Exposing the Real Che Guevara (22 page)

“My father had the goods on them,” Jose Castaño repeats. “It was as simple as that. People like him and his colleague, Salvador Diaz-Verson, had stacks of files that could alert the nation to what was going on behind the scenes.”

And much was. Indeed, almost everything important to Cuba at the time was scrupulously hidden from the public. A secret government was pulling all the strings. Castro himself, a few years later, finally boasted about how he did it. At Castro’s luxurious house in Cojimar, and at Che’s palatial estate in Tarara, these “spartan leaders” hatched and fashioned Cuba’s
real
regime with members of Cuba’s old-line Stalinist Communist Party. This bunch decided everything transpiring in Cuba at the time. Meanwhile a sap “president” and a sap “cabinet” in Havana gabbled, gave each other ornate titles, held meetings, shuffled papers, decreed documents, and imagined themselves to be accomplishing something, with Castro and his henchmen back in their palaces laughing themselves silly.

“All this behind-the-scenes stuff was hidden from the Cuban people and from the worldwide media at the time,” recalls Jose Castaño. “My dad was murdered because he planned on making public something Castro and Che themselves proclaimed loudly and boastfully a short time later. ‘I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be a Marxist-Leninist to the last day of my life!’ Fidel Castro said in October 1961.

“You hear about Che Guevara’s ‘idealism,’ his ‘pureness of heart,’ his ‘utter lack of pretense or guile,’ ” says Jose Castaño. “In fact, my dad’s murder was a classic rubout in the time-honored gangster tradition. Che put a hit—and carried it out himself—on a defenseless witness who could bring his criminal plans to light, who could blow the whistle on his criminal and murderous scheme to Stalinize Cuba. So here I was listening to all these professors at UCLA expounding on Che’s ‘utopian visions’ blah . . . blah. It was a little hard to take, especially while watching these professors’ smug grins while flashbacks of my sobbing, grieving mother, my stricken family, and my father’s broken and bullet-riddled body filled my mind. But I guess, in a way, Al Capone and Don Barzini were ‘visionaries,’ too. And Heinrich Himmler and Pol Pot certainly dreamed of a better world to come—after a little housecleaning.”

“It’s funny,” Jose Castaño says while relating the UCLA incident. “But the odds we few faced from Che fans in that auditorium were about the same as we faced from Che’s militia and army during the Bay of Pigs—about thirty to one. We weren’t intimidated then—and we sure as hell weren’t intimidated by the gang at UCLA.”
⁷

Barely seventeen at the time, Jose Castaño got word of the recruitment for what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion and promptly volunteered as a paratrooper. His father’s murder was very fresh in his mind at the time. Young Jose yearned to see Che and his toadies up against
armed
men, for once—and even better, to be one of them.

9

Brownnoser and Bully

 
“It’s literally true that Che never made one Cuban friend,” says former revolutionary Marcos Bravo. “Deep down, he didn’t like us. And we didn’t like him. He was the typical haughty Argentine, didn’t dance, didn’t joke—and except when around Fidel, because he was always terrified of him, never smiled.”
¹

The only pictures of Che Guevara smiling show him in Castro’s presence. And these smiles look transparently phony. Sniveling behavior isn’t usually associated with an archetypal “Heroic Guerrilla.”

“I never thought I’d admit to feeling sorry for Che Guevara about
anything,
” says former political prisoner and Bay of Pigs veteran Miguel Uria, who witnessed a Fidel-Che meeting in early January 1959. “But when Castro ripped into him and I noticed the look on Che’s face I
had
to. I cringed. You never heard such savage abuse as Castro yelled at Che in a fit of pique. And you never saw a little puppy tuck his tail in between his legs and start whimpering as quickly as Che did. This was a constant topic of conversation among those who saw Fidel and Che together. Nobody could miss it.”
²

Che actually entered Havana a few days before Castro in 1959. When the local rebels planned a twenty-one-gun salute to greet Fidel’s glorious grand entrance into Cuba’s capital, Che freaked. “Oh, no, please!” he told Antonio Nunez Jimenez. “I got here first and Fidel might think I’ve formed a rebellion against him and that we’re shooting at him! Please!”

