Exposing the Real Che Guevara (16 page)

The reason for the UNICEF award to Castro’s Cuba was “the Cuban state’s priority to assist and protect children.”

“Innocent people were not executed in significant numbers,” goes the familiar assurance of Jorge Castañeda. “It is surprising that there were so few abuses and executions.” It’s an old lie. In an April 1959 issue of
Reader’s Digest,
writer Dickey Chapelle comforted her readers with the observation that “the Cuba of Fidel Castro today is free from terror. Civil liberties have been restored.”

In fact, the opposite was happening. Historians consider Hitler’s enabling act, passed on March 23, 1933, among the foremost legal horrors of the century, a law that abolished legislative power and judicial guarantees, laying the groundwork for dictatorship. In Cuba, an almost identical law was passed on January 10, 1959, by Castro’s cabinet that gave a legal veneer to Che Guevara’s firing-squad massacres. This act was initially met by the liberal media as the restoration of the rule of law. Castro has “a deep reverence for civilian, representative, constitutional government,” wrote Jules Dubois in the
Chicago Tribune
in January, 1959.

“Mr. Castro’s bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America’s rejection of brutality and lying; every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence,” concluded the
London Observer
on January 9, 1959.

“Castro is almost Christ-like in his care and concern for his people,” Edwin Tetlow of the
London Daily Telegraph
assured his readers.

“Humanistic” is the parroted term used by the
New York Times
for Castro and Che’s
Revolución
innovations. Among them was this new law that
introduced
the death penalty to Cuba and made it apply
retroactively
. To cap it all, this new law—just passed by a government hailed worldwide as a paragon of justice—abolished habeas corpus.

Within months, Cuba’s jails held ten times the number of prisoners that they had held under the beastly Batista.

Though Che Guevara was overall head of the prosecuting tribunals, many of the executed got no trial whatsoever. The few farcical trials horrified and nauseated all observers, even some of the revolution’s earliest champions. Edwin Tetlow, Havana correspondent for the
London Daily Telegraph
, started having second thoughts as he watched the guilty verdicts and sentences of death announced almost mechanically. He was particularly rattled when he saw some of these verdicts posted on a board—
before the trials were held.
¹

One day in early 1959 one of Che’s revolutionary courts actually found a Cuban army captain named Pedro Morejon innocent. This brought Che’s fellow
comandante,
Camilo Cienfuegos, to his feet. “If Morejon is not executed,” he yelled, “I’ll put a bullet through his head myself!” The court reassembled frantically and quickly arrived at a new verdict. Morejon crumpled in front of one of Che’s firing squads the following day.
²

“I went to one trial as a reporter for NBC,” recalls New York radio legend Barry Farber. “The one for Jesus Sosa Blanco horrified me. I had to leave. Later I heard from a colleague that the prosecution—I really hate to dignify the proceedings with formal legal terms—but the prosecution asked one of the witnesses to point out the guilty—and she pointed to one of
their
guys! She couldn’t recognize the so-called Batista war criminal they were trying. This type of thing went on for hours. No defense witnesses, at all. I’d been one of those young idealists who initially applauded the revolution, but right then, fairly early in the game, I knew something was very wrong—knew that Cuba was heading for major trouble.”

“It was a dismal scene,” wrote Havana’s
New York Times
correspondent Ruby Hart Phillips about a trial she attended in early 1959. “The trial was held at night. The masonry walls were peeling and there was only a dim light. No defense witnesses were called . . . the defense attorney made absolutely no defense . . . instead he apologized to the court for defending the prisoner. The whole procedure was sickening. The prisoner was shot at two that morning.”
³

Equally sickened were some young attorneys who’d swallowed the rebels’ claims about a democratic, just, and “humanistic” revolution and signed on with the regime’s legal team, known as the
Comisión Depuradora
(Cleansing Commission), headed by Che. “What’s the holdup, here!” Che Guevara barked at a commissioner, José Vilasuso, as he stormed into his office in La Cabana. Vilasuso, an honorable man, answered forthrightly that he was gathering and assembling evidence and attempting to determine guilt. Che set him straight. “Quit the dallying! Your job is a very simple one. Judicial evidence is an archaic and secondary bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! We execute from revolutionary conviction.” José Vilasuso quickly fled.
⁴

A rebel captain named Duque de Estrada was Vilasuso’s immediate superior. “Let’s speed things up!” Che turned and gave him the familiar bit of advice. “You people need to start working during the night. Always interrogate the prisoners at night. A man’s mental resistance is always lower at night.”

