How does Castro’s Cuba compare to Hitler’s Germany before the war? The Agencia de Informaciones Periodisticas was an organization of exiled Cuban newsmen active in the 1960s in Miami. Their Boletín Nacional de Noticias, Vol. VI, No. 754, December 27, 1967, calculated that by 1966, some 7,876 men and boys had been executed by revolutionary firing squads—out of a population of 6.4 million.17 Not that it stopped there. The Black Book of Communism has Castro and Che’s firing squads’ murdering 14,000 people by 1970.
At one point in 1961, 300,000 Cubans out of a total population of 6.4 million were crammed in prison. Anne Applebaum writes in her book Gulag that, all told, 18 million people passed through Stalin’s prison camps. At any one time, 2 million were incarcerated, out of a Soviet population of 220 million.
Apply your calculator to the figures for Cuba’s population, and to Toland’s and Shirer’s figures for the Nazi execution and incarceration rate versus Germany’s population at the time, as well as Applebaum’s figures for Stalin’s Soviet Union. In absolute terms, Castro and Che were outdoing the Hitler regime before World War II. In proportional terms, they were imprisoning more Cubans at one time than Stalin imprisoned in the Soviet Gulags.
Even the Nazi treatment of conquered France helps with perspective. The HarperCollins Atlas of the Second World War puts total French civilian deaths during the Nazi occupation at 173,260, out of a French population of 40 million. Cuban-American scholar-researchers Dr. Armando Lago and Maria Werlau, who head the Cuba Archive Project, meticulously documenting every death caused by the Cuban revolution, put the total of Cuban deaths by the Castro-Che regime conservatively at 107,805, including 77,833 desperate souls who died at sea while trying to escape. When it comes to generating refugees, Cuba also merits comparison with Nazi Germany. Between 1933 and 1937, 129,000 German citizens fled Germany, out of a population of 70 million.18 Five years into the Castro-Che regime, half a million Cubans had fled Cuba, out of a population of 6.4 million. And the Cuban figure is for those who succeeded against enormous odds and were forced to abandon their every possession and last penny in the act. An easier trip from Havana to Florida, and a policy of unhindered emigration with property and family (as practiced in all civilized countries, including pre-Castro Cuba), in 1961 would have emptied the island in a fortnight. And don’t forget: Before the Castro-Che liberation, Cuba’s immigration pattern was in the exact opposite direction, with people from Italy to Haiti clamoring to enter.
Nelson Mandela once gushed, “Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.” For all the suffering he endured on Robben Island, if Mandela had instead been sent to La Cabana, he would have never been heard from again.
Cuba’s Death Squads
The Castro-Che bloodbath was hardly confined to La Cabana and the dozens of other official execution grounds. With the Cuban people promptly disarmed, Cuba’s police, militia, and Communist Party toadies swaggered through the streets in search of gusanos, miscreants, and assorted “lumpen” (Che’s favorite insult). Special targets were those who had somehow dissed them in the days prior to the glorious revolution, with its meteoric promotions of such worthies as themselves into positions of authority and eminence.
Ask anyone who’s lived through such times—Cuban, Vietnamese, Pole, or Czech—this type of vengeance is the most characteristic feature of a communist revolution. “Che played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery,” admits his hagiographer Jorge Castañeda.19 As we’ve seen, it is not a huge mural of Justice adorning the compound of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, or secret police. It is the likeness of Che Guevara gracing the secret police HQ, much like the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinski in Lubyanka Square, near the headquarters of the old KGB.
“What a Young Communist Should Be,” Che had titled his exhortation in fall 1962 to the Union de Jovenes Comunistas. “The happiest days of a youth’s life is when he watches his bullets reaching an enemy.”20 In the schoolyard of Havana’s Baldor high school the chief of the local “Communist Youth” took Che Guevara’s speech to his organization to heart.
On October, 7, 1962, fourteen-year-old Ramon Diaz was in the schoolyard during recess when he saw the local Communist Youth leader, gun in hand, approaching a friend of his. Ramon started yelling, pointing, and rushed up to help. But the communist didn’t shoot. Instead, he started pistol-whipping Ramon’s friend savagely.
