Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  There’s ample evidence that Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a very willing tool in similar Stalinist butchery against Cuban anticommunists and noncommunists during the anti-Batista rebellion. “For some reason,” recalls anti-Batista rebel Larry Daley, “it was always the known anticommunists who kept disappearing from our ranks. Che’s march from the Sierra to Las Villas and Santa Clara involved very little fighting by his column. His path had been cleared by another column led by rebel commander Jaime Vega, who was known as a noncommunist. Vega’s forces kept running into ambushes by the Cuban army and air force and took fairly heavy casualties (relatively speaking). We suspect they were being tipped off by Castro and Che confidants.”

  From Havana to Santiago, the Castroites had a history of this type of treachery. Some of the known anticommunists among the rebels were executed by the rebels outright, but others, like Frank Pais and Rene Latour, kept running blindly into Batista’s army or police and were ambushed, or left to die in skirmishes where most communists survived. One entire boatload of eighty anti-Batista rebels who landed in Oriente province in a yacht known as the Corinthia from Florida was promptly defeated and captured by a Batista force. Heaven knows, such lethal efficiency was not characteristic of the bulk of Batista’s army. The Corinthia crew were known to be noncommunist, and had no affiliation with Castro whatsoever, but were probably infiltrated by his agents. Another tipoff? Many anti-Batista people of the time strongly suspect it.

  A bit earlier, in the Sierra, a brave and well-known anticommunist named Armando Cañizarez had a famous run-in with Guevara at his camp. They didn’t see eye to eye on the recent Soviet invasion of Hungary. “Che was all for it,” recalls Armando’s brother Julio, who was also a rebel and witnessed the encounter. “ ‘The Soviets had every right—even a duty—to invade Hungary,’ Che said outright. The Hungarian rebels were ‘fascists! CIA agents!’—the whole bit. It sounded like he was reading straight out of Pravda or Tass. We gaped.

  “Sure, to hear of Che Guevara reading straight from communist propaganda sheets may not sound odd now,” says Julio. “But remember, in 1957 Castro and all the rebel leaders claimed to be anti-communist, prodemocracy, etcetera. And many of us rank and file were indeed anticommunist.

  “So Che’s attitude caught us off-guard. Armando kept getting hotter and hotter as he argued with Guevara. I could see it in his face. He couldn’t believe this Argentine guy—remember, this was early, Che wasn’t a famous comandante yet—was defending that naked aggression and terrible slaughter of Hungarians who were only fighting for their freedom and national independence, which we thought we were doing at the time ourselves. Armando stepped back and I could see he was balling his fist. He was preparing to bash Guevara—to punch his lights out!

  “So I moved in and asked Armando to come over by me. But he was so worked up I had to grab him by the arm and drag him over. A little while later, after we’d cooled off a bit, another rebel soldier came up and whispered to us that we’d better get the hell outta there—and fast. We did get away from Guevara, but continued in the anti-Batista fight.”17

  After the victory, the Cañizarez brothers watched in fury as Che and Castro implemented their covert plan to communize Cuba. They both came to the United States and promptly returned to Cuba with carbines in hand at the Bay of Pigs, where Armando gave his life for Cuban freedom after expending his last bullet. To this day, his family doesn’t know where Armando Cañizarez is buried.

  “We have to create one unified command, with one comandante-in-chief.” Che laid down this Stalinist ground rule to his astonished Bolivian guerrillas shortly after he snuck into that country to start his guerrilla war. “That’s how we did it in Cuba. The guerrilla chief has to take all measures that will assure his future control of power, totally. We have to start early in destroying any and all other revolutionary groups that presume to exist outside of our control. Now, we may use other groups to help eliminate the primary enemy. But that doesn’t mean we’ll share any power with them after the victory. The Cuban experience is valid for the entire continent.”18

  Castro’s Press Hut

  At one point, when it seemed there were more newsmen in Cuba’s mountains than guerrillas or soldiers, it got so bad that a shack in Castro’s “guerrilla camp” in the Sierra Maestra actually had a sign, “Press Hut,” to accommodate the parade of American newspeople lugging their cameras, lighting equipment, sound equipment, makeup, and lunch baskets.19

  In March 1957, CBS had sent two reporters, Robert Taber and Wendell Hoffman, into the Sierra with their microphones and cameras to interview Castro and his rebel “fighters.” The CBS men emerged with “The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters,” a breathtaking news-drama that ran on prime-time U.S. TV.

