Exposing the Real Che Guevara (30 page)

Only a Bolivian guerrilla code-named “Paco” survived the slaughter. Upon questioning him later, Felix Rodriguez learned that Paco was quite eager to rat out the location of his guerrilla group’s “vanguard” led by Che. Paco felt snookered and was bitter. Che, it appeared, had brought him on board, not as a proposed guerrilla at all, but with the bogus offer to send him to Cuba for schooling. As with others, as soon as Paco showed up at the guerrilla camp, Che reneged, virtually kidnapped him, and started treating him like a slave.

But finding Che’s group wouldn’t be easy, explained Paco. Che’s location wasn’t a mystery only to the Bolivian army—it was a much
bigger mystery
to Che himself, and to everyone under his command. (For once, Che’s obtuseness was working in his favor.) Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence man, sensed that Paco was telling the truth. But nonetheless, the ring started closing on Guevara.

“Dear mother,” Tania had written only a few weeks before she was mowed down in the Bolivian ambush, “I’m scared. I’m always frightened and am always crying. My nerves are shot. I’m not a woman. I’m a girl who would like to hide myself in some corner where no one can find me. But where can I hide?”
¹⁴

The terror and despair of her last days would certainly have been tinged with the realization that her fate was tied to that of a man who was increasingly delusional and certainly doomed. “The legend of our guerrilla group is growing like a huge wave,” Che wrote in his diaries for July. “We are already the invincible supermen.”

Perhaps she also finally grasped the nature of Che’s idealism. “
Animalitos,
” was how Che referred to the Bolivian peasants in his diaries. “The peasant masses do not help us in any way.”
¹⁵
(Two years later, Rojas was captured at his home and murdered in front of his wife and children. This method of “fighting” was in complete keeping with Che Guevara’s legacy, as many a peasant family in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra could attest.)

Dariel Alarcon reports how, while lost and starving, Che was obsessed with posing for photos. One was of Che atop a (presumably stolen) horse on a ridgeline, where he was strategically silhouetted against the bare sky. Che handed Alarcon his Pentax and had him back off just the right distance to capture the entire scene. Che nodded, then plucked out a machete and waved it high over his head, shouting, “I am the new Bolivar!” as Alarcon dutifully clicked away.
¹⁶

Meanwhile, Che’s men blundered around, lost, constantly bickering with each other, constantly losing recruits, terrorizing peasants, now eating cats, condors, and armadillos. This was not guerrilla war as Castro had “fought” it, amassing weight, feted by fawning reporters and duped financial backers, who paid bribes to keep Batista’s army from firing.

Dariel Alarcon also remembers Che browbeating him savagely. “One day I was cooking at the camp,” he recalls, “and Che walks up. ‘What you doing?’

“ ‘I’m getting ready to cook.’

“ ‘Well, what are you going to cook?’

“ ‘I think I’m gonna rustle up some boiled potatoes and a little meat.’

“ ‘No!’ snapped Che. ‘Don’t cook any meat. Cook some rice and beans with some sardines.’

“ ‘Fine, whatever you command, Che,’ I replied, and for some reason that set him off.

“ ‘It’s not whatever I command, Chico!’ Che raved. ‘It’s whatever comes out of my goddamned balls to command! You got that?’

“ ‘Yes, but wait a minute now. I have not insulted you in any way,
comandante
? Why are you raving at me like this?’

“ ‘I said
you got that?
’ ”

Che spun around and stomped off.
¹⁷

In his diaries, Che recounts Alarcon’s committing a major blunder by allowing himself to be seen by a peasant family fishing. “Benigno [Dariel Alarcon’s guerrilla name] let himself be seen, then let the peasant, his wife and kid all escape. When I found out I had a major tantrum and called it an act of treason. This provoked a fit of crying and bawling by Benigno.” Apparently, Alarcon should have murdered the family.

This entry is typical. Che’s diaries seem to revel in the punishment he doles out to his peons, along with the trivial infractions that provoked them. “Today there was an unpleasant incident,” Che wrote in September. “Chino came to tell me that Nato had roasted and eaten a whole piece of meat in front of him. So I yelled and stormed at Chino.”

