Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

by Humberto Fontova

  “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

  “I won’t!” said Alice.

  “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.1

  They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted Alice’s Wonderland, a place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward. If only Carroll had lived long enough to visit Cuba in 1959.

  “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, Che Guevara. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón!”2

  “We don’t need proof to execute a man—we only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him. Our mission is not to provide judicial guarantees. Our mission is to make a revolution.”3

  For the first year of Castro’s glorious revolution, the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara was his main executioner, and he executed at a rate that would have done any rival Communist—or National Socialist—proud.

  Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than twenty thousand political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached two thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves who were killed during the “Night of the Long Knives.” Another murderous episode, the Kristallnacht, which horrified civilized opinion worldwide, caused a grand total of ninety-one deaths. This in a nation of seventy million.

  Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed five hundred death warrants, another says more than six hundred. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book Yo Soy El Che! that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book Che Guevara: A Biography, Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering “several thousand” executions during the first few years of the Castro regime. For certain, the first three months of the Cuban revolution saw 568 firing squad executions—even the New York Times admits it—and the preceding “trials” shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades.

  Vengeance—much less justice—was not the point behind Che’s murderous method. Che’s firing squads were a perfectly rational, cold-blooded exercise to decapitate—literally and figuratively—the first ranks of Cuba’s Contras. Five years earlier, when he was a Communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen Guatemala’s officer corps rise against the Red regime of Jacobo Arbenz, who fled to Czechoslovakia. Che didn’t want to repeat that experience in Cuba. He wanted to cow and terrorize the Cuban people against resistance to the revolution. These were all public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were public too. Guevara made it a policy for his men to parade the families and friends of the executed before the blood-, bone-, and brain-spattered paredón.

  The Red Terror had come to Cuba. “We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable. . . . We will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood! Let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois—more blood, as much as possible.” That was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Soviet Cheka in 1918.

  This is from Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, the very diaries just made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford: “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.” Seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che’s diaries from his touching film.

  The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” never reached Guevara’s nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged, and blindfolded men. He was a true Chekist. “Always interrogate your prisoners at night,” Che commanded his prosecutorial goons. “A man is easier to cow at night; his mental resistance is always lower.”

  Che specialized in psychological torture. Many prisoners were yanked out of their cells, bound, blindfolded, and stood against the wall. The seconds ticked off. The condemned could hear the rifle bolts snapping, and finally, “Fuego!”

  Blam! But the shots were blanks. In his book Tocayo, Cuban freedom fighter Tony Navarro describes how he watched a man returned to his cell after such an ordeal. He’d left bravely, grim-faced as he shook hands with his fellow condemned. He came back mentally shattered, curling up in a corner of the squalid cell for days.4

  Che’s judicial models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Stalin. As they had used terror and mass executions, so did he. As they conducted show trials, so did he.

  But in actual combat, his imbecilities defy belief. Cuban American fighters who faced Che at the Bay of Pigs and later in the Congo still laugh. The Bay of Pigs invasion plan included a ruse in which a CIA squad dispatched three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time-release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors, and a tape recording of battle sounds.

  The wily Che immediately deciphered the imperialist scheme. That little feint three hundred miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse! The real invasion was coming here in Pinar del Rio! Che stormed over with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded, and waited for the “Yankee/mercenary” attack. His men braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs, and mirrors did their stuff just offshore.

  Three days later the (literal) smoke and mirror show expended itself and Che’s men marched back to Havana. Not surprisingly, the masterful warrior had managed to wound himself in this heated battle against a tape recorder. A bullet had pierced his chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post–April 1961 pictures of the gallant Che (the picture we see on posters and T-shirts was shot a year earlier.)

  Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Fidelista at the time, speculates the wound might have come from a botched suicide attempt.5 No way! snort Che hagiographers John Lee Anderson, Carlos Castaneda, and Paco Taibo. They insist it was an accident, Che’s own pistol going off just under his face. So it was either a suicide attempt or ineptitude.

  Later, many Cuban American Bay of Pigs vets itched to get back into the fight against the Communists (but with ammo and air cover this time). The CIA obliged and sent them with ex-marine Rip Robertson to the Congo in 1965. There they linked up with the legendary mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare and his “Wild Geese.” Here’s Mike Hoare’s opinion—after watching them in battle—of the Cuban American CIA troops: “These Cuban-CIA men were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding. Their leader [Rip Robertson] was the most extraordinary and dedicated soldier I’ve ever met.”6

  Together Mad Mike, Rip, and the freedom-loving Cubans made short work of the alternately Chinese- and Soviet-backed “Simbas” of Laurent Kabila, who were murdering, raping, and munching (many were cannibals) their way through the defenseless Europeans still left in the recently abandoned Belgian colony.

