Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

“This multifaceted being is not, as it is claimed, the sum total of elements of the same category (and moreover, reduced to the same category by the system imposed upon them),” writes Che in his riveting and pithy Socialism and Man in Cuba. “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.

  “It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms . . . 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.” Jon Lee Anderson hails this pile of turgid, Marxist gibberish as Che’s “opus,” as “the crystallization of Che’s doctrinal message.” For once, Anderson is probably right.

  “Man is an unfinished product,” Che wrote, “who bears the flaws of the past.”1

  Within months of Che’s appointment, the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba’s gold reserves, was practically worthless. In 1958, Cuba had 518 million pesos in circulation. A year later, 1,051 billion pesos were in circulation. A few months later 1,187 billion were in circulation and suddenly declared worthless, whereupon a new 477 million were printed up and distributed as replacements.2

  Talent like this begs for promotion. Castro promptly appointed Che as Cuba’s “minister of industries.” Che quickly wrecked Cuba’s formerly robust sugar, cattle, tobacco, and nickel export industries. Within a year, a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria, Japan, and Spain, a huge influx of immigrants, and the third-highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society.

  The customary observation that this was “communist mismanagement” is wrong. In the service of the goal of absolute power, the Cuban economy was expertly managed in the tradition of Lenin, Mao, Uncle Ho, Ulbricht, Tito, and Kim Il Sung.

  A less megalomaniacal ruler might have considered the Cuban economy a golden goose. Castro, through Che, wrung its neck. He methodically wrecked Latin America’s premier economy in order to disallow any other centers of power from developing. Despite a deluge of tourism and foreign investment from Canada, Latin America, and Europe for over a decade, Cuba is as essentially communist in the early twenty-first century as it was in 1965. The Castro brothers are very vigilant in these matters.

  Castro’s rationale was simply to run Cuba as his personal hacienda, and the Cuban people as his cattle. His minister of industries, however, seemed to actually believe in the socialist fantasy. When Che pronounced in May 1961 that under his tutelage the Cuban economy would boast an annual growth rate of 10 percent, Che seemed to believe it.

  This is where libertarian-free-market ideologues got it wrong. They insisted that with the lifting of the embargo, capitalism would sneak in and eventually blindside Castro. All the proof was to the contrary. Capitalism didn’t sweep Castro away or even co-opt him. He swept it away. He wasn’t a Deng or a Gorbachev. In 1959, Castro could have easily left most of Cuba’s economy in place, made it obedient to his whims, and been a Peron, a Franco, or a Mussolini. He could have grabbed half and been a Tito. He could have demanded a piece of the action from all involved and been a Marcos, a Trujillo, a Mobutu, or a Suharto. But this wasn’t enough for him.

  Castro lusted for power on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao. And he hired a sadistic and pretentious true believer named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch to help him get it; first as chief executioner of his enemies (real, imagined, and potential), then as economic wrecking ball. The task accomplished, Ernesto Guevara was himself liquidated as routinely and cleverly as Castro had liquidated many other accomplices, rivals, and even a few true enemies.

  One day, Che decided that Cubans should learn to play and like soccer (futbol) like the citizens of his native Argentina. A sugar plantation named Central Macareno near Cienfuegos had recently been stolen from its American owners (contrary to leftist mythology, barely a quarter of sugar plantations were U.S.-owned). The plantation also included a huge orchard of mango, avocado, and mamey trees that were just starting to give fruit. Che ordered them all cut down and the ground leveled in order to construct a soccer field.

  A year later the field was weed-grown, potholed, and unusable. The decaying trunks of the fruit-yielding trees were still piled up around the edges of the field even as most Cubans scrambled for fresh fruit on the new black market. It seemed that—the threat of Guanahacabibes notwithstanding—Che’s Cuban subjects simply didn’t take to Che’s futbol.

  Che also believed he could “industrialize” Cuba by fiat, just as he believed his role model Stalin had “industrialized” the Soviet Union. In fact, Che’s decrees ended Cuba’s status as a developed, civilized country. In one of his spasms of decrees, he ordered a refrigerator factory built in Cienfuegos, a pick and shovel factory built in Santa Clara, a pencil factory and a shoe factory built in Havana.

  Supply? Demand? Costs? Such “bourgeois details” didn’t interest Che. None of the factories ended up yielding a single product.

