Exposing the Real Che Guevara (4 page)

Some Che biographers uncritically absorb the lies they are told by authoritative people and pass them on. Of the two most voluminous and best-selling biographies of Che, one was written by a contributor to
Newsweek
and the
New York Times
who is also a former Mexican Communist Party member and fondly recalls plastering Che’s poster in his Princeton dorm room. The other, written by a columnist for
The New Yorker
, was written mostly in Cuba with Castro’s full cooperation and with Aleida Guevara—a high-ranking Cuban Communist Party member—as a primary source.

Che Guevara’s diaries were published by the propaganda bureau of a totalitarian regime, with the foreword written by Fidel Castro himself. Yet all Che “scholars” and the mainstream media take them at face value. Indeed, with regard to the unvarnished secrets of Che Guevara’s history, his scholarly biographers treasure these Havana editions as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. Might there be some embellishments or omissions in these Che “diaries”—in these documents that feature so prominently in the liberal media’s versions of Che’s brilliance and heroism? Not according to Che “scholars.” But as we’ll see in the coming chapters, Che’s early revolutionary colleagues, now in exile, along with the men
actually on the scene
of Che Guevara’s capture, have a very different story to tell.

The book you’re holding relies on testimony from people who are now free to tell the truth without fear of Castro’s torture chambers and firing squads. Normally, eyewitnesses to a Hero and Icon of the Century would have to bat away the journalists, biographers, and screenwriters. Instead, for forty years, the mainstream press, scholars, and scriptwriters have shunned these invaluable sources. It appears that the journalists and scholars, no less than the screenwriters, do not want to entertain facts that conflict with the narrative they have jointly constructed with one of the century’s top manipulators of the intelligentsia, Fidel Castro.

Since Castro’s famous interview with Herbert Matthews of the
New York Times
in 1957, through all the fawning interviews with Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, and Andrea Mitchell, Castro always had the international media eating out of his hand like trained pigeons. The process cranked up several notches when CNN opened its Havana bureau in 1997. This was shortly after Ted Turner, during a packed speaking gig at Harvard Law School, bubbled to the crowd, “Castro is one hell of a guy! You people would like him!” (Another gushing accolade for Cuba’s Maximum Leader came from the gentleman known, at the time, as “Mr. Jane Fonda.” His praise was evoked by a recent hunting trip to Cuba. During Tom Hayden’s expedition with Castro, military helicopters drove thousands of ducks in front of their shotguns, allowing them to slaughter hundreds of hapless birds. Where was PETA on that one?) At any rate, Che lives on in part because he had Fidel Castro as a press agent.

From Castro’s fervid devotion to democracy and well wishes for the United States in 1957, to his regime’s glorious achievements in health care and education, to Elian’s father’s heartfelt yearning for the return of his son, Castro’s every whopper has been respectfully transcribed and broadcast for half a century now—and by the same journalistic Torquemadas who wouldn’t allow an American president to finish a sentence without erupting in cynical snorts and rude interrogations.

Much credit for the remarkable afterlife of Che Guevara goes, of course, to The Picture. To his credit, Guevara understood his role. He performed magnificently at his photo shoot in March 1960 for Alberto Korda. His “faraway eyes” and high cheekbones were perfectly highlighted. Today that’s often all it takes for media stardom. Few Americans know that the famous icon photo was actually spiked by the Castro regime when it was first scheduled to run in Cuba’s official paper,
Revolución
. Che’s image could have overshadowed the Maximum Leader’s at the time. In its place they ran a photo of Fidel sitting and chatting with two of his famous fans, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Castro, better than even his chums Ted Turner and Robert Redford, always understood the power of imagery. Since his high-school days, Castro was a keen student of Nazi pageantry. The official colors of Castro’s July 26 Movement’s flag and armbands are black and red with a splash of white, identical to the Nazi flag and armband. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Seven years after Korda’s photo shoot, when Che was safely “sleeping with the fishes” and could pose no threat to the Maximum Leader, Castro dusted off The Picture and started plastering it all over Cuba. He called the international media with a sharp whistle and said, fetch. The result is the most reproduced and idolized print of the century.

