Che, whose image writhes in an undisclosed location on U.N. Global Humanitarian Award Winner Angelina Jolie’s epidermis in the form of a tattoo, provoked one of the biggest refugee crises in the history of this hemisphere with his firing squads and prisons. On top of the two million who made it to freedom with only the clothes on their backs, an estimated eighty thousand Cubans have died of thirst, exposure, or drowning, or were ripped apart by sharks. They died attempting to flee Che Guevara and his legacy.
Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is not exactly rare on the topic of Che Guevara. Do rock stars Carlos Santana and Eric Burdon know they are plugging a regime that in the mid to late sixties rounded up
roqueros
and longhairs en masse and herded them into prison camps for forced labor under a scorching sun? Many young prisoners were severely punished for “counter-revolutionary crimes” that often involved nothing worse than listening to the Animals. When Madonna camps it up in her Che outfit, does she realize she’s plugging a regime that criminalized gay sex and punished anything smacking of gay mannerisms? In the mid-sixties the crime of effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked from Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped into prison camps. In an echo of the Auschwitz logo, between the machine gunners posted on the watchtowers, bold letters above the gate read, “Work Will Make Men Out of You.”
Does Mike Tyson—who has been consistently and horribly stomped in fight after fight ever since his visit to Cuba—know that his record of defeat perfectly mimics the combat record of his tattoo idol? Do the A-list hipsters and Beautiful People at the Sundance Film Festival—do Tipper and Al Gore, do Sharon, and Meryl, and Paris—know that they stood in rapturous ovation not just for a movie, but for a movie that glorified a man who jailed or exiled most of Cuba’s best writers, poets, and independent filmmakers? Who transformed Cuban cinema into a propaganda machine?
Would Robert Redford—who was required to screen the film for Che’s widow, Aleida (who heads Cuba’s Che Guevara Studies Center), and Fidel Castro for their approval before release—think it appropriate for Robert Ackerman, who made
The Reagans
, to have to have gone to Nancy Reagan to get her approval? We can only imagine the shrieks of outrage from the Sundance crowd—about “censorship!” and “selling out!” Might Redford have employed a b of the lust for investigative reporting he portrayed so well in
All The President’s Men
to tell the truth about Che? (Whatever happened to “talking truth to power”?)
Fortunately for Robert Redford, who lived in New York in October 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had the good sense to yank those missile launchers from the eager reach of the subsequently famous “Motorcycle Diarist,” as well as from the hands of the Stalinist dictator who so kindly gave Redford final benediction on his movie. Also fortunately for Redford and all those unbearably hip Sundance attendees, none were born in Cuba and thus forced to live with their hero’s totalitarian handiwork. Is Christopher Hitchens aware that one week after his selfless Che Guevara entered Havana, he stole what was probably the most luxurious house in Cuba and moved in after the rightful owner fled with his family to escape a firing squad?
Che’s mansion had a yacht harbor, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon, and five television sets. One TV had been specially designed in the United States, had a screen ten feet wide, and was operated by remote control—exotic technology in January 1959. “The habitation was a palace right out of
A Thousand and One Nights,
” according to a Cuban who saw it. This was the same man who Philip Bennett, then a scribe at the
Boston Globe,
now the managing editor of the
Washington Post,
assures us “was aided by a complete freedom from material aspirations.”
A traveling museum show titled “Che; Revolutionary and Icon” recently displayed in Manhattan’s International Center of Photography and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, plays up Che as a symbol of rebellion and anti-imperialism. “Che is politics’ answer to James Dean,” wrote the
Washington Post
’s David Segal about the exhibition, “a rebel with a very specific cause.” In fact, when addressing Cuba’s youth in 1962, Che denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” And as we’ll learn from his former comrades in the following pages, this world-famed anti-imperialist applauded the Soviet slaughter of young, idealistic Hungarian rebels in 1956. All through the appalling massacre, Che dutifully parroted the Soviet script that the workers, peasants, and college kids battling Russian tanks in Budapest with small arms and Molotov cocktails were all “fascists.” A few years later, when Cuba’s countryside erupted in a similar anticommunist (really, anti-Soviet imperialism) rebellion, Che got his chance to do more than cheer the slaughter of humble rebels from the sidelines. But these he denounced as “bandits.” We’ll hear accounts from some of the very few who survived that communist massacre.
