The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  In one scene, amidst the thunder of bombs and hail of bullets, Che laments how the U.S. is intervening on Batista’s side. In fact: at the very time of Che’s lament as depicted in this obsessively accurate movie, the Batista regime was under a U.S. arms embargo.

  On a visit to Cuba in 2001 for a “scholarly summit” with Fidel and Raul Castro, Robert Reynolds—who served as the CIA’s Caribbean desk’s specialist on the Cuban revolution from 1957 to 1960—clarified the U.S. diplomatic stance of the time: “My staff and I were all Fidelistas,” he boasted to his beaming hosts.

  Reynolds’s colleague Robert Weicha concurred. In the late 1950’s, Weicha had served as CIA chief in Santiago, Cuba—the city nearest the Iwo Jima-like exploits depicted in this movie. “Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except Ambassador Earl T. Smith,” he said.

  Weicha’s was a hands-on type of Fidelismo. In the fall of 1957, he and a partner, U.S. consul Park Wollam, smuggled into Cuba and delivered to soldiers in Castro’s July 26 Movement the state-of-the-art transmitters that became Castro and Che’s “Radio Rebelde” or “Rebel Radio.” From these mics—shown in the movie, right before the scene of Che’s “U.S. intervention for Batista” lament—the Castroites broadcast their guerrilla victories island-wide, along with their plans to liberate, uplift and democratize Cuba.7

  That Che’s famous Radio Rebelde was CIA-issue probably went unmentioned by Soderbergh’s Cuban co-producers. Somehow this would not mesh well with the film’s message.

  Soderbergh’s movie also shows Che Guevara steely-eyed and snarling with defiance during his capture. Only seconds before, Che’s very M-2 carbine had been blasted from his hands and rendered useless by a fascist machine-gun burst! Then the bravely grimacing Guevara jerked out his pistol and blasted his very last bullets at the approaching hordes of CIA-lackey soldiers.

  In the theater, viewers gape at the spectacle. Eyes mist and lips tremble at Soderbergh and Del Toro’s impeccable depiction of such undaunted pluck and valor. OK, but just where did Soderbergh and Del Toro—utterly obsessed with historical accuracy—obtain this version of Che’s capture?

  Soderbergh’s scriptwriters transcribed this account of Che’s capture exactly as penned by Fidel Castro. Ah, but when it came to the script for his film Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh balked at anything and everything issuing from Pacific Gas & Electric Company as completely biased and unreliable. No such scruples applied against the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist dictatorship. Why, the man who mentored Soderbergh’s film for impeccable historical honesty is also on record for the following testaments:

  “Let me be very clear—very clear—I am not a communist! And communists have absolutely no influence in my nation!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959)

  “Political power does not interest me in the least! And I will never assume such power!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959) 8

  But as evidenced by Steven Soderbergh’s films, the author of these proclamations deserves to have his version of Che’s capture transcribed on the silver screen as gospel. Fidel Castro, you see, wrote the forward to Che’s Diaries wherein this Davy Crockett-at-the-Alamo version of events appears.

  All accounts of Che’s capture, by the Bolivian soldiers who actually captured him, reveal major discrepancies between Soderbergh and Del Toro’s Fidel Castro-mentored film and historical truth. In fact, on his second-to-last day alive, Che Guevara ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to the last breath and to the last bullet. With his men doing exactly that, Che, with a trifling flesh-wound to the leg—depicted by Soderbergh as ghastlier than the one to Burt Reynolds’s character in Deliverance—snuck away from the firefight, crawled towards the Bolivian soldiers doing the firing, spotted two of them at a distance, then stood up and yelled: “Don’t Shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”9

  His Bolivian captors record that they took from Che a fully-loaded PPK 9mm pistol. And the damaged carbine was an M-I—not the M-2 his diary said he was carrying. The damaged M-1 carbine probably belonged to the hapless guerrilla charge, “Willy,” whom Che dragged along to his doom. But it was only after his obviously voluntary capture that Che went into full Eddie-Haskell-greeting-June-Cleaver mode. “What’s your name, young man?!” Che quickly asked one of his captors. “Why, what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!”

