The Longest Romance (20 page)

No, this wasn't enough for them. In addition, upon the hagiography's screening by the American Film Institute at Grauman's Chinese Theater in 2008, the families of the thousands of Che Guevara's murder victims were gratuitously and cheekily insulted. “Che Guevara is a hugely controversial figure,” laughed Lou Diamond Phillips, who played the role of Bolivian Communist party leader Mario Monje. The cameras in front of Grauman's then turned to “Che” himself, Benicio Del Toro, who snickered along with Phillips, “I don't know how this film is gonna go over in Miami”—then smirked with co-star Joaquim de Almeida while cackles from the cast erupted in the background.

And all this in Hollywood, the world capital of sensitivity-training, where an offhand quip about a black or a gay, about slavery
or lynching can end a career; where “bullying” can take the form of prolonged eye-contact or a sneer; but where, apparently, public laughter and open ridicule of at the grief of thousands of Cuban-Americans, whose loved ones were murdered, passes for humor.

Miami, as you might guess, is home to most of the wives, mothers, daughters, sons and brothers of the thousands of defenseless men—and boys and even some women—murdered by the regime Che Guevara co-founded.

Most of the Cubans Che murdered, he murdered because he claimed they were affiliated with the U.S. (“Batista, America's Boy,” “CIA mercenaries,” etc.) In fact probably 90 per cent of the men, boys and women his regime murdered had no affiliation whatsoever with Batista. The vast majority had actually fought
against
the Batista regime—but as non-communists.

So actually the thousands of murdered and tortured Cubans were more a form of collateral damage as Che Guevara craved to get his cowardly hands on his true hate-obsession: Americans, the very people crowding Grauman's, snickering and cackling.

“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!” raved the terrorist whom Soderbergh and Del Toro glorified and who got a standing ovation in Hollywood with both Robert Redford's
The Motorcycle Diaries
and Soderbergh's
Che.
“Against those hyenas [Americans] there is no option but extermination! The [American] imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we'll destroy him! We must keep our hatred [against the U.S.] alive and fan it to paroxysm! If the [Soviet] nuclear missiles had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S., including New York City.”

As usual, most of the people Che Guevara craved to incinerate viewed protests against the Che movie as a quaint and silly obsession by hyper-sensitive, loudmouthed and even ungrateful Cuban-Americans. The film's reception in Castro's Cuba was vastly different from the one in Miami—but similar to the one in Hollywood.

“‘Che' film gets thumbs up in Cuba,” ran the headline from CNN's Havana Bureau on December 8. 2009. Benicio Del Toro was in the Cuban capital at the Havana Film Festival that week, presenting the movie he co-produced. “Che the movie met Che the myth in Cuba this weekend,” started the CNN report, “and the lengthy biopic of the Argentinean revolutionary won acclaim from among those who know his story best.”

Indeed, but the acclaim came because “those who know his story best”—Castro and his Stalinist henchmen, the film's chief mentors and veritable co-producers—saw that their directives had been followed slavishly; that Che's actual story was completely absent from the movie. This, of course, seemed lost on CNN, the first network to be bestowed a Havana bureau by the film's co-producers.

Del Toro and Soderbergh's movie provides no hint of any of the above, while proving that the Castro regime has lost none of its touch at co-opting the foreign media and Hollywood. “This is Cuban history,” gushed Del Toro at his Havana press conference. “There's an audience in here that that could be the biggest critics and the most knowledgeable critics of the historical accuracy of the film.”

Yes, but if any these dared criticize the historical accuracy of the film they'd likely find themselves in a Cuban jail-cell or torture-chamber. The difference is often academic.

As seems mandatory when any scholar, author or documentarian researches Cuban history, only the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist regime qualifies as a reliable source.

Che was billed as the highlight of the 2009 Havana Film Festival. The Stalinist regime rolled out the red carpet for their honored guest and A+ pupil, Benicio Del Toro. “It's a privilege to be here!” gushed Del Toro to his Castroite hosts. “I'm grateful that the Cuban people can see this movie!”
³

And why shouldn't Castro's subjects be allowed to view this movie? Weren't Stalin's subjects allowed to watch
The Battleship Potemkin?
Weren't Hitler's subjects allowed to watch Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will?
Both were produced at the direction of the propaganda ministries of totalitarian regimes—as was Soderbergh's and Del Toro's
Che.

The screenplay was based on Che Guevara's diaries as published by Cuba's propaganda ministry with the foreword written by Fidel Castro himself. The film includes several Communist Cuban actors; the other Latin American actors spent months in Havana being prepped by for their roles by official Cubans.

A proclamation from Castro's own press dated December 7, 2008 actually boasts of their role. “Actor Benicio Del Toro presented the film [at Havana's Karl Marx Theater] as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute for its assistance during the shooting of the film,
which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba.”
(emphasis added) The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) is an arm of Cuba's KGB-founded propaganda ministry, as revealed by Cuban defector Jesus Perez Mendez.
⁴

An obsession among all involved with making the 271-minute
Che
hagiography was said to be “historical accuracy.” Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie,
Che,
about the life of revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara, couldn't be attacked—at least on a factual level. “I didn't mind someone saying, ‘Well, your take on him, I don't really like', or ‘You've left these things out and included these things'. That's fine,” Soderbergh said. “What I didn't want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, ‘That never happened.'”
⁵

Well, Mr Soderbergh and CNN, pull up a chair.

Let's forget the film's omissions, namely, the only successes in Che's life: the mass murders of defenseless men and boys. Let's instead focus on this shoot-‘em-up war movie's battle scenes, with their attendant dialogues, and compare them to the historical record as published outside Cuba.

For starters, the only guerrilla war on Cuban soil during the 20
^th
century was fought not
by
Fidel and Che, but
against
Fidel and Che.

