Exposing the Real Che Guevara (13 page)

Of course, Goodwin was outsmarted. At the time of that meeting, Che Guevara himself was the Cuban regime’s chief champion of a Soviet alliance—“the scion of the Soviet Union,” his biographer Jorge Castañeda labeled Guevara. Che was the “vital link” with the Soviets, was how Anderson put it. The Soviet ambassador to Cuba at the time, Alexander Alexiev, reports that while planning the secret placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, Che was consistently the most gung-ho—“the most active” is how Alexiev describes the eager Guevara during the meetings.

During the October 14, 1962, broadcast of a Sunday chat show,
Issues and Answers,
a disdainful McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security advisor, told a national audience there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba. “Refugee rumors,” he called the eyewitness reports from Cuban exiles about those missiles—reports they’d been giving the State Department and CIA for months by then, after risking their lives to obtain them.

“Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued Bundy, barely masking his scorn. “There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba.”
⁴⁰
After all, at Punta del Este, Che Guevara had confided that valuable piece of information to Bundy’s colleague Richard Goodwin. And between those insufferable Cuban refugees and the “straightforward” Che Guevara, the Best and Brightest had chosen to trust the latter.

President Kennedy himself sounded off the following day. “There’s fifty-odd thousand Cuban refugees in this country,” he sneered, “all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They’re the ones putting out this kind of stuff.”
⁴¹

Exactly two days later JFK had photos taken by a U-2 spy plane of those “refugee rumors.” He saw nuclear-armed missiles pointing at American cities. The response of Kennedy and his team to the Cuban Missile Crisis has been the stuff of legend, told and retold in movies as a victory of shrewd dealing and brinksmanship. In fact, the solution from the best and the brightest was to team up with the Soviets and grant the Cuban communist regime its mutually assured protection.

“Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said,” said Castro himself. “Perhaps one day they’ll be made public.”
⁴²

“We can’t say anything public about this agreement,” said Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis. “It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.”
⁴³
For its part in the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal, the administration secretly agreed not to oppose Castro’s government in Cuba.

On October 28, 1962, when news that part of the “resolution” of the Cuban Missile Crisis meant removing the missiles from Cuba, thousands of Cuban troops suddenly surrounded the missile sites. A rattled Soviet foreign minister, Anastas Mikoyan, rushed to Havana and met with Castro. The KGB itself feared the Cuban commandos might attack, take control of the missiles, and start World War III.

Mikoyan somehow defused the situation during his meeting with Castro, no doubt explaining that his regime had come out of the deal smelling like a rose. “Mutually Assured Protection,” you might call it, with Castro and Che protected by both the Soviets
and
the United States. True to its word, the United States immediately started rounding up the Cuban exiles who had been launching commando raids against Castro from South Florida.

The Kennedy administration launched into this effort with gusto, giving the U.S. Coast Guard six new planes and twelve new boats and boosting their manpower by 20 percent. JFK called British prime minister Harold Macmillan and informed him that some of those crazy Cubans had moved their operations from South Florida to the Bahamas. Her Majesty’s Navy was only too happy to help. Thus, the very Cuban exiles being trained and armed to launch raids on Cuba by the CIA only the week before were now being arrested by U.S. and British forces.
⁴⁴

What about Goodwin’s belief that Che lacked “propaganda or bombast”? A month later—thinking he was speaking off the record to the
London Daily Worker
—Che Guevara explained: “If the missiles had remained
we would have used them against the very heart of the
United States, including New York.
We must never establish peaceful coexistence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims!”
⁴⁵

Che Guevara himself, of course, did not want to be one of the victims of a nuclear exchange he was only too ready to start. He and Fidel had priority reservations in the Soviet bomb shelter outside Havana. The Soviet ambassador of the day, Alexander Alexiev, reports that Castro and Che had made sure of that.
⁴⁶

As early as 1955, Ernesto Guevara had written to his doting mother that a struggle against the United States was his “true destiny.” “We must learn the lesson of absolute abhorrence of imperialism. Against that class of hyena there is no other medium than extermination!”
⁴⁷
In October 1962, Guevara had gotten tantalizingly close to that medium.

Richard Nixon summed up the Cuban Missile Crisis “resolution” best. “First we goofed an invasion—now we give the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard.”
⁴⁸

Safeguarded by U.S. policy and lavished with Soviet arms, the Cuban communists’ revolution had a secure base to hatch and breed guerrilla wars in pursuit of the dream of “continental liberation” with the Andes as the “Sierra of the continent.” All the odds were with them. With a halfway-competent guerrilla leader as head of the DGI’s “Liberation Department,” they might have pulled it off. Instead they had Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

5

Fidel’s Favorite Executioner

 
Che’s prescription for the ideal revolutionary as an “effective, violent
cold
killing machine” implies a certain detachment or nonchalance toward murder. In fact, Che gave ample evidence of taking to the task with relish. Except in battle, Che was always quite a
warm
killing machine.

“Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” This is a passage from Che’s famous
Motorcycle Diaries
that Robert Redford somehow managed to omit from his touching film. The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” rarely reached Guevara’s nostril from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged, and blindfolded men and boys.

In late January 1957, a few weeks after his dauntless Baptism of Fire when “all seemed lost,” and Che stoically braced for a “dignified death” (from a wound that didn’t require one stitch), he sent a letter to his discarded wife, Hilda Gadea. “Dear
vieja,
I’m here in Cuba’s hills, alive and
thirsting for blood
.”
¹
His thirst would soon be slaked.