“Don’t worry,” Nunez Jimenez calmed Che. “It’s a custom. Fidel is the revolution’s chief. He’ll expect it.”

“Okay, okay,” replied a still-nervous Che. “But please send a messenger to him first to explain that we’re doing it. I don’t want any misunderstandings.”
³

Reading Che Guevara’s literary grovelings to Castro is almost embarrassing. “Song to Fidel” is the title of a poem Che wrote to Fidel shortly after meeting him in Mexico City. “Onward ardent prophet of the Cosmos!” goes the first line. “When your voice shouts to the four winds: agrarian reform, justice, bread, liberty, there at your side you will find me.”

In the April 9, 1961 issue of
Verde Olivo
, the official paper of Cuba’s armed forces, Guevara poured forth again: “This force of nature named Fidel Castro Ruz is the noblest historical figure in all of Latin America. . . . A great leader of men, boldness, strength, courage, have brought him to a place of honor and sacrifice that he occupies today.”

Then, on October 3, 1965, came the mushiest ode of all, Che’s famous “Farewell Letter to Fidel.” “I have lived magnificent days at your side, and feel a tremendous pride in having served beside you,” Che wrote. “Rarely has statesmanship shone as brilliantly as yours . . . I am also proud of having followed you without hesitation, identifying with your way of thinking. I thank you for your teachings and for your example. My only mistake was not to have recognized your qualities as a leader even earlier,” on and on, in an unrelenting obsequiousness that would shame a court eunuch.

The shameless apple-polishing reinforced Castro’s conviction that in Che, he had a handy and dependable—and malleable—puppet. The brilliant longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer comes to mind here. “People who bite the hand that feeds them,” he wrote, “usually lick the boot that kicks them.” The Soviet Union fed Che Guevara, while Fidel Castro kicked him.

Che’s notorious sneer and cruelty were his habitual manner of dealing with
defenseless
men. Against armed men on an equal footing, his behavior was markedly different.

A few months into the Sierra skirmishes, Castro had ordered Che to take command over a guerrilla faction led by a fellow July 26 Movement rebel named Jorge Sotus, who had been operating in an area north of Fidel and Che, and had actually been confronting and fighting Batista’s army. Che and a few of his men hiked over to Sotus’s command station and informed him that Che was now in command.

“Like hell,” responded Sotus.

“It’s Fidel’s order,” responded Guevara. “We have more military experience than you and your group.”

“More experience in running and hiding from Batista’s army, perhaps,” Sotus shot back. Che dithered and looked around. “Besides, me and my men aren’t about to take orders from a foreigner,” Sotus added. “I don’t even know you. You’re not even Cuban. Forget it.”

“Well, I came on the
Granma
with Fidel,” whimpered Che.

“I don’t give a shit,” snapped Sotus. “I’m in command here!”
⁴

Sotus walked away, and the minute Che thought he was out of sight and earshot Che started mingling with his men, trying to get them to come over to him. It was all on Fidel’s orders, of course. And surely they had to listen to Fidel? He was, after all, the . . .

“Listen here,
Argentino
!” Sotus had snuck around, seen Che, and stomped in front of his face. “You keep this shit up and I’ll blow a hole in you. Now scram!”
⁵

And Che did just that, back to Fidel where he whined about Sotus’s insolence. “You’re not worth a damn, Che!” Castro shouted at him. “I didn’t tell you to
ask
him to give you command. I told you to
take
it from him! You should have done it by force!” The problem, of course, had been that Sotus was armed. Che, who was armed, too, quailed before him.
⁶

A few weeks after Batista’s flight and Castro’s triumph, Sotus was arrested without warning and shoved into the Isle of Pines prison. The intrepid Sotus managed to escape, made his way to the United States, and joined an exile paramilitary group, taking part in many armed raids against Cuba from South Florida until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal nixed them.

