In his book
Che Guevara: A Biography
, Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track down Che in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk admitted to “a couple thousand” executions. But he shrugged them off as all being of “imperialist spies and CIA agents.”
Che’s bloodbath in the first months of 1959 was not conducted for either vengeance or justice. Like Stalin’s massacre of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest, like Stalin’s Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che’s firing-squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise.
Five years earlier, while a communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan officer corps, with CIA assistance, rise against the regime of Jacobo Arbenz, sending him and his communist minions into exile. (For those leftist scholars who still claim that Jacobo Arbenz was an innocent “nationalist” victimized by the fiendish United Fruit Company and its CIA proxies, please note: Arbenz sought exile, not in France, or Spain, or even Mexico, the traditional havens for deposed Latin American politicians, but in Czechoslovakia, within the Soviet bloc. The coup went into motion, not when Arbenz started nationalizing United Fruit property, but when a cargo of Soviet-bloc weapons arrived.) “Arbenz didn’t execute enough people,” was how Ernesto Guevara explained the Guatemalan coup’s success.
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Fidel and Che didn’t want a repetition of the Guatemalan coup in Cuba. Their massacres cowed and terrorized. Public show trials underscored the message. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were often public, too. Visitors to La Cabana, even prisoners’ families, all walked in front of the blood-spattered
paredon
. This was no coincidence.
“It was a wall painted in blood,” recalls Margot Menendez, who entered to try to convince Guevara that her brother was innocent. “You couldn’t miss that horrible wall. It seemed to announce that we were entering hell.”
“Your brother wore the wrong uniform,” Che smirked at the sobbing Margot Menendez. That very night Che’s firing squad murdered the boy. Another jailed at La Cabana by Che in the early months of the revolution was a Cuban gentleman named Pierre San Martin. “Sixteen of us would stand while the other sixteen tried to sleep on the cold filthy floor,” San Martin recalled in 1997. “We took shifts that way. Dozens were led from the cells to the firing squad daily. The volleys kept us awake. We felt that any one of those minutes would be our last.
“One morning the horrible sound of that rusty steel door swinging open startled us awake and Che’s guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. He was a boy, maybe fourteen years old. His face was bruised and smeared with blood. ‘What did you do?’ we asked, horrified. ‘I tried to defend my papa,’ gasped the bloodied boy. ‘But they sent him to the firing squad.’ ”
Soon Che’s guards returned. The rusty steel door opened and they yanked the boy out of the cell. “We all rushed to the cell’s window that faced the execution pit,” recalls San Martin. “We simply couldn’t believe they’d murder him.
“Then we spotted him, strutting around the blood-drenched execution yard with his hands on his waist and barking orders—Che Guevara himself. ‘Kneel down!’ Che barked at the boy.
“ ‘Assassins!’ we screamed from our window.
“ ‘I said: KNEEL DOWN!’ Che barked again.
“The boy stared Che resolutely in the face. ‘If you’re going to kill me,’ he yelled, ‘you’ll have to do it while I’m standing! Men die standing!’ ”
“Murderers!” the men yelled desperately from their cells. “Then we saw Che unholstering his pistol. He put the barrel to the back of the boy’s neck and blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.
“We erupted, ‘Murderers!—Assassins!’ Che finally looked up at us, pointed his pistol, and emptied his clip in our direction. Several of us were wounded by his shots.”
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“The blond boy could not have been much over fifteen,” recalls NBC correspondent Edward Scott about another execution he witnessed at La Cabana in February 1959. “As they wrestled him to the stake the boy spoke eloquently to the firing squad, telling them repeatedly that he was innocent.” This seemed to rattle the firing-squad members, and at Herman Marks’s order of “
Fuego!
” only one bullet struck the bound boy. A furious Marks walked up and demolished the boy’s skull with two blasts from his .45. Then he summoned his bodyguards and ordered the entire firing squad arrested. Apparently they’d fallen down on the job.
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Who was Herman Marks? He was an American, an ex-convict, Marine deserter, and mental case with the U.S. law close on his heels in 1957. At age 30, Marks was convicted of raping a teenage girl and sent to the state prison in Waupun, Wisconsin for 3
1
ł
2
years.