Ramon rushed up and shoved the Communist Youth, who stopped the bashing for a second, looked over, and shot Ramon to death in front of his classmates. The revolution armed a schoolyard bully with a gun, and excused his act of murder.
On September 9, 1961, Cuba’s secret police broke into the home of the Cardona family in the town of Esmeraldo in Camaguey province. The Cardonas were suspected of harboring “counter-revolutionary bandits.” After bashing down the door, the police emptied their clips indiscriminately into whatever moved in the house. They murdered the entire family, mother and father along with the two Cardona boys, one five years old, the other six years old.21
That same month, fourteen-year-old Armando Gonzalez Peraza was picked up by police in Las Villas province. After days of desperate inquiries to the local authorities, Peraza’s parents were finally informed that Armando had committed suicide. The identical news was imparted that year to the parents of Elio Rodriguez, who lived in Havana. Elio was thirteen years old when he was rounded up by the Che-trained militia. None of these boys had the slightest mental problem. “Committed suicide” was the Castro-Che counterpart to the infamous phrase “shot while trying to escape” generally used by the thuggish “right-wing” police that Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media love to portray.
Lydia Gouvernier was a vivacious twenty-year-old University of Havana student who somehow annoyed the authorities. On November 12, 1959, she was hauled in by the police. Her parents recovered her dead body from the police station the following day. (“Always interrogate your prisoner at night. A person is easier to cow at night.”)
“Street murders by the police were rampant,” recalls Ibrahim Quintana, “whenever somebody showed the slightest disrespect for the regime.” Quintana was in a good position to know. Until escaping to the United States in 1962, he was a mortician at the Rivero Funeral Home in Havana. “The murder victim was always taken to a government first-aid station—first. Then a mortuary was telephoned to pick up the body. The reason for using the government aid station as an intermediary is so the government official there can make out a death certificate claiming the dead person was killed by means other than shooting. He or she was run over by a truck and the like. . . . The government always orders the mortuary not to permit the family to see the body. In 80 percent of the cases where the body came in with a death certificate saying it had died of something other than shooting—we found one or more gunshot wounds in that body.”22
Unlike the corpses piling up in Cuba’s police stations, the hundreds of bodies delivered from La Cabana required no bogus death certificates. After all, these had been executed “judicially” after a “trial.” “Cause of death was internal hemorrhaging caused by firearm projectiles,” read the official death certificates delivered by the regime to thousands of ashen-faced Cuban families.
“Some of the bodies from La Cabana would come straight to our funeral home accompanied by a man named Menendez,” recalls Quintana. “They always arrived at night. Then at 6:00 A.M. the bodies would be stacked up in vehicles and moved out to Colon Cemetery. The dead had a small piece of paper with their names on their wrists. The cemetery attendant removed the tag and dumped the bodies in an unmarked grave. He had strict instructions to wait three days following the burial before reporting to his family that the body is somewhere in the cemetery.”23
Not long after Che had fired up Cuba’s Communist Youth with his spirited October 1962 speech, seventeen-year-old Armando Piñeiro was chatting with a group of friends in front of the La Perla Hotel in the town of Sancti Spiritus in central Cuba. These we
re all teenaged boys, hence rowdy, boisterous, and not exactly discreet. And somebody please break the news to Rage Against the Machine (who use Che Guevara as their band’s emblem) that if ever any group of youths had cause for youthful angst and rebellion, it was Cuban youth from 1959 on.
The sassy gang (think a Spanish-speaking Delta House here) outside La Perla started complaining loudly about the sorry state of the country, the stifling regimentation, all the nit-picky rules, the idiots and scoundrels running the country into the ground, the rationing, and the forced labor “while chanting government slogans” as mandated by the illustrious minister of industries, Che. In the middle of their spirited confab a young communist militiaman strutted by cradling his prized Czech machine gun. Usually this was enough to quell such talk quickly. But this group either didn’t notice him or didn’t care.
The miliciano didn’t like what he heard and stopped in front of the group. The teenagers finally stopped talking and looked at him just as the miliciano opened up with his machine gun, emptying an entire clip into their group.
