The Cuba that Castro and Che built has since become a global brothel, one in which women are exploited with shocking ease for “sex tourists.”
“Since she is usually desperate,” writes one Dr. Julia O’Connell Davidson, “he can secure sexual access to her very cheaply.”36 O’Connell Davidson, professor of sociology at Britain’s University of Nottingham and author of The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution, conducted a thorough study of contemporary Cuban prostitution.
“A Cuban prostitute can often be beaten down to as little as U.S. $2 to $4,” O’Connell Davidson writes. “Inexperienced women and girls can be persuaded and/or tricked into spending a whole night with a client for the cost of a meal, a few drinks or small gift. Sex tourists state that it costs them less to spend two weeks indulging themselves in Cuba than it does in other centers of sex tourism, such as the Philippines and Thailand. This is partly because competition between so many Cuban women lowers the price.
“Girls aged 14 and 15 are even more desperate for dollars and therefore more vulnerable. We met 14- and 15-year-old prostitutes working in Varadero who reported that a number of their Italian, Canadian and German clients make between three and five trips to Cuba per year. More disturbing still, such tourists are paying older Cuban women and men, often prostitutes themselves, to procure 14- and 15-year-old girls for them.”37
Professor O’Connell Davidson found that what she termed the “hostile sexuality” of many of Cuba’s visiting tourists “can be encapsulated in the motto ‘Find them, feed them, f**k them, forget them’ . . . A U.S.-based company that publishes a book and electronic newsletter entitled Travel & the Single Male identifies Cuba as a new ‘hot destination for the adventurous single male.’ One British tourist explained that his Cuban ‘girlfriend’ (he had traded in another woman for her the previous day) had suggested that he move out of the hotel where he was paying $20 per night, and stay in her flat where she would do all his washing and cook his meals for him. For all this, plus acting as guide and interpreter and granting him sexual access, she asked only $5 a day plus the cost of the food. At home, this man could not even buy a pack of cigarettes for this sum, far less obtain the services of a maid/prostitute.”38
Professor O’Connell Davidson also discovered something of interest for Charlie Rangel, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Naomi Campbell, Kweisi Mfume, Che tattoo wearer Mike Tyson, and Che T-shirt wearer and rapper Jay-Z. “Cubans face many of the same ‘racialised’ barriers that oppress Black people elsewhere in the world. Groups that face this kind of structural disadvantage are often over-represented in prostitution. Our initial impression was that there were more Black than ‘mixed’ or white jiniteras (prostitutes). As one Canadian said to me, ‘You can call a nigger a nigger here [in Cuba], and no-one takes it the wrong way.’ ”
Professor O’Connell Davidson concluded that in Cuba racists “find opportunities for satisfying a sexual appetite for others they both despise and desire. For them, Cuba is ‘paradise.’ Cuba presently has a great deal to offer the sex tourist. Such men can contemptuously command Cuban women and girls with the same ease that they order cocktails.”39
These are not the words of embittered Cuban exiles, but a reading from a feminist European college professor.
But, lest we get the wrong idea and lump her with that tacky Miami bunch, Professor O’Connell Davidson closes with the following: “Their power [to command Cuban women] rests not only upon the obscene disparity in wealth between the developed and underdeveloped world, but also upon American foreign policy. Under Batista, the U.S. indirectly organized Cuba as its brothel and gambling house. Today, its punishment of Cuba is helping to recreate the conditions under which Cuban women and girls must become the playthings of the economically advantaged.”
Once again, it’s the Americans’ fault. Well that’s more like it, especially in view of Professor O’Connell Davidson’s academic standing. At least she documents well what she saw in front of her eyes and heard with her ears in Cuba.
In 1958, Cuba enjoyed a higher standard of living than (I’m looking at the professor’s last name) Ireland. As we have seen, Cuba under Batista was not part of the “underdeveloped” world, much less “a brothel and gambling house for the U.S.” In 1958, Cuba had approximately 10,000 prostitutes. Today 150,000 women ply their desperate trade on the island.40
Professor O’Connell Davidson’s University of Nottingham is ranked among Britain’s ten best universities by the London Sunday Times. So we can’t expect them to teach accurate Cuban history, any more than Berkeley or Yale or Princeton teaches it. The “obscene disparity in wealth” between Cuba (today) and the developed world that Professor O’Connell Davidson documents has nothing to do with U.S. policy and everything to do with Castro’s policy—especially his appointment of Ernesto “Che” Guevara as president of Cuba’s National Bank and Cuba’s minister of industries in quick succession.
