Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  The agents sprang from the bushes and captured Collier just as he located the dynamite stash. Che’s plot failed.8

  Had everything gone according to plan, Che Guevara would have destroyed America’s greatest monuments, killed hundreds if not thousands of visitors from around the world, and allowed the killers to slip into Cuba for safe haven. If the facts of the attack had become publicly known, President Johnson might have been forced to repudiate the Kennedy administration’s noninterference agreement with the Soviet Union following the Cuban Missile Crisis. The result could easily have been catastrophic. Of course, the plot had no effect, either on American security or on Che’s reputation. It fell to twenty-four-year-old Gladys Perez to wear the label “terrorist.” While being booked for felonious assault, Gladys said she had arrived from Cuba two years earlier. In Cuba, as a political prisoner, she had been tortured and raped. Asked by a court interpreter if she regretted her actions, Gladys snapped, “No! If Guevara were here now I’d kill him!”

  The New York Times reported on December 14, 1964, that a young assistant district attorney asked that the handcuffed woman be committed for mental observation.

  Consider the facts: A Cuban woman is imprisoned, tortured, and raped by communist goons. She seeks revenge on the chief executioner of the regime that tortured her, raped her, jailed and executed thousands of her countrymen, and brought the world a hair away from nuclear holocaust. The woman is committed for mental observation.

  Immediately after he boasted of those very executions for a worldwide forum in the heart of their city and after he insulted his hosts as “hyenas,” fit only for “extermination,” New York’s media and high society fetes Cuba’s chief executioner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Their honored guest had twice plotted to incinerate and entomb the very New York now feting him. He was plotting more terrorism for New York during the very feting. Time magazine, headquartered in New York, then hails him as a “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.

  Who needs “mental observation”?

  Should, perhaps, a city that continues to adore a man who wanted to destroy it be corporately committed? In 2004, the New York Public Library was selling Che watches in its gift shop—not unlike the British Museum selling collector’s items bearing the image of Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Perhaps the library management can be forgiven for not knowing about Che’s plans for them. Less forgivable was their benefit gala in 2005, “An Affair in Havana,” which celebrated “Literary Havana.” Was the intention to celebrate Che’s book bonfire? Or was it to celebrate the sixteen librarians who today sit in Castro’s dungeons with twenty-five-year prison sentences for attempting to disseminate such subversive literature as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights? Even liberal columnist Nat Hentoff tried to make the library see reason, by calling it plainly “stupid,” to no avail. And just last year Manhattan’s International Center of Photography packed in the crowds for its exhibition titled “Che! Revolution and Commerce.”

  “Tomorrow New York is going to be here,” Rudy Giuliani assured his stricken fellow citizens on 9/11. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before . . . I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us!”9

  New York-based Time, which places Ernesto “Che” Guevara among “The Heroes and Icons of the Century,” also hailed Rudy Giuliani as its “Man of the Year” in 2001 for being 9/11’s “crisis manager” and “consoler in chief,” and for “teaching us how to respond to a terrorist crisis.”

  “We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation,” Che Guevara declared in his “Message to the Tri-Continental Conference” published in Havana in April 1967. “We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. This is a total war to the death. We’ll attack him wherever we find him. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him!”

  And who was this imperialist enemy? “The great enemy of mankind: the United States of America!”10

  Among the many future luminaries who attended Havana’s Tri-Continental Conference was a promising young man, Abu Am-mar, who would later become known as Yasir Arafat. Also in attendance was a young Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, who became “the World’s Most Wanted Terrorist.” In 1967, Ramírez Sánchez was an eager recruit into Cuba’s terror training camps started by Che in 1959. Through these connections, one can trace a very straight line from Che to 9/11. “I’m proud of the path of Osama bin Laden,” Ramírez Sánchez told the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in an interview from a French prison in 2002. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed . . . I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States nonstop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief.”11

  Che wrote the first draft of the attacks of 9/11. Can anyone read him and doubt if Che were alive today, he would be anything but elated by the toppling of the World Trade Center?

  Historians of the Cuban Missile Crisis have firmly established that New York’s 9/11 explosions would appear like an errant cherry bomb if Che had succeeded in goading the Soviets and Americans into all-out war, which he tried to do. Only the prudence of Nikita Khrushchev stayed Che’s ambitions for a red apocalypse. Nor was the Black Liberation Army plot the only terror plot Che aimed at American citizens.

  On November 17, 1962, the FBI cracked another terrorist plot by Cuban agents who targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and five hundred kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.

  A little perspective: For their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts—all ten of them—that killed and maimed almost two thousand people, al Qaeda’s Spanish allies used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT. Cuban agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day.

  Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.12

  Was this the handiwork of Che? All his biographers admit—grudgingly—that Che had a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery, including the DGI’s (Dirección General de Inteligencia) Liberation Department in charge of “guerrilla” training and foreign “liberation” plots. So it’s inconceivable that Che didn’t sign off on this early New York terror plot, much less that he opposed it.

  The more you place Che’s rhetoric and actions side by side with the adoration of him by New York-based intellectuals, the more the adoration of Che appears to be less of a fashion statement and more of a death wish.

  2

  Jailer of Rockers, Hipsters, and Gays

  Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western world. With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious ’60s.

  —Time MAGAZINE, MAY 1968

  Christopher HitchenS recallS that “1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che. His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model.”1

  In 1968, “Up Against the Wall!” echoed from Paris to Chicago, from Milan to Mexico City. Charles De Gaulle was chased from office by student riots. “The Whole World Is Watching!” shrieked the student protesters who turned the Democratic convention in Chicago into an orgy of tear gas and billy clubs. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” was a favorite chant in places like Berkeley and Columbia Universities, alongside “Che Lives!”

  In one large Western capital in pa
rticular, some youthful protesters were very brazen and disrespectful. They enraged and alarmed their government, which denounced them as “hippies” and “delinquents.” The government was horrified that these “antisocial elements” were “desecrating national symbols! Burning flags! Burning pictures of national heroes!”2 These hippie groups grew long hair, dug rock and roll, and called themselves such names as “the Beats” and “the Psychedelics.” They were clearly a danger to national stability and would suffer severe disciplinary measures, especially as these “delinquents” and “bums” relished trashing the images of one national hero in particular. The rigidly authoritarian national hero these young rebels targeted was known as a stern and violent disciplinarian, utterly lacking in empathy or a sense of humor. He detested rock and roll music and constantly railed against “long hair,” “lazy youths,” and any sign of insubordination in general. He had written that the young must always: “listen carefully—and with utmost respect—to the advice of their elders who held governmental authority.” He preached constantly how students—rather than distracting themselves with idiocies like rock and roll music—must instead dedicate themselves to “study, work and military service.”3

  The reader has long since guessed that this is a description of Havana and Che.

  Any shirkers of duty faced the full wrath of his notoriously brutal police. After all, in his own words, “The happiest days of [a] youth’s life is when he watches his bullets reaching an enemy.” And rather than indulge in frivolous pursuits during their summer vacations, students should volunteer for government service and toil there happily. Che went the Seven Dwarfs one better. For him, whistling while you work didn’t suffice. He wrote that youths should not just toil for their government “happily and with great pride,” but should actually “be chanting government slogans and singing government-approved songs” while in the act.4

  And woe to those youths “who stayed up late at night and thus reported to work tardily.” Youth, in particular, should learn “to think and act as a mass.” Those who chose their own path were denounced as worthless lumpen and delinquents. In one famous speech, Che even vowed “to make individualism disappear from the nation! It is criminal to think of individuals!”5

  This national hero even scorned the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.”6

  In short, “tune in, turn on, drop out” wasn’t exactly Che’s thing.

  It is for these reasons that longhairs and hippies burned, defaced, and ripped to pieces images of Che Guevara. Most galling to the police, to glorify Che’s death, Castro had declared 1968 Cuba’s “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla.” With Che posters blanketing the landscape, youthful angst and rage had the perfect target. And no young people ever had more cause for angst and rage than Cuba’s.

  “These youths walk around with their transistor radios listening to imperialist music!” Castro raved to his usual captive audience in the Plaza de la Revolución as he announced the opening of his regime’s hunting season on Cuban hippies. “They corrupt the morals of young girls—and destroy posters of Che! What do they think? That this is a bourgeois liberal regime? NO! There’s nothing liberal in us! We are collectivists! We are communists! There will be no Prague Spring here!”7 The famous Venceremos brigades of U.S. radicals and college students who visited Cuba to cut sugar cane and help “build Cuban socialism” started the following year. These starry-eyed leftists, with their hippie hair and hippie clothes, learned very quickly to display their Venceremos Brigade insignia prominently. A few, mistaken for homegrown Cuban hippies, had reported very disturbing encounters with Castro’s police. “These young American radicals in their ritual dress,” wrote French socialist Leo Sauvage at the time, “were about as safe among their Cuban ‘revolutionary brothers’ as they were in the streets of downtown Manhattan amidst the hardhats!”

  Not that disillusionment was exactly widespread among U.S. radicals. But a few eyebrows were raised and a few troubled murmurs were overheard by the movement’s high priests. Susan Sontag herself sought to lay herself as a bridge over these (slightly) troubled waters in a Ramparts article in the fevered spring of 1969, wherein she admitted that “the Cuban Revolution presents in part an extremely uncomfortable challenge to American radicals.”

