“Slave labor and torture” is the preferred term of Emilio Izquierdo and of the tens of thousands who suffered in similar camps before him, alongside him, and after him. Like Stalin’s Gulags, the prisons of Cuba filled up with tens of thousands of social parasites, loafers, and unreconstructed men. If this sounds familiar, recall Ernesto Guevara’s cheeky signature on his early correspondence as “Stalin II.”
In time, all of Cuba became a prison. Che instituted a “progressive” labor program of “volunteer” weekend work and sixty-hour workweeks that galled Cuba’s working class. Before their liberation by Che, Cuba’s workers had become accustomed to such working hours and benefits as to make Lane Kirkland and George Meany gape in envy. In fact, in the 1940s and 1950s, Cuban labor was more highly unionized, proportional to population, than U.S. labor. And their leader, Eusebio Mujal, made Samuel Gompers and Jimmy Hoffa look like corporate lapdogs.
Professors and the mainstream media parrot the Castro-Che fable of pre-Castro Cuba as a pesthole of poverty and misery for workers. Susan Sontag bewailed Cuba’s “underdevelopment” in her
Ramparts
screed. The
New York Times
referred to it as Cuba’s “former near-feudal economy,” and hailed Castro and Che’s “promise of social justice which brought a foretaste of human dignity for millions who had little knowledge of it in [pre-Castro] Cuba.”
By 1965 counter-revolutionary activity was winding down in Cuba. The Kennedy-Khrushchev deal in October 1962 had pulled the plug on much of the anti-Castro resistance, including the bloody and ferocious Escambray Rebellion. Now the Castro regime—needing a new pretext for the mass jailings, the cowing of the population and, especially, slave labor—turned its police loose on “antisocial elements,” on “deviants,” “delinquents,” and those branded “lumpen” by Che Guevara (the term is indicative of his famous hauteur). Youths were the target here, with special emphasis on longhairs, suspected rock and roll listeners, the incorrigibly religious, and—especially—homosexuals. “
Peligrosidad predelictiva
” was the favorite charge by the regime against these youths.
Your long hair, your snide look, your taste in music, your tight pants, your open practice of Christianity, your family background, your refusal to volunteer for “voluntary” labor on weekends—any of these would make you a violator of revolutionary morals.
Emilio’s fellow prisoners also included Jehovah’s Witnesses, active Catholics and Protestants, and children of political prisoners—all swept up in Cuba’s mid-1960s dragnet. This system of prison camps that held Emilio Izquierdo and tens of thousands of other youths was called Unidades Militares del Ayuda de Producción (Military Units to Help Production). The official and euphemistic title, UMAP, did little to hide the pretext for the camps—forced labor. In Stalin’s Russia, the initials GULAG stood for the same thing.
These camps were completely enclosed by high barbed wire and had machine guns in each watchtower and ferocious dogs keeping watch below. As we saw earlier, the camp for homosexuals had a sign, “Work Will Make Men Out of You,” above the entrance gate, eerily reminiscent of the Auschwitz sign “Work Will Set You Free.”
The UMAP camps featured brutal labor in the tropical sun and summary beatings and executions for any laggards. As at Guanahacabibes, none of the UMAP prisoners had been convicted, even in the sham Castroite courts, of any “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Military and police trucks would simply surround an area of Havana known as a homosexual pick-up place, or as a hangout for rock and rollers, or near churches. Then every person in sight would be herded into the military trucks at gunpoint. “Everybody in the prison camp wanted to cheer when we heard Che had been killed,” recalls Emilio Izquierdo, who survived to become president of the UMAP Political Prisoners Association.
“You could see everyone trying to stifle their joy, because the guards were watching us all
very
carefully right then, focusing on our faces. They wanted desperately to detect the slightest sign of joy. This would have been a serious ‘crime against Revolutionary morals,’ as Che himself had described it—and right there the guards would have an excuse to indulge their sadism.