Blacks in Cuba
Institutionalized racism was abolished in Cuba thirty years before Rosa Parks was thrown off that Montgomery bus. The government Che Guevara helped overthrow had included blacks as president of the Senate, minister of agriculture, chief of the army, and head of state, Fulgencio Batista himself.
Batista grabbed power in a (bloodless) coup in 1952, but in 1940 he had been elected president in elections considered scrupulously honest by U.S. observers. So whatever racial barriers existed in Cuba at the time did not prevent a country that was 71 percent white from voting in a black president—and electing him almost twenty years before Eisenhower sent federal troops into Little Rock to enforce integration.
Today, Cuba’s jail population is 85 percent black. The regime Che Guevara cofounded holds the distinction of having incarcerated the longest-serving black political prisoner of the twentieth century, Eusebio Peñalver, who was holed up and tortured in Castro’s jails longer than Nelson Mandela languished in South Africa’s.
Peñalver was bloodied in his fight with communism but unbowed for thirty years in its dungeons. “Nigger!” taunted his jailers. “Monkey! We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” snickered Castro’s goons as they threw him in solitary confinement. 41
His communist jailers were always asking Eusebio Peñalver for a “confession,” for a signature on some document admitting his “ideological transgressions.” This would greatly alleviate his confinement and suffering, they assured him.
They got their answer as swiftly and as clearly from Peñalver as the German commander who surrounded Bastogne got his from the 101st Airborne. Eusebio scorned any “re-education” by his Castroite jailers. He knew it was they who desperately needed it. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew it was they who should don it. Through thirty years of hell in Castro’s dungeons, Eusebio Peñalver stood tall, proud, and defiant.
Ever hear of him? He lives in Miami. Ever see a CNN interview with him? Ever see him on 60 Minutes? Ever read about him in the New York Times? The Boston Globe? Ever hear about him on NPR, or during Black History Month? Ever hear the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus mention him?
He was a Cuban political prisoner. And as we all know, with the mainstream media and academia, that form of oppression doesn’t count. Today, Castro’s police bar black Cubans from tourist areas. Cuba’s most prominent political prisoner, Elias Biscet, is black (I won’t bother asking if you’ve heard of him). And exactly .08 percent of Cuba’s communist rulers are black. In other places they called this “apartheid.”
12
Che in Africa
[The Congo] was the path that would lead [Che] to glory.
—JORGE CASTAÑEDA
Che Guevara’s campaign in Africa came to a comic end because Che could not begin to match his opponents’ skill in organizing and inspiring African troops.
In a radio interview shortly after he entered Havana, Che Guevara gave a good clue to what lay ahead for Cuban blacks. A prominent Cuban businessman named Luis Pons, who
happened to be black, called and asked Che what the revolution planned on doing to help blacks.
“We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution,” snapped Che. “By which I mean: nothing.”1 Today Pons is a prominent Cuban-American businessman in New York, and one of the founders of the Cuban American National Foundation. His mother was denied permission to leave Cuba, precisely because she was black.
“When we were training in Mexico before landing in Cuba,” recalls Miguel Sanchez, who did much of the training, “Che delighted in belittling the Cuban black guerrilla named Juan Almedia. He always sneered at him as ‘el Negrito.’ Almedia would get furious at Che so I finally told him, ‘Look, Juan, when Che calls you el Negrito call him El Chancho (the pig) because that guy never, but never takes baths.’ And it worked for a while. But Che soon found other targets for his innate racism, sneering at all ‘these illiterate Indians in Mexico.’ ”2
Did this attitude hobble Che in dealing with African troops? By April 1965, Che was in Tanzania with a contingent of Cuban military officers and troops. Code-named “Tatu,” Che and his force entered the Eastern Congo, which was convulsed at the time by an incomprehensible series of civil (mostly tribal) wars. Leave it to Ernesto Guevara to size up this madhouse conflagration as a “people’s war” against “capitalist oppressors” that demanded “proletarian brotherhood.”