“Every time Che sent for you it was to pull your ear about something or other,” said his former Cuban bodyguard Alberto Castellanos.
¹⁸

Dariel Alarcon, who’d dutifully fought alongside Che from the Sierra Maestra through the Congo and into Bolivia, managed to escape Che’s final Yuro firefight, enter Chile after weeks of hiking, and eventually make his way back to Cuba (much to Castro’s apparent discomfiture). It took a little while, but Alarcon finally came to his senses. He defected in 1996 and lives in Paris today. He has no doubt Che’s fate in Bolivia was a deliberate setup by Castro, which provoked a resentment that fueled Alarcon’s flight to exile. Back in Cuba he even heard it from Che’s bodyguard, Alberto Castellanos, a friendly Cuban intelligence officer. “I’ll tell it right to your face,” Castellanos confided to Alarcon. “You people were dumped in the Bolivian jungle the same way someone throws a used bone into the garbage can.”

“Well before the final ambush and Che’s death it looked to us like Cuba had abandoned us,” recalls Alarcon about a campfire discussion among the guerrillas one night.

“Forget about any help!” snorted Alarcon’s fellow guerrilla Antonio Olo Pantoja. “Forget about it! Dammit! I’m telling you that over there in Cuba what they want
is to get rid of us.
It’s obvious!”
¹⁹
And Antonio was in an excellent position to know. He was a veteran Cuban intelligence operative who knew full well how these things worked. He’d planned the offing of many fellow revolutionaries himself. Now he recognized that his turn had come.

While Che was posing for snapshots by Dariel Alarcon, neither he nor anyone in his group had any way to communicate with Cuba. By late summer, their antique tube radio had finally sputtered out. Castro had sent an agent named Renan Montero to La Paz to keep in touch with Che, but Montero abruptly left Bolivia in July and returned to Cuba. Significantly, just a week earlier, Aleksey Kosygin had visited Cuba and met with Castro.

Kosygin had just come from a meeting with Lyndon Johnson, during which the U.S. president complained about what he saw as “Castroite subversion” in Latin America. (If he’d only known the real motive.) This “Castroite subversion” was a clear breach of the deal the United States and the Soviets had cut back in October 1962, which had left Castro unmolested. Now this mischief in Bolivia might force the United States into an agonizing reappraisal of that deal, LBJ explained.

Hearing this from Kosygin, Castro concluded that the time had come to speed things up and finally rid himself of Che. Within days, Montero came home and Che was cast completely adrift. Barely two months later, the “National Liberation Army” was wiped out and Che was dead.

On September 26, a Bolivian patrol, alerted by those chronically unenlightened peasants, ambushed Che’s vanguard near the village of La Higuera and killed three guerrillas. Felix Rodriguez, who had been getting a wealth of valuable information from the captured Jose Castillo Chavez, or “Paco,” identified one of the dead guerrillas as “Miguel.” This was a Cuban named Manuel Hernandez, a captain in Castro’s rebel army who was second-in-command of the “vanguard” right behind Che. Felix sensed that Guevara was nearby and advised the Bolivian military to send their U.S.-trained ranger battalion to the area.

“But their training isn’t complete,” replied the Bolivian commander.

“No matter!” answered Rodriguez. “I think we ’ve got Che pin-pointed! Send them in!” Barely a week later Che was yelling his pitiful plea to those Bolivian rangers. “Don’t shoot! I’m Che, I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

Che’s capture merits some clarification after the romanticization of his last day by his hagiographers. Che was defiant, they claim. Che was surprised, caught off-guard, and was unable to properly defend himself or to shoot himself with his last bullet, as was his plan. Jon Lee Anderson is particularly obsessed with this version. Jorge Castañeda has a machine-gun burst not only destroying Che’s carbine, but actually “blasting it from his very grip and wounding him in the process.”
²⁰
Christopher Hitchens has written of Che’s “untamable defiance.”

In fact, Che, after ordering his men to fight to the last man and the last bullet, surrendered enthusiastically. His famous “wound” was a bullet graze near his calf that missed bone and most muscle. Che surrendered voluntarily from a safe distance, and was captured
physically sound and with a full clip in his pistol.

