Exposing the Real Che Guevara (7 page)

On other occasions the longhaired and punkish-looking Canek was jerked out of a movie theater line and subjected to a humiliating rectal exam by cops, presumably looking for drugs. But, all in all, Canek was immensely luckier than most Cuban “lumpen” and “delinquents.” The notorious
peligrosidad predelictiva
law (rough translation: “dangerousness likely leading to crime”) never got
him
shoved into a prison camp.

For what it’s worth, Canek Sanchez Guevara lives in Mexico today and fancies himself an anarchist, not a conservative, Yankee stooge. He’s adamant about distancing himself from those tacky and insufferable “Miami Cubans.” He believes Fidel betrayed the “pure” Cuban revolution of the early sixties inaugurated by his idealistic and heroic grandfather and replaced it with an intolerant and autocratic personal dictatorship.

Canek, born in Cuba in 1974, might be excused from knowing that Cuba had never, before or since, been as vicious and Stalinist a police state as it was in the sixties. Canek’s grandfather was actually
more
ideologically rigid,
more
of a Stalinist than Fidel himself—only, to his eventual misfortune, far less shrewd.

The lumpen remaining in Cuba still have Che’s number. A one-time Argentine Communist Party member named Hector Navarro, also a TV reporter and law school professor, visited Cuba in 1998 to cover Pope John Paul II’s visit. “A group of young Cuban musicians were playing for us tourists on the beach at Santa Maria,” recalls Navarro. “So I went up to them and announced proudly that I was an Argentinean
like Che!
”

The musicians stared glumly at Navarro. So he tried again. “I even hung a picture of
Che
in my office!” he now proclaimed. More blank looks. So Navarro plowed ahead. “I’m from the town of Rosario itself—
Che’s birthplace!
”

Now the musicians went from blank stares to outright frowns. “I certainly wasn’t expecting this kind of thing,” says Navarro. “But I continued, requesting they play a very popular song in Argentina, titled ‘And Your Beloved Presence, Comandante
Che Guevara!
’ Now every one of them gave me a complete
cara de culo
(roughly, shitface). Only when I whipped out ten U.S. dollars and handed it to them did they start playing, but in a very desultory manner, and still with those sullen looks.” Meeting after meeting with actual Cubans kept colliding with Hector Navarro’s long-cherished fantasies of Cuban life. “I was in Cuba a month and a half,” says Navarro. But as a fellow communist he was allowed to venture outside the tourist areas.

“This was the most important trip of my life—otherwise I might have kept believing in socialism and Che. I finally saw with my own eyes and learned that Castro’s and Che’s version was no different from Stalin’s and Ceausescu’s.”
¹⁸

Almost a decade before the Summer of Love, Castro, Che, and their henchmen sported beards, long hair, and rumpled clothes. Their early popularity in the United States clearly issued from this superficial, hirsute affinity with the precursors of hippies, the Beat generation. In April 1959, Fidel Castro spoke at Harvard the same week as the similarly bearded Beat icon-poet, Alan Ginsberg. Eight years before he was grandstanding at Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman was grandstanding in Havana, observing Castro on the stump and hailing him as resembling “a mighty penis coming to life!” (Many people in Miami and Cuba, by the way, would heartily agree.)

Any photo of Che, Fidel, Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, and company entering Havana in January 1959, after their bogus guerrilla war in the Sierra, shows how they preempted the Haight-Ashbury look by a full decade. Jean Paul Sartre acclaimed them as
Les Enfants au Pouvoir
(the children in power).
¹⁹
Raul Castro kept his blondish shoulder-length hair in a ponytail at the time. Camilo Cienfuegos’s full, dark beard was identical to Jerry Garcia’s a decade later. Except for his drab olive uniform, Che’s
comandante
comrade, Ramiro Valdez, with his little goatee, looked like Carlos Santana circa Woodstock.

And Che himself was a ringer for Jim Morrison with a fledgling beard. Morrison always affected that “faraway look,” too—that borderline scowl.

