Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  Weeks and months went by and finally one of Che’s Cubans, a high Cuban Communist Party official, Emilio Aragones, burst out: “Che!—que cojones! [roughly, “what the fuck”] are we doing here!” Che responded with his standard rhetoric about international proletarian solidarity and anti-imperialism. His comrades rolled their eyes, nodded, and walked off.

  The Cubans on the other side of the battlefield had a very different experience. Mad Mike Hoare, after watching his allies, noted: “These Cuban CIA men were as tough, dedicated, and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding. Their leader [Rip Robertson] was the most extraordinary and dedicated soldier I’ve ever met. Those Cuban airmen put on an aerial show to compete with any. They’d swoop down, strafing and bombing with an aggressive spirit that was contagious to the ground troops who then advanced in full spirit of close-quarter combat.”11

  Gus Ponzoa is a Cuban-American pilot who flew near-suicidal missions over Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion, where half of his pilot brothers in arms were killed in action. Gus inflicted dreadful damage on his communist enemies at the Bay of Pigs. Four years later he itched to fight those enemies again and ripped into them in the Congo.

  “I really hate to laugh about what we did against Che Guevara in the Congo,” he says. “And I’m honored that Mad Mike Hoare thinks highly of us. We certainly think highly of him. That man was a fighter! He was a tank commander against Rommel at El Alamein, then in southern Africa he was a brave and resourceful commander again. But when I think back at those African cannibals we were up against, the ones Che—the mighty ‘Tatu’—supposedly led, good grief! . . . I’d fly air cover over Hoare’s Fifth Commando, which also included Cuban Americans, Bay of Pigs veterans and friends of mine. That was a thick jungle in the Congo, as you can imagine. We had to fly low—very low, usually following the roads. That was the only way to navigate over that jungle area. I’d spot the enemy and I’d radio down to Hoare’s men: ‘Throw a smoke grenade, let us know where you are.’ And we’d see it—me and my wingmates Luis Ardois, Rene Garcia, and the others, all of us Bay of Pigs vets—we’d swoop down blasting with our fifty-calibers and shooting rockets . . . what a mess down there!12

  “Then Hoare would radio up. ‘We’re down here! You guys are gonna hit us! You’re too close!’

  “ ‘We know you’re down there, Mike,’ we’d shout back. ‘We know exactly where you are. You’ve got enemy close to you and we’re taking them out.’ ” It took a couple of missions before Hoare felt comfortable with the Cuban CIA air support. He’d never had any that was quite that close before, certainly not in the expansive deserts of North Africa. But this was jungle; any air support had to be close.”

  Gus goes on to recall, “But after a couple of missions, Hoare loved us. He saw that we knew how to fly—and how to shoot. From then on, he couldn’t do without us. He was always slapping us on the back when we met, all smiles.”

  When Ponzoa and his fellow pilots dove on a strafing run with guns and rockets blazing, they were often flabbergasted to see their African enemies standing in the road or in the few jungle openings, calmly looking skyward. They behaved more like spectators at an air show than targets. “Some would even wave at us right before we blasted them to smithereens,” he recalls.

  Soon the Cuban-American pilots learned of the magical dawa, or protection, that the local mugangas, or witch doctors, bestowed upon the mighty Tatu’s troops and allies. “The African leader’s name in our area was Pierre Mulele,” says Ponzoa. “He told his soldiers that if they drank the magic water he was giving them—that a very famous and powerful witch doctor had concocted—then bullets would bounce off their bodies.”13

  Not that all of Che’s allies fell for such transparent poppycock. Many remained skeptical. But Mulele had a way to quickly bring around the malcontents and assorted others of little faith. “Mulele would have a few of his soldiers drink the witch doctor water,” says Gus Ponzoa. “Then he’d have his officers grab them, tie them up, and stand the poor bastards up to be shot—Pow! Pow! And they’d be shot—but with blanks. ‘See?’ He’d beam at the troops he’d gathered. ‘See! There’s the proof!’ Now go drink your witch doctor water so we can go into battle against those imperialist mercenaries!’ ”

  Pierre Mulele, by the way, was education minister under the Congolese regime of Patrice Lumumba, who was described by Cornell University’s John Henrik Clarke as “A Black Messiah,” “the best son of Africa,” and “the Lincoln of the Congo.”