  Castro, itching to be rid of Che, sent him (codenamed “Tatu”) and a force of his rebel army “veterans” to help the Congolese cannibals and Communists. The masterful Tatu’s first order of business was plotting an elaborate ambush on a garrison guarding a hydroelectric plant at Front Bendela on the Kimbi River in eastern Congo. The wily Tatu stealthily led his force into position when they heard shots. Whoops! Hey! What the . . . ! The garrison Tatu thought was guarding the plant ambushed the ambush
ers. Che lost half his men and barely escaped with his life.7

  The brilliant Tatu and his comandantes got a second chance to fight the mad dogs of imperialism at a place called Fizi Baraka in the eastern Congo, where his men had mountainous high ground, perfect defensive positions, and a ten to one advantage in men. Mad Mike and his CIA allies sized the place up and attacked. Within one day, the mighty Che’s entire force was scrambling away in panic, throwing away their arms, running and screaming like old ladies with rats running up their legs. Don’t take my word for it, take Che’s—and the BBC’s: “Che Guevara’s seven-month stay in the Fizi Baraka mountains was, as he admits himself, an ‘unmitigated disaster.’ ”8

  One of the most hilarious and enduring hoaxes of the twentieth century was the “war” fought by dauntless Che and the Castro rebels against Batista. But I hear it was a kick—a fun way for adolescents to harass adults, loot, rustle a few cows, and play army on weekends with real guns, maybe even getting off a few shots, usually into the air. What seventeen-or eighteen-year-old male could resist? Petty delinquency became not just altruism here, but downright heroism. How many punks get such a window of glory? Normally these stunts land you in reform school. In Cuba in 1958, it might get your picture in the New York Times.

  Here’s an insider account of one such “battle,” from “Comandante” William Morgan, as recounted to Paul Bethel, who was the press attaché at the American embassy in Cuba in 1959. Bethel describes “Comandante” Morgan recalling the ruse with “great merriment.” “It was all a tremendous propaganda play.... We broadcast fake battle commands [using a short-wave radio], directed fictitious troops here and there, and had a helluva time.... For background noises we used Browning automatics, rifles and pistols. . . . We yelled a lot too.”9

  Here’s another insider account from Bethel’s superb and meticulously researched book The Losers: The Definitive Report, by an Eyewitness, of the Communist Conquest of Cuba and the Soviet Penetration in Latin America. This one features Che and his invincible “column” on their long march through Las Villas province: “Guevara’s column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camagüey. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista’s military commander in the city. The package contained $100,000 with a note. Guevara’s men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops.”10

  This was part of the famous “Battle of Santa Clara” where Che earned his eternal fame. The New York Times of January 4, 1959, covered this same “battle” and reported: “One Thousand Killed in 5 Days of Fierce Street Fighting.... Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties. . . . Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men.”

  All baloney, by the way. Statistically speaking, a nocturnal stroll through Central Park offers more peril than Castro’s rebels faced from the dreaded army of the beastly Fulgencio Batista. According to Bethel, the U.S. embassy was a little skeptical about all the reports of battlefield bloodshed and rebel heroics and investigated. They ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what the New York Times called a “bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles.” The embassy report found that in the countryside, in those two years of “ferocious” battles, the total casualties on both sides actually ran to 182.11 New Orleans has an annual murder rate double that.

  But to give them credit, most of Castro’s comandantes—if not the New York Times—knew their Batista war had been a gaudy clown show. After the glorious victory, they were content to run down and execute the few Batista men motivated enough to shoot back (most of these were of humble background), settle into the mansions stolen from Batistianos, and enjoy the rest of their booty.

  But Che’s pathological power of self-delusion wouldn’t allow him to do this. And he paid the price. When Che tried his hand at a guerrilla war not against unmotivated Batistaites, but in Africa, where people actually shot back and everything, he was run out with his tail between his legs within months. Then, in Bolivia, he and his merry band of bumblers were betrayed, encircled, and wiped out in short order.

