Exposing the Real Che Guevara (9 page)

“Well, if he’s dead, then throw him overboard,” replied Castro.
¹
Guevara, suffering the combined effects of seasickness and an asthma attack, stayed on board.

Guevara’s condition did not immediately improve upon landfall. At one point, he declared: “Doctor! I think I’m dying!”
²
That was “doctor” himself, Ernesto Che Guevara, gasping to fellow rebel (and bona-fide physician) Faustino Perez during their Cuban baptism of fire. The Castro rebels had landed in Cuba three days earlier on the
Granma
from Mexico. The Cuban army, alerted by a peasant who didn’t seem to recognize his self-appointed liberators, had ambushed them near a cane field in a place named Alegria del Pio.

In Che’s Havana-published diaries (primary source for most of his biographers and media stories), he uses slightly different terminology regarding the incident. Much like John Wayne in
Sands of Iwo Jima
, Che recalls saying, “I’m hit!” But far be it from Che Guevara to stop there, so his official diary gushes forth: “Faustino, still firing away, looked at me . . . but I could read in his eyes that he considered me as good as dead. . . . Immediately, I began to think about the best way to die, since all seemed lost. I recalled an old Jack London story where the hero, aware that he is bound to freeze to death in the wastes of Alaska, leans calmly against a tree and prepares to die in a dignified manner. That was the only thing that came to my mind at that moment.”

In fact Faustino Perez later recounted that he was nearly wounded himself—not by the whizzing bullets, but by a hernia while trying to stifle his laughter at the look on Che’s face, especially after seeing the nature of Che’s wound. “It’s a scratch!” Perez blurted. “Keep walking.”
³
A bullet had barely grazed the back of Che’s neck.

And what about Fidel? Upon hearing the first shots fired in anger against his glorious rebellion, this hands-on
comandante-
in-chief vanished, leaving his men to scramble and scrounge for themselves. The future Maximum Leader’s headlong flight from the skirmish site, through rows of sugarcane, leaping over brambles, dodging trees, was so long, and his speed so impressive, that one wonders if he really had missed his true calling, playing major league baseball, as urban legend has it.

None of his men, including Che, could find Castro for the rest of the day. But in the middle of the night, after miles of walking, Faustino Perez heard a tentative voice: “Mr. Perez? . . . Mr. Perez?” And out came Fidel Castro from a cane field, accompanied by his bodyguard, Universo Sanchez.
⁴
“Later I learned that Fidel had tried vainly to get everybody together into the adjoining cane field,” is how the ever-faithful Che covers for Fidel in his diaries. Considering the length and breadth of Cuban cane fields in that area, “adjoining” is technically correct for a place three miles away.

A few weeks after this skirmish, when the only thing Fidel Castro commanded was a raggedy band of a dozen “rebels” in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains, he was approached by some of his rebel group’s many wealthy urban backers. “What can we do?” they asked. “How can we help the glorious rebellion against the upstart mulatto scoundrel Batista? We can write you some checks. We can buy you some arms. We can recruit more men. Tell us, Fidel, what can we do to help?”

“For now,” Castro answered, “get me a
New York Times
reporter up here.”

The rest is history. Castro’s July 26 Movement’s efficient and well-heeled communications network fell promptly to the task. Lines hummed from Santiago to Havana to New York. Within weeks, the
New York Times
’s ranking Latin American expert, Herbert Matthews, was escorted to Castro’s rebel camp with his note-pad, tape recorder, and cameras. Castro was being hailed as the Robin Hood of Latin America on the front pages of the world’s most prestigious papers. The following month CBS sent in a camera crew. Within two years Castro was dictator of Cuba, executing hundreds of political prisoners per week and jailing thousands more—all the while being hailed as “the George Washington of Cuba” by everyone from Jack Paar, to Walter Lippmann, to Ed Sullivan, to Harry Truman.

While Castro and Che failed to launch a successful military invasion, they invaded nonetheless, riding rivers of ink.

On their march from the Sierra mountains of eastern Cuba to Las Villas province in central Cuba during the fall of 1958, Che’s “column” somehow ran into a twenty-member band of Cuba’s Rural Guard, who started shooting. Che and his band scattered hysterically, bewildered and shocked by hearing hostile gunfire. In this mad melee, they fled from a band of country boys whom they outnumbered four to one. In their fright, the gallant
guerrilleros
abandoned two stolen trucks crammed with arms and documents.

