Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  Juan watched helplessly as his son struggled. Three guards managed to drag him down the hall, and Juan tried to steel himself. A few moments later he shuddered at the blast that murdered his boy. A few seconds later he shuddered again at the coup de grace. Juan Valdes’s sentence had been twenty-five years in prison. Would a sentence of death have been any worse?

  Rigoberto Hernandez was also seventeen when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched, and finally proved to his prosecutors that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “planting bombs.”

  But there was no bucking Che’s “pedagogy of the paredon!”

  “Fuego!” and the volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bonds, blindfold, and gag. The revolutionary courts followed Che Guevara’s instructions that “proof is secondary and an archaic bourgeois detail.” Remember this, and remember Harvard University’s rollicking ovation to honored guest Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath.

  The point lost on Harvard was the use of terror to cow the public, to let them know who was now in charge, and the fate that awaited any challengers. The more horrifying the murders, the better they served their purpose.

  One mother, Rosa Hernandez, recalls how she begged for a meeting with Che in order to try to save her seventeen-year-old son, who was condemned without trial to the firing squad. Guevara graciously complied. “Come right in, señora,” said Che as he opened the door to his office. “Have a seat.” Silently he listened to her sobs and pleas, then picked up the phone right in front of her. “Execute the Hernandez boy tonight,” Che barked, and he slammed the phone down. His goons then dragged out the hysterical Mrs. Hernandez. This happened more than once. These grieving people can be found today, wiping their red-rimmed eyes, ambling amid the long rows of white crosses at the Cuban Memorial in Miami’s Tamiami Park. It’s a mini Arlington Cemetery, in honor of Castro and Che’s murder victims. But the tombs are symbolic. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves in Cuba.

  Some of these Cuban Memorial visitors kneel, others walk slowly, looking for a name. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies press their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders. Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother, or aunt are contagious. Yet he’s often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle, father, or cousin.

  “Fusilado,” it says below the white cross. Firing-squad execution. The elderly lady still holds a tissue to her eyes and nose as they wait to cross the street, her grandson still has his arm around her. She told him how his freedom-fighter grandfather yelled, “Viva Cristo Rey!” the instant before the volley shattered his body.

  Still escorted by her grandson, the woman crosses the street slowly, silently, and runs into a dreadlocked youth coming out of a music store. His T-shirt sports the face of her husband’s murderer. They turn their heads in rage and toward the store window. Well, there’s the murderer’s face again, on a huge poster; $19.95 it says at the bottom, right under the poster’s slogan: “Resist Oppression!”

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

  “We Execute from Revolutionary Conviction!”

  “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 gatheri
ng 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 bod
y 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.

  Hitler, Stalin, and Che

  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

  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 that time might have reached a couple of thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the “Night of The Long Knives.” The infamous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused seventy-one deaths out of a total German population of 70 million.16 The regime would, of course, go on to murder six million Jews and millions of others.