As his former comrades could have told you, “Fidel Castro only praises the dead.”

Castro knows the continuing power of Che, and how to appropriate it for himself. According to UCLA professor David Kunzle, “There is no figure in 20th Century history that has produced such a body of fascinating, varied and compelling imagery as Che Guevara.”
⁷

Here, at long last, we encounter a truth about Che—and, as we shall learn, a truth about Fidel. Several men who were Castro’s political prisoners in 1967 have revealed to me that their prison guards finally displayed that now-famous Che poster
the week before Guevara was captured and killed.
Fidel wasn’t exactly surprised by the news of Che’s death, having created the conditions for his death in Bolivia. He then oversaw and personally sold the media blitz for a martyred friend.

And so today The Picture adorns T-shirts, posters, watches, skis, lava lamps, skateboards, surfboards, baseball caps, beer-huggers, lighters, Rage Against the Machine CDs, and vodka bottles. Last year supermodel Gisele Bundchen took to the catwalk in skimpy underwear stamped with Che’s face. Burlington put out a line of infant wear bearing Che’s face. Taco Bell dressed up its Chihuahua spokesdog like Che for its “Taco Revolution” ad campaign. “We wanted a heroic leader to make it a massive taco revolution!” says Taco Bell’s advertising director, Chuck Bennett. (This tribute, perhaps, is comic enough to be appropriate—as long as consumers can keep from thinking about how Che treated real dogs.) The TV shows
South Park
and
The Simpsons
have lampooned Che T-shirt wearers. Omar Sharif and Antonio Banderas have played Che in movies. Under the pseudonym John Blackthorn, Gary Hart wrote a novel titled
I, Che Guevara
. A video game,
Guerrilla War,
plays on Che’s (utterly bogus) military exploits.

Ignorance, of course, accounts for much Che idolatry. But so do mendacity and wishful thinking, all of it boosted—covertly and overtly—by reflexive anti-Americanism. This book will expose you to many eyewitness accounts of Che Guevara’s cruelty, cowardice, and imbecility. The deeper investigation will be why he continues to receive so much adoration from media leftists and celebrities in the twenty-first century.

This book will succeed in some degree, however, if it merely prompts Angelina Jolie to question if her tattoos, as her website claims, are really “a reflection of her personality.” If this is so, then Brad Pitt had better start watching his back.

1

New York Fetes the Godfather of Terrorism

On the evening of December 11, 1964, Che was decked out in a long trench coat, his trademark beret with the red star cocked at a jaunty angle as he strode toward the United Nations to address the General Assembly. Security was tight for the event and cops swarmed on the scene. Cuban exiles infested nearby New Jersey and many were on hand holding up placards, waving fists, and yelling “
Assassin!
” as Guevara prepared to make his grand entrance.

As Che neared the U.N. entrance, a New York cop named Robert Connolly noticed a grim-faced woman racing down Forty-third Street. He alerted his colleague Michael Marino. The two cops tensed while watching the woman pick up speed as she neared the makeshift barrier erected specifically to protect Che at the U.N. perimeter. A large knife flashed in the woman’s hand.

“Watch her!” bellowed Connolly. “She’s got a knife!” Connolly and Marino started sprinting toward her.

“
Arriba!
” the woman yelled, closing on Che. Only then did Che’s bodyguards begin to react. She shrieked again, her little legs pumping furiously.

The cops were closing on her when she turned, yelled “
Arriba!
” a final time, and waved the huge knife. They easily dodged her knife and gang-tackled her. After a few seconds of rolling and scuffling, the inflamed woman, Gladys Perez, was subdued.

“I meant the officers no harm,” Gladys panted while being led away. “The knife was meant for the assassin Guevara!”
¹

Officers Connolly and Marino were soon on their way to St. Clare’s Hospital for treatment of multiple scratches and gouges inflicted by the struggle. Gladys was telling the truth. Her knife did not touch the cops. The poor officers tangled only with the buzz saw of her teeth and fingernails as she struggled to get at Che.