In that very month of January 1957, Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra, accused of being an informer for Batista’s forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard, Universo Sanchez. To everyone’s surprise, Che Guevara—a lowly rebel soldier/medic at the time, not a
comandante
yet—volunteered to accompany Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm. Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.

Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the first execution of a Castro rebel. Without warning, Che stepped forward and fired his pistol into Guerra’s temple. “He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine,” Che wrote in his diaries.

Che’s father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. “I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.”
²

This can-do attitude caught Castro’s eye. More executions of assorted “deserters,” “informers,” and “war criminals” quickly followed, all with Che’s enthusiastic participation. One was of a captured Batista soldier, a seventeen-year-old boy totally green to the guerrilla “war”—hence his easy capture. First Che interrogated him.

“I haven’t killed anyone,
comandante
!” the terrified boy answered Che. “I just got out here! I’m an only son, my mother’s a widow, and I joined the army for the salary, to send it to her every month . . . don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!—
why
?”
³

Che barked the orders and the boy was trussed up, shoved in front of a recently dug pit, and murdered. This was the same man Ariel Dorfman wrote of in
Time
as the “generous Che who tended wounded enemy soldiers.”

Castro thought executing Batista soldiers was incredibly stupid, compared to the propaganda value of releasing them. But he recognized Che’s value as an ardent executioner. Castro was already thinking ahead to his stealth takeover of Cuba, planning his version of Stalin’s Katyn massacre, and with the same rationale: to decapitate—literally and figuratively—any future counter-revolutionaries, future
contras
. So by summer 1957, Che had been promoted to full-fledged major or
comandante,
the rebel army’s highest rank. His fame was spreading.

But not all were favorably impressed. In mid-1958, a rebel soldier, Reynaldo Morfa, was wounded and made his way to Dr. Hector Meruelo in the nearby town of Cienfuegos. The good doctor patched him up and a few weeks later informed him that he was well enough to return to Che’s column.

“No, doctor,” Reynaldo responded. “Please be discreet with this because it could cost me my life, but I’ve learned that Che is nothing but a murderer. I’m a revolutionary but I’m also a Christian. I’ll go and join Camilo’s column—but never Che’s.”
⁴

Agustin Soberon was the first Cuban reporter to visit Che’s Sierra Maestra camp to interview him. “I was a reporter for the Cuban magazine
Bohemia
and visited Che in March 1958 at his camp in La Plata,” he recalls. “It was impossible to break the ice with Guevara, I’ve never met anyone with such a despotic and arrogant nature. First I asked him about his wife, Hilda, whom he left in Mexico to come on the
Granma
with Fidel. ‘I don’t know anything about her since I left—and I don’t care anything about her,’ he snapped. Okay, so I then ask him about his profession of medical doctor. ‘I’m not interested in medicine at all,’ he snaps. ‘I dislike it.’ ” Soberon continues: “That night I slept in a hut at the camp. A young rebel sleeping next to me was having what looked to me like a terrible nightmare. He was rolling back and forth, murmuring, ‘Execute him—execute him—execute him.’ So the next morning I asked him about it. I’ll never forget this, the young rebel’s name was Humberto Rodriguez and he explained how he’d been put in charge of firing squads. What he’d been saying during the nightmare were Che’s constant commands, still ringing in his ears. Apparently they troubled him. A little while later, Che himself comes over and announces they’re tying a victim to the stake. Would I like to come over and watch the firing squad at work? I didn’t. I’d seen enough and heard enough. I left.”
⁵

All these victims were
campesinos
, peasants, of whom Che himself wrote that their “cooperation comes after our planned terror.”
⁶

Ten months after Soberon’s visit to his Sierra campsite, Che entered Havana and moved promptly into that infamous old Spanish fortress, La Cabana. “The shouts of
Viva Cuba Libre!
and
Viva Cristo Rey!
followed by the firing-squad blasts made the walls of that Fortress tremble,” recalls Armando Valladares, who served twenty-two years in Castro’s Cuban prisons.

During these bloody months,
Time
magazine featured Cuban revolutionary
comandante
Ernesto “Che” Guevara on its cover and crowned him the “Brains of the Cuban Revolution.” (Fidel Castro was “the heart” and Raul Castro “the fist.”) “Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating,”
Time
gushed, “Che guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor.”

The tone of the
Time
article was in perfect league with other major media—and utterly wrong. Guevara was no more the brains of the Cuban revolution than Feliks Dzerzhinski had been the brains of the Bolshevik revolution, or Himmler the brains of the National Socialist revolution, or Beria the brains behind Stalinism. Che performed the same role for Fidel Castro that Dzerzhinski performed for Lenin, Himmler for Hitler, and Beria for Stalin. He was the snarling enforcer, the regime’s chief executioner.

Under Che, La Cabana fortress had been converted into a Caribbean Lubyanka. His approach was thoroughly Chekist. “Always interrogate your prisoners at night,” Che commanded his goons, “a man is easier to cow at night, his mental resistance is always lower.”
⁷

Exact numbers may never be known, but the orders of magnitude of these murders are not in doubt. José Vilasuso, a Cuban prosecutor who quickly defected in horror and disgust, estimates that Che signed 400 death warrants during the first three months of his command in La Cabana. A Basque priest named Iòaki de Aspiazu, often on hand to perform confessions and last rites, says Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad during that period. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1956, writes in his book
Yo Soy El Che!
that Guevara sent 1,892 men to the firing squad.