  “So what will they do with me?” Che, desperate to ingratiate himself, asked Bolivian captain Gary Prado. “I don’t suppose you will kill me. I’m surely more valuable alive.... And you, Captain Prado!” Che commended his captor. “You are a very special person! ... I have been talking to some of your men. They think very highly of you, captain! ... Now, could you please find out what they plan to do with me?”10

  From then on, Che Guevara’s Eddie Haskell-isms only get more uproarious. But somehow none of these found their way into Soderbergh’s film.

  Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro actually had an intriguing and immensely amusing theme, if only they’d known how to plumb it. Soderbergh hails Guevara as “one of the most fascinating lives in the last century.” Almost all who actually interacted with Ernesto Guevara—and are now free to express their views without fear of firing squads or torture-chambers—know that The Big Question regarding Ernesto, the most genuinely fascinating aspect of his life, is this:

  How did such a dreadful bore, incurable doofus, sadist and epic idiot attain such iconic status?

  The answer is that this psychotic and thoroughly unimposing vagrant named Ernesto Guevara had the magnificent fortune of linking up with modern history’s foremost PR man, Fidel Castro. For going on half a century now, Fidel has had the mainstream media anxiously scurrying to his every beck and call, eating out of his hand like trained pigeons. Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico City that fateful summer of 1955, everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, panhandling, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.

  SNUBBING THOSE WHO KNOW

  Many who interacted with Che Guevara at close range now live outside Stalinist Cuba, primarily in south Florida, and could have provided accounts of Che’s story without fear of torture-chambers if they deviated from the Castroite party line.

  But Cuban-American Felix Rodriguez, the CIA operative who played a key role in capturing Che, was pointedly snubbed by the film’s producers. “They called and asked for an interview, and though I agreed, they never followed through,” he told this writer.

  Dariel Alarcon, who was on the other side, also was snubbed by Soderbergh. As an illiterate 17-year-old-Cuban hillbilly, he joined Che’s guerrilla band in 1957, then remained among Che’s closest adjutants until the very end. Alarcon was part of Che’s guerrilla group in Bolivia who shot it out with the Bolivian Rangers advised by Felix Rodriguez.

  Unlike Che Guevara, however, Alarcon never surrendered to the Bolivian Rangers. In the same firefight where Che snuck away and surrendered with a full clip in his pistol, Alarcon fought to his last bullet and then escaped. He and four others then fought and snuck their way through the Andes to Chile, where then-senator Salvador Allende helped them make their way back to Cuba.

  Now here’s a feat of genuine guerrilla ingenuity, and one genuinely admirable regardless of the cause Alarcon then served.

  Safely back in Cuba, Alarcon was tasked by Fidel Castro with assassinating Felix Rodriguez. It fit a pattern. Bolivian officers involved in Che’s capture were being picked off. A peasant who had helped the Bolivian army set up an ambush was murdered. Bolivia’s president at the time of Che’s capture, Rene Barrientos, died 18 months later in a mysterious helicopter crash.

  The week after Guevara’s capture, on October 8, 1967, Fidel Castro had indeed put a price on Felix Rodriguez’s head, as he had on all the of the Bolivian army officers Felix assisted.

  Eight years later, in May 1975, General Joaquin Zenteno, a Bolivian officer who had worked with Rodriguez and was now
Bolivia’s ambassador to France, was murdered on a Paris street. When Felix Rodriguez picked up the phone a few days afterward, he heard the words, “You’re next,” then a click.11

  “When you get to Miami,” Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez heard from one of his jailers the day of his release in 1987, “tell your friend Felix Rodriguez his days are numbered. It’s one of el comandante Castro’s top priorities.” Roberto Martin-Perez had been childhood friends with Felix Rodriguez and spent 28 years in Castro’s dungeons and torture-chambers. He was arrested in August 1959 at age 22.12

  But Rodriguez always managed to elude Alarcon. Now here again was a fascinating subplot, if not an entire movie, for Soderbergh. Alas, this genuine guerrilla—the title of part two of Soderbergh’s hagiography is entitled “Guerrilla”—defected from Castro’s regime in 1997 and today lives in Paris. Many movie producers would say, “Ah, perfect!”