“We found Guevara’s own diary and notebooks in one of the trucks,” recalls Cuban air force lieutenant Carlos Lazo, who had made a recon flight over the area and notified the Rural Guard of the Che column.
⁵
The sight of Lieutenant Lazo’s plane overhead had greatly exacerbated Che’s column’s panic attack and spurred on their frantic flight. The “Heroic Guerrilla’s” voluminous writings, and those of his biographers, somehow overlook this exhilarating military engagement.

Oddly, the notebook and diaries found by Lazo differ dramatically from the “Che Diaries,” the “Secret Papers of a Revolutionary,” and the “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” later published by Castro’s government under Che Guevara’s byline, with a foreword by Fidel Castro himself. It is at this juncture that we see how mainstream historical research was poisoned, and the myth of Che the heroic guerrilla was created. On one hand, historians had access to a mass of confidential memos snatched from a frantically fleeing Che. On the other hand, a Stalinist regime published—with a deafening fanfare of trumpets—Che’s “official” diaries and reminiscences. And which set of writings became the source material for all those hard-nosed
New York Times
reporters, all those diligent Che biographers and erudite Ivy league scholars? The propaganda, of course.

“Those confidential notebooks and diaries we found in Che’s truck confirmed everything we were already saying about Che,” says Lazo. “First off, Guevara complained that his column was getting absolutely no help from the country people, whom he claimed were all
latifundistas
(large landholders). The first part was true, the country folk mostly shunned them. The second part was patently untrue, these weren’t huge landholders. They were simply anticommunist. That was enough for Che to mark them for reprisal. I saw where several boys, one of them seventeen, another eighteen, had been marked for execution in his diary. These were not ‘war criminals’ in any sense of the word. They were simply country boys who had refused to cooperate with him. I guess these had really annoyed him somehow. Shortly after the rebel victory these were rounded up and executed as ‘war criminals.’ ”

The
New York Times
,
Look
, and CBS weren’t around for these murders. Even those labeled “war criminals” by the rebels were often simply Cuban military men who had shot back. If they’d actually taken their oath and duty seriously, if they’d actually pursued Che’s rebels, fought them, and inflicted casualties—well, then Che’s henchmen went after them with particular zeal. Lieutenant Orlando Enrizo was one such. “They called us Batista war criminals,” he recalls from Miami today. “First off, I had nothing to do with Batista, didn’t even like the guy. He didn’t sign my checks. Me and most of my military comrades considered ourselves members of Cuba’s Constitutional Army.

“The Castro rebels whom we knew to be communist-led—though many were not communists themselves, simply dupes—start ambushing us, start killing our men in their barracks, destroying roads and bridges, terrorizing the countryside, and we’re supposed to greet them with kisses? Not me,” says Enrizo. “I fought them. I met an ex-rebel in exile later who told me point-blank that Che’s people would murder
campesinos
for not cooperating, or for being suspected informers, or whatever. Then they’d promptly blame it on us.”

And sure enough, the media, both in the United States and in Cuba at the time, took the rebels’ word as gospel that the men of the Cuban army were the murderers. Castro and his network always had the media’s ear.

“Well, I’ll admit it,” says Enrizo. “I fought the rebels hard. I shot during combat when people were shooting at us. I pursued them. I’m damn proud of my record. Let Che’s biographers and anyone else call me a war criminal. I murdered no one. How many of the rebels—much less Che—can claim that?”

Che never forgot Lieutenant Enrizo’s assault on his “column.” “I knew the dragnet was out for us after the rebel victory and escaped to Miami,” Enrizo says. Like most Cuban exiles of the time, Enrizo expected his exile to be short. One day shortly after he arrived in Miami, Lieutenant Enrizo met two men in a diner he had known in Cuba as Castro rebels. “Just the man we’ve been looking for!” they said to Enrizo as they surrounded him. Che Guevara himself had sent these men to Miami on a special mission to kidnap Orlando Enrizo and haul him back to Cuba for a spectacular show trial and public firing-squad execution, much like the famous trial held in February 1959 for Cuban army commander Jesus Sosa Blanco for which the international press was invited to attend. The kidnappers had been jubilant with the assignment and expressed their excitement to Che himself.

