Much mawkish pomp and the usual deluge of Castroite cant characterized the funeral extravaganza. “His unerasable mark is now in history,” Castro declared. “His luminous gaze of a prophet has become a symbol for all the poor of this world.”
1
One hundred thousand in the captive audience cheered and waved Che flags as a twenty-one-gun salute thundered in the background. “We are not here to say good-bye to Che and his comrades,” continued Castro. “We are here to welcome them. I see Che and his men as a battalion of invincible combatants, who have come to fight alongside us and to write new pages of history and of glory.”
2
Castro ended the extravaganza with Che’s most famous line: “
Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
” (Until Victory, Always).
Exactly what “victory” Che referred to has always mystified those who studied Guevara’s military record with open eyes and a clear head. “Quite simply, in the military sense, there were
no
victories,” says Felix Rodriguez, the man who played a key role in capturing Che. But a revolutionary song was composed for the state funeral occasion, “San Ernesto de la Higuera” (borrowing from the Christian lexicon to make a patron saint out of the communist martyr and the name of the little village where he met his end).
By a strange coincidence, the very week Che’s bones were entombed in Santa Clara, Cuba hosted “the 14th World Festival of Youth and Students”—another orgy of Che homage. This festival included 771 “delegates” from the United States, which “embargoes” and “blockades” Cuba, compared to 520 from North Korea.
The hoopla was nonstop. Castro’s captive press declared the entire year of 1997 “The Year of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Death in Combat of the Heroic Guerrilla and His Comrades.” Western media and academia were hardly outdone by that pithy proclamation. That thirtieth anniversary of Che’s untimely death saw a blizzard of hype in American and European press and publishing circles to fully match Cuba’s.
Major publishers released five massive Che Guevara biographies, including one by French-Algerian Pierre Kalfon,
A Legend of Our Century.
“Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was a pop icon of mythic proportions,” proclaimed PBS in a forum titled “The Legacy of Che.”
“He was the first man I ever met who I thought not just handsome but beautiful,” Christopher Hitchens quoted the late
Nation
editor I. F. “Izzy” Stone, in a
New York Times Book Review
in 1997, as saying. “With his curly reddish beard, he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday-school print of Jesus.” An alarmed Stone once wrote that “families are being broken up, long-time residents driven into exile, men face permanent detention on tenuous charges.” Hundreds of thousands of people now living in South Florida have horrible memories of just such a place, right after Che Guevara assumed his official duties in Cuba. But I. F. Stone was instead describing conditions in the United States of the 1950s.
3
Stone, celebrated by his admirers today as a latter-day Socrates, a wizened old man who stood for freedom and fair play, looked at one of the worst violators of human rights in modern times and found only a mild, erotic charge.
On the thirtieth anniversary of Che’s death, even compared to the media/academic heralding of Che throughout the world, the University of California in Los Angeles laid it on pretty thick and heavy in UCLA’s October 1997 symposium, titled “Thirty Years Later: A Retrospective on Che Guevara, Twentieth-Century Utopias, and Dystopias.” (The critical viewpoint of Che ended with the title.)
UCLA’s Latin American Studies Center and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History were not to be outdone, running an exhibition of Che iconography entitled “Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message,” and even issuing a book to commemorate the gala.
“The exhibition comprises some 200 works, mostly posters, with a few etchings, paintings and photographs, which demonstrate a gamut of artistic inventiveness among artists from Cuba and elsewhere,” announced UCLA’s campus paper. “Thematically the show divides into groups such as Che and Latin America, Che and Cuba, Che as Everyman, Che as landscape,
‘Chesucristo’
and Che’s message of solidarity with the poor of the Third World. At once cultural icon and romantic inspiration, Che was also used for political ends in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism everywhere.”
4
No Cuban-American survivors were invited to speak. But as proof of the event’s evenhandedness, Che biographer,
Newsweek
writer, academic, and former Mexican Communist Party member Jorge Castañeda was among the prominent panelists. He was billed as being on the “con” side.