  Here’s a “guerrilla hero” who in real life never fought in a guerrilla war. When he finally brushed up against one, he was routed. Here’s a cold-blooded murderer who executed thousands without trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an “unnecessary bourgeois detail,” who stressed that “revolutionaries must become cold killing machines motivated by pure hate,” who stayed up till dawn for months at a time signing death warrants for innocent and honorable men, whose office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions—and today he is a hero to the Hollywood and college campus Left.

  Here’s Communist Cuba’s first “minister of industries,” whose main slogan in 1960 was “accelerated industrialization,” whose dream was converting Cuba (and the Western Hemisphere, actually) into a huge bureaucratic-industrial ant farm—and he’s the poster boy for greens and anarchists who rant against industrialization.

  Here’s a sniveling little suck-up, teacher’s pet, and mama’s boy (his parents were limousine Bolsheviks), who was a humorless teetotaler, a plodding paper-pusher, a notorious killjoy, and all-around fuddy-duddy. In 1961, Che established a special concentration camp at Guanacabibes in extreme western Cuba for “delinquents” whose “delinquency” involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness, and playing loud music—and yet you see his T-shirt on MTV’s Spring Break revelers.

  The only thing Che excelled at was the mass murder of defenseless men. Just as in 1940, when Stalin’s commissars rounded up captured Polish officers, herded them into the Katyn Forest, and slaughtered them to a man, so Che tried to track down former Cuban army officers—and anyone else whose loyalty was suspect—and slaughter them to a man. Che’s true legacy is simply one of terror and murder. That dreaded midnight knock; wives and daughters screaming in fear and panic as Che’s goons drag off their dads and husbands; desperate crowds of weeping daughters and shrieking mothers clubbed with rifle butts outside La Cabana as Che’s firing squads murder their dads and sons inside; thousands of heroes yelling at the firing squads “Viva Cuba Libre!” and “Viva Christo Rey!”; mass burials, secret graves, and sometimes crude boxes with bullet-riddled corpses delivered to ashen-faced loved ones.

  When the wheels of justice finally turned, and Che was captured in Bolivia, he was revealed as unworthy to carry his victims’ slop buckets: “Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”12 He had learned nothing from the bravery of the Cuban patriots he’d murdered. The champagne corks popped in Cuban American households when we got the wonderful news of Che’s death in October 1967. Yes, our own compatriots serving proudly in the U.S. Special Forces had helped track down the murderous, cowardly, and epically stupid little weasel named Che Guevara in Bolivia. Justice has never been better served.

  The writings he left behind are turgid gibberish, only underlining that he went through life with a perpetual scowl. Food, drink, good cheer, bonhomie, roistering, fellowship—Guevara recoiled from these like Dracula from a cross. “I have no home, no woman, no parents, no children, no brothers. My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.”13 As a professional duty, I tortured myself with Che Guevara’s writings. I finished glassy-eyed, dazed, almost catatonic. Nothing written by a first-year philosophy major (or a Total Quality Management guru) could be more banal, jargon-ridden, depressing, or idiotic. A specimen: “The past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness—in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily—but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodity relations still persist, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized.14

  Slap yourself and let’s continue: “To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane—or, vice versa
, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research—we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, and to the cause of humanity.”

  Splash some cold water on your face and stick with me for just a little more: “It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken.”

  Throughout his diaries Che whines about deserters from his “guerrilla” ranks (bored adolescents, petty crooks, and winos playing army on the weekend). Can you blame them? Imagine sharing a campfire with some yo-yo droning on and on about “subjective aspirations not yet systematized” and “closely interdependent processes and total consciousness of social being”—and who also reeked like a polecat (foremost among the bourgeois debouchments disdained by Che were baths).

  These hapless “deserters” were hunted down like animals, trussed up, and brought back to a dispassionate Che, who put a pistol to their heads and blew their skulls apart without a second thought. After days spent listening to Che and smelling him, perhaps this meant relief.

  Who can blame Fidel for ducking into the nearest closet when this yo-yo came calling? Call Fidel everything in the book (as I have) but don’t call him stupid. Guevara’s inane twaddle must have driven him nuts. The one place where I can’t fault Fidel, the one place I actually empathize with him, is in his craving to rid himself of this insufferable Argentine jackass.

  That Che’s Bolivian mission was clearly suicidal was obvious to anyone with half a brain. Fidel and Raul weren’t about to join him down there, but were happy to see him go. Two months later he was dead. Bingo! Fidel scored another bull’s-eye. He rid himself of the Argentine nuisance and his glorious revolution had a handsome young martyr for the adulation of imbeciles worldwide. Nice work.