Armando Piñeiro fell dead along with his friends Carlos Rodríguez, Ismael Lorente, and Rene Odales. Many more kids were on the ground writhing and moaning.24
Some might call this type of thing “collateral damage.” But Che Guevara’s own writings and exhortations help clarify the matter. He wrote, “The people’s cooperation can often be coaxed by the use of systemic terror.”25
This was a young Cuban militiaman who pulled the trigger. The Che-indoctrinated miliciano in front of La Perla Hotel was, as Castañeda observed, plenty “reliable.”
An early revolutionary colleague once complained to Che of difficulties raising money for the anti-Batista rebellion in Cuba’s Matanzas province. “It’s understandable in a way,” the revolutionary shrugged. “I mean, after all, what can I offer them except the chance to live democratically if we succeed?”
“Don’t waste your time with that stuff,” snorted Che. “That rarely works. Instead you offer them terror—you threaten them with terror for not contributing.”26 Extortion, blackmail, and death threats—these are traits you do not see in the Che of the Hollywood Left.
Researchers Maria Werlau and Dr. Armando Lago have documented 20,400 “extrajudicial” murders of Cubans by the Castro-Che regime. Every morning in school, Cuban kids recite the Castroite counterpart to our Pledge of Allegiance, which begins and ends with “We will be like Che!” Jon Lee Anderson writes with apparent pride how his own daughter dutifully recited the pledge every morning while they lived in Cuba. Even Herbert Matthews didn’t go that far.
Che’S Camps for “Delinquents”
“On October 9, 1967, the first news of Ernesto Che Guevara’s alleged death reached the United States,” recalls journalist John Gerassi, who taught at San Francisco State University. “I was approached by a nineteen-year-old coed. She had tears in her eyes and a ‘Make Love Not War’ button on her breast. ‘Do you think it’s true?’ ”27
Around the world, young idealists were in tears over a man who mandated perpetual war and universal military service for youth. “For me it was the most marvelous sight in the world,” wrote Che about a supply of machine guns delivered to his guerrilla column in Cuba’s Sierra mountains. “There under our envious eyes were the instruments of death!”28
An eighteen-year-old Cuban named Emilio Izquierdo got the news of Che’s death on the same day as Professor Gerassi’s class. But Emilio’s reaction was markedly different from the San Francisco flower child’s. “Oh, how I wanted to cheer!” he recalls from Miami today. “I wanted to jump up and down! To whoop with joy! To throw a party! To hug the very man who had given me the news!”
But that would have been very unwise. The news of Che’s death had been imparted to Emilio by a machine-gun-toting guard. Emilio, you see, was in a UMAP prison camp for “delinquents” and “lumpen” in October 1967. This penal system had been the brainchild of Che Guevara (the hero of students who want “no rule from above”) back in 1960 at a place called Guanahacabibes in extreme western Cuba.
Castro and Che’s “revolutionary justice” had made great strides in just one year. No bogus trials without defense counsel and with illiterate common criminals as judges condemned these prisoners, as they had thousands in 1959 to the firing squads and prisons. “We send to Guanahacabibes people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals,” announced Che himself. “It is hard labor . . . the working conditions are harsh . . .” And that was that.29 “Rehabilitation” was the professed goal at Che’s forced-labor camps. Jon Lee Anderson uses the word without quotation marks and apparently with a straight face in his Che biography. Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh preferred the term “re-education” for a similar process.
“Slave labor and torture” is the preferred term of Emilio Izquierdo and of the tens of thousands who suffered in similar camps before him, alongside him, and after him. Like Stalin’s Gulags, the prisons of Cuba filled up with tens of thousands of social parasites, loafers, and unreconstructed men. If this sounds familiar, recall Ernesto Guevara’s cheeky signature on his early correspondence as “Stalin II.”
In time, all of Cuba became a prison. Che instituted a “progressive” labor program of “volunteer” weekend work and sixty-hour workweeks that galled Cuba’s working class. Before their liberation by Che, Cuba’s workers had become accustomed to such working hours and benefits as to make Lane Kirkland and George Meany gape in envy. In fact, in the 1940s and 1950s, Cuban labor was more highly unionized, proportional to population, than U.S. labor. And their leader, Eusebio Mujal, made Samuel Gompers and Jimmy Hoffa look like corporate lapdogs.