UCLA professor of political sociology Maurice Zeitlin was among the first panelists to commence the exultation. “Che’s legacy is embodied in the fact that the Cuban revolution is alive today,” he said, beaming, and the crowd concurred, clapping madly. “Che taught us all that freedom, democracy, and socialism are inseparable.” More applause and more cheers acclaimed the professor’s reverie.
“Bullshit!”
suddenly erupted from the back of the hall. The professor stopped and craned his neck as the crowd and panel looked around in alarm.
Panelist professor Fabian Wagmister tried defusing the scene, interjecting, “As utopian as Che’s dreams may have been, as utopian as a world of peace and plenty for all may seem, no social justice is possible without a vision like Che’s.”
“Complete
horseshit
!” erupted again from a little knot now moving through the flustered crowd toward the front of the room and the flustered panelists. “Complete crap!” blurted someone as the group bustled to the stage.
“Che Guevara was a
murdering
swine!” one shouted. “He was a
coward
, too!” barked another.
“Yes, a murderer—but also a
patsy
and a
fool
!” continued the first man in his heavily accented English.
“And just how is it that you know that, sir?” asked a professor from the panel.
“Because he murdered my father,” answered the hard-faced man in front of the stage. “
Che Guevara murdered my father,
using his own pistol and
in cold blood
when my dad was
completely defenseless.
” The room fell suddenly quiet. The panelists looked at each other. Finally motions were graciously made for the heckler to continue. “My father was completely defenseless at the time. That was a Guevara specialty. Che had his men beat him savagely, then he shot my father in the back of the head and neck.”
One of the panelists added that yes, okay, a few dozen men had been killed in the early weeks of the Cuban revolution, but these had been tried by courts and found guilty of horrible crimes while serving as Batista policemen and soldiers.
“Bullshit!”
answered the man again. The inflamed protester was a Cuban American named Jose Castaño, who was accompanied by a dozen or so of his compatriots (many were Bay of Pigs veterans). Again Jose Castaño was graciously given the floor. “My dad never laid a finger on anyone. He was a researcher of communist activities in Cuba and Latin America, an intelligence analyst—and so he had the goods on Che as a communist at a time Che was denying it—and at a time idiots like reporters for the
New York Times
were spreading his lies word for word.”
The panel and auditorium were humming with rude murmurs now, but Jose Castaño bulled ahead. “My father’s trial was a complete
farce.
Even Castro was hesitant to execute my father.” Many in the crowd and even some panelists seemed intrigued now, and they motioned Jose to continue.
Indeed, the reputation in Cuba of Castaño’s father, Lieutenant Jose Castaño Quevedo, as a man of honor was such that even Fidel Castro was leery of executing him. When his death sentence by Che’s prosecutors was made public, many in Cuba finally saw through Che’s lies. Others had their worst fears confirmed. A flurry of protests from the Catholic Church, the U.S. embassy, and several still nominally free newspapers finally led Castro to call Che in La Cabana to call off the execution at the last moment.
“But Che told Castro that it was too late,” Jose Castaño said. “The sentence had already been carried out. My father had already been shot.” Castano looked around the UCLA auditorium and noticed a few raised eyebrows, a few people even nodding. He went on. “Che Guevara was
lying.
We learned from people on the scene that my father was still alive at the time. So Guevara knew he had to act fast. Heaven knows he wasn’t one to disobey a Fidel order. So he hung up, had his men drag my father out of his cell and into his office where they beat and tortured him. Finally Che put his pistol to the back of my father’s head and fired two quick shots.”
“Well now . . . how?” The professors were a bit taken aback by this.
“How do we
know
this? . . . I’ll tell you how. We snuck in and retrieved my father’s body from a mass grave in Havana’s Colon Cemetery—I was only fifteen at the time—and had an autopsy performed. My father’s femurs were both broken. He had broken bones all over his body. His liver was demolished. His forehead was gone and he had entrance wounds in the
back
of his head and neck. That’s not where a firing-squad volley hits one.”
Some in the crowd were getting restive now, and the panelists were murmuring to each other. “This was early in the revolution,” said Castaño. “Many people were defecting from Castro and Che’s ranks. From them we got the details of the murder—details that the autopsy abundantly confirmed.”
