Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  This is, of course, good history, necessary to remember and retell. Liberals are especially sensitive—and in some cases, oversensitive. Let some rural school board today refuse to assign Darwin or James Joyce in its curriculum and liberals quickly trot out the Nazi book-burning episode as the obvious next step by officials in the dark hinterlands of Red State America.

  But regarding the intellectual atrocity by Che in Cuba? “The portrait of Che is now as complete as it will ever be,” says the London Times Literary Supplement about Anderson’s book.

  You’ll search Anderson’s book, along with all the other massive and “scholarly” biographies of Che, in vain for any mention of his biblio-pyre.

  It happened. On January 24, 1959, in the street directly in front of 558 G Street in Havana’s Vedado district—on Che Guevara’s direct orders—three thousand books were doused with gasoline and set ablaze, to the cheers and whoops of his communist toadies.

  “I contacted several foreign correspondents in Havana at the time,” recalls Salvador Diaz-Verson, whose books, pamphlets, and files had fueled the blaze, and whose private office and library had been broken into and pillaged by Che’s armed goons. “Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune and Hal Hendricks of the Miami News were among the dozens of correspondents who came with me to inspect the ruins of my library and the ashes which had become of my books. None of them attached any importance whatsoever to the incident.”2

  We can only imagine the U.S. media reaction had it happened a month earlier at the hands of Batista’s unbearded and unfashionable henchmen.

  The Nazi book burning was public and theatrical, a naked attempt at rabble-rousing. Joseph Goebbels and the SA hoodlums mocked the books’ authors by name—Einstein, Freud, H. G. Wells—and displayed the book contents while scorning them and heaving them into the bonfire. Che’s motives were different; they had nothing to do with totalitarian pageantry. Indeed, Che tried to keep his bonfire secret. The very last thing he and Castro wanted was more exposure of the contents of Salvador Diaz-Verson’s library.

  Diaz-Verson, a renowned Cuban journalist, scholar, and former public official, was president of Cuba’s Anti-Communist League, a private research organization and an early version of a think tank. Since the mid-1930s—labeled by Eugene Lyons as the “Red Decade”—the league had devoted itself to the study of communism. In the course of their investigations Diaz-Verson and his staff compiled detailed lists of Communist Party members and agents (both card carriers and secret) and their assorted front groups. By 1959 they had accumulated information on 250,000 Latin American communists, agents, and accomplices.

  During World War II, the league had also investigated the activities of Nazi agents in Latin America (remember, Nazis and commies were allies from September 1939 till June 1941). Early in the war, the Florida Straits crawled with German U-boats playing havoc with Allied shipping. Cuba herself had four of her merchant marine fleet sunk. Salvador Diaz-Verson and his people uncovered a cell of Nazi agents who were passing along details about the ships’ schedules to their German masters.

  The Nazi agents were rounded up and the problem nipped in the bud. Cuba’s death penalty, abolished in 1933, was very briefly reinstated just for the occasion. Diaz-Verson was often consulted on his work by a man who consequently became his friend, J. Edgar Hoover. The friendship and professional relationship had actually begun during the work against Nazis and grew afterward. The FBI chief began receiving reports from the Anti-Communist League every month.

  Diaz-Verson’s books and files—notably his just-published Red Czarism, three thousand copies of which helped fuel the massive fire in front of his office—posed a bigger threat to Castro and Che’s plans for Cuba than anything written by Einstein, Freud, or H. G. Wells presented to Hitler and Goebbels’s plans for Germany. Both the Castro brothers’ and Che’s communist contacts and affiliations were heavily documented by Diaz-Verson, hence their urgency on the matter.

  “I have never been a Communist,” the New York Times had dutifully quoted Ernesto “Che” Guevara as saying during an interview on January 4, 1959. “It gives me great pain to be called a Communist!”

  At the time they were also parroting the line that “Castro himself is a strong anticommunist.” (Nary a note of apology or “Oops! We goofed,” appeared afterward in the New York Times either. We’re going on forty-eight years of the most unrelenting communist regime in history, and the “Newspaper of Record” has yet to do a mea culpa on this one.)