But no matter, by the mid-sixties in Castro and Che’s Cuba rock and roll was associated with the United States and regarded as subversive, even if the song’s performers lived in Liverpool or on Carnaby Street. “The government was always on the lookout for long hair,” recalls another former Cuban delinquent and lumpen, Miguel Forcelledo. “We called rock ‘midnight music,’ because that was the safest time to try and listen to it. Even government snitches have to sleep, especially as these swine usually awoke very early to start their snooping. We’d form underground clubs to tap into U.S. radio stations with a Russian-made short-wave radio someone would ‘borrow’ from a friend with government connections. But we were never completely safe. I was fifteen years old at the time but very lucky to get away with a brisk beating by the secret police and brief stint in jail. Many of my older friends wound up in the prison camps.”

A former publicist for the Rolling Stones named David Sandison wrote a book titled
Rock & Roll People
that features reverential interviews with such musical icons as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and the Sex Pistols. He also wrote a book titled
Che Guevara
, which is even more reverential toward its subject. To Sandison it must seem perfectly congruous, one book almost an extension of the other. “A legend!” Sandison gushes on the very cover of
Che Guevara
, “a hero to radical youth to this day.” In an interview Sandison prides himself on having “a great BS detector.”

“All over Cuba,” gushes David Sandison, “pictures of Che remind the Cuban people of their debt to this extraordinary man!”
²⁰

Yes indeed, Sandison. Just ask those Cuban musicians who gave
Señor
Navarro a “complete shitface” at the mere mention of Che’s name, or Canek, subject of a spot rectal exam. Also ask the “Beats,” the “Psychedelics,” and assorted Cuban longhaired “lumpen,” who stomped and shredded every Che picture they could get their hands on.

3

Bon Vivant, Mama’s Boy, Poser, and Snob

 
“Like So many epics,” starts the opening sentence of
Time
magazine’s story honoring Che Guevara as a Hero and Icon of the Century, “the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth . . .” Let’s stop there.

Typically for the topic of Che, not halfway through the
very first sentence
of the
Time
story we encounter two lies. Ernesto Guevara was
not
a doctor. Though he’s widely described as a medical doctor by his “scholarly” biographers (Castañeda, Anderson, Taibo, Kalfon), no record exists of Ernesto Guevara’s medical degree. When Cuban-American researcher Enrique Ros asked the rector of the University of Buenos Aires and the head of its Office of Academic Affairs for copies or proof of the vaunted degree, Ros was variously told that the records had been misplaced or perhaps stolen.

And if the young Ernesto Guevara left Argentina hell-bent on “the emancipation of the earth’s poor” he leaves little record of that, either. He originally headed for Venezuela, with plans to eventually come to the United States, because, in his own words in a letter to his father, those were “the best places to make money.”
¹

And after the Revolution? Following a hard day at the office signing execution warrants, Che repaired to his new domicile in Tarara, fifteen miles outside Havana on the pristine beachfront, an area that today is reserved exclusively for tourists and elite Communist Party members. “The house was among the most luxurious in Cuba,” writes Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes, of the mansion mentioned earlier with the futuristic big-screen television and remote control. “Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba’s most successful building contractor. The mansion had a yacht harbor, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets. . . . The mansion’s garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of
A Thousand and One Nights
.”
²

Llano Montes wrote this candid description while in exile. In January 1959, he didn’t go into such detail in his article, which appeared in the Cuban magazine
Carteles
. He simply wrote that “Comandante Che Guevara has fixed his residence in one of the most luxurious houses on Tarara Beach.”

Two days after his article ran, while lunching at Havana’s El Carmelo restaurant, Llano Montes looked up from his plate to see three heavily armed rebel army soldiers ordering him to accompany them. Shortly the journalist found himself in Che Guevara’s office in the old Spanish Fortress, La Cabana, converted into a prison, seated a few feet in front of the
comandante
’s desk, which was piled with papers.