Unscathed, Che Guevara entered the halls of the General Assembly and started his speech. “Executions?” He paused for effect at one point. “Certainly, we execute!” he declared to the claps and cheers of that august body. “And we will
continue executing
[emphasis his] as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the Revolution’s enemies!” The Spanish word for death is
muerte
, and Che rolled the Rs deliciously. The trilling of “
mueRRRRTE!
” resonated grandly throughout the hall.
²

Che was merely proclaiming, of course, what the scholars of
The Black Book of Communism
would reveal—that fourteen thousand Cubans would be executed without anything smacking of due process by the end of the decade. For perspective, consider that Slobodan Milosevic went on trial for allegedly ordering eight thousand executions. The charge against Milosevic—by the same United Nations that applauded Che—was “genocide.” Che let the General Assembly’s ovation that greeted his “
mueRRRRRTE!
” subside and proceeded to other favored themes. “The government of the United States is not the champion of freedom,” he said, “but rather the perpetuator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population!” More claps, more cheers. Yankee Imperialism was “a carnivorous animal feeding on the helpless.” Another ovation.
³

Che was in New York for eight days but could barely accommodate all the Beautiful People jostling to meet him. On
Face the Nation,
Che was softballed by the
New York Times
’s Tad Szulc. “The road of liberation will go through bullets,”
⁴
Che said, firing rhetorical bullets through the softballs—and paying no price in reputation for this extreme display of belligerence.

Lisa Howard—Hollywood actress, Mutual Radio Network host, and ABC noontime news anchorette—hosted Che in her Manhattan penthouse. Howard had also invited Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, to fete Che. Howard, a self-appointed matchmaker between Cuba and the United States, achieved nothing but the encouragement of even more spirited denunciations of her country.

Such was Che’s New York social swirl that Malcolm X had to settle for a written message, which he read in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. “Dear Brothers and Sisters of Harlem,” Malcolm read without disclosing the messenger, “I would have liked to have been with you and Brother Babu . . . Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel.”

“This is from Che Guevara!”
⁵
an enraptured Malcolm X finally yelled as the room exploded in applause.

Columnist Laura Berquist conducted two reverential interviews with Che Guevara for
Look
magazine, one in November 1960, another in April 1963.
Look
’s covers and interviews featured mostly movie stars. So a Che interview must have struck
Look
’s editors as a simply
mahh-velous
idea. Berquist traveled to Havana for her interviews and in 1960 brought back the following scoop: “Che denies he’s a party-line Communist.” She then suggested the proper characterization for him as a “pragmatic revolutionary,” to which Che smilingly agreed. “When he smiles he has a certain charm,” Berquist reported. Overall she found him “fascinating . . . cool and brainy.”
⁶

By 1963, with Cuba officially declaring itself to be a Marxist-Leninist state, a fact it celebrated with Soviet missiles and banners of Lenin, Berquist prudently shucked the “pragmatic revolutionary” label. But she still found things to admire in Cuba—the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for instance. They make up a network of government spy groups set up on every city block to promptly report any “counter-revolutionary” backsliding by their neighbors to the police. Depending on the severity of the infraction, penalties range from a cut in the weekly food ration, to a stint in a prison camp, to being riddled with bullets by a firing squad. The system is novel even for communist regimes, formerly in place only in East Germany where the STASI, who helped set it up in Cuba, grandfathered it from the Nazi Gestapo. Berquist seemed charmed by them. Their role, she reported in
Look
, was “to see that children are vaccinated, and learn to read and write. And that the local butcher doles out meat fairly.”
⁷

The day after Che’s “
mueRRRRRRTE!
” oration at the United Nations, Laura Berquist arranged a splendid and celebrity-studded evening for Cuba’s mass executioner as guest of honor at the town-house of her friend, Bobo Rockefeller. In attendance were several black activists, beat poets, and assorted literary types—in short, the very people most passionate in their support of civil rights for all people, and opposed to the death penalty. Bobo Rockefeller hosted the classic scene from
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
six years before Tom Wolfe wrote the hilarious essay and book.