Tatu’s self-appointed mission was to help the alternately Soviet-and Chinese-backed “Simbas” of the Congolese Red leader, Laurent Kabila, those of Pierre Mulele, and several other bands of rapists, cutthroats, and cannibals. All these “liberation” groups were busy hacking their way through the Congolese followers of Moise Tshombe, along with many of the defenseless Europeans still left in the recently abandoned Belgian colony.
The Simbas’ sack of Stanleyville was particularly gruesome. Among those hacked to death during the murderous melee were American missionaries Dr. Paul Carlson and Phyllis Rine. U.S. Consul Michael Hoyt and his entire consulate staff and their families, though captured by the Simbas, who shrieked “Ciyuga! Ciyuga! [Kill! Kill!] Kill them all! Have no scruples! Men, women, children—kill them all!” while parading them through downtown Stanleyville, managed to escape alive. The Simbas had just herded their hostages into Stanleyville’s main square under the Patrice Lumumba statue and were moving in to comply with the command “Ciyuga!” when Belgian Foreign Legion paratroopers literally dropped in. They jumped from Hercules C-130s flown by U.S. pilots from bases in France. The Simbas scattered in panic.3
Soon the Belgian legionaries linked up with the mercenary forces of “Mad” Mike Hoare, with Congolese who opposed Kabila, and with some Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans sent by the CIA. The Cubans were mostly pilots who provided close air support for Mad Mike with North American T-28 Trojans and Douglas B-26 Invaders. A small force of Bay of Pigs veterans also formed part of Mad Mike’s Fifth Commando on the ground. They were soon making short work of the cannibal Simbas, to the lasting gratitude of Stanleyville’s terrorized residents.
Around this time Che—the mighty “Tatu”—made his entrance.
Che’s first military mission as an ally of these Simbas was to plot an attack on a garrison guarding a hydroelectric plant at Front Bendela on the Kimbi River in eastern Congo. An elaborate ambush of the garrison, it was meant to be a masterstroke. No sooner had Tatu’s ambushers blundered into position than the ambushers became the ambushed. They fell under a withering rain of mortar shells and machine-gun fire. In this first military masterstroke, Comandante Tatu lost half his men.
Che’s African allies started frowning a little more closely at his resume and asking a few questions (but in Swahili, which he didn’t understand). Victor Colas was a Cuban comandante attached to Che. “I finally decided to give the order to retreat,” he recounts about the next confrontation with Mad Mike and the CIA Cubans. “I turned around—and found I was alone! Apparently I’d been alone for a while. Everyone had fled. I’d been warned about this.”
A few more routs followed, and soon Che couldn’t get an audience with any African leader. “I tried to talk to Major Kasali,” records Che. “But he refused to see me saying he was suffering from a headache.”4
For weeks, Simba head Laurent Kabila himself pointedly refused to answer any of Tatu’s correspondence. Finally he answered one missive brusquely, and Che was jubilant, responding like a neglected puppy to a man he had met only once, and briefly. “Dear Comrade,” Tatu wrote him back. “Thank you so much for your letter. I await your arrival here with impatience because I consider you an old friend, and I owe you an explanation. Also be assured: I put myself unconditionally under your orders. I also ask you a favor. Give me permission to join the fight with no other title than political commissar of my comrades.”5 Obviously, Che’s battlefield fame was spreading in Africa.
Some Simbas spoke halting French and were able to communicate with Che. “One of the first Congolese I met, a chief named Lambert,” recalls Che in his diaries, “explained to me while pounding his chest how he and his troops merely laughed at the enemy planes. Lambert explained that the planes were completely harmless, their bullets had struck him many times and simply bounced off and dropped to the ground. The reason was because he and his troops were completely protected by a dawa applied by a local muganga, or witch doctor, a very powerful one at that. This consisted of many magical herbs sprinkled over them before battle. The only problem came if the combatant either touched a woman before battle or experienced any fear during it. Then he would lose the dawa protection. The power of the particular muganga was also important.”6
Che, avowed Marxist theoretician that he was, seemed unfazed by this disclosure, reporting it in the same languid tone as the rest of his writings. Many of the Simbas’ “helmets” were manes of monkey fur and chicken feathers.