  “Lets’ see—both Felix Rodriguez and Dariel Alarcon are intimately tied to the Che Guevara story; both were alternately cat-and-mouse with each other as part of this narrative; both have fascinating first-person accounts of war and international intrigue; and both live in free countries. So both could be easily located and both could speak at length without fear of censorship about Che Guevara’s military exploits, which constitute the entirety of our film.”

  Hah! That was exactly the rub. That’s the very last thing Steven Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro’s co-producers—the Castro regime—would allow. So it never came to pass, though both Rodriguez and Alarcon had been initially contacted and made to believe their stories would be part of the film. More interesting still, guerrilla hunter and hit-target Rodriguez and guerrilla and hit-man Alarcon have since become friends and socialize often.

  But don’t look for their fascinating story anywhere. It doesn’t fit the Hollywood narrative, nor that of PBS, NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, the History Channel, A&E, and so on. All of these have been granted Havana bureaus and/or frequent Cuban visas. All would probably need the Castro regime’s approval first. So forget it.

  Little known—because it makes Che Guevara look like the monumental bungler he was—is how Dariel Alarcon and four others from his guerrilla band fought their way out of the Bolivian army ambush; then found their way across some of the world’s wildest terrain all the way over to Chile, and finally escaped back to Cuba. As mentioned, here’s material for a genuinely exciting and intriguing Hollywood movie all by itself.

  Only one hitch: Everyone with half a brain would quickly conclude how this (by any measure) genuinely proficient guerrilla action was finally made possible: namely, that these five were finally rid of the blundering leadership of an incurable jackass named Che Guevara, who seemed unable to apply a compass-reading to a map. Under Che’s leadership the guerrilla band had been split; they walked in circles and actually engaged in firefights against each other, each thinking the other was the Bolivian enemy!

  Free from such brilliant command after Che’s whimpering surrender, they pulled off a genuinely skillful fighting retreat across two countries and some of the world’s tallest mountains.

  According to Soviet-bloc intelligence defector Ion Pacepa, the Che Guevara myth was a KGB creation; the words were “Operation Che” and the photo was that ultra-famous portrait of “Guerrillero Heroico,” the Heroic Guerrilla, taken by Alexander Korda, a Cuban intelligence officer. To that recipe, add Fidel Castro’s vast media savvy and contacts, and you cook up some history.13

  Would the Castro regime dare pop this bubble? The question answers itself.

  Alas, having Fidel Castro as your PR man has its drawbacks since, as former colleagues all attest, “Fidel only praises the dead.” So prior to whipping up the legend of Che Guevara, Fidel sent him to “sleep with the fishes.” Too bad Soderbergh and Del Toro didn’t interview the former CIA officers who revealed to this author how Castro himself, via the Bolivian Communist party’s Mario Monje, constantly fed info to the CIA on Che’s whereabouts in Bolivia. They might also have added drama by including Fidel’s directive to Monje regarding Che and his merry band. “Not even an aspirin,” instructed Cuba’s Maximum Leader to his Bolivian comrade—meaning that Bolivia’s Communists were not to assist Che in any way—“not even an aspirin” if Che complained of a headache.

  Recall that Lou Diamond Phillips played the Monje role in Soderbergh’s movie. Imagine how this intrigue and treachery would have spiced up the plot. Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino might have rolled up their sleeves and made this material interesting—if not the character himself, then perhaps whatever malfunction in his brain-synapses might animate his fans. But utterly starstruck by their subject and slavishly compliant to Fidel Castro’s script and casting-calls, Del Toro and Soderbergh let all the fascinating plots and subplots fly right over their heads—to the immense gratification of their Cuban co-producers.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing that shows me a little bit more about Castro,” said frequent Cuba visitor and Castro fan Jesse Ventura during a March 2010 interview with Christopher Stipp. “The main downtown building in Havana has this huge flat wall and it has got a huge portrait on it. It’s not Castro. It’s Che Guevara. The biggest photograph in downtown Havana was a mural of Che. Now if Castro was such an egomaniac and all this, wouldn’t he put himself up there instead of Che?”

  For a man with Ventura’s (mostly self-vaunted) street-smarts, Fidel Castro’s blandishments of (the dead) Che Guevara should be a cinch to plumb. Didn’t Don Barzini send the biggest and fanciest flowers to Don Corleone’s funeral?