  This challenge may have been “uncomfortable,” but it was hardly insurmountable. Sontag went on to explain that “although their awareness of underdevelopment inevitably leads to an increasing emphasis on discipline, the Cubans are safeguarding the voluntary character of their institutions.” Sontag’s mass of gibberish was titled “Some Thoughts on the Right Way for Us to Love the Cuban Revolution.” Sontag echoed the words used forty years earlier, when the New York Times’s Walter Duranty had commented on the “voluntary” character of the Ukraine’s collectivization.

  Charlie Bravo was a notorious “delinquent”—in other words, a Cuban college student from the sixties who finds himself in exile today. “I’d loved to have seen these Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘antiauthority’ grandstanding in Cuba at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on them. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about—and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castro and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.”

  Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker writer and Che biographer, calls Che “the ultimate emblematic figure of what might be called the Decade of Youth. . . . That was the last period in which young people around the world rose up in revolt against the established order.”8

  Historically speaking, order has rarely been as established as under the regime cofounded by Che Guevara. According to a former Che lieutenant, Dariel Alarcon, Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior (Ministry of Interior, Cuba’s version of the Gestapo and KGB, indoctrinated by Che and trained by the East German STASI) runs the country lock, stock, and barrel. It constitutes Cuba’s genuine government. Cuba’s National Assembly and everything else is all smoke-and-mirror Potemkin politics.9

  And Alarcon should know. He was a dutiful officer of the ministry for almost twenty years. If ever a fascist military-industrial complex, a secret cabal, or a hidden government of ruthless, power-mad schemers and sadists such as those Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer constantly detect and decry in the United States actually ran a country, it’s in the very country Mailer and Chomsky constantly laud: the Cuba of Castro and Che.

  Che’s two sons, Ernesto and Camilo, were no hippies. They attended a full five-year course at the KGB academy in Moscow. “Che played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery,” admits his biographer, Jorge Castañeda.10 To this day a ten-story-tall mural of Che Guevara adorns Cuba’s Ministerio del Interior building. Che does live, as the face of the Cuban secret police.

  Santana Loves Che’s Evil Ways

  Carlos Santana’s grand entrance at the 2005 Oscars certainly had an impact on Cuban Americans. The famed guitarist stopped for the photographers, cast a manic smile, and swung his jacket open. TA-DA! There it was: Carlos’s elegantly embroidered Che Guevara T-shirt. Half of Miami was sitting on the couch, wishing someone would say, “Tune in to this, Carlos—your T-shirt icon set up concentration camps in Cuba for anyone like you, including ordinary rock and roll fans who bought your album.” A lumpen was any hapless youth who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music in Cuba. Would Carlos Santana still be grinning if he knew that Cuba criminalized Carlos Santana and most other rock music?

  “The stuff we had to go through!” recalls Cuban rock-and-roller Carmen Cartaya. “If you were known to have rock records, if you wore blue jeans, if you were a boy with longish hair, the police were on your ta
il constantly. My friend Juan Miguel Sanchez always managed to get his hands on the latest Beatles album. This wasn’t easy in Cuba, believe me, but he was a resourceful guy. Usually the only people with access to rock albums back then were the kids of the party members, the regime people, who traveled abroad. Juan Miguel wasn’t one of those.”

  One fine day in 1965 Carmen’s friend Juan Miguel vanished. “They grabbed him in one of the ‘roundups,’ as they called it when a group of army trucks and soldiers would surround an area known as a hangout for lumpen and round everyone up at gunpoint,” recalls Carmen.

  “We still had a piano in our house in 1965 and a friend had a guitar, another drums. All this was prerevolution gear, needless to say. So we’d get together and play Beatles songs; ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was a favorite. Then my mother would come running in. ‘STOP! Are you crazy! Those so-and-sos from El Comité [the regime’s neighborhood snitch groups] will hear it! We’re in enough trouble already!’ My dad was in a concentration camp at the time. My mother, as usual, was right. Listening to rock was bad enough. Listening and playing it was a quick way to find yourself in serious trouble with the police. Our little band didn’t last long.”11

  True, Santana didn’t hit it big till Woodstock in 1969, at a time when Che had already received a heavy dose of the very medicine he had dished out to hundreds of bound and gagged men and boys. This means the first inmates of his concentration camps were probably guilty of the heinous crime of listening to the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, and the like. But the regime Che cofounded kept up the practice of jailing roqueros well past the time Santana was hot on the rock charts.

  Still, ignorance flourishes. Rage Against the Machine plaster Che’s image on their shirts, guitars, and amps. “We’ve considered Che a fifth band member for a long time now,” gushes lead guitarist Tom Morello. “Che was an amazing example.”