Exposing the Real Che Guevara (31 page)

“Shall I attend him?” Che asked his captors.

“Why? Are you a doctor?” asked Captain Gary Prado.

“No, but I have some knowledge of medicine,” answered Guevara, resuming his pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with his captors, and admitting on the record that he was not, in fact, a doctor.
³¹

“So what will they do with me?” Che asked Captain Prado. “I don’t suppose you will kill me. I’m surely more valuable alive.”

A bit later, Che asked again, “What will you do with me? I’d heard on the radio that if the Eighth Division captured me the trial would be in Santa Cruz, and if the Fourth Division captured me, the trial would be in Camiri.”

“I’m not sure,” responded Captain Prado. “I suppose the trial will be in Santa Cruz.”

“So Colonel Zenteno will preside. What kind of fellow is Colonel Zenteno?” asked an anxious Che.

“He’s a very upright man,” answered Prado, “a true gentleman. So don’t worry.”

“And
you,
Captain Prado,” said Che quickly. “You are a very special person yourself. I’ve been talking to some of your men. They think very highly of you, captain. And don’t worry, this whole thing is over. We have failed.” Then to further ingratiate himself, “Your army has pursued us very tenaciously . . . now, could you please find out what they plan to do with me?”
³²

A young Bolivian schoolteacher named Julia Cortes from the village of La Higuera had brought the captured Che some food on his last day alive. “He seemed to think he’d come out of it alive,” she recalls. “They might take me out of here,” Che told her. “I think it’s more in their interest to keep me alive. I’m very valuable to them.”
³³

Like an actor, Che was warming up to his new role as captured hero. In fact, he was captured wearing his famous black beret, sporting a bullet hole, yet those on the Bolivian mission with him, such as Dariel Alarcon, attest that Che
never once
wore that beret during the Bolivian campaign. Che had always worn a military cap. All pictures of him in Bolivia back this up. Marcos Bravo, an anti-Batista operative now in exile who knew many of Che’s Cuban revolutionary comrades, speculates that Che put on his famous black beret (and even shot a hole in it) to make a dramatic celebrity surrender and impress his captors. Che probably expected a few snapshots in the process.

After a peaceful capture, Che expected a celebrity trial erupting into a worldwide media sensation. Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre would issue eloquent pleas for his freedom. Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag would lend their voices from New York. Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald, and Wavy Gravy would hold a concert and candlelight vigil in Golden Gate Park. Ramsey Clark would take a leave of absence as LBJ’s attorney general to assist William Kunstler in Che’s courtroom defense. And above all, college students around the world could be counted on to protest, riot, and disrupt their campuses until Che was released.

Here is what happened.

“Finally I was face to face with the assassin of thousands of my brave countrymen,” recalls Felix Rodriguez. “I walked into the little schoolroom and he was tied up lying on the ground. My boots were next to his face—just like Che’s boots had been next to my friend Nestor Pino’s face after he was captured at the Bay of Pigs. Che had looked at Nestor with that cold sneer of his and simply said, ‘We’re going to shoot every last one of you.’ Now the roles were reversed, and I was standing over Guevara.”
³⁴

Both CIA officers involved in his capture, Felix Rodriguez and Mario Riveron, affirm that—leftist legend to the contrary—the agency happened to agree with Guevara. They wanted him alive and made strenuous efforts to keep him that way. “Handled decently, a prisoner talks sooner or later,” says Riveron, “a dead prisoner, obviously, won’t.”

Despite attempts by Felix Rodriguez to dissuade the Bolivian high command, the orders came through to shoot the prisoner. Rodriguez reluctantly passed them on to his Bolivian colleagues. “I was their ally in this mission, an advisor,” he says. “I wasn’t the one who gave the final orders. But I operated the radio at that location and had the official rank of captain. The orders came to me: Che to be executed.”

Felix passed the order along as he was duty bound, but kept trying to change the Bolivian officers’ minds. “Felix, we’ve worked together very closely and very well,” replied the stern Bolivian Colonel Zenteno. “We’re very grateful for the help you and your team have given us in this fight. But please don’t ask me to disobey a direct order from my commander-in-chief. I would be dishonorably discharged.”

Now that Che was gone from his command post, the fight by his guerrillas back at Yuro was
really
raging, and the Bolivian rangers were taking casualties. Unlike their gallant commander, Che’s men were holed up and defiantly blasting away to the last bullet. So Colonel Zenteno had urgent business at his own command post.

“Felix, I have to go back to my headquarters now,” Colonel Zenteno said. “But I’d like your word of honor that the execution order will be carried out by two this afternoon. We know the terrible damage Guevara has done to your country, and if you’d like to carry it out personally we’d certainly understand.”

Instead, Felix kept trying to change the colonel’s mind. Finally he saw it was futile. “You have my word, colonel.”

“Actually, I knew that execution order was coming a little before I got it,” says Rodriguez, “when I heard on the Bolivian radio station that Che Guevara had been killed in combat. So I asked Sergeant Teran to shoot Che below the neck to simulate combat wounds. Then I walked back into the little schoolhouse to break the news to Che. ‘Look,
comandante,
’ I said. ‘I’ve done everything in my power to try and save . . .’ At that moment Che turned white. He knew what was coming. So I asked Che if he had any last words he’d like me to pass along.

“He told me: ‘Yes, tell Fidel that the armed rebellion will eventually triumph,’ but Che said this very ironically, with a sad smirk on his face. I’m convinced that Che finally—at long last—realized that Castro had deliberately sold him down the river. For some reason, here I was finally face to face with one of my bitterest enemies, yet I felt no hate for Che Guevara at the moment . . . It’s hard to explain.

“I walked outside the little schoolhouse and heard the shots. I looked at my watch and it was 1:10 P.M., October 9, 1967.” Ernesto “Che” Guevara was dead.

Che’s biographers, basing their accounts on Castro’s fictions, tell a different, more edifying story. When it comes to heroism, perhaps it is better to remember the courageous and defiant yells of Che’s firing squad victims.

“I kneel for no man!”

“Aim
right here
!”

Chapter 1: New York Fetes the Godfather of Terrorism

 
Chapter 2: Jailer of Rockers, Hipsters, and Gays

 
Chapter 3: Bon Vivant, Mama’s Boy, Poser, and Snob

 
Chapter 4: From Military Doofus to “Heroic Guerrilla”