And what about Che the military strategist? One day before his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara—for the first time in his life—finally faced something properly described as combat. He ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to their last breath and last bullet. A few hours later, with his men doing just that, a slightly wounded Che snuck away from the firefight and surrendered with a full clip in his pistol while whimpering to his captors: “Don’t shoot! I’m Che, I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”
Yet on top of Hitchens’s “conclusive” assertion that Che was “no hypocrite” comes Benicio Del Toro’s remark that “Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked the talk. There’s just something cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him.”
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Del Toro’s respect will surely come across clearly in his screen portrayal of his idol. The famously cagey actor based these comments (and his performance) on a screenplay based on Che’s diaries, which were edited and published in Cuba, which is to say, by the propaganda ministry of the longest-reigning totalitarian dictator of modern times. Benicio Del Toro’s director, Steven Soderbergh—hailed as immensely sharp and shrewd for depicting the treachery and guile of industrialists in
Erin Brockovich
, which he directed, along with the unmitigated evil of Joe McCarthy in
Good Night and
Good Luck,
which he coproduced
—
based his Guevara movie mostly on books edited by Fidel Castro.
Calling it “the theater of the absurd” somehow fails to describe the Che phenomenon.
The
New Yorker
writer Jon Lee Anderson wrote an 814-page biography of Che titled
Che: A Revolutionary Life.
Anderson asserts that despite his exhaustive research, “I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed an innocent.”
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Yet hundreds of eyewitnesses to Che’s extrajudicial murders are only a cab ride away for Anderson in New York City. Guevara himself boasted that he “manufactured evidence” and stated flat out, “I don’t need proof to execute a man—I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
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By which he meant the murdered man might have presented an obstacle to his Stalinization of Cuba. As Stalin himself put it: “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Interestingly, Che Guevara cheekily signed some of his early correspondence, “Stalin II.”
“Certainly we execute,” boasted Che, while addressing the U.N. General Assembly in December 1964. “And we will
continue executing
as long as it is necessary.” According to
The Black Book of Communism
—not the work of embittered exiles in Miami, but the labor of French scholars, and published by Harvard University Press—the revolution’s firing-squad executions had reached fourteen thousand by the beginning of the 1970s. Given Cuba’s population at the time, the slaughter was the equivalent of over three million executions in the United States.
Despite this extrajudicial bloodbath, while visiting Havana in 1984, Jesse Jackson was so smitten by both his host and the lingering memory of his host’s late sidekick that he couldn’t contain himself. “Long Live Fidel!” bellowed Jackson to a captive crowd at the University of Havana. “Long live our Cry of Freedom!—LONG LIVE CHE!”
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This is the same Jesse Jackson who wrote a 224-page book against the death penalty. Even better, Che, far from reciprocating Jackson’s fond sentiments, regarded blacks as “indolent and fanciful, spending their money on frivolity and drink.” Che wrote this passage in his now-famous
Motorcycle Diaries
—one of the touches that Robert Redford and Walter Salles somehow left out. Black rapper Jay-Z might keep it in mind before donning his super-snazzy Che shirt for his next MTV Unplugged session where he raps: “I’m like Che Guevara with a bling on!”
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Mike Tyson might want to laser off his tattoo, lest he be seen as “indolent and frivolous.”
What about Che the intellectual? “For Ernesto Guevara everything began with literature,” writes Jon Lee Anderson. Yet Che’s first official act after entering Havana (between executions) was a massive book burning. On Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s direct orders, more than three thousand books were stolen from a private library and set ablaze on a busy Havana street. Around the same time, Che signed death warrants for authors and had them hunted through the streets like rabid animals by his secret police. We’ll hear the whole story straight from these authors’ families.
