Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  “ ‘We don’t need proof. We manufacture the proof,’ Che said while stroking his shoulder-length hair, a habit of his. One of his prosecutors, a man nicknamed ‘Puddle-of-Blood,’ then walked in and started talking. ‘Don’t let the stupid jabbering of those defense lawyers delay the executions!’ Che yelled at him. ‘Threaten them with execution. Accuse them of being accomplices of the Batistianos. ’ Then Che jerked the handful of papers from Mister Puddle and started signing them.

  “This type of thing went on from noon until 6:30 P.M., when Che finally turned to his aides and said, ‘Get this man out of here. I don’t want him in my presence.’ ”3

  The Che remembered by his innumerable victims was a man who enjoyed reducing people to powerlessness—then making them grovel for their lives. Yet in Time’s article, Ariel Dorfman writes of Che that “this secular saint [was?] ready to die because he could not tolerate a world where the poor of the earth, the displaced and dislocated of history, would be eternally relegated to its vast margins.” Among Che’s favorite guests at his Tarara estate was a Soviet GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) officer named Angel Ciutat, who had been a close colleague of Leon Trotsky’s killer, Ramon Mercader. Ciutat was actually a Spanish communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War who fled into the arms of the Soviets after Franco battered Spain’s red army. Stalin’s secret police thumbed through Angel Ciutat’s impressive resume as a murderer and Soviet proxy during the Spanish Civil War and promptly hired him on.

  While holding court in Che’s luxurious Tarara estate, Ciutat advised the admiring Guevara on the finer points of forming Cuba’s secret police. After all, Ciutat had studied under the master himself—Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s police chief. And Che, as once before, in front of another Spanish communist—General Bayo, who taught him in Mexico—was all ears, a medical student, of sorts.

  Angel Ciutat’s guidelines for Che’s firing squads were particularly adroit. These firing squads consisted of ten men and every one shot live ammo, bucking the norm, whereby some shot blanks to assuage their consciences. Such assuaging would contradict one of the Cuban firing squads’ most vital purposes, secretly named El Compromiso Sangriento (the Blood Covenant).4

  The point was to make murderers to bond with the murderous regime. The more shooters, the more murderers. The more murderers thus manufactured, the more complicit people on hand to resist any overthrow of their system. The fanatic and suicidal resistance put up by Hitler’s SS troopers against the advancing Red Army saw the same theme at work. These SS troops knew they were fighting the sons and fathers of people they’d murdered in places like Babi Yar.

  Under the Soviet Ciutat’s orders, all cadets to Cuba’s military academy were forced to serve on a firing squad. This became a prerequisite for graduation. We can imagine Che leaping in joy, slapping his forehead: “Now why didn’t I think of that!” This policy of slaughtering Cubans—dictated by a Soviet officer and implemented by an Argentine hobo—became official in newly “nationalist” Cuba in February 1959.

  Soon, “for health reasons,” Che was forced to spend more and more time at his Tarara estate. But he began every day with an eager phone call to his hard-working crew in La Cabana. “How many did we execute yesterday?” he would ask.5

  Che Carries on Family Tradition

  For a communist New Man, Che had held on to a number of traditional Argentine prejudices. Anything “Yankee” was utterly loathsome. To this day polls show two-thirds of Argentines hold unfavorable opinions of the United States—the highest disapproval rate in the hemisphere. Regarding the United States, Argentina was always the France of South America—a reflexive critic.

  Che had other prejudices. Many Argentines fancy themselves Europeans in a predominantly Indian and mestizo continent. The Argentine elite’s snobbery toward Americans is more cultural than racial, however, and closely mimics the snobbery of the French (as well, perhaps, as that of our homegrown blue state “elites” toward red state “yokels”). Indeed, a recent poll showed that the higher a Latin American’s educational level, the more pronounced his anti-Americanism. 6 In Buenos Aires, as elsewhere, a liberal arts education is especially sure to be steeped in anti-Americanism. On both sides, Che’s ancestors hailed from Spanish grandees and the early viceroys of Spain’s South American empire. He was also of Irish lineage. Even here, his ancestral Lynch line was claimed as noble. Dolores Mayona Martin, a childhood friend of Che Guevara, wrote in a New York Times magazine article in 1968 of how the young Ernesto Guevara often boasted about descending from the original viceroy of the River Platte region, “roughly the Argentine equivalent of having had an ancestor on the Mayflower,” she adds.7

  Che’s mother, Celia, who inherited a small fortune and a latifundium from her parents, was an early version of a feminist harridan straight from central casting. The inherited wealth, of course, made it easy. Celia was a full-blown Marxist and a noted political debater always ready to attack U.S. imperialism.8 She always doted on her first born, little Ernestico.