  For the record: Botanically speaking, Cuba has no “jungle,” the “fighters” numbered about two dozen at the time (though both the New York Times and CBS mentioned “hundreds”), and the “fighting” itself up to that time had consisted of a few ambushes and murders of Batista soldiers, usually while they were asleep in their rural barracks.

  CBS correspondent Robert Taber’s services to Castro had just begun, however. A few years later he was a founding father of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an outfit whose fifteen minutes of fame came in November 1963 when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines. Dan Rather soon picked up the torch from the “unbiased” Robert Taber.20

  The U.S. embassy’s public affairs officer in Havana, Richard Cushing, even served as an unofficial tour guide for the throngs of American newspeople flocking into the Sierra to interview the Cuban rebels. And one rebel who hadn’t seen Castro since their days in joint Mexican exile met up with him in his mountain camp. “Pero Chico!” he blurted. “You’re getting so fat! How much weight you’ve put on!”

  Didn’t he realize? Castro’s gut-busting “guerrilla war” was a moveable feast.

  Typically, Che Guevara doesn’t even merit credit for the perfectly sensible scheme of bribing Batista’s army, then portraying little skirmishes to the international press as Caribbean Stalingrads. What about the source of these funds? They came, as we saw, from Fidel’s snookering of Batista’s wealthy political opponents. How had he convinced these hard-nosed businessmen to fund his July 26 Movement? By speaking the language of democracy and prosperity.

  In late 1957, Castro signed an agreement called the Miami Pact with several anti-Batista Cuban politicians and ex-ministers in exile at the time. Che Guevara, never one to grasp the subtleties of Castro’s schemes, went ballistic over the Miami Pact, denouncing it as a shameful deal with “bourgeois” elements. “I refuse to lend my historic name to that crime!” he wrote. “We rebels have proffered our asses in the most despicable act of buggery that Cuban history is likely to recall!”21 Che underestimated the craftiness of Castro, mistaking the buggerers for the buggerees.

  That a “guerrilla war” with “peasant and worker backing” overthrew Batista is among the century’s most widespread and persistent academic fables. But no Castroites who participated actually believed it—except, of course, Guevara. The Associated Press dispatches about Castro and Che’s “war” were actually concocted and written by Castro’s own agent in New York, Mario Llerena, who admits as much in his book, The Unsuspected Revolution. Llerena was also the contact with Herbert Matthews. (National Review’s famous cartoon in 1960 showing a beaming Castro saying, “I got my job through the New York Times!” nailed it.)

  To give them credit, most of Castro’s comandantes knew their Batista war had been an elaborate ruse. After the glorious victory, they were content to run down and execute the few Batista men motivated enough to shoot back (most of these were of humble background), settle into the mansions stolen from Batistianos, and enjoy the rest of their booty.

  British historian Hugh Thomas, though a Labor member who sympathized with Castro’s revolution in his younger years, studied mountains of records (outside Castro’s Cuba) and simply could not evade the truth. His massive a
nd authoritative historical volume Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom sums it up very succinctly: “In all essentials, Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.”

  “The Guerrilla war in Cuba was notable for the marked lack of military skills or offensive spirit in the soldiers of either side,” writes military historian Arthur Campbell, in his authoritative Guerillas: A History and Analysis. “The Fidelistas were completely lacking in the basic military arts or in any experience of fighting as a co-coordinated force. Their tactics . . . were confined to road ambushes which were seldom carried to close quarters, to patrols whose sole object was to fire at some isolated target far removed from the main communication arteries. . . . The Batistianos suffered from a near-paralysis of the will to fight . . . Fidel Castro was opposed by a weak and inefficient regime which had virtually worked its way out of power before the guerrilla war even started . . . this short campaign was noted . . . for its low number of casualties.”

