Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  Che actually entered Havana a few days before Castro in 1959. When the local rebels planned a twenty-one-gun salute to greet Fidel’s glorious grand entrance into Cuba’s capital, Che freaked. “Oh, no, please!” he told Antonio Nunez Jimenez. “I got here first and Fidel might think I’ve formed a rebellion against him and that we’re shooting at him! Please!”

  “Don’t worry,” Nunez Jimenez calmed Che. “It’s a custom. Fidel is the revolution’s chief. He’ll expect it.”

  “Okay, okay,” replied a still-nervous Che. “But please send a messenger to him first to explain that we’re doing it. I don’t want any misunderstandings.”3

  Reading Che Guevara’s literary grovelings to Castro is almost embarrassing. “Song to Fidel” is the title of a poem Che wrote to Fidel shortly after meeting him in Mexico City. “Onward ardent prophet of the Cosmos!” goes the first line. “When your voice shouts to the four winds: agrarian reform, justice, bread, liberty, there at your side you will find me.”

  In the April 9, 1961 issue of Verde Olivo, the official paper of Cuba’s armed forces, Guevara poured forth again: “This force of nature named Fidel Castro Ruz is the noblest historical figure in all of Latin America. . . . A great leader of men, boldness, strength, courage, have brought him to a place of honor and sacrifice that he occupies today.”

  Then, on October 3, 1965, came the mushiest ode of all, Che’s famous “Farewell Letter to Fidel.” “I have lived magnificent days at your side, and feel a tremendous pride in having served beside you,” Che wrote. “Rarely has statesmanship shone as brilliantly as yours . . . I am also proud of having followed you without hesitation, identifying with your way of thinking. I thank you for your teachings and for your example. My only mistake was not to have recognized your qualities as a leader even earlier,” on and on, in an unrelenting obsequiousness that would shame a court eunuch.

  The shameless apple-polishing reinforced Castro’s conviction that in Che, he had a handy and dependable—and malleable—puppet. The brilliant longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer comes to mind here. “People who bite the hand that feeds them,” he wrote, “usually lick the boot that kicks them.” The Soviet Union fed Che Guevara, while Fidel Castro kicked him.

  Che’s notorious sneer and cruelty were his habitual manner of dealing with defenseless men. Against armed men on an equal footing, his behavior was markedly different.

  A few months into the Sierra skirmishes, Castro had ordered Che to take command over a guerrilla faction led by a fellow July 26 Movement rebel named Jorge Sotus, who had been operating in an area north of Fidel and Che, and had actually been confronting and fighting Batista’s army. Che and a few of his men hiked over to Sotus’s command station and informed him that Che was now in command.

  “Like hell,” responded Sotus.

  “It’s Fidel’s order,” responded Guevara. “We have more military experience than you and your group.”

  “More experience in running and hiding from Batista’s army, perhaps,” Sotus shot back. Che dithered and looked around. “Besides, me and my men aren’t about to take orders from a foreigner,” Sotus added. “I don’t even know you. You’re not even Cuban. Forget it.”

  “Well, I came on the Granma with Fidel,” whimpered Che.

  “I don’t give a shit,” snapped Sotus. “I’m in command here!”4

  Sotus walked away, and the minute Che thought he was out of sight and earshot Che started mingling with his men, trying to get them to come over to him. It was all on Fidel’s orders, of course. And surely they had to listen to Fidel? He was, after all, the . . .

  “Listen here, Argentino!” Sotus had snuck around, seen Che, and stomped in front of his face. “You keep this shit up and I’ll blow a hole in you. Now scram!”5

  And Che did just that, back to Fidel where he whined about Sotus’s insolence. “You’re not worth a damn, Che!” Castro shouted at him. “I didn’t tell you to ask him to give you command. I told you to take it from him! You should have done it by force!” The problem, of course, had been that Sotus was armed. Che, who was armed, too, quailed before him.6

  A few weeks after Batista’s flight and Castro’s triumph, Sotus was arrested without warning and shoved into the Isle of Pines prison. The intrepid Sotus managed to escape, made his way to the United States, and joined an exile paramilitary group, taking part in many armed raids against Cuba from South Florida until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal nixed them.