  “Che Guevara never concealed his beliefs,” stresses his hagiographer Jon Lee Anderson.

  “Guevara had always spoken honestly about the aims of Castro’s revolution. I have never heard anyone—even his most bitter foes—accuse Guevara of betraying his beliefs in Marxist revolution.”3 Well, this learned and universally acclaimed Che biographer might consult the January 4, 1959, edition of the New York Times, the very paper Anderson has written for.

  “Che did not once betray his basic loyalties,” wrote Ariel Dorfman in Time.

  “Che’s life demonstrates conclusively that he was not a hypocrite,” 4 wrote Christopher Hitchens in the New York Review of Books. Professor Dorfman and Hitchens might have a look at that New York Times edition themselves.

  In early 1959, Diaz-Verson’s work exposed Castro and Che’s treachery with a brilliant spotlight. When the alarmed U.S. ambassador to Cuba in late 1958, Earl T. Smith, asked CIA Havana chief Jim Noel, “Is this Che Guevara a communist?” a cocksure Noel quickly replied, “Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s group in the Sierra. Castro has no affiliations with any communists whatsoever” (italics mine).5

  The U.S. embassy’s top political officer at the time was John Topping, described as “very able” by the CIA’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick. Topping had snorted derisively at the rude and tacky inquiry of Ambassador Smith (a Republican interloper into that State Department circle) and heartily endorsed his trusted colleague Jim Noel.

  Noel’s CIA superior in Washington, Frank Bender, known as the agency’s “expert” on Latin America, was equally on the ball. “Castro is a strong anticommunist fighter,”6 he declared after chatting up Fidel during his U.S. visit in April 1959. Bender was so impressed he planned on setting up an information exchange between the CIA and the Castro-Che government as a partnership in the joint fight against the spread of communism in the hemisphere. The CIA of George Tenet had many antecedents.

  Even before he entered Havana, Che’s Cuban Communist Party comrades had informed him of Diaz-Verson’s diligent work. So just a week after entering Havana, Che dispatched an armed mob straight from his La Cabana headquarters to Diaz-Verson’s office and library. At the door stood a friend of Salvador’s named Vicente Blanco, who refused them entry. Che’s mob pummeled Blanco into a near coma with their rifle butts, bound and gagged him, smashed down the door, and stormed in to rampage. They tore down pictures and slashed and smashed Diaz-Verson’s furniture to splinters before carting out his books and files. Che—Sartre’s intellectual, the most complete human being of our age—destroyed Diaz-Verson’s property and had his men bash and bloody his associates with machine-gun butts. He also quickly condemned Salvador Diaz-Verson to death by firing squad, for the crime of publishing truth.

  Luckily, and unknown to Che, a friend of Diaz-Verson’s was involved in the revolutionary paperwork. He saw the charges and the death sentence on their way to the “public prosecutor” in La Cabana and secretly alerted his friend. Appreciating the speed and efficiency of Che’s “revolutionary justice,” of his “pedagogy of the paredon,” Salvador Diaz-Verson jumped into the trunk of his friend’s car the very next night and was driven to the docking point for the Havana-Miami ferry, which he boarded incognito, without even notifying his family.

  “I arrived once more in the United States broke and minus a passport,” recalls Diaz-Verson. “But at least I wasn’t lying in a mass grave.”

  Notice the “once more.” Just six years earlier, Diaz-Verson had come brief
ly to the United States on the strong advice of Batista’s police, who’d been harassing him for his services as intelligence consultant to Carlos Prio, the Cuban president Batista ousted with his coup in 1952. Diaz-Verson hadn’t actually feared for his life at the time and was able to keep all his property—and indeed return to Cuba the following year under a general political amnesty declared by Batista himself, the same amnesty that pardoned and released from jail a fellow named Fidel Castro!

  But the point is, Salvador Diaz-Verson was anything but a Batistiano (Batista follower), the justification used by Che, his henchmen, and his biographers against the victims of his massacre.

