Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  Che’S Room with a View

  In La Cabana, Marks would bring his pet dog to work with him. “A huge dog,” recalls Roberto Martin-Perez, who suffered twenty-eight years in Castro’s Gulag (over three times as long as Alexander Solzhenitzyn and Natan Sharansky spent in the Soviet Gulag) and is today married to Miami radio star Ninoska Perez. “The dog looked like a German shepherd-hound cross of some kind. He followed Marks everywhere.”

  Whatever his pedigree, the dog’s specialty was happily bounding up after the firing-squad volley and lapping up the blood that oozed from the shattered heads and bodies of the murdered. We can assume that Che was watching and gloating from his window. After all, one of Che’s first acts upon entering La Cabana was to order a section of wall torn out from his office so he could watch his beloved firing squads at work.

  Another of Marks’s amusements was walking down the dark, dank halls of the prison fortress, laughing crazily and rattling the bars of the cells. After he got the attention of the condemned men and boys, he’d ask them behind which ear they wanted the coup de grace from his .45 pistol. A real cut-up, this Herman Marks. “Marks was like a butcher killing cattle in an abattoir,” finally wrote (of all people!) Herbert Matthews of the New York Times.

  “We’d hear the clump of the bootsteps coming down the hall and wondered who was next,” remembers one prisoner, Roberto Martin-Perez. “Sometimes it was Marks who would stop in front of a cell and point. Then he’d walk to the next one and point. He might pass two more, then stop again. Men were dragged out of the cell and a bit later we’d hear the volley. It was hard to sleep under such conditions. You never knew when your turn was coming. Somehow I made it, but I lost many friends. During one week in 1962, we counted four hundred firing-squad blasts.”

  Technically, Che Guevara was no longer in command of La Cabana after September 1959. But it was still his system of justice, with firing squads piling up corpses throughout Cuba. Guevara established it, on Castro’s orders, cranked it into high gear, and always claimed it proudly, as we saw in his famous U.N. speech. “Executions? Certainly, we execute!”

  “There was something seriously wrong with Guevara,” says Roberto Martin-Perez. “Castro killed and ordered killing—for sure he killed. But he killed, it seemed to us, motivated by his power lust, to maintain his hold on power, to eliminate rivals and enemies—along with potential rivals and potential enemies. For Castro it was a utilitarian slaughter, that’s all. Guevara, on the other hand, seemed to relish it. He appeared to revel in the bloodletting for its own sake. You could somehow see it in his face as he watched the men dragged out of their cells.”

  As it happened, Señor Roberto Martin-Perez was childhood friends with Aleida March, Che Guevara’s widow. The Castroites certainly had utilitarian reasons to jail Roberto Martin-Perez. “More than hating Castro, Che, and their toadies, I despised them,” he admits. “Knowing how they’d taken power, I felt contempt. All that guerrilla war stuff was utterly bogus. It was a huge con job. They had a few shootouts, a few skirmishes, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with taking power without much bloodshed. But then to start strutting around like they were battle-hardened heroes and ‘mighty guerrilla warriors,’ etcetera. It was almost laughable. As a kid, I’d known one of their bunch, Efigenio Ameijeiras, who after their victory was suddenly promoted to ‘head of the revolutionary national police,’ where he immediately started jailing and torturing people.

  “Ameijeiras had been a purse snatcher and a hubcap thief a few months before. He even tried to sell me some stolen hubcaps and stolen watches—good grief! So then I have to see this bunch acclaimed as ‘heroes’ and ‘idealists,’ etcetera by the New York Times? Had I gotten out? In ten seconds I’d have grabbed a gun and gone against them again,” says Martin-Perez.12

  He was incapable of masking his scorn, and in prison he suffered horribly for it. Even at age nineteen, Martin-Perez was known among his captors and prison guards as “El Cojuno” (the ballsy one). “One day I’d gotten particularly smart-mouthed, I guess,” he remembers. “So they dragged me down to the torture cell and hung me by my wrists, behind my back, with my feet exactly an inch from the floor. I could touch it with my tippy-toes every now and then. They had the elevation exactly right. After all, Che himself had called in the KGB to train the Cuban police. They hung me there for seventeen days—exactly seventeen. I still remember it well.”