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He was also one of the very few people to whom Che was close.
Marks escaped to Cuba, joined Che’s rebels in the Sierra Maestra, became a gung-ho “revolutionary,” and was quickly promoted to “captain” (apparently theft and rape constituted no “crime against revolutionary morals”). As early as the Sierra skirmishes, Marks’s specialty had been jumping into the freshly dug pit and shattering the skulls of Che’s firing-squad victims with the coup de grace blast from his .45 pistol. Later, during the Che-ordered firing-squad marathons in La Cabana, Marks really started earning his keep. He named La Cabana his personal “hunting lodge,” and his .45 barely had time to cool between assignments.
Che’S Room with a View
In La Cabana, Marks would bring his pet dog to work with him. “A huge dog,” recalls Roberto Martin-Perez, who suffered twenty-eight years in Castro’s Gulag (over three times as long as Alexander Solzhenitzyn and Natan Sharansky spent in the Soviet Gulag) and is today married to Miami radio star Ninoska Perez. “The dog looked like a German shepherd-hound cross of some kind. He followed Marks everywhere.”
Whatever his pedigree, the dog’s specialty was happily bounding up after the firing-squad volley and lapping up the blood that oozed from the shattered heads and bodies of the murdered. We can assume that Che was watching and gloating from his window. After all, one of Che’s first acts upon entering La Cabana was to order a section of wall torn out from his office so he could watch his beloved firing squads at work.
Another of Marks’s amusements was walking down the dark, dank halls of the prison fortress, laughing crazily and rattling the bars of the cells. After he got the attention of the condemned men and boys, he’d ask them behind which ear they wanted the coup de grace from his .45 pistol. A real cut-up, this Herman Marks. “Marks was like a butcher killing cattle in an abattoir,” finally wrote (of all people!) Herbert Matthews of the
New York Times
.
“We’d hear the clump of the bootsteps coming down the hall and wondered who was next,” remembers one prisoner, Roberto Martin-Perez. “Sometimes it was Marks who would stop in front of a cell and point. Then he’d walk to the next one and point. He might pass two more, then stop again. Men were dragged out of the cell and a bit later we’d hear the volley. It was hard to sleep under such conditions. You never knew when your turn was coming. Somehow I made it, but I lost many friends. During one week in 1962, we counted four hundred firing-squad blasts.”
Technically, Che Guevara was no longer in command of La Cabana after September 1959. But it was still
his
system of justice, with firing squads piling up corpses throughout Cuba. Guevara established it, on Castro’s orders, cranked it into high gear, and always claimed it proudly, as we saw in his famous U.N. speech. “Executions? Certainly,
we
execute!”
“There was something seriously wrong with Guevara,” says Roberto Martin-Perez. “Castro killed and ordered killing—
for sure
he killed. But he killed, it seemed to us, motivated by his power lust, to maintain his hold on power, to eliminate rivals and enemies—along with
potential
rivals and
potential
enemies. For Castro it was a utilitarian slaughter, that’s all. Guevara, on the other hand, seemed to
relish
it. He appeared to revel in the bloodletting for its own sake. You could somehow see it in his face as he watched the men dragged out of their cells.”
As it happened
, Señor
Roberto Martin-Perez was childhood friends with Aleida March, Che Guevara’s widow. The Castroites certainly had utilitarian reasons to jail Roberto Martin-Perez. “More than hating Castro, Che, and their toadies, I despised them,” he admits. “Knowing how they’d taken power, I felt contempt. All that guerrilla war stuff was utterly bogus. It was a huge con job. They had a few shootouts, a few skirmishes, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with taking power without much bloodshed. But then to start strutting around like they were battle-hardened heroes and ‘mighty guerrilla warriors,’ etcetera. It was almost laughable. As a kid, I’d known one of their bunch, Efigenio Ameijeiras, who after their victory was suddenly promoted to ‘head of the revolutionary national police,’ where he immediately started jailing and torturing people.