  Che’s father, Ernesto, continually lost his shirt in business blunders, from trying to grow yerba mate (Argentina’s version of tea), to trying to process it, to a construction business. He finally blew most of the family’s inherited wealth and ended up selling the plantation to make ends meet.

  There’s nothing like having failed in the grubby business of business to make someone anticapitalist—and fancy himself culturally superior for it. Argentina’s Guevara de la Serna y Lynch family was a perfect example of Latin America’s limousine leftists—bumbling and bookish, pretentious, resentful, and haughty. The young Ernestico was anything but a rebel. He was a classic mama’s boy, dutifully carrying on his parents’ manifold petty snobberies and ideological prejudices.

  Writer David Sandison mentions the Guevara children’s “abiding admiration” for their parents. Most people have at least a brief period of youthful rebellion against their parents. Leave it to Che Guevara, the worldwide icon of youthful rebellion, to fail us even here.

  “In camp Che always sported an annoying little smirk that drove us nuts,” recalls associate instructor and Cuban Korean War vet Miguel Sanchez. “One day I simply got tired of looking at Che’s little shit-eating smile and blew up. ‘Twenty-five push-ups, Ernesto Guevara!’ I yelled, inches from his face, ‘And pronto!’ He grew wide-eyed, but dropped down right there and gave the twenty-five push-ups.”9

  Those who know him from posters and T-shirts thrill at Che’s apparently natural look of “untamable defiance.” Those who knew Che Guevara remember a habitual poser, an Eddie Haskell smile for Fidel, a pensive Charlie Rose-type frown when hosting Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a Wicked Witch of the West cackle for his execution victims and their families, and a Marlon Brando smolder for Alberto Korda’s camera.

  At the end of his life, his Bolivian captors marveled when they opened Che’s knapsack. The other guerrillas captured with him, all ragged and half-starved, carried nothing but weapons. Che carried scissors, a comb, a brush, even a little mirror. As we’ll see later, Che was probably preparing for the social event of the fall ’67 season—his own celebrity trial with a raucous worldwide clamor for his release. He seemed certain this would commence shortly upon his grand celebrity surrender.10

  Cuban exile Frank Fernandez recalls a run-in between his aunt and Che Guevara in Havana in early 1959. “Che was visiting different businesses at the time, throwing his weight around, trying to cow those ‘Cubiches,’ as he sneered at Cubans. He barged into the office where my aunt worked and snorted that she was una vieja burgesa (a bourgeois old bat).

  “ ‘Wrong,’ she snapped back. ‘I’m not bourgeois, I’m an aristocrat .’ This curveball threw Che off-balance and he stood there trying to look cool.

  “So my aunt she followed up with: ‘And you’re nothing but a brazen and insolent young punk.’ ”11 She lived to tell the tale. Why? Did Che have a grudging admiration for her because the man she was speaking with considered himself an aristocrat, t
oo?

  A similar story is recounted by Cuban freedom fighter Tony Navarro, whose family owned a textile mill in Cuba.

  Shortly after he became Cuba’s National Bank president, Che sent his armed goons to confiscate Tony Navarro’s mill, Textileras, which had always been efficient and profitable, employing hundreds and contributing much to Cuba’s export sector. Navarro set up a meeting with Che to explain these things and try to make him see reason. What was the point in confiscating such an enterprise, throwing out the efficient managers, replacing them with revolutionary flunkies, and wrecking it?

  An aide said, “Commander Guevara will see you now.” Navarro walked into Che’s office and made his best pitch as the great man pursed his lips and occasionally nodded. “Tony, have you read Kafka’s The Trial?”