  Roberto Martin-Perez was moved from La Cabana to another prison, where his reputation had preceded him. “Hah! So you’re El Cojuno?” sneered the new prison chief upon calling him out. Then he took out his pistol and aimed carefully. “He hit me in the leg,” recalls Martin-Perez, “and I fell grimacing. Blam!—he hit me in the other leg. Blam! In the arm with his third shot.”

  All told, Roberto Martin-Perez took six bullets. “The last one finally hit me in the crotch.” He smirks. “I don’t really know if he was trying to kill me, or what. But he did shoot one of my testicles off. I suppose that’s what he was aiming at, given my nickname at the time. But typical for these ‘expert guerrilla warriors’—as the New York Times and, to this day, all the exalted college professors acclaim these idiots—he couldn’t even hit a target from five feet away.”

  At sixty-six, Roberto Martin-Perez is hale, hearty, gregarious, and good-natured. He laughs loud and often. Incredibly, he laughs after almost thirty years in Castro’s dungeons. Martin-Perez survived one of the longest political prison sentences of the twentieth century.

  A Romanian journalist named Stefan Bacie visited Cuba in early 1959 and was fortunate enough to get an audience with the already famous Che Guevara, whom he’d also met briefly in Mexico City. The meeting between Bacie and Guevara took place in Che’s office in La Cabana. Upon entering, the Romanian saw Che motioning him over to his office’s newly constructed window.

  Stefan Bacie got there just in time to hear the command of “Fuego!” and the blast from the firing squad and see the condemned man crumple and convulse. The stricken journalist immediately left and composed a poem, titled “I No Longer Sing of Che.”13

  “I no longer sing of Che any more than I would of Stalin,” go the first lines.

  Besides his demanding job in the La Cabana killing grounds, Herman Marks also served as “security director” at Havana’s El Principe prison, already packed to suffocation with political prisoners. Within a year, stadiums, schools, and movie theaters throughout Cuba became makeshift prison camps also. The roundup of political prisoners required it.

  On June 3, 1959, Captain Herman Marks took a break from his demanding profession to stand as witness at Che’s wedding to Aleida March. Captain Marks was among the lucky few, and the envy of many revolutionaries. Che’s wedding was the hottest ticket of Havana’s social season. It would take until 1961 for the erratic Marks to finally run afoul of the revolution. He somehow slithered back into the country that had already revoked his citizenship. (Given his Castrophilia, it’s a wonder Marks did not become a scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies, or CNN’s Latin America correspondent.) The man who replaced Marks as the humanistic revolution’s “security director” also had an impressive resume. He was Ramon Mercader, the Stalinist assassin who had driven an ice-ax into Leon Trotsky’s forehead in 1940.

  Castro’s fervently “nationalist” revolution, widely hailed as eradicating humiliating foreign influences from Cuba, overran Cuba with rude, malodorous Russian communists. It had as its main executioners of Cuban patriots an Argentine hobo and a genuine American psycho.

  Cuban Blood for Sale

  Biographer Jorge Castañeda stresses that Che operated from an ethical and humanistic stance. Given the rate of firing-squad executions in Cuba in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, thousands of gallons of valuable blood were gushing from the bodies of young men and boys, soaking uselessly into the mud, washing into gutters, or getting licked up by Herman Marks’s hound. What a waste, reasoned Cuba’s new rulers.

  Heaven knows that Cuba, then as now, h
ad a crying need for some foreign exchange. And here was an ocean of fresh, plasma-rich blood freed from its confines by bullets and spilling in torrents daily. Let’s collect it and sell it, reasoned the cash-hungry communist regime for which Che ministered.

  Below is a court record from a lawsuit filed by the family of a U.S. citizen, Howard Anderson, murdered by a Cuban firing squad in April 1961.

  Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Cir. April 13, 2003): “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”

  After the volley at La Cabana’s blood-spattered wall, Howard Anderson’s sparse blood soaked into the same soil and bricks as that of Rogelio Gonzalez, Virgilio Campaneria, and Alberto Tapia, all Havana University students and members of Catholic Action. Like Howard Anderson, they refused blindfolds. These young men all died yelling, “Long Live Christ the King!”