At the same time Sartre was hailing Che’s towering intellect in summer 1960,
Time
magazine put him on its cover for the first time. Their feature story attributed “vast competence and high intelligence” to Guevara, who had recently been promoted to Cuba’s economic minister after showing a certain acumen for numbers as Cuba’s chief executioner.
Within a year of that appointment, a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria and Japan, a huge influx of immigrants, and the third-highest protein consumption in the hemisphere, was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society.
Che responded to the unexpected economic crisis in classic manner. He opened a forced-labor camp at Guanahacabibes—Cuba’s version of Siberia, but featuring broiling heat rather than cold—and filled it to suffocation by herding in Cuba’s recalcitrant laborers at bayonet and machine-gunpoint.
The economic crisis fostered by Che forced the Soviets to pump the equivalent of eight Marshall Plans into Cuba. The original $9-billion Marshall Plan, applied by the United States to a war-ravaged continent of 300 million, promptly lifted its economy. All this wealth invested by the Soviets in a nation of 6.4 million—whose citizens formerly earned more than the people of Taiwan, Japan, and Spain—resulted in a standard of living that repels impoverished Haitians more than forty years later.
Che’s incompetence defies not just the laws of economics, but seemingly the very laws of
physics
.
Concerning Che’s military exploits, the liberal media lay it on even thicker and heavier. “One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting,” blared a
New York Times
headline on January 4, 1959, about the final “battle” in the anti-Batista rebellion in the Cuban city of Santa Clara. “Commander Che Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men,” continued this article on the front page of the world’s most respected newspaper of the time. In fact, as you’ll see in the coming pages, the rebel victory at Santa Clara, where Che supposedly earned his eternal fame—like all others in which he “fought”—was accomplished by bribing Batista commanders. Total casualties on
both
sides did not exceed five. Che spent the three days of the Bay of Pigs invasion three hundred miles from the battle site braced for what he was certain was the real invasion. He’d been lured away by a rowboat full of fireworks, mirrors, and a tape recording of battle, a literal smoke-and-mirrors show concocted by the CIA for that very purpose.
Yet Che managed to earn the Cuban version of a Purple Heart in his battle against the unmanned and unarmed rowboat. A bullet had pierced Che’s chin and exited above his temple, just missing his brain. The bullet came from Che’s
own pistol
. “Che’s military leadership was permeated by an indomitable will that permitted extraordinary feats,” writes
New York Times
contributor and Che biographer Jorge Castañeda.
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“Extraordinary” is one way of putting it. Castañeda, also a Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton visiting professor, adds that “Che’s contribution to the [Bay of Pigs] victory was crucial.”
Four years later, in the Congo while planning a military campaign against crack mercenaries commanded by a professional soldier who had helped defeat Rommel in North Africa, Che confidently allied himself with “soldiers” who used chicken feathers for helmets and stood in the open waving at attacking aircraft because a
muganga
(witch doctor) had assured them that the magic water he sprinkled over them would make .50-caliber bullets bounce harmlessly off their bodies. Within six months, Che had fled Africa, narrowly saving his life and leaving behind a military disaster.
Two years later, during his Bolivian guerrilla campaign, Che made textbook mistakes for a guerrilla leader. He split his forces and allowed both units to become hopelessly lost. They bumbled around, half-starved, half-clothed, and half-shod, without any contact with each other for six months before being wiped out. Che’s forces didn’t even have World War II vintage walkie-talkies with which to communicate and were apparently incapable of reading compasses. They spent much of the time walking in circles, often within a mile of each other.
“Che waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill,” reads the
Time
encomium honoring this “Hero and Icon of the Century.” The authoritative piece was written by Ariel Dorfman, who heads the Department of Latin American Studies at Duke University and previously taught at the Sorbonne. Professor Dorfman might have consulted Che Guevara’s former rebel comrade, Huber Matos, now living in Miami, who recalls that while attempting to coordinate an attack on Batista’s forces with him in 1958, Che admitted knowing “absolutely nothing” about military strategy. Amongst themselves communists are often quite candid. They coined the term “useful idiot,” after all. But even the famously dour Nikolai Lenin might have erupted in horselaughs if he could have seen the unbridled success of Che propaganda.