  “That Sotus was a hell of a guy,” recalls Carlos Lazo. “We became friends in prison.” Lazo was a Cuban air force officer who had bombed and strafed Sotus during the rebellion. They both found themselves jailed by the Castroites.

  Che Guevara also had a run-in with a rebel group named the Second Front of the Escambray. These operated against Batista in Cuba’s Escambray mountains of Las Villas province. When Che’s column “invaded” the area in late 1958, he had orders from Castro to bring these guerrillas under his command, much as he’d attempted with Sotus. But again he ran into trouble, especially from a comandante named Jesus Carreras who knew of Che’s communist pedigree and basically told him to go piss up a rope. Again, Guevara didn’t press the issue.

  A few weeks into the January 1959 triumph, Carreras and a group of these Escambray commanders visited Che in La Cabana to address the issue of how they’d been frozen out of any leadership roles in the new regime. On the way in, Carreras ran into a rebel he’d known in the anti-Batista fight and stopped to chat while the rest of the group entered Che’s office. Once the others were inside, Che immediately ripped into Carreras as a drunkard, a womanizer, a bandit, and a person he’d never appoint to any important position.

  Midway into Che’s tirade, Carreras had finished chatting with his old buddy and entered the office, having overheard much while outside. “Che went white,” recall those present. An enraged Carreras jumped right in his face and Che backed off. Finally, Carreras challenged Che to a duel, “right outside in the courtyard!” he pointed. “Let’s go!”7

  “How is it possible,” Che said, smiling, “that two revolutionary compañeros get to such a point simply because of a little misunderstanding?” 8

  The subject was dropped and they turned to other issues, but a year later an unarmed Jesus Carreras was ambushed by Che’s men and shortly found himself a prisoner in a La Cabana dungeon. A few months later, he found himself bound and facing a firing squad.

  Fuego! The volley riddled him, and the coup de grace blasted his skull to pieces while Che watched from his favorite window.

  10

  Guerrilla Terminator

  One of the longest and bloodiest guerrilla wars in the Western Hemisphere was fought not by Fidel and Che, but against Fidel and Che—and by landless peasants. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s Kulaks had guns, a few at first, anyway, until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal cut off potential supplies.

  It’s rarely reported, but Che Guevara had a bloody hand in one of the major anti-insurgency wars in this hemisphere. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” was how one of the few lucky who escaped alive described these guerrillas’ desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through the Soviet proxies Castro and Che.

  Of course, slaughtering resisters was not an ideological departure for Che, who, as we saw, justified the extermination of Hungarian freedom fighters by Soviet tanks as early as 1956.

  Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines in 1962. “Cuban militia units [whose training and morale, remember, Jorge Castañeda insists we credit to Che] commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counter-revolutionaries and bandits.”1 Though it raged from one tip of the island to the other, most Cubans know this war as “the Escambray Rebellion,” for the mountain range in central Cuba where most of the bloodiest battles raged. Cuba’s country folk went after the Reds with a f
erocity that forced Castro and Che to appeal to their Soviet sugar daddies for help. In the countryside, these Cuban rednecks often faced the firing squads untrussed, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. “Aim right here!” was a favorite among some of these as they reached below the belt, “ ’cause you ain’t got any!”

  “I was a poor country kid,” says Escambray rebel Agapito Rivera. “I didn’t have much, but I had hopes and aspirations for the future. And there was abosolutely no chance that I’d go work like a slave on one of Cuba’s state farms. I planned on working hard, but on my own, for myself, getting my own land maybe. Then I saw the Castro communists stealing everything from everybody. They stole my hopes. I had no choice but to fight them.”2 Agapito Rivera had two brothers and nine cousins who took up arms in the anticommunist guerrilla war. He was the only survivor.

