“Those things almost feel like a wasp when they first jab it in. Well, the guards loved to watch these bloodthirsty mosquitoes completely cover the bodies of the helpless naked prisoner, dig in for hours at a time, and drive the prisoner to the point of agonized insanity. The prisoner might hang on that fence for two days without food or water, too. Oh, how the guards would laugh!”30
“Another favorite game for those guards,” recalls fellow UMAP prisoner Cecilio Lorenzo, “was to gallop up on one of their horses, throw a lasso over some prisoner whose attitude they didn’t like, and drag him off. A friend of mine, seventeen years old at the time, was dragged for over a mile down country roads and through brambles and thickets. He came back unconscious and covered in blood.”31
Che himself explains the matter in his Socialism and Man in Cuba: “For the masses to follow the vanguard, they must be subjected to influences and pressures of a certain intensity.”
Che and Dogs
Che killed men, but rarely in combat. He also killed animals, but not as a hunter. Perhaps fittingly, he seemed to have a particular animus toward man’s best friend. Che’s own Motorcycle Diaries go into the gory details. Shortly after leaving on his famous motorcycle jaunt with his chum Alberto Granados, their motorcycle, La Poderosa, blew a cylinder and they stopped at a house of a country couple near the Argentina-Chile border. The kind couple took them in, gave them dinner, and even gave them overnight lodging in their barn’s hayloft. During dinner, recounts Guevara, the couple warned them of a ferocious puma that roamed the area and often prowled near the houses at night.
While turning in that night, the motorcycle duo discovered that the barn door did not close securely. So Che slept with his trusty pistol loaded and within reach, as he wrote, “in case the Chilean lion, whose dark shadow filled our minds at the time, decided to pay us a midnight visit.”
And sure enough, near dawn the itinerant Argentines were awakened by the sound of scratching on the barn door. As they were startled awake and sat there gathering their wits, “Alberto was locked in apprehensive silence beside me,” recounts Guevara. Finally the barn door swung open. “My hand gripped the pistol and my finger was tight on the trigger” writes Guevara, “as a pair of luminous eyes gazed at me from the shadows!”
So Che leveled on the eyes and blasted away with this pistol. “The instinct of self-preservation is what pulled the trigger,” he writes. Che then turned on his flashlight and saw he’d killed “Boby,” the couple’s pet dog, whom he’d met and petted during dinner. Che goes on about “the stentorian yells of the husband” and “the hysterical screams and moans of the lady” as she hugged the body of her murdered dog.
To those who later got to know Che in Cuba the whole account sounds like a rationalization, a fable that prettified the man’s primal sickness. Why didn’t Che turn on the flashlight before he shot the beast, asks former revolutionary Marcos Bravo? Probably because he wanted to kill the dog, he surmises.
Other passages in Guevara’s own writings argue against the likelihood of his mistaking a puppy for a puma. While “fighting” in the Sierra, Che’s “column” had befriended a stray puppy only “a few weeks old,” according to Guevara himself. The little mongrel came by their campsite for scraps of food and to frolic and play with the men. He became the group’s mascot, according to Guevara himself. One day as they marched off to plan an “ambush” of Batista’s army, the dog followed them, happily bounding along and constantly wagging his tail.
“ ‘Kill the dog, Felix,’ ” Che ordered one of his men. “ ‘But don’t shoot him—strangle him.’ Very slowly, Felix pulled out his rope, made a noose, and wrapped it around the little animal’s neck—then he started tightening,” writes Che.
When Felix picked him up, the puppy’s tail had been wagging happily. Naturally, the puppy had expected the usual petting and caresses. Now Felix grimaced as he tightened the noose on the agonized puppy. “That happy wagging of the tail turned convulsive,” writes Che. “Finally the puppy let out a smothered little yelp. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but to us it seemed a long time till the end finally came,” recounts Che. “Finally after one little spasm the puppy lay still, his little head resting over a branch.”32
During the Bolivian campaign, compatriot Dariel Alarcon heard Che screaming, “Move it! Move it! Move it! Goddammit!” Alarcon turned around and saw Che atop his little mule and kicking it savagely. The beast was unable to pick up speed. Che hopped off and pulled out his dagger. “I said move it! Move it! Move it!” he started shrieking again. This time, with every exclamation, he plunged the dagger into the little mule’s neck until it fell dead.
