Exposing the Real Che Guevara (12 page)

“For the first time in my life I was ashamed of my country,” admits Grayston Lynch about the Bay of Pigs. “Tears filled my eyes.”
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An abandoned invader named Manuel Perez-Garcia, who parachuted into that inferno of Soviet firepower known as the Bay of Pigs, epitomizes the depth of this betrayal. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he had volunteered for the U.S. Army and made paratrooper with the famed Eighty-second Airborne Division. “The Philippine theater of operations is the locus of victory or defeat,” said General Douglas MacArthur. And it was exactly into that locus that Cuban-born Manuel Perez-Garcia parachuted after battling through New Guinea.

At war’s end the Eighty-second presented a special trophy to the U.S. soldier who had racked up the most enemy kills in the Pacific theater. Today that trophy sits prominently in Miami’s Bay of Pigs Museum, donated by the man who won it, Bay of Pigs veteran and Cuban-born Manuel Perez-Garcia. The trophy sits alongside the three Purple Hearts, three Bronze Stars, and three Silver Stars Perez-Garcia earned in the Pacific.

When Japan’s ferocious General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the infamous “Tiger of Malaya,” finally emerged from his headquarters to surrender his pistol, samurai sword, and battle flag to the first U.S. soldier he saw, he found himself facing Manuel Perez-Garcia. “Manuel was always out front,” recalls his brother-in-arms José M. Juara Silverio, a fellow paratrooper at the Bay of Pigs.
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“The tip of the spear,” military historian John Keegan calls the place Perez-Garcia always scrambled to occupy. In fact, Perez-Garcia ranks right behind Audie Murphy in the enemy kills by a U.S. soldier in World War II, with eighty-three Japanese soldiers killed in combat. (General Yamashita’s battle flag and sword, by the way, are also on display at the Bay of Pigs Museum.)

When Kim Il Sung blitzkrieged South Korea in June 1950, Manuel Perez-Garcia rallied to the U.S. colors again, volunteering for the U.S. Army at age forty-one. It took a gracious letter from President Harry Truman himself to explain that by U.S. law he was slightly overaged but that, “You, sir, have served well above and beyond your duty to the nation. . . . You’ve written a brilliant page in service to this country.”

Perez-Garcia’s son, Jorge, however, was the right age. He joined the U.S. Army, made sergeant, and died from a hail of bullets while leading his men in Korea on May 4, 1952. To fight America’s enemies, Perez-Garcia and his son were shipped thousands of miles to distant continents. When he tried fighting a tyrant every bit as rabid and murderous as Tojo or Kim Il Sung, but only ninety miles away, he was abandoned.

Here’s a summary of the battle of the Bay of Pigs, and the Che-indoctrinated militia’s performance: forty-one thousand Castro troops and militia with limitless Soviet arms, including tanks, planes, and batteries of heavy artillery, met fourteen hundred mostly civilian exile freedom fighters, most with less than a month’s training. These men carried only light arms and one day’s ammo. The Che-trained militia was immediately halted, before fleeing hysterically.

They were ordered back, probed hesitantly, got mauled again, and retreated in headlong flight. They marched back
again
, many at gunpoint, and rolled in battery after battery of Soviet 122mm howitzers. They rained two thousand rounds of heavy artillery fire into lightly armed men they outnumbered twenty to one. (“Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” writes Bay of Pigs historian Haynes Johnson.) Then Castro’s unopposed air force strafed the invaders repeatedly and at will.

The invaders stood their ground, and the militia was forced to probe yet again, but with heavy reinforcements (twenty-to-one odds weren’t enough). Then they rained
another
Soviet artillery storm on the utterly abandoned and hopelessly outnumbered invaders.

Finally they moved in and overwhelmed the freedom fighters—after three days of effort, and only when the invaders, who hadn’t eaten or slept in three days, were
completely out of ammo with no more coming.
When the smoke cleared and all their ammo had been expended, when a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after their very mortar and machine-gun barrels had melted from their furious rates of fire, after three days of relentless battle, barely fourteen hundred of them had squared off against fifty-one thousand troops trained by Che’s Department of Instruction of the Rebel Armed Forces, as well as Castro’s entire air force and squadrons of Stalin tanks. In the process, Castro’s forces took
3,100 casualties
. The invaders took
114 casualties.
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They did it while being denied the air support and cover they expected from the Kennedy administration.

