Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  President Kennedy himself sounded off the following day. “There’s fifty-odd thousand Cuban refugees in this country,” he sneered, “all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They’re the ones putting out this kind of stuff.”41

  Exactly two days later JFK had photos taken by a U-2 spy plane of those “refugee rumors.” He saw nuclear-armed missiles pointing at American cities. The response of Kennedy and his team to the Cuban Missile Crisis has been the stuff of legend, told and retold in movies as a victory of shrewd dealing and brinksmanship. In fact, the solution from the best and the brightest was to team up with the Soviets and grant the Cuban communist regime its mutually assured protection.

  “Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said,” said Castro himself. “Perhaps one day they’ll be made public.”42

  “We can’t say anything public about this agreement,” said Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis. “It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.”43 For its part in the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal, the administration secretly agreed not to oppose Castro’s government in Cuba.

  On October 28, 1962, when news that part of the “resolution” of the Cuban Missile Crisis meant removing the missiles from Cuba, thousands of Cuban troops suddenly surrounded the missile sites. A rattled Soviet foreign minister, Anastas Mikoyan, rushed to Havana and met with Castro. The KGB itself feared the Cuban commandos might attack, take control of the missiles, and start World War III.

  Mikoyan somehow defused the situation during his meeting with Castro, no doubt explaining that his regime had come out of the deal smelling like a rose. “Mutually Assured Protection,” you might call it, with Castro and Che protected by both the Soviets and the United States. True to its word, the United States immediately started rounding up the Cuban exiles who had been launching commando raids against Castro from South Florida.

  The Kennedy administration launched into this effort with gusto, giving the U.S. Coast Guard six new planes and twelve new boats and boosting their manpower by 20 percent. JFK called British prime minister Harold Macmillan and informed him that some of those crazy Cubans had moved their operations from South Florida to the Bahamas. Her Majesty’s Navy was only too happy to help. Thus, the very Cuban exiles being trained and armed to launch raids on Cuba by the CIA only the week before were now being arrested by U.S. and British forces.44

  What about Goodwin’s belief that Che lacked “propaganda or bombast”? A month later—thinking he was speaking off the record to the London Daily Worker—Che Guevara explained: “If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims!”45

  Che Guevara himself, of course, did not want to be one of the victims of a nuclear exchange he was only too ready to start. He and Fidel had priority reservations in the Soviet bomb shelter outside Havana. The Soviet ambassador of the day, Alexander Alexiev, reports that Castro and Che had made sure of that.46

  As early as 1955, Ernesto Guevara had written to his doting mother that a struggle against the United States was his “true destiny.” “We must learn the lesson of absolute abhorrence of imperialism. Against that class of hyena there is no other medium than extermination!”47 In October 1962, Guevara had gotten tantalizingly close to that medium.

  Richard Nixon summed up the Cuban Missile Crisis “resolution” best. “First we goofed an invasion—now we give the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard.”48

  Safeguarded by U.S. policy and lavished with Soviet arms, the Cuban communists’ revolution had a secure base to hatch and breed guerrilla wars in pursuit of the dream of “continental liberation” with the Andes as the “Sierra of the continent.” All the odds were with them. With a halfway-competent guerrilla leader as head of the DGI’s “Liberation Department,” they might have pulled it off. Instead they had Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

  5

  Fidel’s Favorite Executioner

  [Che presented a] Christlike image . . . with his mortuary gaze it is as if Guevara looks upon his killers and forgives them.

  —Newsweek WRITER AND CHE BIOGRAPHER JORGE CASTAÑEDA

  [Che’s image] derives from a visual language . . . it also references a classical Christ-like demeanor.

  —TRISHA ZIFF, GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM CURATOR

  It was out of love, like a perfect knight, that Che had set out. In a sense he was like an early saint.

  —The Nation COLUMNIST I. F. STONE AFTER MEETING GUEVARA

  Che’s prescription for the ideal revolutionary as an “effective, violent cold killing machine” implies a certain detachment or nonchalance toward murder. In fact, Che gave ample evidence of taking to the task with relish. Except in battle, Che was always quite a warm killing machine.

  “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” This is a passage from Che’s famous Motorcycle Diaries that Robert Redford somehow managed to omit from his touching film. The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” rarely reached Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged, and blindfolded men and boys.

  Thirsting for Blood

  In late January 1957, a few weeks after his dauntless Baptism of Fire when “all seemed lost,” and Che stoically braced for a “dignified death” (from a wound that didn’t require one stitch), he sent a letter to his discarded wife, Hilda Gadea. “Dear vieja, I’m here in Cuba’s hills, alive and thirsting for blood.”1 His thirst would soon be slaked.

  In that very month of January 1957, Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra, accused of being an informer for Batista’s forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard, Universo Sanchez. To everyone’s surprise, Che Guevara—a lowly rebel soldier/medic at the time, not a comandante yet—volunteered to accompany Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm. Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.

  Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the first execution of a Castro rebel. Without warning, Che stepped forward and fired his pistol into Guerra’s temple. “He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine,” Che wrote in his diaries.

  Che’s father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. “I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”2

  This can-do attitude caught Castro’s eye. More executions of assorted “deserters,” “informers,” and “war criminals” quickly followed, all with Che’s enthusiastic participation. One was of a captured Batista soldier, a seventeen-year-old boy totally green to the guerrilla “war”—hence his easy capture. First Che interrogated him.

  “I haven’t killed anyone, comandante!” the terrified boy answered Che. “I just got out here! I’m an only son, my mother’s a widow, and I joined the army for the salary, to send it to her every month . . . don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!—why?”3

  Che barked the orders and the boy was trussed up, shoved in front of a recently dug pit, and murdered. This was the same man Ariel Dorfman wrote of in Time as the “generous Che who tended wounded enemy soldiers.”

  Castro thought executing Batista soldiers was incredibly stupid, compared to the propaganda value of releasing them. But he recognized Che’s value as an ardent executioner. Castro was already thinking ahead to his stealth takeover of Cuba, planning his version of Stalin’s Katyn massacre, and wit
h the same rationale: to decapitate—literally and figuratively—any future counter-revolutionaries, future contras. So by summer 1957, Che had been promoted to full-fledged major or comandante, the rebel army’s highest rank. His fame was spreading.

  But not all were favorably impressed. In mid-1958, a rebel soldier, Reynaldo Morfa, was wounded and made his way to Dr. Hector Meruelo in the nearby town of Cienfuegos. The good doctor patched him up and a few weeks later informed him that he was well enough to return to Che’s column.

  “No, doctor,” Reynaldo responded. “Please be discreet with this because it could cost me my life, but I’ve learned that Che is nothing but a murderer. I’m a revolutionary but I’m also a Christian. I’ll go and join Camilo’s column—but never Che’s.”4

  Agustin Soberon was the first Cuban reporter to visit Che’s Sierra Maestra camp to interview him. “I was a reporter for the Cuban magazine Bohemia and visited Che in March 1958 at his camp in La Plata,” he recalls. “It was impossible to break the ice with Guevara, I’ve never met anyone with such a despotic and arrogant nature. First I asked him about his wife, Hilda, whom he left in Mexico to come on the Granma with Fidel. ‘I don’t know anything about her since I left—and I don’t care anything about her,’ he snapped. Okay, so I then ask him about his profession of medical doctor. ‘I’m not interested in medicine at all,’ he snaps. ‘I dislike it.’ ” Soberon continues: “That night I slept in a hut at the camp. A young rebel sleeping next to me was having what looked to me like a terrible nightmare. He was rolling back and forth, murmuring, ‘Execute him—execute him—execute him.’ So the next morning I asked him about it. I’ll never forget this, the young rebel’s name was Humberto Rodriguez and he explained how he’d been put in charge of firing squads. What he’d been saying during the nightmare were Che’s constant commands, still ringing in his ears. Apparently they troubled him. A little while later, Che himself comes over and announces they’re tying a victim to the stake. Would I like to come over and watch the firing squad at work? I didn’t. I’d seen enough and heard enough. I left.”5

  All these victims were campesinos, peasants, of whom Che himself wrote that their “cooperation comes after our planned terror.”6

  Ten months after Soberon’s visit to his Sierra campsite, Che entered Havana and moved promptly into that infamous old Spanish fortress, La Cabana. “The shouts of Viva Cuba Libre! and Viva Cristo Rey! followed by the firing-squad blasts made the walls of that Fortress tremble,” recalls Armando Valladares, who served twenty-two years in Castro’s Cuban prisons.

  During these bloody months, Time magazine featured Cuban revolutionary comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara on its cover and crowned him the “Brains of the Cuban Revolution.” (Fidel Castro was “the heart” and Raul Castro “the fist.”) “Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating,” Time gushed, “Che guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor.”

  The tone of the Time article was in perfect league with other major media—and utterly wrong. Guevara was no more the brains of the Cuban revolution than Feliks Dzerzhinski had been the brains of the Bolshevik revolution, or Himmler the brains of the National Socialist revolution, or Beria the brains behind Stalinism. Che performed the same role for Fidel Castro that Dzerzhinski performed for Lenin, Himmler for Hitler, and Beria for Stalin. He was the snarling enforcer, the regime’s chief executioner.

  Under Che, La Cabana fortress had been converted into a Caribbean Lubyanka. His approach was thoroughly Chekist. “Always interrogate your prisoners at night,” Che commanded his goons, “a man is easier to cow at night, his mental resistance is always lower.”7

  Exact numbers may never be known, but the orders of magnitude of these murders are not in doubt. José Vilasuso, a Cuban prosecutor who quickly defected in horror and disgust, estimates that Che signed 400 death warrants during the first three months of his command in La Cabana. A Basque priest named Iòaki de Aspiazu, often on hand to perform confessions and last rites, says Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad during that period. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1956, writes in his book Yo Soy El Che! that Guevara sent 1,892 men to the firing squad.

