Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  Morello, whose music inspires so many head-banger balls, raves, and mosh pits, might be amazed to learn that upon taking over the Cuban city of Santa Clara, Che’s first order of business (after summarily executing twenty-seven “war criminals,” after a battle with four casualties) was to ban drinking, gambling, and dancing as “bourgeois frivolities.” “I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers, and no friends,” wrote Che. “My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.”12 In short, Che, the fifth band member of Rage Against the Machine, took one of the world’s most culturally vivacious countries and transformed it into a human ant farm.

  “Carlos Santana smiled vacantly and gave me the peace sign,” recalls a young Cuban American named Henry Gomez about a run-in with the hip guitarist in San Francisco shortly after his 2005 Oscar gig. Henry was wearing his homemade “Che’s Dead—Get Over It” T-shirt when he passed the famed guitarist as he sat in a café. Santana immediately noticed the shirt and walked over.

  “ ‘Che may be dead for you,’ he said in a classic hippy-dippy drawl,” says Henry. “ ‘But he lives in our hearts . . . Che is all about love and compassion.’ ”13

  “ ‘Che murdered hundreds,’ I said. ‘It’s fully documented. He urged the opposite of love. Hate as a factor of struggle. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm. Hate as . . . ’ ” But Santana wasn’t listening as Henry Gomez quoted Che Guevara. “Che fought for blacks, women, and Native Americans,” Carlos drawled. “Before the Cuban Revolution, women weren’t allowed to enter the casinos.”

  Now Henry Gomez himself stared vacantly. “Where do you begin with this kind of space-cadet drivel?” He laughs. “In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the United States. And Cuban women went into any casino they desired. If not many did, it wasn’t because they were barred.”

  But let’s give Che credit. He indeed opened some Cuban establishments to women—political prisons and the execution wall.

  Santana was also ignorant of Che’s famous racism, of his disparaging comments on blacks and Mexicans. “Like a fool,” recalls Henry, “I went on, trying to explain a few things to Carlos Santana, who was still annoyed with my T-shirt.”

  “You’re getting hung up on facts, man,” Santana slurred at one point. “We’re only free when we free our hearts.”

  “Santana had a point,” says Henry, nodding. “I was definitely ‘hung up on facts.’ So here I’m giving him facts—and he’s rebutting with flower-power slogans. I should have known better. My wife was standing there highly amused by it all, not being impolite at all, simply smiling in what must have seemed to Mister Santana and his wife the typical reverential smile they get from fans. My wife was actually very hard at work stifling guffaws.”14

  “We Gotta Get Outta This Place”

  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.”15

  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.”16

  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!”17 Canek protested to the cops who grabbed him.

  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 revo
lution 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.”18

  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).19 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!”20

  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.

  3

  Bon Vivant, Mama’s Boy, Poser, and Snob

  Nothing could be more vicariously gratifying than Che’s disdain for material comfort and everyday desires.

  —DUKE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR ARIEL DORFMAN IN Time MAGAZINE

  The emblematic impact of Ernesto Guevara is inconceivable without its dimension of sacrifice. Che renounces comfort for an idea.

  —CHE BIOGRAPHER AND Newsweek WRITER JORGE CASTAÑEDA

  Che was aided by . . . a complete freedom from convention or material aspirations.

  —PHILIP BENNETT, Boston Globe

  “Like So many epics,” starts the opening sentence of Time magazine’s story honoring Che Guevara as a Hero and Icon of the Century, “the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth . . .” Let’s stop there.

  Typically for the topic of Che, not halfway through the very first sentence of the Time story we encounter two lies. Ernesto Guevara was not a doctor. Though he’s widely described as a medical doctor by his “scholarly” biographers (Castañeda, Anderson, Taibo, Kalfon), no record exists of Ernesto Guevara’s medical degree. When Cuban-American researcher Enrique Ros asked the rector of the University of Buenos Aires and the head of its Office of Academic Affairs for copies or proof of the vaunted degree, Ros was variously told that the records had been misplaced or perhaps stolen.

  And if the young Ernesto Guevara left Argentina hell-bent on “the emancipation of the earth’s poor” he leaves little record of that, either. He originally headed for Venezuela, with plans to eventually come to the United States, because, in his own words in a letter to his father, those were “the best places to make money.”1

  And after the Revolution? Following a hard day at the office signing execution warrants, Che repaired to his new domicile in Tarara, fifteen miles outside Havana on the pristine beachfront, an area that today is reserved exclusively for tourists and elite Communist Party members. “The house was among the most luxurious in Cuba,” writes Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes, of the mansion mentioned earlier with the futuristic big-screen television and remote control. “Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba’s most successful building contractor. The mansion had a yacht harbor, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets. . . . The mansion’s garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.”2

  Llano Montes wrote this candid description while in exile. In January 1959, he didn’t go into such detail in his article, which appe
ared in the Cuban magazine Carteles. He simply wrote that “Comandante Che Guevara has fixed his residence in one of the most luxurious houses on Tarara Beach.”

  Two days after his article ran, while lunching at Havana’s El Carmelo restaurant, Llano Montes looked up from his plate to see three heavily armed rebel army soldiers ordering him to accompany them. Shortly the journalist found himself in Che Guevara’s office in the old Spanish Fortress, La Cabana, converted into a prison, seated a few feet in front of the comandante’s desk, which was piled with papers.

  It took half an hour, but Che finally made his grand entrance, “reeking horribly, as was his custom,” recalls Llano Montes. “Without looking at me, he started grabbing papers on his desk and brusquely signing them with ‘Che.’ His assistant came in and Che spoke to him over his shoulder. ‘I’m signing these twenty-six executions so we can take care of this tonight.’

  “Then he got up and walked out. Half an hour later he walks back in and starts signing more papers. Finished signing, he picks up a book and starts reading—never once looking at me. Another half-hour goes by and he finally puts the book down. ‘So you’re Llano Montes,’ he finally sneers, ‘who says I appropriated a luxurious house.’

  “I simply wrote that you had moved into a luxurious house, which is the truth,” replied Llano Montes.

  “I know your tactics!” Che shot back. “You press people are injecting venom into your articles to damage the revolution. You’re either with us or against us. We’re not going to allow all the press foolishness that Batista allowed. I can have you executed this very night. How about that!”

  “You’ll need proof that I’ve broken some law,” responded Montes.