It took half an hour, but Che finally made his grand entrance, “reeking horribly, as was his custom,” recalls Llano Montes. “Without looking at me, he started grabbing papers on his desk and brusquely signing them with ‘Che.’ His assistant came in and Che spoke to him over his shoulder. ‘I’m signing these twenty-six executions so we can take care of this tonight.’

“Then he got up and walked out. Half an hour later he walks back in and starts signing more papers. Finished signing, he picks up a book and starts reading—never once looking at me. Another half-hour goes by and he finally puts the book down. ‘So you’re Llano Montes,’ he finally sneers, ‘who says I appropriated a luxurious house.’

“I simply wrote that you had moved into a luxurious house, which is the truth,” replied Llano Montes.

“I know your tactics!” Che shot back. “You press people are injecting venom into your articles to damage the revolution. You’re either with us or against us. We’re not going to allow all the press foolishness that Batista allowed. I can have you executed this very night. How about that!”

“You’ll need proof that I’ve broken some law,” responded Montes.

“ ‘We don’t need proof. We manufacture the proof,’ Che said while stroking his shoulder-length hair, a habit of his. One of his prosecutors, a man nicknamed ‘Puddle-of-Blood,’ then walked in and started talking. ‘Don’t let the stupid jabbering of those defense lawyers delay the executions!’ Che yelled at him. ‘Threaten
them
with execution. Accuse
them
of being accomplices of the Batistianos. ’ Then Che jerked the handful of papers from Mister Puddle and started signing them.

“This type of thing went on from noon until 6:30 P.M., when Che finally turned to his aides and said, ‘Get this man out of here. I don’t want him in my presence.’ ”
³

The Che remembered by his innumerable victims was a man who enjoyed reducing people to powerlessness—then making them grovel for their lives. Yet in
Time
’s article, Ariel Dorfman writes of Che that “this secular saint [was?] ready to die because he could not tolerate a world where the poor of the earth, the displaced and dislocated of history, would be eternally relegated to its vast margins.” Among Che’s favorite guests at his Tarara estate was a Soviet GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) officer named Angel Ciutat, who had been a close colleague of Leon Trotsky’s killer, Ramon Mercader. Ciutat was actually a Spanish communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War who fled into the arms of the Soviets after Franco battered Spain’s red army. Stalin’s secret police thumbed through Angel Ciutat’s impressive resume as a murderer and Soviet proxy during the Spanish Civil War and promptly hired him on.

While holding court in Che’s luxurious Tarara estate, Ciutat advised the admiring Guevara on the finer points of forming Cuba’s secret police. After all, Ciutat had studied under the master himself—Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s police chief. And Che, as once before, in front of another Spanish communist—General Bayo, who taught him in Mexico—was all ears, a medical student, of sorts.

Angel Ciutat’s guidelines for Che’s firing squads were particularly adroit. These firing squads consisted of ten men and
every one
shot live ammo, bucking the norm, whereby some shot blanks to assuage their consciences. Such assuaging would contradict one of the Cuban firing squads’ most vital purposes, secretly named
El Compromiso Sangriento
(the Blood Covenant).
⁴

The point was to make murderers to bond with the murderous regime. The more shooters, the more murderers. The more murderers thus manufactured, the more complicit people on hand to resist any overthrow of their system. The fanatic and suicidal resistance put up by Hitler’s SS troopers against the advancing Red Army saw the same theme at work. These SS troops knew they were fighting the sons and fathers of people they’d murdered in places like Babi Yar.

Under the Soviet Ciutat’s orders, all cadets to Cuba’s military academy were forced to serve on a firing squad. This became a prerequisite for graduation. We can imagine Che leaping in joy, slapping his forehead: “Now why didn’t
I
think of that!” This policy of slaughtering Cubans—dictated by a
Soviet
officer and implemented by an
Argentine
hobo—became official in newly “nationalist” Cuba in February 1959.