  The heralded author of “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” the man scholars hoist on the same pedestal with Giap, Mao, and Lawrence of Arabia, the founder of Cuba’s Revolutionary Military Academy, the official trainer of Cuba’s militia, the subject of the Hollywood hagiography Guerrilla!—this mighty Tatu might have persuaded his Congolese troops that fifty-caliber bullets and forward-firing aircraft rockets that opened German Tiger tanks like sardine cans do indeed penetrate human skin.

  Tatu’s final clash with the mad dogs of imperialism came at a mountaintop town called Fizi Baraka. Che’s ally here was “General Moulana,” who dressed in a motorcycle helmet draped in a leopard skin and was nicknamed “General Cosmonaut” by the other Cubans. When Che visited his headquarters, Moulana put on his splendid motorcycle helmet battle garb. Then, to display his formidable defenses, he had his troops in all their chicken feather and monkey fur finery parade before Tatu. Needless to say, General Cosmonaut’s resident witch doctor had made them all bulletproof.

  Hoare’s Fifth Commando soon burst upon the scene—literally, with Gus and his partners flying cover with their machine guns and rockets. The result was another hideous slaughter and a complete rout. Tatu scrambled for his life between explosions. Another witch doctor nervously concocted excuses for his somewhat faulty dawa.

  The whole comic-opera operation finally impressed itself even on Tatu. “History of a disaster,” he titles his Congo diaries. But he blames it all on his allies. “The Congolese were very, very bad soldiers,” he finally confided to Felix Rodriguez during his last hour alive. Yet, for some reason, the Congolese on Hoare’s side seemed to fight rather well.

  Tatu’s Congo mission was soon abandoned. Che and the Castro Cubans made a humiliating retreat, across Lake Tanganyika. They abandoned their allies and possessions in a frantic retreat, barely escaping Africa with their lives. Che now set his sights on Bolivia for his next guerrilla adventure, for living his dream of turning the Andes “into the Sierra Maestra of the continent,” for creating “two, three, many Vietnams.”

  Castro, as usual, drew valuable lessons from experience. He would soon get out of the business of guerrilla wars and “people’s wars.” In the mid-1970s, when Castro was serious about a client regime in Africa, he sent fifty thousand troops, hundreds of Soviet tanks, and squadrons of MIGs. They used saturation barrages of 122mm Soviet howitzer shells, hails of Katyusha rockets, and sarin gas against unarmed villages. Force at this level explained the Cuban “victory” in Angola, one unhampered by witch doctors and their dawa. (The Clark Amendment passed by Democrats in the U.S. Congress, which cut off all U.S. aid to Angolan anticommunists, also made things easier for Castro.)

  One thing that did impress the Simbas about Tatu was that “he never went down to the river to wash.”

  13

  Che’s Final Debacle

  Che died a martyr’s death in 1967.

  —DAVID SEGAL, Washington Post

  Che Guevara . . . was young and charismatic and brutally murdered with the support of the CIA.

  —GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM CURATOR TRISHA ZIFF

  In a way, 1968 began in 1967 with the murder of Che.

  —CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, The Guardian

  It would be difficult to imagine a more cockamamie plan for Bolivia than the one Che devised. Under President Paz Estenssoro in 1952-53, Bolivia underwent a revolution of sorts, with an extensive land reform that—unlike Che and Fidel’s—actually gave ownership of the land to the peasants,
to the tillers of the soil themselves, much like Douglas MacArthur’s land reform in postwar Japan. Even stranger, Che himself, during his famous motorcycle jaunt, had visited Bolivia and witnessed the positive results. Still, his amazing powers of self-deception prevailed.

  Che convinced himself that in a section of Bolivia where the population consisted not of landless peasants, but of actual home-steaders, he’d have the locals crowding into his recruitment tent to sign up with a bunch of foreign communists to overthrow the government that had given them their land, rural schools, and considerable freedom to manage their own affairs. These Indians were highly suspicious of foreigners and especially of white foreigners. Che was undaunted by any of these facts. Hasta la victoria siempre! as he liked to say. At this stage in his life Che was probably as deluded as Hitler in his bunker.