As former political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez says, “There was something seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
One wonders what this strangler of puppies and stabber of donkeys would have made of “The Che Café,” an ultrahip student hangout in La Jolla, California. The owners deplore cruelty to animals, so the café proudly boasts a strictly vegetarian menu. “The Che Café is a great place to meet and hang out with other people who envision a better world,” says the menu.
Papa Che
Jon Lee Anderson’s Che: A Revolutionary Life contains many touching pictures of “Papa Che” with his darling little daughters in his lap. While describing Che’s good-bye scene as he left Cuba in late 1966 for his Bolivian venture, The New Yorker writer tugs mightily at our heartstrings. “The last few days had been emotional for everyone,” writes Anderson about the final family scene. “But the most poignant were Che’s final encounters with Aleida and his children. Che was in disguise for his clandestine trip to Bolivia and couldn’t reveal himself even to his children. Papa Che was instead ‘Uncle Ramon, ’ who was there to pass along their father’s love and little pieces of advice for each of them. They ate lunch with tio Ramon at the head of the table like papa Che used to do.”33
Orlando Borrego was the “judge” without legal training who presided over bogus trials during a time when hundreds of Cubans were sent to the firing squad at Che’s orders in the first months of the revolution. He stayed on as a Castro henchman and sycophant, recently a Cuban government official. While in Cuba writing his “impartial” Che biography that “separates man from myth,” Anderson apparently found Borrego among his most trusted and cooperative sources on Papa Che.
Borrego also was present for Che’s teary Cuban farewell. “For Borrego, Che’s final visit with his three-year-old daughter, Celia . . . was one of the most wrenching experiences he had ever witnessed,” sighs Anderson. “There was Che with his child but unable to tell her who he was or to touch her and hold her as a father would.”34
In the process of “separating man from myth,” there is no mention by Anderson of the hundreds of mothers and daughters who would wait outside La Cabana prison for a final chance, not to touch, but perhaps merely to see or to say a few last words to their husbands and fathers condemned to death by Papa Che.
“One day we’d been waiting for hours in the hot sun,” recalls Margot Menendez, who was hoping to see her condemned father. “Finally we see a car driving out and it’s Che himself inside, so we start screaming and shouting for someone to let us in to see our loved ones. Che stopped the car and rolled down the window. ‘You’re all punished!’ he yells. ‘No visits this week!’ and he rolls his window up. So we start screaming even louder. Then we see he picks up a radio and calls someone. A few seconds later gangs of his soldiers came rushing out of La Cabana with billy clubs and guns and started bashing us brutally until we dispersed.”35
“ ‘Until always, my little children,’ ” Anderson quotes Papa Che’s good-bye letter to his children, “ ‘a really big kiss and a hug from Papa.’
“The most Che could do was to ask his children to give him a little peck on the cheek,” Anderson continues. Papa Che was leaving for Bolivia, so “tears welled up in Che’s eyes. Aleida was devastated but managed to contain her own tears.”36
A woman named Barbara Rangel-Ro
jas, who today lives in Miami, has a tough time commiserating with Borrego and Anderson about the sad parting of Papa Che from his children.
Shortly after the bogus battle of Santa Clara, her grandfather Cornelio Rojas disappeared. He was a beloved pillar of the community, well known for his public service and philanthropy. He was also a colonel in Cuba’s police. “Naturally my mother, grandmother, and father all suspected he’d been arrested,” says Barbara. “But we heard nothing and all our inquiries turned up nothing.”
An entire week went by and the Rojas family was still in the dark about their patriarch’s fate. “We were all worried sick—especially my poor mom, who was six months pregnant at the time. My grandmother kept up a stoic front, but we knew what was going on inside. She was going to pieces.”