“The Castro-Che regime hired hard-core sadists and psychopaths—complete mental cases—as guards and wardens for these camps,” Emilio continues. “I suppose all totalitarian regimes hire such people. I read books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by Elie Wiesel, by the U.S. POWs in the Hanoi Hilton, and I think to myself: This sounds very familiar. Anyway, many of these guards—despite all the regime’s propaganda about its literacy campaign—were virtually illiterate. They loved any excuse to beat us, to throw us in a tiny punishment cell to roast half to death under the midday sun, even to shoot us. I saw boys shot to death for simply being unable to stand up to the workload. You try and explain these things to people in this country and nobody believes it. They can’t imagine these horrors just ninety miles away—much less initiated by men whom much of the international media portray as well-meaning reformers.
“But one poor boy was unable to disguise his joy at Che’s death,” recalls Emilio. “He just couldn’t. I don’t think he was any happier than the rest of us—just unable to effectively disguise it. So the guards dragged him off and soon we heard the screams—accompanied by the laughter. When they were in a playful mood, some of the guards’ favorite punishment was to rip all the clothes off a prisoner and tie him up to the fence at dusk, totally naked, totally immobile. The UMAP camps were in the countryside, not far from the coast. And you know about Cuba’s salt-marsh mosquitoes . . .
“Those things almost feel like a wasp when they first jab it in. Well, the guards loved to watch these bloodthirsty mosquitoes completely cover the bodies of the helpless naked prisoner, dig in for hours at a time, and drive the prisoner to the point of agonized insanity. The prisoner might hang on that fence for two days without food or water, too. Oh, how the guards would laugh!”
30
“Another favorite game for those guards,” recalls fellow UMAP prisoner Cecilio Lorenzo, “was to gallop up on one of their horses, throw a lasso over some prisoner whose attitude they didn’t like, and drag him off. A friend of mine, seventeen years old at the time, was dragged for over a mile down country roads and through brambles and thickets. He came back unconscious and covered in blood.”
31
Che himself explains the matter in his
Socialism and Man in Cuba
: “For the masses to follow the vanguard, they must be subjected to influences and pressures of a certain intensity.”
Che and Dogs
Che killed men, but rarely in combat. He also killed animals, but not as a hunter. Perhaps fittingly, he seemed to have a particular animus toward man’s best friend. Che’s own
Motorcycle Diaries
go into the gory details. Shortly after leaving on his famous motorcycle jaunt with his chum Alberto Granados, their motorcycle, La Poderosa, blew a cylinder and they stopped at a house of a country couple near the Argentina-Chile border. The kind couple took them in, gave them dinner, and even gave them overnight lodging in their barn’s hayloft. During dinner, recounts Guevara, the couple warned them of a ferocious puma that roamed the area and often prowled near the houses at night.
While turning in that night, the motorcycle duo discovered that the barn door did not close securely. So Che slept with his trusty pistol loaded and within reach, as he wrote, “in case the Chilean lion, whose dark shadow filled our minds at the time, decided to pay us a midnight visit.”
And sure enough, near dawn the itinerant Argentines were awakened by the sound of scratching on the barn door. As they were startled awake and sat there gathering their wits, “Alberto was locked in apprehensive silence beside me,” recounts Guevara. Finally the barn door swung open. “My hand gripped the pistol and my finger was tight on the trigger” writes Guevara, “as a pair of luminous eyes gazed at me from the shadows!”
So Che leveled on the eyes and blasted away with this pistol. “The instinct of self-preservation is what pulled the trigger,” he writes. Che
then
turned on his flashlight and saw he’d killed “Boby,” the couple’s pet dog, whom he’d met and petted during dinner. Che goes on about “the stentorian yells of the husband” and “the hysterical screams and moans of the lady” as she hugged the body of her murdered dog.
To those who later got to know Che in Cuba the whole account sounds like a rationalization, a fable that prettified the man’s primal sickness. Why didn’t Che turn on the flashlight
before
he shot the beast, asks former revolutionary Marcos Bravo? Probably because he
wanted
to kill the dog, he surmises.
Other passages in Guevara’s own writings argue against the likelihood of his mistaking a puppy for a puma. While “fighting” in the Sierra, Che’s “column” had befriended a stray puppy only “a few weeks old,” according to Guevara himself. The little mongrel came by their campsite for scraps of food and to frolic and play with the men. He became the group’s mascot, according to Guevara himself. One day as they marched off to plan an “ambush” of Batista’s army, the dog followed them, happily bounding along and constantly wagging his tail.