  “The only place where we have a serious structure,” a confident Che told the Bolivian Communist Party head, Mario Monje, “is in Bolivia. And the only ones who are really up to the [anti-imperialist] struggle are the Bolivians.”1

  Monje, a Bolivian native and a shrewd and veteran communist, must have wondered what planet Che Guevara had been inhabiting lately. The local Indians seemed equally mystified. “Their silence was absolute,” wrote Che in his diaries about confronting the residents of a Bolivian village named Espina, “as though we were in a world apart.”2 This unnerved Che. In keeping with this principle, he had diligently prepared his guerrillas by having them learn some of the Quechua dialect spoken by most Andean Indians.

  The problem was, the Indian population living in the area of Bolivia he had chosen for his glorious guerrilla campaign spoke Guarani, a completely different dialect.

  There is no evidence that Castro took the Bolivian mission seriously except as a means to rid himself of Che Guevara. His Soviet patrons were certainly not behind it. They knew better. They’d seen every guerrilla movement in Latin America wiped out. The only thing these half-baked adventures accomplished was to upset the Americans, with whom they’d cut a splendid little deal during the Cuban Missile Crisis to safeguard Castro. Why blow this arrangement with another of Che’s harebrained adventures? Much better to work within the system in Latin America, reasoned the Soviets at this time, subtly subverting the governments by using legitimate communist parties. A few years later Salvador Allende’s victory in Chile bore fruit for the Soviet strategy.

  The Bolivian Communist Party itself had very clear instructions regarding Che’s Bolivian adventure. Its head, Mario Monje, was a faithful follower of the Soviet party line who wanted nothing to do with Che, except to help him fail. As soon as Che entered Bolivia, Monje visited both Havana and Moscow for instructions. According to former CIA officer Mario Riveron, who headed the CIA group that tracked down Che in Bolivia, Monje was gratified to learn that he and Castro were in full accord. Fidel’s advice to Monje on helping Che was very explicit: “Not even an aspirin.”3

  The Bolivian communist leader’s lack of commitment was so obvious that even the numbskull Guevara finally sensed it, but without at first grasping its origins in Moscow and Havana. After meeting with Monje in December 1966, Che wrote in his diaries, “The party is already against us, and I don’t know where this will lead.”4

  It would lead, of course, to doom, to betrayal at the hands of Castro himself. That the “ardent prophet of the Cosmos,” “the noblest historical figure in all of Latin America” had secretly sent out word that the Heroic Guerrilla would soon “sleep with the fishes” wasn’t conceivable for Che—just yet. It would culminate in October 1997, with Castro shedding crocodile tears over his “very best friend” at Che’s reinterment and funeral extravaganza in Santa Clara.

  According to Mario Riveron, as early as 1964 Castro was already grooming Che for the same fate as his revolutionary comrade Camilo Cienfuegos, who had come across in the Granma and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Castro brothers and Che. “Castro’s ego simply will not allow anyone to upstage him, even temporarily, even slightly,” according to Mario Riveron. “Because of Che’s fame by that time, eliminating him would be a more delicate matter than getting rid of Camilo. But get rid of him he would.”

  Who was Camilo Cienfuegos?

  Camilo had entered Havana a day before Che on January 3, 1959, where, acting on Castro’s orders, he promptly took command of Cuba’s military headquarters at Camp Colombia. Camilo was handsome and charismatic, and in the eyes of many, actually outshone Fidel and Che at early revolutionary rallies, often stealing the limelight with his ready smile and humor. Simpático is the term Cubans use for Camilo Cienfuegos’s personality. Castro seemed to recognize this and actually turned to Camilo on the podium during his first mass rally in Havana. “Voy bien, Camilo?” Fidel asked (am I doing OK, Camilo?). Such deference was—to say the least—not a Castro trademark.

  A few months later, Camilo flew from Havana to the eastern province of Camaguey for the hateful task of arresting his friend and revolutionary comrade Huber Matos, who was being devoured by the revolution he helped seat at the table. On the flight back to Havana after he dutifully arrested Matos, Camilo Cienfuegos disappeared without a trace. His plane crashed and vanished, said the authorities, though the evening had excellent weather, according to all records. The Castro brothers made a big show of a search and rescue, but nothing turned up. To many, including Huber Matos himself, Camilo’s death seemed much too convenient.