  “My father simply disappeared,” recalls his daughter Sylvia, who lives in Miami today.7 “And any day, any hour, any minute, we expected a call to go claim his body in Colon Cemetery. This was happening to families all over Cuba. Also, we knew that Che knew that my dad knew that he was a communist. So you can imagine what my poor mom was going through at the time—all of us, really. So when we find out a couple days later that my dad was in Miami, we were jubilant, as you can imagine.

  “But we also knew we had to get out of Cuba ourselves—and fast. My dad was a lifelong researcher into communism. So naturally some of his knowledge and insights rubbed off on us. We knew very well that Che’s people would soon be coming for us, if not overtly to grab us, at least secretly to watch for my father’s return.

  “Heck, you don’t have to be an expert on communist tactics to know this,” says Sylvia. “Just watch Doctor Zhivago, or read the book! So my mom and sisters and my brother and I, we all took off for Miami immediately. A few weeks later, my mom, who barely knew English, is trying to sell Avon products door to door, my dad’s washing dishes and mowing lawns—we’re all doing whatever we can to make ends meet.”

  On May 6, 1960, with Cuba already filling with Russians, with close to two thousand Cubans already massacred by Che’s firing squads, with Castro’s orientation much clearer, and with Che on Cuban television yelling, “Our road to liberation will be opened with a victory over U.S. monopolies!”—with this backdrop Salvador Diaz-Verson finally got his say in the United States, by testifying before the U.S. Senate at a hearing titled, “Communist Threat to the United States Through the Caribbean.” We can imagine the nervous coughs behind the hand by the CIA’s Latin American wizards at the time. But, amazingly, even at this late date, Diaz-Verson had much to teach. Many in Congress were still skeptical. From the session:

  MR. SOURWINE. Is it true that the Castro forces destroyed files on Cuban Communists?

  MR. DIAZ-VERSON. Yes, sir.

  MR. SOURWINE. How many such files?

  MR. DIAZ-VERSON. I had an archive of 250,000 cards of Latin American Communists and 943 personal records. . . . The Communists have everywhere two lines of leadership: One that they show to the public, the other that acts underground—one visible; the other “invisible.” In Cuba the “underground” is the one that operates at La Cabana prison, with Che Guevara at the head.8

  To this day, Western intellectuals remain utterly undisturbed by the fact that sixteen librarians languish in Castro’s dungeons with twenty-five-year prison sentences for stocking such subversive literature as Orwell’s Animal Farm, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights. “After sentencing the librarians, Castro’s judges declared the confiscated library materials ‘lacking in usefulness’ and ordered them burned.”9

  No less an authority on book-burning than Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury was appalled. “I pled with Castro and his government to immediately take their hands off the independent librarians and release all those librarians in prison, and to send them back into Cuban culture to inform the people,” Bradbury declared during the keynote speech at the American Library Association’s annual convention in 2005.10

  The Art Burglar

  It’s an oft-told story that the Nazis stole valuable paintings and assorted art holdings from the people they murdered, conquered, and exiled. Many private art galleries in Europe were visited by Nazi goons and “Aryanized,” as they termed it. But the Nazis, Hermann Goering in particular, usually hogged the loot for themselves.

  The Castroites were in this league, with “nationalized” the preferred term. Che’s stolen palace at Tarara was crammed with gorgeous art. This luxury lasted as long as the Soviet sugar market paid the bills. But when that transatlantic ATM machine went out of order in 1990, the suddenly desperate Cuban burglars started hocking their stolen wares on the international market. The Cuban American National Foundation estimates that since 1991, the Castro regime has sold off almost one thousand invaluable paintings, antiques, manuscripts, and other items stolen from their rightful owners.

  From his first day in office as Cuba’s exalted National Bank president, Che Guevara had been particularly keen on funding, staffing, and arming Cuba’s newly created Ministerio de la Recuperación de Bienes Malversados, or Ministry for the Recuperation of Stolen Goods. This Orwellian ministry—as anyone familiar with communist terminology will immediately infer—was in charge of stealing. (The Nazis titled their ministry of theft “The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories.”)