“That Sotus was a hell of a guy,” recalls Carlos Lazo. “We became friends in prison.” Lazo was a Cuban air force officer who had bombed and strafed Sotus during the rebellion. They both found themselves jailed by the Castroites.

Che Guevara also had a run-in with a rebel group named the Second Front of the Escambray. These operated against Batista in Cuba’s Escambray mountains of Las Villas province. When Che’s column “invaded” the area in late 1958, he had orders from Castro to bring these guerrillas under his command, much as he’d attempted with Sotus. But again he ran into trouble, especially from a
comandante
named Jesus Carreras who knew of Che’s communist pedigree and basically told him to go piss up a rope. Again, Guevara didn’t press the issue.

A few weeks into the January 1959 triumph, Carreras and a group of these Escambray commanders visited Che in La Cabana to address the issue of how they’d been frozen out of any leadership roles in the new regime. On the way in, Carreras ran into a rebel he’d known in the anti-Batista fight and stopped to chat while the rest of the group entered Che’s office. Once the others were inside, Che immediately ripped into Carreras as a drunkard, a womanizer, a bandit, and a person he’d never appoint to any important position.

Midway into Che’s tirade, Carreras had finished chatting with his old buddy and entered the office, having overheard much while outside. “Che went white,” recall those present. An enraged Carreras jumped right in his face and Che backed off. Finally, Carreras challenged Che to a duel, “right outside in the courtyard!” he pointed. “Let’s go!”
⁷

“How is it possible,” Che said, smiling, “that two revolutionary
compañeros
get to such a point simply because of a little misunderstanding?”
⁸

The subject was dropped and they turned to other issues, but a year later an unarmed Jesus Carreras was ambushed by Che’s men and shortly found himself a prisoner in a La Cabana dungeon. A few months later, he found himself bound and facing a firing squad.

Fuego!
The volley riddled him, and the coup de grace blasted his skull to pieces while Che watched from his favorite window.

10

Guerrilla Terminator

One of the longest and bloodiest guerrilla wars in the Western Hemisphere was fought not
by
Fidel and Che, but
against
Fidel and Che—and by landless peasants. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s Kulaks had guns, a few at first, anyway, until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal cut off potential supplies.

It’s rarely reported, but Che Guevara had a bloody hand in one of the major
anti
-insurgency wars in this hemisphere. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” was how one of the few lucky who escaped alive described these guerrillas’ desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through the Soviet proxies Castro and Che.

Of course, slaughtering resisters was not an ideological departure for Che, who, as we saw, justified the extermination of Hungarian freedom fighters by Soviet tanks as early as 1956.

Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines in 1962. “Cuban militia units [whose training and morale, remember, Jorge Castañeda insists we credit to Che] commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counter-revolutionaries and bandits.”
¹
Though it raged from one tip of the island to the other, most Cubans know this war as “the Escambray Rebellion,” for the mountain range in central Cuba where most of the bloodiest battles raged. Cuba’s country folk went after the Reds with a ferocity that forced Castro and Che to appeal to their Soviet sugar daddies for help. In the countryside, these Cuban rednecks often faced the firing squads untrussed, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. “Aim right here!” was a favorite among some of these as they reached below the belt, “ ’cause you ain’t got any!”

“I was a poor country kid,” says Escambray rebel Agapito Rivera. “I didn’t have much, but I had hopes and aspirations for the future. And there was abosolutely no chance that I’d go work like a slave on one of Cuba’s state farms. I planned on working hard, but on my own, for myself, getting my own land maybe. Then I saw the Castro communists stealing everything from everybody. They stole my hopes. I had no choice but to fight them.”
²
Agapito Rivera had two brothers and nine cousins who took up arms in the anticommunist guerrilla war. He was the only survivor.

“It was hard to sleep in those days,” recalls Emilio Izquierdo, who was twelve at the time. He lived in the Pinar del Rio province of western Cuba where, in 1961, a fierce rural rebellion also raged. Cuba had been divided into three military zones, each with a member of the Holy Revolutionary Trinity in command. The eastern provinces were Raul’s, the center was Fidel’s, and the western, including Pinar del Rio province, was Che’s.