  “No commander,” answered a puzzled Navarro. “I’ve read Metamorphosis and The Prison by Kafka, but not The Trial.”

  “Read it,” snapped Che. “It will explain much to you.” Tony was then driven back to his home by Che’s personal chauffeur.12 “Without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning,” reads the very first sentence of the book Che recommended. “A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him,” is how one reviewer sums it up. Another reviewer says, “A fictional account of an individual’s arrest, trial, conviction and execution on charges that are never explained.”13

  Tony Navarro soon joined the anti-Castro underground and risked his life daily. If Che was going to kill him, well, Navarro would go down fighting. One day, after a shootout with Che’s police, Navarro was arrested, but they did not get his identity right and he managed to escape and slip into the Venezuelan embassy, and on to the United States.

  As with the disputatious aunt, here is another case where Che’s hauteur briefly overrode his blood lust. He could have watched Tony Navarro’s execution from his La Cabana office window with visitors while eating lunch, as he liked to do. Instead, in front of a cultured man like Navarro, Che felt compelled to flaunt his own highbrow tastes and erudition. Che’s vanity allowed Tony Navarro to slip through his bloody paws.

  It is said that Che never made one genuine Cuban friend. Even Cuban communists found Che insufferable. For all his disdain of “bourgeois” traits, old-line Cuban communists like Anibal Escalante and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez secretly complained of Guevara’s own “petit bourgeois” conceits; how he preferred hobnobbing with French intellectuals rather than with Cuban Communist Party members of mixed blood. One famously portly and rumpled Cuban communist official named Francisco Brito bristled at Che’s habit of bringing in immaculately tailored and coiffed Argentine and Chilean communists to staff some of Cuba’s bureaucracy. Brito finally blurted out that the best thing for Che was “to get the hell out of Cuba!” because his diktats as Minister of Industries “were nothing put a pile of shit!”14

  Che Meets Papa Hemingway

  Around the time Alberto Korda snapped the famous photo of Che—now helping to sell snowboards, watches, and thong undies—he also snapped several of Che and Fidel chumming it up with Ernest Hemingway on May 15, 1960, at Havana’s annual Hemingway Fishing Contest. Here, we may assume, was a mutual admiration society.

  “The Cuban revolution,” Hemingway wrote in 1960, is “very pure and beautiful. . . . I’m encouraged by it. . . . The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time.”15

  Papa Hemingway’s on-again off-again friend, the novelist and author of Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos, once said that Hemingway “had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into.”16

  Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (Korda’s real name) himself was a longtime Hemingway drinking chum. So his pious objections in later years against Smirnoff ’s plans to use Che’s image on a bottle of vodka strikes many as fatuous. “I am categorically against the exploitation of Che’s image for the promotion of products such as alcohol, or for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che,” Korda carped to the U.K. Guardian. “To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka is a slur on his name and memory.”17 (With Hemingway and Korda, vodka and slur were perhaps the right words. Apparently, though, Smirnoff considers it no slur to paste the image of a mass murderer on its product.)

  But Korda did sue Smirnoff for slurring Che and won, on grounds of unauthorized use of the picture. After snapping his famous Che photo, Korda accepted a post as Castro’s personal photographer, in which post he groveled shamelessly as a Castro court eunuch until he died of a heart attack in 2001.

  In a way, John Dos Passos was right about Hemingway. Dos Passos had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War along with Hemingway, but unlike him and unlike the New York Times’s Herbert Matthews, who also ran in his circles, Dos Passos refused to turn his head when the communists began massacring the non-Stalinist left in Madrid and Barcelona. Dos Passos finally left Spain in disillusionment and disgust—a break that had begun when he visited the Soviet Union a few years earlier. Stalin was leaving nothing to chance in Spain. He was doing advance work for what he saw as an imminent victory against Franco’s forces.

  As Dos Passos prepared to cross the French border out of the cauldron of murder and treachery known as Republican Spain, Hemingway’s shrewdness (in professional matters at least) manifested itself. “Look, Dos,” Papa warned him. “If you write negatively about the communists the reviewers will ruin you forever.”18

  Hemingway was proven right. Dos Passos’s literary career crashed and burned after his return. Never mind that he wrote the truth, and as eloquently as ever.