“They were excited with the assignment all right,” says Enrizo, “because it allowed them to finally scoot out of Cuba, something they’d been planning for a while, but couldn’t find a way out. Those guys still live here in Miami. We’re friends.”
⁶

Enrizo’s fellow fighter, Lieutenant Lazo, uncovered much of interest in Che’s personal papers. “Every last one of the contacts Guevara had listed in his notebooks was a well-known Cuban Communist Party member.” Cuba’s Communist Party was rigidly Stalinist and slavishly followed Moscow’s orders. But to this day, assert that Castro’s rebels had communist support or were communists themselves, and you will find yourself labeled a crackpot by mainstream academia.

All serious scholars will tell you that only “Yankee bullying” pushed a reluctant Castro and Che into the arms of the Soviet Union. This wall of resistance to the truth has proven more durable than the concrete and steel of the Berlin Wall. It has been impervious to a half-century of contrary evidence, including declassified Soviet documents that list Raul Castro as a reliable KGB contact since 1953. This myth persists in the face of innumerable telling details, like the fact that when Che Guevara was arrested in Mexico City in 1956, he was actually carrying the card of the local KGB agent, Nikolai Leonov, in his wallet.

In short, Lazo’s documents are the Cuban version of the Venona papers. Declassified in 1995, the Venona project was a U.S. intelligence project that broke Soviet codes and revealed Soviet spies in the U.S. It makes no difference to academia, the major media, or other apologists. “War with the U.S. is my true destiny,” Castro had written to a confidant in early 1958.

The Batista government made all the information found in Che’s private papers known to the U.S. government. It did no good. The U.S. government held tough on its arms embargo against Batista, while the U.S. media lionized Castro.

Che’s most famous military exploit as a Cuban
comandante
was “The Battle of Santa Clara,” the December 1958 confrontation that caused Batista to lose hope and flee Cuba. “One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting,” blared a
New York Times
headline in a January 4, 1959, article about the battle. “Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties,” continued the article. “Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men.” “Santa Clara became a bloody battleground,” writes Jon Lee Anderson. “Pitched battles were fought in the streets. Tanks fired shells, airplanes bombed and rocketed . . . both civilian and guerrilla casualties began to pile up in hospitals.”

Exiles who were at Santa Clara tell a very different story. “I was there,” recalls Manuel Cereijo. “I lived in Santa Clara. Sure there was a little shooting, but people were actually going outside to see the show. Best I could gather, a grand total of two civilians and two or three rebels died.”

In fact, the Battle of Santa Clara—despite the reporting of ur-Jayson Blairs—was a puerile skirmish. The
New York Times
was still very much in Castro’s thrall and reported on that battle accordingly, though no reporters were actually on hand. So who were Anderson’s other impeccable sources? Che’s widow and the Castro regime, thirty years after the fact. Che Guevara’s
own diary
mentions that his column suffered
exactly one casualty
(a soldier known as
El Vaquerito
) in this ferocious “battle.” Other accounts put the grand total of rebel losses at from three to five men. Most of Batista’s soldiers saw no reason to fight for a crooked, unpopular regime that was clearly doomed, so they didn’t fire a shot, even those on the famous “armored train” that Guevara supposedly attacked and captured.

“Che targeted all enemy positions but concentrated on the armored train,” writes the ever-starstruck Anderson, who then resorts to quoting Che’s own Havana-published diaries. “The men were forced out of the train by our Molotov cocktails . . . the train became a veritable oven for the soldiers,”
⁷
he claims.

Actually the men were “forced out of the train” by a bribe from Che to their commander before a shot was fired, much less any “Molotov cocktails” thrown.

Today that armored train features as a major tourist attraction in Santa Clara. The train, loaded with 373 soldiers and $4 million worth of munitions, had been sent from Havana to Santa Clara in late December by Batista’s high command as a last-ditch attempt to halt the rebels. Che’s rebels in Santa Clara bulldozed the tracks and the train derailed just outside of town.