After the glorious victory, some of the Castroite guerrillas explained the harrowing battlefield exploits so expertly dramatized by Soderbergh to Paul Bethel, who served as U.S. press attaché in Cuba's U.S. Embassy in 1959. Paul Bethel: “Che Guevara's column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camaguey where I worked. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista's military commander in the city. The package contained $100,000 with a note. Guevara's men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops.”
⁶

According to Bethel, the U.S. embassy had been highly skeptical about all the battlefield bloodshed and heroics reported in
The New York Times
and investigated. They ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what
The New York Times
called a “bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles.”

They found that in the Cuban countryside, in those two years of ferocious battles, the total casualties for both sides actually ran to 182. The famous “Battle of Santa Clara,” which Soderbergh depicts as a Caribbean Stalingrad, claimed about nine casualties total—for
both
sides.

He's lauded as the century's most celebrated guerrilla fighter but he barely fought in anything properly describable as a guerrilla war. “The guerrilla war in Cuba was notable for the marked lack of military skills or offensive spirit in the soldiers of either
side.” That's not a Cuban exile with an axe to grind. It's military historian Arthur Campbell in his authoritative
Guerrillas:
A
History and Analysis.
“The Fidelistas were completely lacking in the basic military arts or in any experience of fighting.”

“In all essentials Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.” That's no right-wing Miami Cuban; it's British historian Paul Johnson, who initially sympathized with the Castro-Che regime.

Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro, obsessively wary of lapsing into the slightest historical inaccuracy, relied on the Castro regime as their principal source—and made a shoot-'em-up war movie!

In one scene, amidst the thunder of bombs and hail of bullets, Che laments how the U.S. is intervening on Batista's side. In fact: at the very time of Che's lament as depicted in this obsessively accurate movie, the Batista regime was under a U.S. arms embargo.

On a visit to Cuba in 2001 for a “scholarly summit” with Fidel and Raul Castro, Robert Reynolds—who served as the CIA's Caribbean desk's specialist on the Cuban revolution from 1957 to 1960—clarified the U.S. diplomatic stance of the time: “My staff and I were all Fidelistas,” he boasted to his beaming hosts.

Reynolds's colleague Robert Weicha concurred. In the late 1950's, Weicha had served as CIA chief in Santiago, Cuba—the city nearest the Iwo Jima-like exploits depicted in this movie. “Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except Ambassador Earl T. Smith,” he said.

Weicha's was a hands-on type of Fidelismo. In the fall of 1957, he and a partner, U.S. consul Park Wollam, smuggled into Cuba and delivered to soldiers in Castro's July 26 Movement the state-of-the-art transmitters that became Castro and Che's “Radio Rebelde” or “Rebel Radio.” From these mics—shown in the movie, right before the scene of Che's “U.S. intervention for Batista” lament—the Castroites broadcast their guerrilla victories
island-wide, along with their plans to liberate, uplift and democratize Cuba.
⁷

That Che's famous Radio Rebelde was CIA-issue probably went unmentioned by Soderbergh's Cuban co-producers. Somehow this would not mesh well with the film's message.

Soderbergh's movie also shows Che Guevara steely-eyed and snarling with defiance during his capture. Only seconds before, Che's very M-2 carbine had been blasted from his hands and rendered useless by a fascist machine-gun burst! Then the bravely grimacing Guevara jerked out his pistol and blasted his very last bullets at the approaching hordes of CIA-lackey soldiers.

In the theater, viewers gape at the spectacle. Eyes mist and lips tremble at Soderbergh and Del Toro's impeccable depiction of such undaunted pluck and valor. OK, but just where did Soderbergh and Del Toro—utterly obsessed with historical accuracy—obtain this version of Che's capture?

Soderbergh's scriptwriters transcribed this account of Che's capture exactly as penned by Fidel Castro. Ah, but when it came to the script for his film
Erin Brockovich,
Soderbergh balked at anything and everything issuing from Pacific Gas & Electric Company as completely biased and unreliable. No such scruples applied against the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist dictatorship. Why, the man who mentored Soderbergh's film for impeccable historical honesty is also on record for the following testaments:

“Let me be very clear—very clear—I am not a communist! And communists have absolutely no influence in my nation!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959)

“Political power does not interest me in the least! And I will
never
assume such power!” (Fidel Castro, April
1959)
⁸

But as evidenced by Steven Soderbergh's films, the author of these proclamations deserves to have
his
version of Che's capture transcribed on the silver screen as gospel. Fidel Castro, you see, wrote the forward to
Che's Diaries
wherein this Davy Crockett-at-the-Alamo version of events appears.

All accounts of Che's capture, by the Bolivian soldiers who actually captured him, reveal major discrepancies between Soderbergh and Del Toro's Fidel Castro-mentored film and historical truth. In fact, on his second-to-last day alive, Che Guevara ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to the last breath and to the last bullet. With his men doing exactly that, Che, with a trifling flesh-wound to the leg—depicted by Soderbergh as ghastlier than the one to Burt Reynolds's character in
Deliverance
—snuck away from the firefight, crawled towards the Bolivian soldiers doing the firing, spotted two of them at a distance, then stood up and yelled: “Don't Shoot! I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!”
⁹

His Bolivian captors record that they took from Che a
fully-loaded
PPK 9mm pistol. And the damaged carbine was an M-I—not the M-2 his diary said he was carrying. The damaged M-1 carbine probably belonged to the hapless guerrilla charge, “Willy,” whom Che dragged along to his doom. But it was only after his obviously voluntary capture that Che went into full Eddie-Haskell-greeting-June-Cleaver mode. “What's your name, young man?!” Che quickly asked one of his captors. “Why, what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!”