Exposing the Real Che Guevara (6 page)

Not that disillusionment was exactly widespread among U.S. radicals. But a few eyebrows were raised and a few troubled murmurs were overheard by the movement’s high priests. Susan Sontag herself sought to lay herself as a bridge over these (slightly) troubled waters in a
Ramparts
article in the fevered spring of 1969, wherein she admitted that “the Cuban Revolution presents in part an extremely uncomfortable challenge to American radicals.”

This challenge may have been “uncomfortable,” but it was hardly insurmountable. Sontag went on to explain that “although their awareness of underdevelopment inevitably leads to an increasing emphasis on discipline, the Cubans are safeguarding the voluntary character of their institutions.” Sontag’s mass of gibberish was titled “Some Thoughts on the Right Way for Us to Love the Cuban Revolution.” Sontag echoed the words used forty years earlier, when the
New York Times
’s Walter Duranty had commented on the “voluntary” character of the Ukraine’s collectivization.

Charlie Bravo was a notorious “delinquent”—in other words, a Cuban college student from the sixties who finds himself in exile today. “I’d loved to have seen these Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘antiauthority’ grandstanding in
Cuba
at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on
them
. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about
—
and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castro and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.”

Jon Lee Anderson,
New Yorker
writer and Che biographer, calls Che “the ultimate emblematic figure of what might be called the Decade of Youth. . . . That was the last period in which young people around the world rose up in revolt against the established order.”
⁸

Historically speaking, order has rarely been as established as under the regime cofounded by Che Guevara. According to a former Che lieutenant, Dariel Alarcon, Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior (Ministry of Interior, Cuba’s version of the Gestapo and KGB, indoctrinated by Che and trained by the East German STASI) runs the country lock, stock, and barrel. It constitutes Cuba’s
genuine
government. Cuba’s National Assembly and everything else is all smoke-and-mirror Potemkin politics.
⁹

And Alarcon should know. He was a dutiful officer of the ministry for almost twenty years. If ever a fascist military-industrial complex, a secret cabal, or a hidden government of ruthless, power-mad schemers and sadists such as those Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer constantly detect and decry in the United States actually ran a country, it’s in the very country Mailer and Chomsky constantly laud: the Cuba of Castro and Che.

Che’s two sons, Ernesto and Camilo, were no hippies. They attended a full five-year course at the KGB academy in Moscow. “Che played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery,” admits his biographer, Jorge Castañeda.
¹⁰
To this day a ten-story-tall mural of Che Guevara adorns Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior building. Che does live, as the face of the Cuban secret police.

Carlos Santana’s grand entrance at the 2005 Oscars certainly had an impact on Cuban Americans. The famed guitarist stopped for the photographers, cast a manic smile, and swung his jacket open. TA-DA! There it was: Carlos’s elegantly embroidered Che Guevara T-shirt. Half of Miami was sitting on the couch, wishing someone would say, “Tune in to this, Carlos—your T-shirt icon set up concentration camps in Cuba for anyone like you, including ordinary rock and roll fans who bought your album.” A lumpen was any hapless youth who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music in Cuba. Would Carlos Santana still be grinning if he knew that
Cuba criminalized Carlos Santana and most other rock music?

“The stuff we had to go through!” recalls Cuban rock-and-roller Carmen Cartaya. “If you were known to have rock records, if you wore blue jeans, if you were a boy with longish hair, the police were on your tail constantly. My friend Juan Miguel Sanchez always managed to get his hands on the latest Beatles album. This wasn’t easy in Cuba, believe me, but he was a resourceful guy. Usually the only people with access to rock albums back then were the kids of the party members, the regime people, who traveled abroad. Juan Miguel wasn’t one of those.”

One fine day in 1965 Carmen’s friend Juan Miguel vanished. “They grabbed him in one of the ‘roundups,’ as they called it when a group of army trucks and soldiers would surround an area known as a hangout for lumpen and round everyone up at gunpoint,” recalls Carmen.

“We still had a piano in our house in 1965 and a friend had a guitar, another drums. All this was prerevolution gear, needless to say. So we’d get together and play Beatles songs; ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was a favorite. Then my mother would come running in. ‘STOP! Are you crazy! Those so-and-sos from
El Comité
[the regime’s neighborhood snitch groups] will hear it! We’re in enough trouble already!’ My dad was in a concentration camp at the time. My mother, as usual, was right. Listening to rock was bad enough. Listening
and
playing it was a quick way to find yourself in serious trouble with the police. Our little band didn’t last long.”
¹¹

True, Santana didn’t hit it big till Woodstock in 1969, at a time when Che had already received a heavy dose of the very medicine he had dished out to hundreds of bound and gagged men and boys. This means the first inmates of his concentration camps were probably guilty of the heinous crime of listening to the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, and the like. But the regime Che cofounded kept up the practice of jailing
roqueros
well past the time Santana was hot on the rock charts.

Still, ignorance flourishes. Rage Against the Machine plaster Che’s image on their shirts, guitars, and amps. “We’ve considered Che a fifth band member for a long time now,” gushes lead guitarist Tom Morello. “Che was an amazing example
.”

Morello, whose music inspires so many head-banger balls, raves, and mosh pits, might be amazed to learn that upon taking over the Cuban city of Santa Clara, Che’s first order of business (after summarily executing twenty-seven “war criminals,” after a battle with four casualties) was to ban drinking, gambling, and dancing as “bourgeois frivolities.” “I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers, and no friends,” wrote Che. “My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.”
¹²
In short, Che, the fifth band member of Rage Against the Machine, took one of the world’s most culturally vivacious countries and transformed it into a human ant farm.