  Now, on to Cuba’s genuine guerrilla war, the one fought from 1960 to 1966 and—it cannot be repeated often enough—against the Fidel-Che regime. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway. At the time, Cuba’s enraged campesinos had risen in arms by the thousands as Castro and Che started stealing their land to build Soviet kolkhozes, and murdering all who resisted. Alarmed by the savage insurgency, Castro and Che sent a special emissary named Flavio Bravo whimpering to their sugar-daddy Khrushchev. “We are on a crusade against kulaks like you were in 1930,” whimpered this old-guard Cuban Communist party member.

  In short order, Soviet military advisors, still flush from their success against their own campesinos in the Ukrainian Holocaust, were rushed to Cuba.14

  This anti-Stalinist rebellion, 90 miles from U.S. shores, involved ten times the number of rebels, ten times the casualties and more than twice the amount of time as the puerile skirmish against Batista; but it found no intrepid U.S. reporters anywhere near Cuba’s hills. What came to be known as The Bay of Pigs invasion was originally planned as a link-up with the Cuban resistance of the time, which was more numerous per capita than the French resistance before D-Day, though you’d never know it from any media outlet.

  Had these rebels gotten a fraction of the aid the Afghan Mujahedeen got, the Viet Cong got—indeed, that George Washington’s rebels got from the French—had these Cuban rebels gotten any help, those Latin American Bandits named Fidel Castro and Che Guevara would merit less textbook and Wiki space today than Pancho Villa. And Miami’s jukeboxes today would carry more Faith Hill than Gloria Estefan.

  TAKE ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY WALL, BABY

  In 1955 Fidel Castro and his wealthy Cuban backers of the time hired a Cuban Korean war veteran named Miguel Sanchez to train his guerrilla band in Mexico for their invasion of Cuba to topple Batista. None of the trainees had the slightest combat experience so their extra-curricular curiosity on the matter did not surprise or annoy Sanchez.

  But one of the trainees struck Sanchez as curioser and curioser than the others about the act of killing. “How many men have you killed?” he constantly asked Sanchez. “What does it feel like to kill a man?”

  “Look, Ernesto,” Sanchez would tell the younger man, who did not yet have the moniker, ‘Che.’ “It was a war. I was in combat. It wasn’t a personal thing. Most soldiers don’t make it a personal
thing. You aim at an enemy uniform and pull the trigger. That’s it.”

  “But did you ever come upon a wounded enemy and kill him with the coup de grace?” A wide-eyed Ernesto Guevara would continue. “What did it feel like? I want to know what it feels like.”

  “It became obvious to me that the man who would shortly become known as ‘Che’ wanted to kill for the sake of the act itself,” says Sanchez, “instead of—as in the case of most others, and this includes Fidel and Raul Castro—as a means to an end. That end for Castro, of course, was absolute power.... His power lust fueled his killing, and it didn’t seem to affect him one way or the other. With Ernesto Guevara it struck me as a different motivation, a different lust.”15

  “On Sundays in Mexico I would often dine with Guevara and his Peruvian wife, a great cook,” recalls Sanchez. “Ernesto was a voracious reader and loved poetry. I’ll never forget his favorite poem, ‘Despair’ by Jose de Espronceda: ‘I love a sullen-eyed gravedigger crushing skulls with his shovel! I would love to light the flames of a holocaust which spreads devouring flames that pile up dead and roast an old man until he crackles, What pleasure! What Pleasure!’

  “Ernesto Guevara would close his eyes dreamily and recite it from memory during all of my visits, even at the dinner table,” recalled Sanchez.16

  Che Guevara’s favorite poem continues: “I love to see bombs falling from the sky and lying still and silent then bursting, vomiting fire and leaving dead everywhere!”

  “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands!” writes Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his own diaries that later become known as “Motorcycle.” “My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood.” Robert Redford somehow overlooked this part of Che’s Motorcycle Diaries.

  “He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still,” gloats Che Guevara in his diaries later known as Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. He was lovingly describing the death-agonies of a bound Cuban peasant he had just shot in the temple with his pistol. “Now his belongings were mine.” (Here, unwittingly, Che Guevara gives us communism in a nutshell: cowardly murder and theft.)