  In his book Che Guevara: A Biography, Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track down Che in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk admitted to “a couple thousand” executions. But he shrugged them off as all being of “imperialist spies and CIA agents.”

  Che’s bloodbath in the first months of 1959 was not conducted for either vengeance or justice. Like Stalin’s massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin’s Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che’s firing-squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise.

  Five years earlier, while a communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan officer corps, with CIA assistance, rise against the regime of Jacobo Arbenz, sending him and his communist minions into exile. (For those leftist scholars who still claim that Jacobo Arbenz was an innocent “nationalist” victimized by the fiendish United Fruit Company and its CIA proxies, please note: Arbenz sought exile, not in France, or Spain, or even Mexico, the traditional havens for deposed Latin American politicians, but in Czechoslovakia, within the Soviet bloc. The coup went into motion, not when Arbenz started nationalizing United Fruit property, but when a cargo of Soviet-bloc weapons arrived.) “Arbenz didn’t execute enough people,” was how Ernesto Guevara explained the Guatemalan coup’s success.8

  Fidel and Che didn’t want a repetition of the Guatemalan coup in Cuba. Their massacres cowed and terrorized. Public show trials underscored the message. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were often public, too. Visitors to La Cabana, even prisoners’ families, all walked in front of the blood-spattered paredon. This was no coincidence.

  “It was a wall painted in blood,” recalls Margot Menendez, who entered to try to convince Guevara that her brother was innocent. “You couldn’t miss that horrible wall. It seemed to announce that we were entering hell.”

  “Your brother wore the wrong uniform,” Che smirked at the sobbing Margot Menendez. That very night Che’s firing squad murdered the boy. Another jailed at La Cabana by Che in the early months of the revolution was a Cuban gentleman named Pierre San Martin. “Sixteen of us would stand while the other sixteen tried to sleep on the cold filthy floor,” San Martin recalled in 1997. “We took shifts that way. Dozens were led from the cells to the firing squad daily. The volleys kept us awake. We felt that any one of those minutes would be our last.

  “One morning the horrible sound of that rusty steel door swinging open startled us awake and Che’s guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. He was a boy, maybe fourteen years old. His face was bruised and smeared with blood. ‘What did you do?’ we asked, horrified. ‘I tried to defend my papa,’ gasped the bloodied boy. ‘But they sent him to the firing squad.’ ”

  Soon Che’s guards returned. The rusty steel door opened and they yanked the boy out of the cell. “We all rushed to the cell’s window that faced the execution pit,” recalls San Martin. “We simply couldn’t believe they’d murder him.

  “Then we spotted him, strutting around the blood-drenched execution yard with his hands on his waist and barking orders—Che Guevara himself. ‘Kneel down!’ Che barked at the boy.

  “ ‘Assassins!’ we screamed from our window.

  “ ‘I said: KNEEL DOWN!’ Che barked again.

  “The boy stared Che resolutely in the face. ‘If you’re going to kill me,’ he yelled, ‘you’ll have to do it while I’m standing! Men die standing!’ ”

  “Murderers!” the men yelled desperately from the
ir cells. “Then we saw Che unholstering his pistol. He put the barrel to the back of the boy’s neck and blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.

  “We erupted, ‘Murderers!—Assassins!’ Che finally looked up at us, pointed his pistol, and emptied his clip in our direction. Several of us were wounded by his shots.”9

  “The blond boy could not have been much over fifteen,” recalls NBC correspondent Edward Scott about another execution he witnessed at La Cabana in February 1959. “As they wrestled him to the stake the boy spoke eloquently to the firing squad, telling them repeatedly that he was innocent.” This seemed to rattle the firing-squad members, and at Herman Marks’s order of “Fuego! ” only one bullet struck the bound boy. A furious Marks walked up and demolished the boy’s skull with two blasts from his .45. Then he summoned his bodyguards and ordered the entire firing squad arrested. Apparently they’d fallen down on the job.10 Who was Herman Marks? He was an American, an ex-convict, Marine deserter, and mental case with the U.S. law close on his heels in 1957. At age 30, Marks was convicted of raping a teenage girl and sent to the state prison in Waupun, Wisconsin for 31ł2 years.11 He was also one of the very few people to whom Che was close.

  Marks escaped to Cuba, joined Che’s rebels in the Sierra Maestra, became a gung-ho “revolutionary,” and was quickly promoted to “captain” (apparently theft and rape constituted no “crime against revolutionary morals”). As early as the Sierra skirmishes, Marks’s specialty had been jumping into the freshly dug pit and shattering the skulls of Che’s firing-squad victims with the coup de grace blast from his .45 pistol. Later, during the Che-ordered firing-squad marathons in La Cabana, Marks really started earning his keep. He named La Cabana his personal “hunting lodge,” and his .45 barely had time to cool between assignments.