Exposing the Real Che Guevara (10 page)

Then a few rebels shot at the train and a few soldiers fired back. No one was hurt. Soon some rebels approached brandishing a truce flag and one of the train’s officers, Enrique Gomez, walked out to meet them. Gomez was brought to meet
Comandante
Guevara.

“What’s going on here!” Che shouted. “This isn’t what we agreed on!”

Gomez was puzzled. “What agreement?” he asked. Turned out, unbeknownst to the troops inside, the train and all its armaments had been
sold
, fair and square, to Guevara by its commander, Colonel Florentino Rossell, who had already hightailed it to Miami. The price was either $350,000 or $1 million, depending on the source.
⁸
“The whole thing was staged for the cameras,” says Manuel Cereijo. “The train had already been sold to Che without a shot fired from either side. Then Che ordered the train to back up a bit so they could bulldoze the tracks, then have the train come forward so they could stage the spectacular ‘derailment,’ for the cameras.”
⁹

Seems that Che was finally learning from Fidel how to wage a “guerrilla war.” Che had every reason to be upset. Actual
shots
fired against his troops? Here’s another eyewitness account regarding Che’s famous “invasion” of Las Villas province shortly before the famous “battle” of Santa Clara.

“Guevara’s column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camaguey. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista’s military commander in the city. The package contained one hundred thousand dollars with a note. Guevara’s men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops.”
¹⁰

Francisco Rodriguez Tamayo was a rebel captain who had been in on many of these transactions, defecting mere months after the rebel victory. In an
El Diario de Nueva York
article on June 25, 1959, he claimed that Castro still had $4.5 million left in that “fund” at the time of the revolutionary victory. “I don’t know what might have happened to that money,” Rodriguez Tamayo adds.

“Castro kept the money in jute sacks at his camp,” recalls former rebel Jose Benitez. “I saw bags stuffed with pesos.”
¹¹

In January 1959, Che’s men arrested a Batista army colonel named Duenas at his office in Camaguey, Cuba. “What’s going on here!” the indignant colonel protested. “You people have to show me respect! I’m the one who let you through this province without a shot! Just ask Fidel! He’ll tell you!”
¹²

Yet immediately after the Santa Clara bribe and skirmish, Che ordered twenty-seven Batista soldiers executed as “war criminals.” Gratitude was never his strong suit. Dr. Serafin Ruiz was a Castro operative in Santa Clara at the time, but apparently an essentially decent one. “But,
comandante,
” he responded to Che’s order, “our
Revolución
promises not to execute without trials, without proof. How can we just . . . ?”

“Look, Serafin,” Che snorted back, “if your bourgeois prejudices won’t allow you to carry out my orders, fine. Go ahead and try them tomorrow morning—but execute them
now
!”
¹³
Che might have known Lewis Carroll as well as his Kafka, perhaps recalling the Queen of Hearts’s famous line to Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards!”

“Surrounded by death, it is a normal human reaction to reach out for life and even Che was not immune to this instinct,”
¹⁴
Che hagiographer and
New Yorker
writer Anderson states, referring to Che’s actions during the apparently Stalingradesque battle of Santa Clara.

In fact, the only death Che was “surrounded by” was the flurry of executions without trial he ordered against his future enemies. “Damn, but Che has drowned this city in blood!” exclaimed his rebel comrade Camilo Cienfuegos upon passing through Santa Clara. “Seems that on every street corner there’s the body of an execution victim!”
¹⁵

And that reaching out for life by Che was the ditching of his squat and homely Peruvian wife, Hilda Gadea, for an illicit affair with his new flame, the trim blonde Cuban Aleida March. Officials in Cuba’s U.S. embassy at the time became a little skeptical about all the battlefield bloodshed and heroics reported by the
New York Times,
CBS,
Look
, and
Boys’ Life
(honest, even they braved the perils of this war of bribery for a Castro interview). U.S. officials ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what the
New York Times
kept reporting as bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles. They found that in the entire Cuban countryside, in those two years of “ferocious” battles between rebel forces and Batista troops, the total casualties on
both
sides actually ran to 182.
¹⁶

Che Guevara’s own diary puts the grand total of his forces’ losses during the
entire two-year-long
“civil war” in Cuba at twenty, about equal to the average number dead during Rio de Janeiro’s carnival every year. In brief, Batista’s army barely fought.