Professors and the mainstream media parrot the Castro-Che fable of pre-Castro Cuba as a pesthole of poverty and misery for workers. Susan Sontag bewailed Cuba’s “underdevelopment” in her Ramparts screed. The New York Times referred to it as Cuba’s “former near-feudal economy,” and hailed Castro and Che’s “promise of social justice which brought a foretaste of human dignity for millions who had little knowledge of it in [pre-Castro] Cuba.”
By 1965 counter-revolutionary activity was winding down in Cuba. The Kennedy-Khrushchev deal in October 1962 had pulled the plug on much of the anti-Castro resistance, including the bloody and ferocious Escambray Rebellion. Now the Castro regime—needing a new pretext for the mass jailings, the cowing of the population and, especially, slave labor—turned its police loose on “antisocial elements,” on “deviants,” “delinquents,” and those branded “lumpen” by Che Guevara (the term is indicative of his famous hauteur). Youths were the target here, with special emphasis on longhairs, suspected rock and roll listeners, the incorrigibly religious, and—especially—homosexuals. “Peligrosidad predelictiva” was the favorite charge by the regime against these youths.
Your long hair, your snide look, your taste in music, your tight pants, your open practice of Christianity, your family background, your refusal to volunteer for “voluntary” labor on weekends—any of these would make you a violator of revolutionary morals.
Emilio’s fellow prisoners also included Jehovah’s Witnesses, active Catholics and Protestants, and children of political prisoners—all swept up in Cuba’s mid-1960s dragnet. This system of prison camps that held Emilio Izquierdo and tens of thousands of other youths was called Unidades Militares del Ayuda de Producción (Military Units to Help Production). The official and euphemistic title, UMAP, did little to hide the pretext for the camps—forced labor. In Stalin’s Russia, the initials GULAG stood for the same thing.
These camps were completely enclosed by high barbed wire and had machine guns in each watchtower and ferocious dogs keeping watch below. As we saw earlier, the camp for homosexuals had a sign, “Work Will Make Men Out of You,” above the entrance gate, eerily reminiscent of the Auschwitz sign “Work Will Set You Free.”
The UMAP camps featured brutal labor in the tropical sun and summary beatings and executions for any laggards. As at Guanahacabibes, none of the UMAP prisoners ha
d been convicted, even in the sham Castroite courts, of any “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Military and police trucks would simply surround an area of Havana known as a homosexual pick-up place, or as a hangout for rock and rollers, or near churches. Then every person in sight would be herded into the military trucks at gunpoint. “Everybody in the prison camp wanted to cheer when we heard Che had been killed,” recalls Emilio Izquierdo, who survived to become president of the UMAP Political Prisoners Association.
“You could see everyone trying to stifle their joy, because the guards were watching us all very carefully right then, focusing on our faces. They wanted desperately to detect the slightest sign of joy. This would have been a serious ‘crime against Revolutionary morals,’ as Che himself had described it—and right there the guards would have an excuse to indulge their sadism.
“The Castro-Che regime hired hard-core sadists and psychopaths—complete mental cases—as guards and wardens for these camps,” Emilio continues. “I suppose all totalitarian regimes hire such people. I read books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by Elie Wiesel, by the U.S. POWs in the Hanoi Hilton, and I think to myself: This sounds very familiar. Anyway, many of these guards—despite all the regime’s propaganda about its literacy campaign—were virtually illiterate. They loved any excuse to beat us, to throw us in a tiny punishment cell to roast half to death under the midday sun, even to shoot us. I saw boys shot to death for simply being unable to stand up to the workload. You try and explain these things to people in this country and nobody believes it. They can’t imagine these horrors just ninety miles away—much less initiated by men whom much of the international media portray as well-meaning reformers.
“But one poor boy was unable to disguise his joy at Che’s death,” recalls Emilio. “He just couldn’t. I don’t think he was any happier than the rest of us—just unable to effectively disguise it. So the guards dragged him off and soon we heard the screams—accompanied by the laughter. When they were in a playful mood, some of the guards’ favorite punishment was to rip all the clothes off a prisoner and tie him up to the fence at dusk, totally naked, totally immobile. The UMAP camps were in the countryside, not far from the coast. And you know about Cuba’s salt-marsh mosquitoes . . .
Exposing the Real Che Guevara Page 13