  As we shall see, Che Guevara possessed an immense capacity for self-deception regarding his “guerrilla war,” helping to set the stage for his doom in Bolivia. In Cuba few fought against him. In the Congo few fought with him. In Bolivia, Che finally started getting a taste of both. In short order, he would be betrayed by the very peasants he was out to “liberate.”

  Che as Guerrilla Professor

  Left-wing scholars also excuse Che’s radicalism as a response to the April 1961 Bay of Pigs attack against an innocent nationalist revolution that wished only to be left alone. They ignore the fact that every single invader, including the commanders, was a Cuban. If anything, the documentary evidence shows that Castro and Che dispatched five of their own versions of the Bay of Pigs invasions before the United States had even started contingency planning for theirs.

  Shortly after entering Havana, Che had formed “the Liberation Department” in Cuba’s State Security Department and was already advising, equipping, and dispatching guerrilla forces to attempt to duplicate the Cuban rebellion (as he saw it) in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, and Nicaragua. Every one of those guerrilla forces, Cuban-communist led and staffed, was wiped out in short order, usually to the last man. Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Luis Somoza in Nicaragua weren’t about to follow Batista’s example in Cuba of pussyfooting around against guerrillas. A few years later Che equipped, advised, and sent more guerrillas to Argentina and Guatemala. Again, they were stomped out almost to a man. These guerrilla expeditions cost the lives of two of Che’s fatally credulous friends: the Guatemalan Julio Caceres and the Argentine Jorge Massetti. The story of the latter is worth retelling. Shortly after Che became the jailer and executioner of La Cabana, he flew in his Argentine flunkie friends. He ensconced them in stolen Cuban mansions and had them chauffeured around Havana in stolen Cuban cars. Che’s comrades were quite impressed with the local boy who had made good. Among these Argentines was an unemployed journalist, the ill-fated Jorge Massetti, whom Che had brought to Cuba to start a press agency, an unemployed lawyer named Ricardo Rojo, who later authored the reverential tome My Friend Che, and an unemployed caricaturist and ceramic artist named Ciro Bustos, who became a globe-trotting and self-professed intelligence ace.

  One day in 1962, while meditating in his Havana office, Che had divined that “objective conditions for a revolution”22 had suddenly sprouted in his native Argentina and hatched a plan. He decided that his hardy and intrepid Argentine friends could be the revolutionary vanguard to hack their way into the northern Argentine jungle, set up a guerrilla foco and lead the masses to storm Buenos Aires’s Presidential Palace as boldly as Paris’s vainqueurs had stormed the Bastille.

  Soon Che’s friends had graduated from Che’s Cuban academy of guerrilla war and proclaimed themselves “the People’s Guerrilla Army.” Weeks later, with the help of Cuban officers, they slipped through Bolivia and into northern Argentina, where they had set up a clever “underground” of rugged revolutionary sleuths and gun-slingers consisting mainly of professors and administrators from Cordoba University’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. A few philosophy students and bored bank tellers also rallied to the cause, hobbling into the guerrilla foco with severely blistered feet and plucking fleas from their legs—but boosting the ranks of “the People’s Guerrilla Army” to almost two dozen.

  Soon all guerrilleros were issuing fire-breathing “War Communiques” from their bug- and snake-infested camp, poised to overthrow the democratically elected Argentine government.

  The only Argentine “people” they ever recruited were a few more students and professional misfits like themselves. Within a month they were starving, aching from more blisters and sprained ankles, and scratching maniacally at mosquito and tick bites, all the while bickering and betraying each other. Within two months, and before a shot had been fired in anger against any Argentine force, three “guerrilla” slackers were executed by firing squad on Massetti’s orders. Che had taught Massetti well.

  Local campesinos finally got tired of all the pasty-faced intellectuals skulking around. Buenos Aires dispatched a couple of patrols and wiped them out in a few days.

  Che never got a chance to make his grand guerrilla entrance into his homeland, and the ever-acute Bustos had slipped away before things got really hot. (We’ll encounter him later in Bolivia.)

  An escapee from one of Che’s “guerrilla schools,” Juan de Dios Marin, tells a blood-curdling story.