“ ‘Kill the dog, Felix,’ ” Che ordered one of his men. “ ‘But don’t shoot him—strangle him.’ Very slowly, Felix pulled out his rope, made a noose, and wrapped it around the little animal’s neck—then he started tightening,” writes Che.
When Felix picked him up, the puppy’s tail had been wagging happily. Naturally, the puppy had expected the usual petting and caresses. Now Felix grimaced as he tightened the noose on the agonized puppy. “That happy wagging of the tail turned convulsive,” writes Che. “Finally the puppy let out a smothered little yelp. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but to us it seemed a long time till the end finally came,” recounts Che. “Finally after one little spasm the puppy lay still, his little head resting over a branch.”
32
During the Bolivian campaign, compatriot Dariel Alarcon heard Che screaming, “Move it! Move it! Move it! Goddammit!” Alarcon turned around and saw Che atop his little mule and kicking it savagely. The beast was unable to pick up speed. Che hopped off and pulled out his dagger. “I said move it! Move it! Move it!” he started shrieking again. This time, with every exclamation, he plunged the dagger into the little mule’s neck until it fell dead.
As former political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez says, “There was something seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
One wonders what this strangler of puppies and stabber of donkeys would have made of “The Che Café,” an ultrahip student hangout in La Jolla, California. The owners deplore cruelty to animals, so the café proudly boasts a strictly vegetarian menu. “The Che Café is a great place to meet and hang out with other people who envision a better world,” says the menu.
Papa Che
Jon Lee Anderson’s
Che: A Revolutionary Life
contains many touching pictures of “Papa Che” with his darling little daughters in his lap. While describing Che’s good-bye scene as he left Cuba in late 1966 for his Bolivian venture,
The New Yorker
writer tugs mightily at our heartstrings. “The last few days had been emotional for everyone,” writes Anderson about the final family scene. “But the most poignant were Che’s final encounters with Aleida and his children. Che was in disguise for his clandestine trip to Bolivia and couldn’t reveal himself even to his children. Papa Che was instead ‘Uncle Ramon, ’ who was there to pass along their father’s love and little pieces of advice for each of them. They ate lunch with
tio
Ramon at the head of the table like papa Che used to do.”
33
Orlando Borrego was the “judge” without legal training who presided over bogus trials during a time when hundreds of Cubans were sent to the firing squad at Che’s orders in the first months of the revolution. He stayed on as a Castro henchman and sycophant, recently a Cuban government official. While in Cuba writing his “impartial” Che biography that “separates man from myth,” Anderson apparently found Borrego among his most trusted and cooperative sources on Papa Che.
Borrego also was present for Che’s teary Cuban farewell. “For Borrego, Che’s final visit with his three-year-old daughter, Celia . . . was one of the most wrenching experiences he had ever witnessed,” sighs Anderson. “There was Che with his child but unable to tell her who he was or to touch her and hold her as a father would.”
34
In the process of “separating man from myth,” there is no mention by Anderson of the hundreds of mothers and daughters who would wait outside La Cabana prison for a final chance, not to touch, but perhaps merely to see or to say a few last words to their husbands and fathers condemned to death by Papa Che.
“One day we’d been waiting for hours in the hot sun,” recalls Margot Menendez, who was hoping to see her condemned father. “Finally we see a car driving out and it’s Che himself inside, so we start screaming and shouting for someone to let us in to see our loved ones. Che stopped the car and rolled down the window. ‘You’re all punished!’ he yells. ‘No visits this week!’ and he rolls his window up. So we start screaming even louder. Then we see he picks up a radio and calls someone. A few seconds later gangs of his soldiers came rushing out of La Cabana with billy clubs and guns and started bashing us brutally until we dispersed.”
35
“ ‘Until always, my little children,’ ” Anderson quotes Papa Che’s good-bye letter to his children, “ ‘a really big kiss and a hug from Papa.’
“The most Che could do was to ask his children to give him a little peck on the cheek,” Anderson continues. Papa Che was leaving for Bolivia, so “tears welled up in Che’s eyes. Aleida was devastated but managed to contain her own tears.”
36
A woman named Barbara Rangel-Rojas, who today lives in Miami, has a tough time commiserating with Borrego and Anderson about the sad parting of Papa Che from his children.