“Ameijeiras had been a purse snatcher and a hubcap thief a few months before. He even tried to sell
me
some stolen hubcaps and stolen watches—good grief! So then I have to see this bunch acclaimed as ‘heroes’ and ‘idealists,’ etcetera by the
New York Times
? Had I gotten out? In ten seconds I’d have grabbed a gun and gone against them again,” says Martin-Perez.
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He was incapable of masking his scorn, and in prison he suffered horribly for it. Even at age nineteen, Martin-Perez was known among his captors and prison guards as “
El Cojuno
” (the ballsy one). “One day I’d gotten particularly smart-mouthed, I guess,” he remembers. “So they dragged me down to the torture cell and hung me by my wrists, behind my back, with my feet exactly an inch from the floor. I could touch it with my tippy-toes every now and then. They had the elevation exactly right. After all, Che himself had called in the KGB to train the Cuban police. They hung me there for seventeen days—exactly seventeen. I still remember it well.”
Roberto Martin-Perez was moved from La Cabana to another prison, where his reputation had preceded him. “Hah! So you’re
El Cojuno
?” sneered the new prison chief upon calling him out. Then he took out his pistol and aimed carefully. “He hit me in the leg,” recalls Martin-Perez, “and I fell grimacing. Blam!—he hit me in the other leg. Blam! In the arm with his third shot.”
All told, Roberto Martin-Perez took six bullets. “The last one finally hit me in the crotch.” He smirks. “I don’t really know if he was trying to kill me, or what. But he did shoot
one
of my testicles off. I suppose that’s what he was aiming at, given my nickname at the time. But typical for these ‘expert guerrilla warriors’—as the
New York Times
and, to this day, all the exalted college professors acclaim these idiots—he couldn’t even hit a target from five feet away.”
At sixty-six, Roberto Martin-Perez is hale, hearty, gregarious, and good-natured. He laughs loud and often. Incredibly, he laughs after almost
thirty years
in Castro’s dungeons. Martin-Perez survived one of the longest political prison sentences of the twentieth century.
A Romanian journalist named Stefan Bacie visited Cuba in early 1959 and was fortunate enough to get an audience with the already famous Che Guevara, whom he’d also met briefly in Mexico City. The meeting between Bacie and Guevara took place in Che’s office in La Cabana. Upon entering, the Romanian saw Che motioning him over to his office’s newly constructed window.
Stefan Bacie got there just in time to hear the command of
“Fuego!
” and the blast from the firing squad and see the condemned man crumple and convulse. The stricken journalist immediately left and composed a poem, titled “I No Longer Sing of Che.”
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“I no longer sing of Che any more than I would of Stalin,” go the first lines.
Besides his demanding job in the La Cabana killing grounds, Herman Marks also served as “security director” at Havana’s El Principe prison, already packed to suffocation with political prisoners. Within a year, stadiums, schools, and movie theaters throughout Cuba became makeshift prison camps also. The roundup of political prisoners required it.
On June 3, 1959, Captain Herman Marks took a break from his demanding profession to stand as witness at Che’s wedding to Aleida March. Captain Marks was among the lucky few, and the envy of many revolutionaries. Che’s wedding was the hottest ticket of Havana’s social season. It would take until 1961 for the erratic Marks to finally run afoul of the revolution. He somehow slithered back into the country that had already revoked his citizenship. (Given his Castrophilia, it’s a wonder Marks did not become a scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies, or CNN’s Latin America correspondent.) The man who replaced Marks as the humanistic revolution’s “security director” also had an impressive resume. He was Ramon Mercader, the Stalinist assassin who had driven an ice-ax into Leon Trotsky’s forehead in 1940.
Castro’s fervently “nationalist” revolution, widely hailed as eradicating humiliating foreign influences from Cuba, overran Cuba with rude, malodorous Russian communists. It had as its main executioners of Cuban patriots an Argentine hobo and a genuine American psycho.
Cuban Blood for Sale
Biographer Jorge Castañeda stresses that Che operated from an ethical and
humanistic
stance. Given the rate of firing-squad executions in Cuba in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, thousands of gallons of valuable blood were gushing from the bodies of young men and boys, soaking uselessly into the mud, washing into gutters, or getting licked up by Herman Marks’s hound. What a waste, reasoned Cuba’s new rulers.