In 1959, most Cuban homes had three generations living in them at the same time. Families were very close. “Like most Cuban girls, I was extremely close to my granddad,” says Barbara. “We ate dinner together every night. I sat on his lap in the living room every night. He spoiled me absolutely rotten with gifts and constant attention. I was only seven at the time, but I remember all this vividly.”37
A week after her grandfather’s disappearance, Barbara heard her mother calling excitedly from the living room. She rushed in and saw her mother pointing at the television and her grandmother staring wide-eyed and covering her mouth. There on the screen was her grandfather.
“And he was alive,” she recalls, “walking apparently freely, without handcuffs or anything. My grandfather had been an important figure in the province for decades. Our family had fought prominently in all of Cuba’s wars of independence. And this was a news show, so we thought nothing of it for a few seconds. We all looked at each other wide-eyed. My grandmother even put her hand to her chest and looked heavenward, apparently relieved. My grandfather as he appeared on the screen, didn’t seem scared at all—or that he was under any type of coercion.”
Then the camera angle changed and Rojas was seen standing and holding his hand aloft while saying something. “It took us a few seconds to realize that he was then standing in front of a thick concrete wall. My mother frowned. My grandmother squinted and leaned toward the television.”
Then the camera moved back, the angle changed again, and some rifles came into view—rifles that were pointing at Rojas. “ ‘No! No!’ My mother started screaming ‘No!’ My grandmother and my mom rushed to each other and hugged. My granddad was standing in front of one of Che’s firing squads! But—typical for my grandfather—he’d refused a blindfold and was facing the firing squad head on. He was preparing to give the order. . . .”
“Fuego!” Colonel Cornelio Rojas gave the order and the firing-squad volley murdered Barbara’s granddad in front of his family’s eyes. It was a horribly graphic murder. The camera closed in to show the shattered head and body, blood oozing.
“My grandmother collapsed on the floor at the horrible sight,” recalls Barbara. “My mother was screaming. I’m crying. We rush over to my grandmother—remember, my mom was six months pregnant at the time, so I’m helping out here. ‘Abuela! Abuela! ’ I’m crying. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ ”
Barbara’s grandmother could not be revived. She had suffered a fatal heart attack from the diabolical vision she had just seen on Cuban national television. She joined her husband and constant companion of forty years.
“After a few minutes,” recalls Barbara, “my mom, horribly traumatized, as you might imagine—goes into labor. She managed to contact some neighbors and they rushed over to help. She delivered my brother, prematurely, right there in her bedroom, with my grandmom’s body still in the living room, with my grandfather’s bloody body lying in front of that bullet-pocked wall. To this day we don’t know where he was buried by Che’s firing squad. A mass grave, we imagine, like so many others. The murdering Che Guevara didn’t even give us the solace of a funeral, of allowing us to put a cross or flowers atop my murdered granddad . . . How can you expect someone to forget that? These things haunt me still.”
Caridad Martinez was ten years old in March 1959 when a crew of Che’s militiamen burst into her home carrying two crude wooden boxes roughly the shape of coffins and dropped them loudly on the floor of their humble living room. “That one’s Jacinto” (Caridad’s father), barked a bearded goon while pointing at a box. “And that one’s Manuel” (Caridad’s uncle). “We don’t want to hear of any funeral and we don’t want to hear of any major show of grief!”38 They looked around at the ashen-faced women and the terrified children now clinging to them, then marched out and drove back to La Cabana, where lovable “Papa Che” had gleefully watched the executions of Caridad’s father and uncle from his favorite window.