  “It was hard to sleep in those days,” recalls Emilio Izquierdo, who was twelve at the time. He lived in the Pinar del Rio province of western Cuba where, in 1961, a fierce rural rebellion also raged. Cuba had been divided into three military zones, each with a member of the Holy Revolutionary Trinity in command. The eastern provinces were Raul’s, the center was Fidel’s, and the western, including Pinar del Rio province, was Che’s.

  “All those Russian helicopters flying over day and night—whomp-whomp-whomp. I still remember the sound, almost like thunder. It was constant. And Russian trucks loaded with troops constantly passing in front of our house. They were all headed to the hills to fight the freedom fighters. It was a terrible thing to watch, because we knew the rebels got no support from anywhere, not from the Americans. They fought on a shoestring with very little ammunition and supplies. It’s amazing how they held out and the damage they caused the communists. Very few people on the outside know about this terrible fight. My family lost many friends in that fight.”3

  One of these was Aldo Robaina. “My brother always said those communist SOBs would never take him alive,” recalls Aldo’s brother, Guillermo Robaina, who would bring the guerrillas supplies from time to time. “I remember the time I brought them a supply of bullets I’d managed to steal from Castro’s army. My brother’s little band of rebels divided them up right there—and it came to sixty-seven bullets per person. They were ecstatic. ‘Now we’ll see!’ they said, and everybody was slapping backs. They regarded it as an enormous amount of ammo. The following week my brother and his band were wiped out. One who made it out of the encirclement said they simply ran out of bullets but refused to surrender. They literally fought to the last bullet. My brother kept his vow—the communists never took him alive. We don’t know where he’s buried.”4

  Lazaro Piñeiro was only seven at the time, but the memories are still vivid.

  “My father took to the hills of Pinar del Rio as a rebel in 1961. We knew what he was up against because we could see the Russian helicopters and the convoys of Russian trucks constantly taking troops into the hills to pursue them. My mother, as you can imagine, was going through a living hell. But my father said he’d fight those communists as long as he had a breath in his body and a bullet in his gun. We lived in the country, had a small but comfortable house. We didn’t have a sugar mill or anything like that. When we came to the U.S. that’s all we heard, ‘Oh you people must be those millionaire plantation owners that lost your fortunes to Castro, huh?’

  “We were very surprised by the ignorance, and even today we still hear much of the same things. One day I was out in front of the house playing and one of the Russian trucks braked to a halt in front of me. ‘Get your mother!’ some guy yelled from the window. I ran inside and my mother opened the door and peeked out. She was, of course, terrified. ‘You the wife of Piñeiro, right?’ the soldier shouted from the truck. My mom stood there stunned, but she nodded.

  “Then two guys in back of the truck hoisted a body like if it was a butchered animal. ‘Well here’s your husband!’ and they threw my father’s body out of the back of the truck into a ditch in front of our house and roared off, all of them laughing. All the neighbors came running to console my mother who was . . . well, as you can imagine, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. My father had over fifteen bullet holes in his body. He fought to his last bullet. He had always told my mother the communists would never take him alive. They certainly didn’t.”5

  The Maoist line about how “a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people” fit Cuba’s anticommunist rebellion perfectly. Raul Castro himself admitted that his government faced 179 bands of “counter-revolutionaries” and “bandits” at the time.6

  In a massive “relocation” campaign—reminiscent of that of the Spanish general Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler at the turn of the century—Castro’s armed forces ripped hundreds of thousands of rural Cubans from their ancestral homes at gunpoint and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba. One of these Cuban wives refused to be relocated. After her husband, sons, and nephews were murdered by the gallant Che and his minions, she grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip, and took to the hills. She became a rebel herself. Cubans know her as La Niña del Escambray.7

  For a year she ran rings around the communist armies sweeping the hills in pursuit of her. Finally she ran out of ammo and supplies and was captured. La Niña suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons for years, but she survived to live in Miami today. Her tragic story would make ideal fodder for Oprah, for the professorettes of “Women’s Studies,” for Gloria Steinem, for a Hollywood movie, perhaps a Susan Sarandon role. Feisty female leads are big in Hollywood. They don’t come much feistier than Zoila Aguila, her real name. Had she been fighting, say, Somoza or Pinochet, or U.S. forces in Iraq, Hollywood and New York would be all over her story. But she fought the most picturesque poster boy of the left, so her story is deemed uninteresting.