“Carlos Santana smiled vacantly and gave me the peace sign,” recalls a young Cuban American named Henry Gomez about a run-in with the hip guitarist in San Francisco shortly after his 2005 Oscar gig. Henry was wearing his homemade “Che’s Dead—Get Over It” T-shirt when he passed the famed guitarist as he sat in a café. Santana immediately noticed the shirt and walked over.

“ ‘Che may be dead for you,’ he said in a classic hippy-dippy drawl,” says Henry. “ ‘But he lives in our hearts . . . Che is all about love and compassion.’ ”
¹³

“ ‘Che murdered hundreds,’ I said. ‘It’s fully documented. He urged the
opposite
of love.
Hate
as a factor of struggle. We must keep our
hatred
alive and fan it to paroxysm.
Hate
as . . . ’ ” But Santana wasn’t listening as Henry Gomez quoted Che Guevara. “Che fought for blacks, women, and Native Americans,” Carlos drawled. “Before the Cuban Revolution, women weren’t allowed to enter the casinos.”

Now Henry Gomez himself stared vacantly. “Where do you
begin
with this kind of space-cadet drivel?” He laughs. “In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the United States. And Cuban women went into any casino they desired. If not many did, it wasn’t because they were barred.”

But let’s give Che credit. He indeed opened some Cuban establishments to women—political prisons and the execution wall.

Santana was also ignorant of Che’s famous racism, of his disparaging comments on blacks and Mexicans. “Like a fool,” recalls Henry, “I went on, trying to explain a few things to Carlos Santana, who was still annoyed with my T-shirt.”

“You’re getting hung up on facts, man,” Santana slurred at one point. “We’re only free when we free our hearts.”

“Santana had a point,” says Henry, nodding. “I was
definitely
‘hung up on facts.’ So here I’m giving him facts—and he’s rebutting with flower-power slogans. I should have known better. My wife was standing there highly amused by it all, not being impolite at all, simply smiling in what must have seemed to Mister Santana and his wife the typical reverential smile they get from fans. My wife was actually very hard at work stifling guffaws.”
¹⁴

When he hosted the PBS special “The 60’s Experience,” Eric Burdon’s Che shirt shamed even Carlos Santana’s, even Johnny Depp’s. This was no measly T-shirt, either. It was a collared shirt, very elegant, with a huge image of the hip fellow who criminalized rock music on both front and back.

Eric was belting out the Animals’ classics on the show. So naturally he sang the incomparable “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”—the exact desperate refrain of Cubans when Fidel and Che took over.

And certainly the phrase “the last thing we ever do” hits home for the families of the one in three desperate Cuban escapees who never make landfall. According to Cuban-American scholar Armando Lago, this hideous arithmetic translates into seventy-seven thousand deaths at sea over the past forty-six years—families perishing like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst, gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally give out and they gulp that last lungful of seawater. Still others are eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. Sharks don’t dally at a meal.

Every year in South Florida, the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such stories. (Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct—say, if they could somehow pin them on George Bush—we’d have no end of books, movies, and documentaries.)

A consistently hot item on Cuba’s black market is used motor oil. Why? It is the poor man’s shark repellent, they say. Desperate people cling to small hopes.

“I Hate the Sea” is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It’s about some young men Rafael met on the beach near Havana. For most people, the sea soothes, attracts, infatuates. It is a symbol of liberation, travel, vacation. “Water is everywhere a protection,” writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, trying to explain the lure, “like a moat. As a species we love it.” These young men Rafael met stared out to sea, cursed it, and spat into it. “It incarcerates us, worse than jail bars,” they said.

So perhaps Che Guevara succeeded in fashioning his “New Man” after all. In Cuba, Che’s totalitarian dream gave rise to psychic cripples beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: people who hate the sight of the sea.

“Che exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire,” boasted Rage Against the Machine lead guitarist Tom Morello in a
Guitar World
interview. “He was an amazing example, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them. Everywhere there was injustice, Che showed up. That’s a pretty good resume.”
¹⁵

Tom Morello might benefit from a chat with a fellow heavy-metal rock guitarist named Canek Sanchez Guevara—Che’s own grandson. Morello might learn a few things about the regime his “honorary fifth band member” cofounded, from which Canek Guevara was forced to flee in horror and disgust. Among the many reasons for Canek’s flight was his desire to play exactly the same kind of music without being brutalized by the penal system and police put in place by his grandfather, Rage’s “fifth band member.” Are you listening, Tom Morello? Carlos Santana? Madonna? Eric Burdon?

“In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” Canek said in an interview with Mexico’s
Proceso
magazine. “The regime demands submission and obedience . . . the regime persecutes hippies, homosexuals, free-thinkers, and poets. . . . They employ
constant
surveillance, control and repression.”
¹⁶

One day in 1991 leftist author and frequent Cuba visitor Marc Cooper was sitting on a Havana patio having coffee and chatting with the members of Cuba’s
nomenklatura
hosting him. Suddenly they heard frenzied footsteps. They turned around and there came Che’s grandson and a bandmate, stumbling, coughing, wheezing, and wiping their eyes. Finally catching his breath, Canek blurted that his rock band had set up to play in a nearby public square and had just started kicking out the jams when the police burst upon the scene, lobbing tear gas bombs and swinging billy clubs.

“But I’m Che’s grandson!”
¹⁷
Canek protested to the cops who grabbed him.

There is a delicious irony here. Canek’s grandfather had a major hand in training and indoctrinating Cuba’s police force. As far as these cops were concerned, they were dutifully carrying out Canek’s grandfather’s revolutionary mandate. Besides his affinity for rock music, Canek further tweaked the authorities by adorning his guitar with a big decal of a U.S. dollar bill. And he wonders why his grandfather’s disciples took such glee in pummeling him.