  The homes and bank accounts of anyone who fled Cuba to escape a firing squad were subject to seizure by the diligent and heavily armed agents of this ministry. The property of anyone who didn’t display the proper revolutionary zeal was also subject to seizure. The property of anyone who might have had cross words with any of the newly minted comandantes and “ministers” when they had been purse snatchers, winos, hubcap thieves, and unemployed ambulance chasers—which is to say, before they were lionized by Time and the New York Times—were also subject to seizure. The injured parties were all accused of having been “Batista crooks and gangsters.”

  But even this farce gave way a year later to unabashed looting. In the immortal words of Che Guevara himself during his speech on March 23, 1960, as National Bank president: “In order to conquer something we have to take it away from somebody!”

  And take they did—some $2 billion worth from U.S. businessmen and stockholders, and many times that amount from Cubans themselves, including many valuable art treasures.11 Because of its history as the Spanish empire’s crown jewel and its later prosperity as a U.S. business partner, Cuba had always been rich in private art collections. Many of these stolen art treasures have fetched handsome prices for the thieves at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York and London.

  When the Cuban-exile Fanjul family started noticing many of their former art possessions in European museums and boardrooms, they began legal action to recover them. It was an utterly vain exercise, at least in Europe. Sure, these very European countries were the ones looted by the Nazis. Sure, these very Europeans raised a raucous and self-righteous hullabaloo about that looting in every international forum. But when it came time to apply the same scruples to looting by Castro and Che? Well, the Fanjuls have never retrieved a dime’s worth of their property in Europe.

  Cuban sugar magnate Julio Lobo had amassed one of the world’s most extensive collections of Napoleon Bonaparte memorabilia, from weapons, to paintings, to furniture, to historic documents. Many now sit in French museums, which may seem appropriate, except that Julio Lobo was not a willing donor. An official in Havana’s French embassy named Antoine Anvil facilitated the sale of the Lobo collection to a French museum for an undisclosed price.12

  Not that all of Castro and Che’s loot wound up in European museums and auction houses. On a recent visit to Cuba, Danielle Mitterrand, widow of former French socialist president François Mitterrand, squealed with undisguised glee when presented with a priceless porcelain vase by the Castro government.13 Communists had looted this Sevres vase from a Cuban owner no less blatantly than the Nazis looted the Louvre.

  No doubt as a token of Castroite appreciation, David Rockefeller, a steadfast behind-the-scenes bankroller of propaganda against the Cuban “embargo,” had his privat
e art collection enriched by stolen Cuban paintings. Former Mexican president Salinas, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, and Argentinean soccer star Diego Maradona have all been given various valuable art objects that caught their eye while visiting Cuba—every one of them stolen from their rightful owners during Che Guevara’s stint as Cuba’s economic minister.14

  The plunder has not been entirely one-sided, however. The good guys have gotten in a few jabs of their own. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA officer who helped nab Che in Bolivia and was the last to question him, wears Che’s Rolex to this day.

  8

  Academia’s Rude Surprise

  Ernesto “Che” Guevara is one of the most appealing figures of our century.

  —UCLA PROFESSOR DAVID KUNZLE

  Near the thirtieth anniversary of Che Guevara’s untimely death, the Bolivian government of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada invited representatives from Castro’s regime to Bolivia to search for Che’s bones.

  In light of Che’s prominent role in destroying Cuba morally, spiritually, economically, and even physically, his burial in Cuba seemed proper even to many Cubans outside the island. So with the help of Bolivian representatives, Castro’s henchmen were taken to a grave near a rural airstrip and dug out the remains. These were carted back to Cuba, and on October 17, 1997, Che’s remains were deposited in a mausoleum in Santa Clara, at the base of a giant statue of the gallant Guevara, rifle in hand.

  It seemed a hugely humanitarian gesture to return the hallowed bones of Che to Cuba. But according to Mario Riveron, who headed the CIA team that hunted Che down in Bolivia in 1967, there’s a little more to it. “Castro paid a princely sum—many millions—to various Bolivian officials for Che’s remains,” he says. “Not that it hasn’t been worth it. Che’s mausoleum is a major tourist attraction in Cuba. Castro has earned back his bribes many times, I assure you.”