  Juan was a Venezuelan recruit into one such camp that sprang up on the vast property of Che’s stolen luxurious seaside estate, Tarara, fifteen miles east of Havana, which Che had “requisitioned” for health reasons. “I am ill,” Che wrote in the Cuban newspaper Revolución. “The doctors recommended a house in a place removed from daily visits.” Apparently, Che’s doctors also prescribed a yacht harbor, as well as that huge swimming pool with the waterfall, and, of course, the futuristic television.

  “This guerrilla school had fifteen hundred recruits,” recalls Marin. “We trained sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. The training lasts four months and six thousand communist guerrillas were turned out every year. The program was run by Spanish Civil War veteran Alberto Bayo. Our instructors were mainly Russians and Czechs. . . . The trainers and guides watched us constantly. Two boys who tried to sneak out one night were hauled in front of a firing squad and shot. The primary training manual is titled 150 Principles Every Guerrilla Should Know by Alberto Bayo.” Che did not instruct, and the Russians knew better than to use his manual.

  Juan de Dios Marin finally became disillusioned and tried to escape. He was caught, savagely beaten, and finally lined up in front of a firing squad. “The wall was splattered with dried blood, and without a blindfold I found myself staring at the muzzles of six rifle barrels,” he recalls. “The shots went off and I thought I’d passed out. In a few seconds I realized they had shot blanks.”23

  This was a favorite interrogation technique for the Che-trained police, a sort of good-cop/bad-cop ploy that often bore fruit when the rattled prisoner suddenly realized he was alive.

  The only open skeptic of these revolutionary cadres was Castro. “These foreigners are nothing but troublemakers,” he told a Cuban rebel named Lazaro Ascencio right after the revolutionary triumph. “Know what I’m going to do with Che Guevara? I’m going to send him to Santo Domingo and see if Trujillo kills him.”24

  How serious was Castro here? We can only guess. Castro’s immediate solution to occupying Che was to assign him as commander of La Cabana, an assignment shrewdly matched to Che’s aptitude and abilities.

  Che and “Imperialism’s First Defeat” (the Bay of Pigs)

  Castro and his court scribes declare the Bay of Pigs invasion “Imperialism’s First Defeat.” This should have been Che’s crowning moment, the highlight of his career, such as it was. Instead, most of the fourteen hundred freedom fighters trapped on that bloody beach saw more combat in three days than the “Heroic Guerrilla” saw his entire life
—probably twice as much.

  The invasion plan included a CIA squad dispatching three row-boats off the coast of Pinar del Rio in western Cuba, 350 miles from the true invasion site. They were loaded with time-release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors, and a tape-recording of battle. This area of Cuba was closest to the United States, making it a logical choice for any amphibious landing. So the ruse made sense, just as in World War II when Hitler was tricked into believing that the main Allied landing was coming at Calais, even as the invasion stormed Normandy.

  Castro, as well as Che, decided that the action three hundred miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse. The real invasion was coming in the western Pinar del Rio right on the Yankees’ doorstep and—as luck would have it—Che Guevara’s area of command!

  Che stormed over with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded, and waited for the “Yankee-mercenary” attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs, and mirrors put on a show just offshore.

  It was later revealed that during the smoke-and-mirror show Che had managed to almost lobotomize himself with a misfire. The bullet pierced Che’s chin and exited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post-April-1961 pictures of the gallant Che. Che hagiographers Jon Lee Anderson, Jorge Castañeda, and Paco Taibo all admit that Che’s own pistol went off just under his face.

  That Che missed a direct role in the defeat of imperialism troubles his hagiographers almost as much as it troubled Che himself. Ivy League luminary, Mexican politician, and Newsweek writer Jorge Castañeda explained that “Che’s contribution to the victory was crucial” in his Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. “Cuba’s 200,000 militiamen played a central role in the victory. They allowed Castro to deploy lightly armed, mobile forces to all possible landing points, forming a huge early-warning network. The militia’s training was entrusted to the Department of Instruction of the Rebel Armed Forces, headed by Che since 1960. His contribution to the victory was thus crucial. Without the militias, Castro’s military strategy would not have been viable; without Che the militias would not have been reliable.”25