During the Spanish Civil War Stalinists attempted to ensure their future rule by butchering their leftist allies. This butchery commenced well before they foresaw any victory over the common rightist foe, Franco. One year into that war, Spanish Stalinists were already piling up the bodies of anarchists, Trotskyites, and socialists in mass graves, each with a bullet hole in the nape of the neck. This leftist rabble had been useful as cannon fodder against Franco for a time. But by 1937 the time had come to get the house in order.

One leftist who narrowly escaped was George Orwell, who had volunteered for the anti-Franco anarchist militia and been wounded in battle. Unlike the rest of the literati (the always blustering Ernest Hemingway comes to mind here), Orwell actually enlisted in the Spanish Republican forces and fought—long, hard, and bravely. His
Homage to Catalonia
tells the whole story. Orwell scooted out of Spain in disguise and just in time—with Stalinist death squads hot on his tail.

There’s ample evidence that Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a very willing tool in similar Stalinist butchery against Cuban anticommunists and noncommunists during the anti-Batista rebellion. “For some reason,” recalls anti-Batista rebel Larry Daley, “it was always the known anticommunists who kept disappearing from our ranks. Che’s march from the Sierra to Las Villas and Santa Clara involved very little fighting by his column. His path had been cleared by another column led by rebel commander Jaime Vega, who was known as a noncommunist. Vega’s forces kept running into ambushes by the Cuban army and air force and took fairly heavy casualties (relatively speaking). We suspect they were being tipped off by Castro and Che confidants.”

From Havana to Santiago, the Castroites had a history of this type of treachery. Some of the known anticommunists among the rebels were executed by the rebels outright, but others, like Frank Pais and Rene Latour, kept running blindly into Batista’s army or police and were ambushed, or left to die in skirmishes where most communists survived. One entire boatload of eighty anti-Batista rebels who landed in Oriente province in a yacht known as the
Corinthia
from Florida was promptly defeated and captured by a Batista force. Heaven knows, such lethal efficiency was not characteristic of the bulk of Batista’s army. The
Corinthia
crew were known to be noncommunist, and had no affiliation with Castro whatsoever, but were probably infiltrated by his agents. Another tipoff? Many anti-Batista people of the time strongly suspect it.

A bit earlier, in the Sierra, a brave and well-known anticommunist named Armando Cañizarez had a famous run-in with Guevara at his camp. They didn’t see eye to eye on the recent Soviet invasion of Hungary. “Che was all for it,” recalls Armando’s brother Julio, who was also a rebel and witnessed the encounter. “ ‘The Soviets had every right—even a duty—to invade Hungary,’ Che said outright. The Hungarian rebels were ‘fascists! CIA agents!’—the whole bit. It sounded like he was reading straight out of
Pravda
or Tass. We gaped.

“Sure, to hear of Che Guevara reading straight from communist propaganda sheets may not sound odd
now
,” says Julio. “But remember, in 1957 Castro and all the rebel leaders claimed to be anti-communist, prodemocracy, etcetera. And many of us rank and file were indeed anticommunist.

“So Che’s attitude caught us off-guard. Armando kept getting hotter and hotter as he argued with Guevara. I could see it in his face. He couldn’t believe this Argentine guy—remember, this was early, Che wasn’t a famous
comandante
yet—was defending that naked aggression and terrible slaughter of Hungarians who were only fighting for their freedom and national independence, which we thought we were doing at the time ourselves. Armando stepped back and I could see he was balling his fist. He was preparing to bash Guevara—to punch his lights out!

“So I moved in and asked Armando to come over by me. But he was so worked up I had to grab him by the arm and drag him over. A little while later, after we’d cooled off a bit, another rebel soldier came up and whispered to us that we’d better get the hell outta there—and fast. We did get away from Guevara, but continued in the anti-Batista fight.”
¹⁷

After the victory, the Cañizarez brothers watched in fury as Che and Castro implemented their covert plan to communize Cuba. They both came to the United States and promptly returned to Cuba with carbines in hand at the Bay of Pigs, where Armando gave his life for Cuban freedom after expending his last bullet. To this day, his family doesn’t know where Armando Cañizarez is buried.