Nilo Messer, Jose Castaño, and Manuel Perez-Garcia, along with their thousand-plus surviving Band of Brothers from Brigada 2506, have never seen fit to write an instructional book an amphibious warfare. Manuel Perez-Garcia, in particular, might be expected to know a thing or two regarding combat. The few long-fighting Escambray rebels who managed to survive the Castroite massacres have also refrained from expounding in print on their experiences.

Leave it to Che Guevara (characterized as “modest” by his biographers), after a few skirmishes that the Cripps or Bloods would shrug off as a slow week, to deliver to the world his book
Guerrilla Warfare
, his opening chapter titled “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method.” “You really have to laugh at that book,” says retired CIA officer Mario Riveron (himself a Bay of Pigs survivor), whose job was to study, track, and finally capture Che in Bolivia. “Guevara’s name is certainly on the cover of that book. But no one who actually fought against him believes those were
his
ideas. The man was a complete failure as a guerrilla. He constantly got lost. He didn’t have reliable maps. He split his forces in two and they
both
got lost, without any contact with each other for several months, though they were often bumbling around a mere mile from each other. He abandoned camp-sites and carelessly left documents and pictures and supplies where we could easily find them. He knew nothing about the use of aerial reconnaissance or helicopters against guerrillas, which strengthens the suspicion that he lifted his stuff straight from Mao. Best of all, he was unable to recruit
one single peasant
into his guerrilla ranks. And here were the people he was there to ‘liberate.’ ”
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Many who fought
alongside
Che Guevara were also astounded by his thundering military ineptitude. “When I got to the Sierra,” recalls former rebel
comandante
Huber Matos in an interview with Pedro Corzo for the documentary
Anatomia de un Mito
, “Che had already been fighting for over a year. He commanded a column. I was assigned to form a defense line—a line of fortifications in an area under his command. So I consulted him, asked him about it, asked him to help me with the plan.

“ ‘Look Huber,’ he replied straight to my face, ‘I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.’ ‘But
you’re
the commander here?’ I answered. ‘I mean, we have to coordinate this thing, have to come up with some kind of tactical plan. I’m assigned to this so I’d like to know how many men to use, and where to place them. I want to make sure that my defense line is coordinated with your own defense plan for the area.’ ‘But I don’t have
any
plan,’ Che answered. Several times after that he confessed to me that he knew nothing about tactical military matters.”
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Che did show up at the Bay of Pigs battle site—on the day the shooting ended. He walked into a building strewn with captured and wounded freedom fighters and looked around with his wry Argentine smile. “We’re going to execute every one of you,” he barked. Then he turned on his heels and walked out.
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(As usual, Castro had a plan for these prisoners that was much shrewder. By returning them, Castro’s regime reaped a propaganda windfall, as well as a $62-million ransom payment from JFK.) Jon Lee Anderson describes the scene of Che’s arrival with ghoulish humor: “Upon recognizing Che, one of the POWs was so terrified he urinated in and soiled his trousers.”
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One of Anderson’s primary sources for his book was the Castro government, so the story should be suspect. No
Brigadista
I’ve interviewed recalled it. Assume, however, for the sake of argument, that this incident of the “terrified” captive actually happened. What this captive feared was Che’s well-known treatment of
defenseless
men. Anderson has a remarkable sense of humor, indeed.

Along with his fellow prisoners from Brigada 2506, Manuel Perez-Garcia lived for almost two years under a daily death sentence in Castro’s dungeons. Escaping it would be a simple matter of signing the little confession eagerly presented almost daily by his communist captors. The little piece of paper denounced the United States, the very nation that had left them to die.

Neither Manuel, Jose, Nilo, nor any of their brothers in arms signed that document. Many spat on it, figuring they were signing their own death warrants in the act. After all, Castro and Che’s firing squads were murdering hundreds of Cubans a week for trivial offenses. These men were avowed enemies of the regime.