  The skirmishing of Castro and Che that set them up to occupy the vacuum of the Batista regime lasted two years. The anticommunist rebellion lasted six years, and involved ten times as many fighters as the Castro-Che rebellion against Batista. But you’ll search the New York Times, Look, Life, CBS, and Paris Match in vain for any stories on these rebels. In fact, you will not find any mention whatsoever of this fierce guerrilla war that raged for six years within ninety miles of America’s borders.

  Che’s hagiographers aren’t much help either. Jon Lee Anderson’s eight-hundred-page biography devotes two hundred pages of hyper-ventilating prose to Che’s puerile skirmishes in the Sierra and Las Villas. Anderson covers Cuba’s six-year, islandwide, anticommunist rebellion—that, again, according to Che’s accomplice Raul Castro, saw 179 different bands of anticommunist “bandits” and cost the Castroites six thousand casualties—in two sentences. Jorge Castañeda skips the anticommunist rebellion altogether, though he was clear that Che was technically Cuba’s second-in-command at the time.

  In 1987, the Cuban regime’s own press hailed Che Guevara’s role in the glorious slaughter of rural rebels. “Presencia del Che en la Lucha Contra Bandidos y Limpia del Escambray,” crowed the Castroite press (“Che’s Role in the War Against Bandits and the Escambray CleanUp”). The Castroites were “cleaning” the area, you see, of counter-revolutionary vermin and “bandits,” also known as brave peasants who took up arms and took to the hills to defend their humble family farms against the genuine bandits—Cuba’s Stalinist regime.

  “With his great moral authority, tenacity and fine example,” says one of the Che-trained bandit exterminators quoted in the article, “Che came into our camp and compelled our combat spirit. He pored over all the battle maps. He pointed out the main points of bandit resistance. Che inquired about all of our recent actions. He instructed and investigated and greatly fortified us. He spurred us on to whip and whip the enemy until defeating him. Che’s lessons, his visits and his inspiration contributed much to the victory of the War Against the Bandits. When he was leaving our camp he turned around pointed to the hills and shouted, ‘The mountains are now ours!’ ”8

 
Indeed they were. According to evidence presented to the Organization of American States by Cuban-exile researcher Dr. Claudio Benedi, four thousand anticommunist guerrillas were summarily executed during this rural rebellion.

  Here was a genuine rebellion with true battles. Cuba’s genuine Bravehearts, Davy Crocketts, and Patrick Henrys fought a desperate and lonely war against a Soviet-backed enemy, against outrageous odds. They died unknown to the world, many summarily by firing squad. Those interested in plugging this yawning gap in their historical knowledge should forget the mainstream media and academia. Consult Enrique Encinosa’s superb book, Unvanquished.

  11

  “The Brains of the Revolution” as Economic Czar

  Che Guevara’s Socialism and Man in Cuba is one of the great documents in the history of socialism.

  —FORMER Time AND Newsweek EDITOR AND New York Times WRITER JOHN GERASSI

  Eleanor Clift has the power to make the worldly and garrulous John McLaughlin—host of the eponymous political chat show—gape in astonishment. Clift said on national television, “To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S.” McLaughlin had to ask her to repeat that to make sure he had heard her correctly.

  Few myths are more persistent, or more rotten, than the myth of Cuban economic progress and egalitarianism.

  In late 1959, Castro appointed Che as Cuba’s “Economics Minister.” Like a true child of the French Revolution, Che set out to re-fashion human nature, with hapless Cubans as his guinea pigs. His task was to create a “new man,” diligent, hard-working, obedient, free from all material incentives—in brief, lobotomized. And any shirkers, or smart-alecks who offered any lip, would quickly find themselves behind the barbed wire, watchtowers, and guard dogs of the prison camp Che christened at the harsh Guanahacabibes peninsula in extreme western Cuba.