paul Sartre acclaimed them as Les Enfants au Pouvoir (the children in power). Raul Castro kept his blondish shoulder-length hair in a ponytail at the time. Camilo Cienfuegos’s full, dark beard was identical to Jerry Garcia’s a decade later. Except for his drab olive uniform, Che’s comandante comrade, Ramiro Valdez, with his little goatee, looked like Carlos Santana circa Woodstock.
And Che himself was a ringer for Jim Morrison with a fledgling beard. Morrison always affected that “faraway look,” too—that borderline scowl.
But no matter, by the mid-sixties in Castro and Che’s Cuba rock and roll was associated with the United States and regarded as subversive, even if the song’s performers lived in Liverpool or on Carnaby Street. “The government was always on the lookout for long hair,” recalls another former Cuban delinquent and lumpen, Miguel Forcelledo. “We called rock ‘midnight music,’ because that was the safest time to try and listen to it. Even government snitches have to sleep, especially as these swine usually awoke very early to start their snooping. We’d form underground clubs to tap into U.S. radio stations with a Russian-made short-wave radio someone would ‘borrow’ from a friend with government connections. But we were never completely safe. I was fifteen years old at the time but very lucky to get away with a brisk beating by the secret police and brief stint in jail. Many of my older friends wound up in the prison camps.”
A former publicist for the Rolling Stones named David Sandison wrote a book titled Rock & Roll People that features reverential interviews with such musical icons as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and the Sex Pistols. He also wrote a book titled Che Guevara, which is even more reverential toward its subject. To Sandison it must seem perfectly congruous, one book almost an extension of the other. “A legend!” Sandison gushes on the very cover of Che Guevara, “a hero to radical youth to this day.” In an interview Sandison prides himself on having “a great BS detector.”
“All over Cuba,” gushes David Sandison, “pictures of Che remind the Cuban people of their debt to this extraordinary man!”
Yes indeed, Sandison. Just ask those Cuban musicians who gave Señor Navarro a “complete shitface” at the mere mention of Che’s name, or Canek, subject of a spot rectal exam. Also ask the “Beats,” the “Psychedelics,” and assorted Cuban longhaired “lumpen,” who stomped and shredded every Che picture they could get their hands on.
pages vii-xi (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 who 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.
Pages xiii-xvii (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.
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.
Che Guevara.jpg
Che Guevara I.jpg
Last edited by HERO; 06-14-2018 at 12:39 PM.
I knew an SLI who was obsessed with him (of course a lot of people are). I also know doctor i common for sli career wise, wouldn't surprise me if Che Guevara was SLI seems like some delta values, seems irrational.
From the Ireland 1964 video I say SLI for sure, sx/sp
LSI-Se.
Che Guevara - ENFJ - Hamlet
Last edited by khcs; 06-20-2020 at 07:12 PM.
Beta as fuck..
I think LSI
I think he is SLE. He has an Exxp vibe + beta quadra.
ENFJ Hamlet
He was a fascinating person. Turned into a monster, but a true idealouge and not always wrong.
The way the US went after him..he truly represented a free South and Central America. To bad he failed and died in disgrace.
He understood ordinary mens struggles, but was ruthless against those people who were not aligned with him. He shot a man in the head in cold blood in front of comrades because the man was accused of stealing.
No wonder US was afraid of him. An articulate orator who could turn his passion on and off when nessesary.
Still don't know much about him, but I see no reason to change the SLE typing. As far as beta revolutionaries go, he always struck me as more involvedly charismatic, like an actual leader without pretensions. Not saying LSIs can't have charisma, but it tends to be secondary to whatever role they fill.
4w3-5w6-8w7
I'd like to hear everyone's opinion as to what type the stereotypical "Ultraviolent commie" is. I mean, my type's the stereotypical scheming villain 99 times out of a hundred and I do know that there are more than a few admirers of Che lurking about this particular corner of the web so, for the sake of my data collection, please tell me what type y'all think this commie scumbag is.
They can be found in "the anarchist quadrant" ENFJ, ESTP, ISTP, INFJ.Originally Posted by End
Last edited by khcs; 06-21-2020 at 07:17 PM.
He VIs as SEE,
Still the Coordinator works. Ad hoc hiearchial grouping.
beta extravert methinks~
･ﾟ*✧ 𝓘 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝒶𝒸𝒸𝑒𝓅𝓉 𝒶 𝓁𝒾𝒻𝑒 𝓘 𝒹𝑜 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝒹𝑒𝓈𝑒𝓇𝓋𝑒 ✧*:･ﾟ
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...ooks.booksnews
The contents of a green, dog-eared notebook carried by revolutionary Che Guevara when he was shot dead by the CIA in a remote Bolivian village 40 years ago are to be revealed to his adoring fans for the first time.
Not political writings or military plans, but a collection of his favourite poetry, written out in his own hand. 'It is a very intimate anthology loaded with political poems and poems dealing with emotions, feelings. This adds another element to the myth of Che,' says Ignacio. Among the 69 poems are some by Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, Cuban Nicolas Guillen and Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, who was one of the century's great poetic innovators..
IEI
my ideas about socionics:
https://soziotypen.de/thoughts-on-socionics/
the section will be updated ever other month or so.
this is a VI thread with IEI examples
https://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...-(IEI-edition)
and this is a thread with EIE examples
https://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...s-EIE-examples
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