“Our family was never the same,” recalled Caridad, now fifty-five but still weeping unapologetically at the memory. “My mother became a mere shadow of her former self, walking listlessly around until her death. I’d go in our patio to weep where no one could see me. I was a little girl and afraid Che’s men would come back to harm us if they saw me crying.”39
Much like al Qaeda’s beheading of Nicolas Berg, Che’s murders were staged to cow and terrorize. The televised murder of Cornelio Rojas was a pioneer version of what would later become an Internet specialty of professional terrorists. (The murder of Cornelio Rojas, Barbara Rangel’s grandfather, on Che Guevara’s orders, can be viewed at www.aguadadepasajeros.bravepages.com/menu1/fusivista.htm.)
Thousands of other Cuban mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers simply got an anonymous phone call saying the bodies of their formerly imprisoned menfolk were now in Colon Cemetery. These were usually unmarked mass graves. To visit and place a cross or flowers over them was to invite retribution from “Papa Che’s” goons.
“I and thousands of other little girls in Cuba had the laps and kisses of our fathers and grandfathers stolen forever by that murdering Argentine coward,” says Barbara Rangel-Rojas. “When I recall my granddad’s and my uncle’s courageous death—then I think of Che Guevara’s famous words when he was captured: ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!’ . . . Well, I’m torn between laughing and crying . . . not really . . . the truth is . . . I still cry.”
Heartbreak wasn’t over for the Rojas family after grandfather Cornelio’s public murder. Two years later Barbara’s seventeen-year-old uncle Pedro, who’d escaped to the United States, came back to his homeland by landing at the Bay of Pigs with a rifle in his hands, hell-bent on freeing Cuba from Che Guevara.
After three days of continuous ground combat on that doomed beachhead, Barbara’s young uncle was grim-faced, thirst-crazed, and delirious. A CIA officer named Grayston Lynch had trained, befriended, and even fought alongside these men. On the third day of battle he was on his U.S. flagship thirty miles offshore and had just learned from Washington that they’d been abandoned. No ammo was coming—no air cover, no reinforcements, no naval support. He was enraged and heartsick as he radioed his brothers in arms and offered to evacuate them.
“We will not be evacuated!” yelled Pedro Rojas’s commander into his radio, even as forty-one thousand communist troops and swarms of Soviet tanks closed the ring on him and his fourteen hundred utterly abandoned band of brothers. “We came here to fight! This ends here!”
“Tears filled my eyes,” recalls Lynch. “Never in my thirty-seven years had I been so ashamed of my country.”
After expending his last bullet on that bloody beachhead, seventeen-year-old Pedro Rojas was captured and murdered in cold blood by the Che-trained and -indoctrinated communist militia.
7
The “Intellectual and Art Lover” as Book Burner and Thief
Che is not only an intellectual, he was the most complete human being of our time—our era’s most perfect man.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
All Che biographers dwell on his affinity for matters intellectual and literary. “Che was interested in everything from sociology and philosophy to mathematics and
engineering,” writes former Time and Newsweek editor John Gerassi, “there were 3,000 books in the Guevara home.”1 “The asthmatic boy spent long hours . . . developing an intense love of books and literature,” writes Jorge Castañeda. “He devoured the children’s classics of the time, but also Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Jules Verne. He also explored Cervantes, Anatole France, Pablo Neruda. . . . He bought and read the books of all Nobel Prize winners in literature and held intensive discussions with his history and literature professors.”
Jon Lee Anderson quotes a Che friend from the era of The Motorcycle Diaries, “For Ernesto Guevara everything began with literature.” Then Anderson goes on to rhapsodize about Che’s “voracious reading appetite” and immense “intellectual curiosity.”
Certainly, one of this bibliophile’s first acts after entering Havana in January 1959 was to stage a massive book burning.
We’ve all seen the newsreels of Nazi goons burnings books in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Probably no two weeks go by without the History Channel or PBS graphically reminding us of this intellectual atrocity, with either a voiceover or subtitles of Joseph Goebbels gloating that “these flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new!” Many have heard a somber voiceover quoting German philosopher Heinrich Heine: “If you burn books today, you burn people tomorrow.” In Berlin today, a “Submerged Library” monument stands in Berlin commemorating that outrage.
Exposing the Real Che Guevara Page 14