“Certainly,
Mi Comandante,
” responded Estrada.

“Besides, to execute a man we don’t need proof of his guilt,” continued Guevara. “We only need proof that
it’s necessary to execute him
. It’s that simple.”

“Yes, of course,
Comandante.
”

“Our mission isn’t to uphold legal guarantees,” Che further clarified the matter. “It’s to carry forth a revolution. For that we must establish the pedagogy of the firing squad!”

“Very well,
Comandante.
”

“Surely you’re familiar with what Trotsky said, right, Estrada?”

“No,
Mi Comandante,
I’m afraid I’m not.”

“Trotsky said that terror is an essential political instrument, and that only hypocrites refuse to acknowledge that. You can’t teach the masses with good examples, Estrada. It just won’t work.”
⁵

A respected Cuban lawyer named Oscar Alvarado joined Che’s legal dream team with high hopes in early January. During these early revolutionary “trials,” guilt was often determined by a “mother.” She’d enter the courtroom dressed in solid black mourning garb, including a veil to shield the face, point at the accused, and exclaim, “Yes, that’s him! I’m sure of it! That’s the Batista criminal who killed my son!”

Alvarado started studying the female face behind the black veil. It seemed to be the same woman every day. One day he got one of his
barbudo
assistants to shave, dressed him in civilian garb, and put him up as the accused. “No doubt about it!” shrieked the woman as she circled him from close up and studied his face. “I’d recognize him anywhere! That’s the Batista criminal who killed my son!”
⁶

But even this process was wasting precious time. Soon Alvarado noticed little Xs next to the names of the men and boys to be tried and asked Che’s legal adjutant about them. “Why, those are the death sentences,” he explained, shrugging, as if the logic spoke for itself.

“We execute as a means of social prophylaxis,” is how one of Che’s favorite henchmen and prosecutors, Fernando “Puddle of Blood” Flores-Ibarra, explained it a bit later. He’d gotten with the program much more quickly than Duque de Estrada.
⁷

Yet we have it from scholarly Che biographer and
New Yorker
writer Jon Lee Anderson that “most were sentenced in conditions aboveboard, with defense lawyers, witnesses, prosecutors.” And how is Anderson so certain? He interviewed the prosecutors themselves, while both he and his interviewees were living in Cuba. “We gave each case due and fair consideration and we didn’t come to our decisions lightly,” he dutifully quotes Duque de Estrada himself. “Che always had a clear idea about the need to . . . exact justice on those found to be war criminals.”
⁸

“Our paramount concerns . . . were that no injustice was committed. In that, Che was very careful,” Orlando Borrego, an early Che henchman who served as a “judge” and later as Castro’s minister of transportation, told Anderson.

And besides, according to Duque de Estrada (who lives in Cuba as a Castro minister today), the death toll was minimal. “We carried out about fifty-five executions by firing squad in La Cabana,” he says.
⁹
Others, no longer associated with the regime, can attest to a different reality. “At a meeting in early 1959 Che was interrupted by an aide who walked in with a big stack of papers,” recalls Jose Pujols, who served briefly as director of ports for the Castro regime. “Che grabbed the stack and just started signing away, without looking. These were the executions for that night.”
¹⁰

For a Cuban exile, reading the scholarly biographies of Che is like reading a Hitler biography in which the primary sources for the chapter on the Holocaust were Adolf Eichmann and Julius Streicher who scoff at Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank as embittered frauds. Or it is like reading a biography of Stalin that covers the purge trials and the Gulag using testimony mainly from Andrey Vyshinsky and Lavrenty Beria, who snort at Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Cardinal Mindszenty as fanciful cranks. Add to that the media that hails these books as “Superb! A masterly job in separating the man from the myth!” as the
New York Times Book Review
crowed about Anderson’s Che biography, or “admirably honest and staggeringly researched!” as the
Sunday Times
hailed Anderson’s work.