  There were hints that shortly before his suicide, Hemingway’s infatuation with Castro and Che had begun to ebb. Did it happen when several thousand Cubans in his province were dragged from their homes and imprisoned or riddled with bullets by firing squads?

  In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway seems to excuse communist massacres as “necessary murder.” No, his crush on the gallant revolutionaries started ebbing when Papa found that this “pure and beautiful” revolution made it difficult for him to repair the pump on the gigantic swimming pool of his Cuban estate.

  Hemingway might have thanked Cuba’s minister of industries at the time, Che Guevara, for the scarcity of pool pump parts (though most Cubans were already thanking him for the scarcity of other items, such as food). Then Papa got singed by the very flames he had helped ignite. His Finca Vigia outside Havana—paid for, we may assume, from royalties earned extolling Spanish communists in For Whom the Bell Tolls—was finally stolen by Cuban communists, his fishing buddies.

  If anyone ever fit the description of the effete bourgeois latifundista whom Che claimed to scorn (though the term perfectly described his own family), it was Ernest Hemingway himself. Had Papa been in a less fashionable line of business, Che would have made short work of him.

  4

  From Military Doofus to “Heroic Guerrilla”

  Che waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill.

  —Time MAGAZINE, HAILING ITS “HEROES AND ICONS OF THE CENTURY”

  Che’s most famous book is titled Guerrilla Warfare. His famous photo is captioned “Heroic Guerrilla.” His Hollywood biopic is titled Guerrilla. And his most resounding failure came precisely as guerrilla warrior. There is no record of his prevailing in any bona-fide battle. There are precious few accounts that he actually fought in anything properly describable as a battle.

  Had Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala in 1954, who later introduced him to Raul Castro and his brother Fidel in Mexico City, he might have continued his life as a traveling hobo, mooching off women, staying in flophouses, and scribbling unreadable poetry. Che was a revolutionary Ringo Starr, who, by pure chance, fell in with the right bunch and rode their coattails to world fame. His very name, “Che,” was given him
by the Cubans who hobnobbed with him in Mexico. Argentines use the term “Che” much as Cubans use “chico,” or Michael Moore fans use “dude.” The term has an Italian rather than a Spanish pedigree. The Cubans noticed Ernesto Guevara using it, so it stuck. Fidel Castro recruited his new friend to serve as the rebel army’s doctor (on the strength of his bogus credentials) before their “invasion” of Cuba. On the harrowing boat ride through turbulent seas from the Yucatan to Cuba’s Oriente province in a decrepit old yacht, the Granma, a rebel found Che lying comatose in the boat’s cabin. He rushed to the commander. “Fidel, looks like Che’s dead!”

  “Well, if he’s dead, then throw him overboard,” replied Castro.1 Guevara, suffering the combined effects of seasickness and an asthma attack, stayed on board.

  Baptism of Fire

  Guevara’s condition did not immediately improve upon landfall. At one point, he declared: “Doctor! I think I’m dying!”2 That was “doctor” himself, Ernesto Che Guevara, gasping to fellow rebel (and bona-fide physician) Faustino Perez during their Cuban baptism of fire. The Castro rebels had landed in Cuba three days earlier on the Granma from Mexico. The Cuban army, alerted by a peasant who didn’t seem to recognize his self-appointed liberators, had ambushed them near a cane field in a place named Alegria del Pio.

  In Che’s Havana-published diaries (primary source for most of his biographers and media stories), he uses slightly different terminology regarding the incident. Much like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, Che recalls saying, “I’m hit!” But far be it from Che Guevara to stop there, so his official diary gushes forth: “Faustino, still firing away, looked at me . . . but I could read in his eyes that he considered me as good as dead. . . . Immediately, I began to think about the best way to die, since all seemed lost. I recalled an old Jack London story where the hero, aware that he is bound to freeze to death in the wastes of Alaska, leans calmly against a tree and prepares to die in a dignified manner. That was the only thing that came to my mind at that moment.”