  Fourteen thousand young men would join them in mass graves shortly, on the orders of Ted Turner’s chum Fidel and the icon of Burlington Industries’ T-shirts, Che.

  Herman Marks’s hound might have found less blood to lap up, but Havana’s birds were gorging on flesh. “Those firing-squad volleys rang like a dinner bell to the birds,” recalls Cuban freedom fighter Hiram Gonzalez, imprisoned in La Cabana at the time of Anderson’s murder, in the documentary Yo Los He Visto Partir. “Those firing squads had been going off daily since January 7, 1959, the day Che Guevara entered Havana. It didn’t take long for the birds to catch on. Flocks of them had learned to perch atop the wall that surrounded La Cabana fortress and in the nearby trees. After the volley they swooped down to peck at the bits of bone, blood, and flesh that littered the ground. Those birds sure grew fat.”14

  Paul Bethel was press attaché for the U.S. embassy in Cuba during the anti-Batista rebellion and the first years of revolution. Later he worked as head of the Latin American division of the U.S. Information Agency, where he interviewed hundreds of the Cuban refugees then landing in South Florida. Bethel also kept hearing accounts of this blood extraction from firing-squad victims. Finally he was able to question Dr. Virginia de Mirabal Quesada, who escaped Cuba through Mexico and had actually fled, horrified, after witnessing the process. “It’s absolutely true,” she told the U.S. Information Agency. “Before being shot, the men are taken to a small first-aid room at La Cabana, where the communists extract between a quart and a quart and a half of blood from each victim. It is then placed in a blood bank. Some of it is shipped to North Vietnam. Sometimes the victims are so weak, they have to be carried to the execution stake. Others, not healthy at the time from the prison ordeal, or with bad hearts, die during the extraction.”15

  On April 7, 1967, the Organization of American States Human Rights Commission finally issued a detailed report on the humanistic Cuban revolution’s long-practiced vampirism. The report was based on dozens of verified eyewitness accounts by defectors.

  “On May, 27, 1966, from six in the morning to nightfall political prisoners were executed continuously by firing squad in Havana’s La Cabana prison,” the report read. “One hundred and sixty-six men were executed that day and each had 5 pints of blood extracted prior to being shot. Extracting this amount of blood often produces cerebral anemia and unconsciousness so that many had to be carried to the execution wall on stretchers. The corpses were then transported by truck to a mass grave in a cemetery outside the city of Marianao. On that day, the truck required seven trips to deliver all the corpses. On 13th Street in Havana’s Vedado district Soviet medical personnel have established a blood bank where this blood is transported and stored. This blood is sold at fifty U.S. dollars per pint to the Republic of North Viet Nam.”

  Communist Cuba’s innovative blood-marketing program has received no attention from the mainstream media and “scholars” in general, though Cuba’s medical practices usually get no end of fawning coverage. Dr. Juan Clark, sociology professor at Miami-Dade Community College, Bay of Pigs veteran and former political prisoner, is the shining exception. His research included interviews with dozens of Castro’s and Che’s ex-political prisoners and defectors who confirmed the practice. Needless to say, in the thousands upon thousands of pages devoted to their subject, no Che “biographer” mentions Cuba’s blood trade, yet they all play up Che’s role as minister of industries starting in early 1961—just when the blood-marketing campaign began.

  Henry Butterfield Ryan, diplomat and scholar, in particular laments that Che’s glowing record as Cuba’s export manager at the time has largely gone unheralded. “Where Guevara shone,” he writes in his widely praised book The Fall of Che Guevara, “was in the role of a diplomat, especially on economic issues. He secured export and import deals for Cuba within the communist bloc on terms that no other countries received and that helped Cuba enormously.”16

  As we will see, Che was an economic disaster, wrecking every vestige of Cuba’s flourishing capitalism. But history should not overlook this signal economic achievement, that Cuban blood had a ready market in Cuba’s sister socialist republics on distant continents for ready cash.