“We have to create
one
unified command, with one
comandante
-in-chief.” Che laid down this Stalinist ground rule to his astonished Bolivian guerrillas shortly after he snuck into that country to start his guerrilla war. “That’s how we did it in Cuba. The guerrilla chief has to take all measures that will assure his future control of power,
totally.
We have to start early in destroying any and all other revolutionary groups that presume to exist outside of our control. Now, we may use other groups to help eliminate the primary enemy. But that doesn’t mean we’ll share any power with them after the victory. The Cuban experience is valid for the entire continent.”
¹⁸

At one point, when it seemed there were more newsmen in Cuba’s mountains than guerrillas or soldiers, it got so bad that a shack in Castro’s “guerrilla camp” in the Sierra Maestra actually had a sign, “Press Hut,” to accommodate the parade of American newspeople lugging their cameras, lighting equipment, sound equipment, makeup, and lunch baskets.
¹⁹

In March 1957, CBS had sent two reporters, Robert Taber and Wendell Hoffman, into the Sierra with their microphones and cameras to interview Castro and his rebel “fighters.” The CBS men emerged with “The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters,” a breathtaking news-drama that ran on prime-time U.S. TV.

For the record: Botanically speaking, Cuba has no “jungle,” the “fighters” numbered about two dozen at the time (though both the
New York Times
and CBS mentioned “hundreds”), and the “fighting” itself up to that time had consisted of a few ambushes and murders of Batista soldiers, usually while they were asleep in their rural barracks.

CBS correspondent Robert Taber’s services to Castro had just begun, however. A few years later he was a founding father of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an outfit whose fifteen minutes of fame came in November 1963 when member Lee Harvey Oswald
really
racked up some headlines. Dan Rather soon picked up the torch from the “unbiased” Robert Taber.
²⁰

The U.S. embassy’s public affairs officer in Havana, Richard Cushing, even served as an unofficial tour guide for the throngs of American newspeople flocking into the Sierra to interview the Cuban rebels. And one rebel who hadn’t seen Castro since their days in joint Mexican exile met up with him in his mountain camp. “
Pero Chico!
” he blurted. “You’re getting so fat! How much weight you’ve put on!”

Didn’t he realize? Castro’s gut-busting “guerrilla war” was a moveable feast.

Typically, Che Guevara doesn’t even merit credit for the perfectly sensible scheme of bribing Batista’s army, then portraying little skirmishes to the international press as Caribbean Stalingrads. What about the source of these funds? They came, as we saw, from Fidel’s snookering of Batista’s wealthy political opponents. How had he convinced these hard-nosed businessmen to fund his July 26 Movement? By speaking the language of democracy and prosperity.

In late 1957, Castro signed an agreement called the Miami Pact with several anti-Batista Cuban politicians and ex-ministers in exile at the time. Che Guevara, never one to grasp the subtleties of Castro’s schemes, went ballistic over the Miami Pact, denouncing it as a shameful deal with “bourgeois” elements. “I refuse to lend my historic name to that crime!” he wrote. “We rebels have proffered our asses in the most despicable act of buggery that Cuban history is likely to recall!”
²¹
Che underestimated the craftiness of Castro, mistaking the bugger
ers
for the bugger
ees.

That a “guerrilla war” with “peasant and worker backing” overthrew Batista is among the century’s most widespread and persistent academic fables. But no Castroites who participated actually believed it—except, of course, Guevara. The Associated Press dispatches about Castro and Che’s “war” were actually concocted and written by Castro’s own agent in New York, Mario Llerena, who admits as much in his book,
The Unsuspected Revolution
. Llerena was also the contact with Herbert Matthews. (
National Review
’s famous cartoon in 1960 showing a beaming Castro saying, “I got my job through the
New York Times!
” nailed it.)