“And it wasn’t ‘a few dozen’ that Che executed either,” added Castaño’s friend Hugo Byrne to the stuttering panel. “He and his courts and his firing squads murdered thousands! You people haven’t done your homework—and you claim to be professors.”
The professorial panel and crowd were getting surly by now, and some burly students started closing in on the vastly outnumbered Cuban Americans. A few were shoved. “Fine!” said Hugo, shoving back briskly. “But if that’s what you people want, let’s go outside and settle this!”
Leftist for all causes Ralph Schoenman had traveled to UCLA from his San Francisco offices of the “International Committee Against Repression” (another nice touch of Orwellianism). Schoenman entered the discussion and even aped Castro and Che’s own jargon, calling Cuban Americans
gusanos,
or worms.
Hugo Byrne turned to face him and leaned in closely, “The only worm here is
you
! Don’t like it? Fine. Let’s go outside and we’ll see who’s the real worm!”
“Looking back on it,” says Hugo, “that was a childish thing for me to do. Good heavens, I was a grown man. But I simply wasn’t going to let this pack of leftists insult Cuba’s heroes and martyrs—friends of mine who’d put their lives on the line, then gone down in front of firing squads yelling in defiance. No, I couldn’t sit still for that. I simply lost it when I saw that complete piece of trash, Schoenman, trashing the memory of men I knew to be heroes. So I jumped in his face—literally. Here we’re listening to these long eulogies to Che,” snorts Hugo. “And I’m sitting there recalling that the men Che murdered didn’t get family eulogies. Most got dumped in anonymous mass graves. And the families were warned not to hold any memorials—and were watched to make sure they complied. I was fuming. I wasn’t gonna put up with those insults from these pasty-faced idiots.”
5
Jose Castaño Quevedo’s “trial” in La Cabana on March 4, 1959, had been a pathetic joke, even by the standards of Che’s legal dream team. Most in Cuba knew of Lieutenant Castaño’s sterling reputation. He was a highly educated man who spoke five languages, including Russian, and he was renowned as being scrupulously honest. Far from being a “Batista police criminal,” Castaño had never even carried a gun. Among other professions, he was a language instructor at Cuba’s military academy and had worked as an intelligence analyst for the democratically elected governments of Ramon Grau and Carlos Prio, uncovering details of communist infiltration into Cuba’s labor unions. The usual frame-up of a “Batistiano-sadist-torturer-murderer” would never fly against Castaño in Cuba (though the
New York Times
,
Paris Match
, and CBS might buy it). So Che’s prosecutors came up with the charge of rape.
“That was even more preposterous,” recalls his son, Jose Castaño. “Here was perfect proof that Che knew nothing about Cuba, and that his half-literate prosecutors and judges were in no way familiar with my father’s reputation. What made the thing even more absurd was the woman they picked to claim the role of rape victim. Good grief. All Cuba was laughing over this one.”
6
The woman who testified against the very handsome Jose Castaño was a failed actress, a failed radio personality, and a failed journalist named Alicia Agramonte. She was also—surprise!—a Cuban Communist Party member. Jose Castaño takes after his father. He’s a true gentleman of the old school, who refuses to describe Alicia Agramonte’s physical attributes.
The woman was hideous.
Of course, an ugly woman can be raped. But Cubans knew that even more hideous than her face and body was Alicia’s soul. All those who have experienced the hijacking of their nations to communism—from Cubans, to Vietnamese, to Hungarians—know the archetype of the Communist Party member and activist: the failed professional who becomes the professional failure. They resent being bested by others who are more talented, industrious, or virtuous. So they nurture a malignant grudge against the world, or society, or “the system.” Che himself was a failed physician. Castro was a failed lawyer. Behind them were legions of “
Los Resentidos
,” the Resentful Ones.
Fifteen others “testified” against Jose Castaño Quevedo during his trial, enumerating a long list of fabricated crimes. Every one of these witnesses was a longtime Cuban Communist Party member (in a fair system of justice, that would be an odd thing, for Cuba was not yet officially communist at the time).