  A crowning irony: This was the same man who liked to proclaim that he helped free Cuba from the rapacity of those “blood-sucking Yankee imperialist exploiters!”

  6

  Murderer of Women and Children

  Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che Guevara guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor.

  —Time MAGAZINE, AUGUST 8, 1960

  On April 17, 1961, a counter-reVolutionary named Amelia Fernandez García had her young body destroyed by a firing-squad volley.

  On Christmas Eve of that same year, Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. She had been found guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (the term for Cuban farmers who took up arms to fight the theft of their land). When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso—remember, all ten executioners shot live ammo—Juana was six months pregnant.

  Dr. Amando Lago has fully documented the firing-squad executions of eleven Cuban women in the early days of the regime. He documents a total of 219 female deaths, the rest listed as “extrajudicial.” (And we’ve seen what even a “judicial” execution meant to Che—the verdict announced before the trial.)

  Lydia Perez also died “extrajudicially,” on August 7, 1961, while a prisoner at the Guanajay women’s prison camp. Eight months pregnant at the time, she somehow annoyed a young guard, who bashed her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach, and walked off. Lydia and her baby were left to bleed to death. Olga Fernandez and her husband, Marcial, were both machine-gunned to death on April 18, 1961, while rushing to the Argentine embassy for asylum. Amalia Cora was machine-gunned to death along with five others for the crime of trying to exit Cuba in a boat on February 5, 1965.

  Twenty-four-year-old Teresita Saavedra was a lay Catholic leader when the Che-trained militia arrested her in the town of Sancti-Spiritus in central Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion had just been crushed and a huge dragnet was sweeping Cuba for any who had sympathized with those abandoned freedom fighters. Teresita, who certainly qualified, was hauled away at Czech machine-gun point to the town’s police headquarters. In the interrogation room she was repeatedly raped by five milicianos, who then released her. Teresita committed suicide that night. “Without Che the militias would not have been reliable,” goes the refrain of Che biographer Jorge Castañeda. The recent foreign minister of Mexico is correct. The milicianos were unusually reliable. And diligent.

  Two Catholic nuns were part of the “extrajudicial” massacre of women. Sister Aida Rosa Perez kept getting on the authorities’ nerves with her anticommunist speeches. She was finally sentenced to twelve years at hard labor, despite her heart condition. Two years into her sentence, while toiling in the sun inside Castro’s Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister R
osa collapsed from a heart attack. The media are always ready to headline atrocities, such as the killing of Catholic nuns in El Salvador by “right-wing” death squads. When Salvadoran archbishop Romero was assassinated, it provoked a major Hollywood movie. Aside from independent efforts by brave loners, like Andy Garcia’s The Lost City, few directors will touch a story that fairly portrays the victims of Che.

  A good case can be made that Castro and Che preempted the Taliban by a good forty years. The stifling economic and social conditions created by the Cuban Revolution leave Cuban women today as the most suicidal in the world. This does not, however, prevent the United Nations from naming Cuba to its Human Rights Commission. Nor does the regime’s treatment of women prevent UNICEF from naming an award in Castro’s Cuba’s honor.

  Certainly, Time magazine did not report how “devastating” Che actually was for many Cuban women.

  Evelio Gil Diez was seventeen years old when Che signed his death warrant and Marks blasted his skull apart in La Cabana’s killing ground, with Che watching from his window. Luis Perez Antunez was also seventeen when he stared his executioners boldly in the face, seconds before the volley riddled his body and ended his young life.

  Seventeen-year-old Calixto Valdes was found guilty of “crimes against the revolution” in the same mass trial that condemned his father, Juan. From his cell in La Cabana, Juan watched the guards stomp down the hall and enter the nearby cell that held his son. He heard a scuffle, then watched how they yanked his struggling boy from the cell in a chokehold. “Cowards!” yelled Juan in tears of rage, bashing the cell bars. “Miserable assassins!” While one guard bent his boy’s arms back and bound his hands, two more guards came into play. One grabbed his furiously struggling son’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut. (By then, the firing squads were becoming rattled by the defiant yells of “Viva Cuba Libre!” “Viva Cristo Rey! ” and “Down with Communism!”)