“We will die with dignity!” snapped Brigada 2506 second-in-command Erneido Oliva to the furious communists day after day. An attitude like Brigada 2506’s not only enrages but baffles the likes of Castro—and Che, as we will see from his behavior in Bolivia.

The comrades of Manuel Perez-Garcia recall he was particularly defiant and scornful toward his strutting Castroite captors, who after the shooting stopped, lorded over captive men with new-found bravery. Having observed these Che-trained men in battle—and considering his own experience in battle—Perez-Garcia must have found a few snorts and wisecracks irresistible. General Yamashita himself, after conquering half of Britain’s Asian empire with a fraction of the empire’s Asian forces, never put on such airs as Fidel and Che as they toyed with these prisoners.

Fellow prisoner Jose Castaño recalls one morning in Havana’s El Principe prison when Manuel Perez-Garcia made a particularly snide comment to one of his captors. “That commie guard was probably around twenty-five years old, and held a loaded Czech machine gun,” Jose says. “He was
still
afraid of the fifty-one-year-old, half-starved prisoner, Manuel! So he called over a couple of his buddies and they were moving in on Manuel—who quickly jerked off his belt and wrapped one end around his fist. He sneered at them, ‘Come on!’ and started snapping the buckle end of the belt like a bullwhip. “Suddenly an officer rushes up and whispers something into the guards’ ears. This defused the scene immediately,” Jose recalls. “Manuel’s history was well known even by the Castroites.”
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In private, Castro was
fuming
at his own militia’s performance. A week after the battle, Castro visited some of the freedom fighters in their Havana prison cells. One had been an old acquaintance from college. “
Hombre,
if I had twenty thousand men like you guys, I’d have all of Latin America in my hands right now,” Castro told his old friend.
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Four months after the Bay of Pigs invasion the Organization of American States held a conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay. At this event, JFK’s special counsel and speechwriter Richard Goodwin represented the United States and had a long and amiable chat with the Cuban representative, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

“Behind the beard his features are quite soft, almost feminine,” Goodwin wrote in a memo to JFK, declassified in 1999. Guevara “has a good sense of humor, and there was considerable joking back and forth during the meeting . . . his conversation was free of propaganda and bombast. He spoke calmly, in a straightforward manner, and with the appearance of detachment and objectivity . . . he went on to say that he wanted to thank us very much for the [Bay of Pigs] invasion—that it had been a great political victory for them—enabled them to consolidate. At the close he said that he would tell no one of the substance of this conversation except Fidel. I said I would not publicize it either.

“After the conversation was terminated I left to record notes on what had been said. [Che] stayed at the party, and talked with the Brazilian and Argentine representatives. The Argentine fellow—Larretta—called me the next morning to say that Guevara had thought the conversation quite profitable, and he told him that it was much easier to talk to someone of the ‘newer generation.’ ”
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In this recently declassified document, Goodwin revealed no discomfiture or skepticism regarding any of Che’s statements. Nor did he offer the mildest rebuttal to Guevara. Apparently they were occupied with all that “considerable joking back and forth.” Che indeed had ample reason to be grateful to the Best and Brightest of the Kennedy administration. As Castro often remarked during 1960, “We’d better hope Kennedy wins the election. If Nixon wins our revolution won’t last.”
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Goodwin, a Harvard Law School graduate, typified the indulgent attitude of many of the young, new left in America toward Castro. “I believe this conversation [with Guevara]—coupled with other evidence which has been accumulating—indicates that the Soviet Union is not prepared to undertake the large effort necessary to get [Cuba] on their feet,” wrote Goodwin, “and that Cuba desires an understanding with the U.S. They would have free elections—but only after a period of institutionalizing the revolution had been completed. . . . They could agree not to make any political alliance in the East. Che said they did not intend to construct an Iron Curtain around Cuba . . . [the U.S.] should seek some way of continuing the belowground dialogue which Che has begun. We can thus make it clear that we want to help Cuba and would help Cuba if it would sever communist ties and begin democratization.”
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