“Che could not shoot back,” claims Castañeda. “His pistol had no clip.”
²¹

“Che fired his M-2 carbine but it was soon hit in the barrel by a bullet, rendering it useless,” writes Anderson. “The magazine of his pistol had apparently already been lost; he was now unarmed.”
²²

And where did Che’s diligent and hard-nosed biographers get this heroic version of events? Their source reads: “We have been able to precisely determine that Che had been battling even while wounded until the barrel of his M-2 carbine was damaged by a shot that made it totally useless. And his pistol was without a clip. These incredible circumstances explain why Che was captured alive.”
²³

The above passage is in the prologue to Che’s Bolivian diaries, published in Havana. This prologue had been written by
Fidel Castro.

After all, PBS, in its 1997 special on Che commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of his death, informs us that “Mr. Anderson . . . gained unprecedented access to both Che’s personal archive through his widow and to formerly sealed
Cuban government archives.
” Aleida March, of course, is now a Castro regime official who chairs the Ernesto Guevara Research Center in Havana. Anderson received unprecedented access to the propaganda of one of the world’s most censored societies. It’s as if historians were to uncritically accept neo-Nazi claims that Hitler had died battling Soviet troops, instead of commiting suicide.

What really happened? Castro, obviously, wasn’t at the scene. The three Cuban guerrillas who escaped Bolivia were nowhere near Guevara at the time of his surrender. Willy, a Bolivian miner and guerrilla captured with Che, was executed along with Che the following day.

Why not consult the
full
records of the Bolivian officers actually
on the scene of the capture?
We know perfectly well why. The truth isn’t pretty.

Bolivian army officers Captain Gary Prado and Colonel Arnaldo Saucedo Parada both inspected and listed all of Che’s personal effects upon his capture. Both list his Walther PPK 9mm pistol as containing
a fully loaded clip.
²⁴

More tellingly, though he was in the bottom of a ravine during the final firefight and could have made a fighting escape in the opposite direction like a few of his men, Che actually moved
upward
and
toward
the Bolivian soldiers who had been firing, ordering his comrade at the time, the hapless Willy, along with him. Yet Che was doing
no firing of his own
in the process. Then, as soon as he saw soldiers he made that yell, “Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” and came out of the brambles completely unarmed, having dropped his fully loaded weapon.

“We represent the prestige of the Cuban Revolution!” Che had thundered to his men hours before. “And we will defend that prestige to the last man and to the last bullet!”
²⁵
But he himself was ready to do no such thing.

“If he had wanted to die he could have stayed further down and kept fighting,” says Captain Gary Prado. “But no, he was trying to get out.”
²⁶

Che was surprised by “concealed soldiers who popped up a few feet away,” writes Anderson, who got this version straight from Castro’s sources while living in Havana itself.

“Che was surprised . . . caught off guard,” claims Castañeda.

Again, these unattributable stories conflict with those from the men
who were actually there.
“Che made his position known to our soldiers well in advance so that they would stop firing,” writes Colonel Saucedo Parada, “yelling, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Che!’ Then he came out unarmed.”
²⁷

“Che raised his carbine from a distance,” says Bolivian general Luis Reque Teran, who commanded the Fourth Division. “Then he yelled: ‘I surrender! Don’t kill me! I’m worth more alive than dead!’ ”
²⁸

“When captured all of Che’s and Willy’s weapons were fully loaded,” writes Colonel Saucedo Parada, further demolishing the media’s titillating fantasy of Che’s “untamable defiance.”
²⁹
Also overlooked by his hagiographers is that the fully armed Che and Willy were confronted by only two Bolivian soldiers. That makes
two
Bolivian rangers against
two
armed guerrillas. But then, even odds were never to Che’s liking.

What about Che’s “damaged” carbine? Castro’s account has Che armed with an M-2 carbine, as were all Cuban guerrilla officers. Captain Gary Prado lists a damaged carbine, but it is a damaged
M-1
carbine, which may have been that of Willy, Che’s partner in the final firefight. Naturally, none of Che’s diligent biographers care to speculate on the above discrepancies.

Immediately after his capture, Che’s demeanor was even more telling. “What’s your name, young man?” Che asked one of his captors. “Why what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!” he blurted after hearing it.
³⁰
The firefight was still raging after Che’s surrender. His men, unlike their
comandante
, were
indeed
fighting to the last bullet. Soon a wounded Bolivian soldier was carried by.