  Two of Camilo’s loyal lieutenants also died in “accidents” within days of their commander’s disappearance. The head of Camaguey’s small airport, from which Camilo had taken off on his doomed flight, was also suspicious and started to ask questions about the rescue effort. Two weeks after Camilo’s disappearance, this airport official was found with a bullet through his head. His death was ruled a “suicide.”

  Always the true believer, Che Guevara swallowed Castro’s version of Camilo’s death without a hiccup. (Che’s first son, Camilo, was named in honor of his deceased friend.)

  Just two months after arriving in Bolivia and setting up camp in Nancahuazu, Che decided to leave a small crew at the camp and take his guerrilla band on a “conditioning” and “reconnaissance” trek through the surrounding area. “We’ll be back next week,” he told the others.

  Not two miles from the camp, Che’s outfit lost its bearings. Two weeks later, they ran out of food. A month later, they were still stumbling around totally lost, eating monkeys and parrots for sustenance and constantly bickering. Several had caught malaria. Then two men drowned while trying to cross a river with a load of six rifles and ammo. Forty-eight days later, the rest stumbled back to the main campsite, with their masterful guerrilla chieftain at their head, demoralized, sick, and half-starved. Here they learned that the few Bolivian guerrillas in their band were already deserting and ratting them out, and that the local peasants had already alerted the army to their “liberators’ ” presence.

  Che, the author of the century’s best-selling guerrilla guidebook, had gone into the jungle having learned the wrong local language and apparently lacking the ability to correlate a compass to a map. Che might have tried celestial navigation, or “steering by the stars,” a reliable form of guidance used since the Upper Paleolithic. He did not.

  The only Bolivians Che managed to recruit into his doomed group were renegade communists and Maoists. Most of these were tricked into joining. Che’s guerrilla force, which averaged about forty-five members, was pompously titled the “National Liberation Army.” Yet at no point during its eleven-month venture did Bolivians make up more than half of its members. And these few Bolivians all came from the cities, tin mines, and universities far distant from the guerrilla base. The rural population shunned their “National Liberation Army” like a band of lepers. On March 25, 1967, Bolivia’s National Confederation of Peasants (as Latin American, as rural, and as indigenous an outfit as there is) mobilized its entire membership against Che Guevara, “against the intervention of foreign elements in our country’s internal affairs.”
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  Long before the Gap- and Birkenstock-clad tourists from Chelsea, Manhattan, and Malibu arrived on their Che tours, these Bolivian peasants were “on the trail of Che Guevara,” as the tourist brochures advertise their junkets—but with machetes, pitchforks, and a hang-man’s noose.

  Six hundred peasants from Bolivia’s rural department of Cochabamba volunteered to form a militia to fight Che. This was three times as many guerrillas as Castro and Che’s rebel army ever numbered in Cuba, and over ten times as many as Che’s own Bolivian “National Liberation Army,” counted at its peak, including the snookered miners. Sweetest of all ironies—all of these six hundred Bolivians willing to fight Che were actually peasants, not unemployed lawyers, bored college students, and cashiered philosophy professors.

  Yet Bolivian peasants did not scorn and resent all foreigners. When U.S. Army major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton of the Green Berets arrived in Bolivia with his sixteen-man crew to train the men who would hunt down and extinguish Che and his “National Liberation Army,” Bolivian peasants mobbed him at every turn. Everywhere “Pappy” and his men ventured in the Bolivian countryside the locals showered them with food, drink, song, and fond salutations.

  “You hate to laugh at anything associated with Che, who murdered so many,” says Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA officer who played the key role in tracking him down in Bolivia and was a friend of “Pappy” Shelton. “But when it comes to Che as guerrilla you simply have to. In Bolivia he was unable to recruit one single campesino into his guerrilla ranks!—not one! I fought the Viet Cong, El Salvador’s FMLF, the Sandinistas, and with the Nicaraguan Contras. So I know about guerrilla movements. All of those—especially the Contras—recruited heavily from the rural population.