Armando Valladares, who somehow escaped the
paredon
but spent twenty-two torture-filled years in Cuba’s Gulag, described his trial very succinctly: “Not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me.”
¹¹
It was simply enough that he’d been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk.

Evelio Rodriguez was murdered by Che’s firing squad in February 1959. His daughter-in-law, Miriam Mata, scoffs at Anderson’s account of Guevara’s justice. “My father-in-law was a police officer in Cuba—not a ‘Batista war criminal,’ ” she says, rolling her eyes. “He had served in democratically elected Cuban governments in the forties, and in 1952 he stayed on. His checks weren’t signed by Batista, for goodness sake. In fact, he was relieved from his post by Batista’s people. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what Che’s people could possibly arrest him for. So he stayed in Cuba.”
¹²

Evelio Rodriguez was arrested and executed by Che within weeks of the rebel victory.

Again, there is a certain logic here. As in Stalin’s Russia, being
related
to a “counter-revolutionary” qualified one for a death sentence in Che’s Cuba. Pedro Diaz-Lanz had been Castro’s personal pilot in the Sierra during the anti-Batista skirmishes. In January 1959, Castro appointed him head of Cuba’s air force, where Diaz-Lanz saw Che’s communist instructors indoctrinating the new air force cadets in Marxist-Leninist dogma. Soon Diaz-Lanz realized this indoctrination was going on from one end of Cuba to the other and involved all members of the military and police.

Diaz-Lanz resigned his post in May and tried to warn his close friends, the Cuban people, and U.S. officials of what was coming down the pipeline in Cuba. Pedro bundled his wife and kids onto a small boat and escaped to Miami. A few weeks later he rented a small plane and flew over Havana dropping leaflets warning Cubans of the communization Castro and Che planned for Cuba. Pedro Diaz-Lanz’s brother, Guillermo, was immediately arrested in Cuba and thrown into a La Cabana dungeon. No evidence of any counter-revolutionary activity was ever presented, but a few months later he was jerked from his cell and bayoneted to death.
¹³

At around the same time, a Cuban father of five named Juan Alvarez-Aballi received a visit from the Cuban police. “We’ll only be gone an hour or so,” the officer told Alvarez-Aballi’s terrified wife. “Just bringing him down to the station to ask a few questions.” What was his crime? Alvarez-Aballi had a brother-in-law named Juan Maristany who had slipped into the Venezuelan embassy just ahead of Castro’s cops a few days before. He suspected it was something to do with that. “Don’t worry, honey.” Alvarez-Aballi kissed his wife. “I’ll be right back.”

He was in fact dumped into a La Cabana dungeon. The “humanistic” rebels were simply using him as a hostage to lure his brother-in-law from his refuge in the embassy. A few days later Alvarez-Aballi himself was dragged from his cell and subjected to Che’s avant-garde judicial procedures. No charges were ever filed against him. But the sentence was pronounced promptly: death by firing squad.

Alvarez-Aballi had to pass a picture of Fidel and one of Che on his way to the stake. “Because of those two wretches,” Armando Valladares recalls him saying as he walked past, “there will be five orphans!” The following day his bullet-shattered body was dumped in an unmarked grave in Havana’s Colon Cemetery.

Idelfonso Canales was an interrogator for Cuba’s Che-indoctrinated military police, the G-2. In 1961 he explained the workings of the system to Dr. Rivero Caro. “Forget your lawyer mentality,” he sneered. “What you say doesn’t matter. What proof you provide doesn’t matter, even what the prosecuting attorney says doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what the G-2 says!”
¹⁴

To some, equating the young Cuban revolution with the young Nazi regime or Stalin’s seems outrageous or fanciful, a typical stunt of those “Cuban exile hard-liners and right-wing crackpots.” But the historical comparison is solid, not rhetorical.

Well before the outbreak of World War II, Nazi Germany had become the modern standard for political evil. By 1938, FDR was already calling Hitler a “gangster,” and Winston Churchill was sputtering at Hitler as a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe.” Even future ally Benito Mussolini denounced Hitler as “worse than Attila!”
¹⁵