After one of the very few successful ambushes of Mad Mike’s Fifth Commando column, Che’s troops discovered that the ambushed truck contained a major stash of whiskey. Having evaded a complete stomping that day, Tatu was in proud form. His victory discourse on “proletarian internationalism” and “imperialist exploitation” was louder and longer than usual. Not that anyone ever listened particularly closely to Tatu’s promulgations. But that day his soldiers were truly distracted as they fell upon the captured truck’s contents. Soon the revelry started.
For the full picture here, let’s recall that “Tatu,” when known as “Che” in Cuba, had decreed a ban on liquor, dancing, and cock-fighting when he marched into Santa Clara. (This might come as something of a surprise to all the spring break revelers in Cancun who bear his image.)
It didn’t take long for the ambush site to become a madhouse of yelling and laughing as Tatu screeched hoarsely and futilely from the sidelines about “proletarian internationalism.” Alas, the Simbas had plenty of ammo left in their weapons, and soon the fireworks started, at first into the air. But soon aiming became difficult, and several Simbas ended up shooting themselves and each other in the festive melee. A poor peasant was quickly mowed down. The man was clearly a “spy of the mercenaries,” explained a soused Simba.7 (Richard Pryor’s famous skit where he played a pistol-packing Idi Amin Dada comes to mind here.)
Tatu soon hit upon a familiar solution to such problematic behavior by his troops. He proposed setting up a “Congolese Military Academy,” to properly indoctrinate his “African Liberation Army” in “proletarian brotherhood, and revolutionary consciousness,” much as he’d done with the militia recruits in Cuba.
The Cubans under Che Guevara’s command weren’t quite as sanguine. “This whole thing is a stupid pile of sh*t!” one complained. As rout followed rout for the Congolese rebels and their Cuban allies at the hands of Mad Mike Hoare, the Belgians, and the CIA Cubans, morale plummeted. “Many revolutionary comrades are doing a dishonor to their pledge as revolutionaries,” is how Tatu described this outburst of common sense among the Cuban troops in his Congo Diaries. “Their actions are the most reprehensible that
can be imagined for a revolutionary. I am taking the most severe disciplinary measures against them.”8
So Che/Tatu hit upon the disciplinary measure of threatening to send his Cuban colleagues home!
“We had no idea why we were in the Congo,” recalls Dariel Alarcon, who as a teenager was recruited into Che’s column in Cuba’s Sierra and accompanied him on every catastrophe from then on. “That Congo thing was very hasty and reckless. We were simply soldiers following orders. But it was impossible to tell Che anything. We were very immature at the time, and Che treated us like marionettes. Whenever he called a meeting it was to browbeat us. No one dared contradict anything he said or offer an opinion. ‘You there—shut your mouth!’ was all he’d say.”9 (Recall Castañeda’s statement that “Che’s decency and nobility always led him to apologize.”)
Che didn’t have anything like that leverage over his African charges, who usually laughed at him. One day Tatu finally put his foot down with the soldiers of his “African Liberation Army.” They had refused to dig trenches, to carry any supplies, to do any work whatsoever. “We’re not trucks,” they said, laughing at Che as he thundered his commands. “And we’re not Cubans” (here referring to the ones doing all the grunt work). Che finally lost it.10
“In my fury,” writes Che in his diaries, “I yelled at them that they were behaving like women. That I’d have to put aprons on them and baskets on their heads so they could carry yucca around like women.”
But Che’s tirade had to first pass through an interpreter. A French-speaking African would stand close to Che and translate his exhortations for the troops. This meant a slight time lag until his grandiloquence hit home. First the troops turned to face the sputtering Che. Then they turned to the interpreter, who would disclose what all that red-faced sputtering was about.
When the message finally sank in, “they started cackling hysterically,” Che writes, “and in a very ingenious and disconcerting manner.” It never seemed to occur to the shrewd Che, who didn’t understand a word of Swahili, that his interpreters might deliberately mistranslate, thus framing the mighty Tatu as an even bigger jackass than his local fame already proclaimed.
Exposing the Real Che Guevara Page 20