  Che railed against the new Coca-Cola plant’s chemists because the Coke they were producing tasted awful. Some of these flustered chemists responded that he’d been the one who nationalized the plant and booted out the former owners and managers, who took the secret Coca-Cola formula with them to the United States. This impertinence was answered with the threat of Guanahacabibes. During Che’s ministry, he also bought a fleet of snowplows from Czechoslovakia—surely a parable of communism, if ever there was one. Che had personally inspected them and was convinced they could easily be converted into sugarcane harvesting machines, thus mechanizing the harvest and increasing Cuba’s sugar production. The snowplows in fact squashed the sugarcane plants, cut them off at the wrong length, and killed them. This was just one reason Cuba’s sugar production in 1963 was less than half of its Batista-era volume.3

  Che’s famous Havana shoe factory turned out a product that was good for about two blocks of brisk walking before disintegrating. Che Guevara, naturally, couldn’t figure out why the shoes his pet factory manufactured just sat on shelves. In 1961, most Cubans still wore their prerevolutionary shoes, constantly repairing them, constantly polishing them—anything but wearing the product from Che’s showcase factory. This enraged him, and he finally stormed down to the factory.

  Knowing his “humanistic” reputation, all the factory workers were on their best behavior. “What’s the problem here!” Che barked at the factory foreman. “Why are you turning out shoes that are pure shit!”

  The factory foreman looked Minister of Industries Guevara straight in the face. “It’s the glue, it won’t hold the soles to the shoe. It’s that shitty glue you’re buying from the Russians. We used to get it from the U.S.” This really stung Che. So he went off on one of his habitual tirades as the factory workers quaked, fearing the worst. Many had lost relatives in La Cabana, or had relatives behind the barbed wire of Che’s pet concentration camp in Guanahacabibes.

  “Okay, here,” and the foreman handed Che a shoe fresh from the assembly line. “See for yourself.”

  Che grabbed the sole, pulled, and it came right off like a banana peel. “Why didn’t you report this slipshod glue to anyone at our Ministry of Industries!” Che snapped.

  “We did,” shot back the foreman, “repeatedly, but nothing happened!” Che ordered his ever-present henchmen to grab the insolent foreman. “Now you people figure out how to make these shoes better.” Che glared. “Or the rest of you
will get it!” He spun away and stomped off with his captive, who was not seen again.4 Yet Jon Lee Anderson assures us that “it was social change, not power itself, that impelled Che.”

  It was Guevara, of course, who threw out the prerevolutionary manager of that factory, and banned glue imports from the United States.

  The Russians Say “Nyet!”

  By late 1964, the Minister of Industries had so badly crippled Cuba’s economy and infrastructure, had so impoverished and traumatized its workforce, that the Russians themselves were at their wits’ end. They were subsidizing the mess, and it was getting expensive—much too expensive for the paltry geopolitical return. “This is an underdeveloped country?!” Anastas Mikoyan had asked while looking around on his first visit to Cuba in 1960. The Soviets were frankly tickled to have a developed and civilized country to loot again, as they had done in Eastern Europe after World War II.

  Alas, the looting went in the opposite direction. Castro was no chump like Ulbricht or Gomulka. A French socialist economist, Rene Dumont, tried advising Castro as the wreckage of Cuba’s economy spiraled out of control. “The Cuban Revolution has gone farther in its first three years than the Chinese in its first ten,” he counseled.5 But Guevara was allergic to criticism, however well-meaning.

  In 1964, the Soviets themselves finally told Castro that Che had to go. Castro knew who buttered his bread. He had never much liked Che. And with power thoroughly consolidated, Castro no longer needed his Robespierre.

  Here we come to another hoary myth spun by Che’s hagiographers, that of his “ideological” falling out with the Soviets. Che’s pureness of revolutionary heart, we’re told, led him to clash with the corrupt Soviet nomenklatura. In fact, this was a purely practical conflict. The Soviets simply refused to bankroll Che’s harebrained fantasies any longer. When Che finally realized this, he knew he was on the way out. He decided to retaliate. So in December 1964, right after his visit to the United Nations, Che visited his friend Ben Bela in Algeria and delivered his famous anti-Soviet speech, branding them “accomplices of imperialist exploitation.”

  To many it looked like Che was setting the stage for a role as the Trotsky of his generation. For Che, it was just a new role to play. When he touched down in Havana after the speech, the regime’s press was absolutely mute regarding both his speech and his recent return. Soon, he was invited to visit the Maximum Leader and Raul. Raul had just returned from Russia, where Che’s Algeria speech had caused quite a stir. As soon as he got within earshot, both Castros ripped into Guevara as undisciplined, ungrateful, and plainly stupid.

  “Fidel!” Che stuttered back. “Please, show me some respect! I’m not Camilo!” Che’s wife, Aleida, was forced to jump in between the men, exclaiming, “I can’t believe such a thing is happening between longtime compañeros.” 6

  The quaking Che finally went home, where he found his telephone lines cut. Much evidence points to Che’s undergoing house arrest at this point. And it was under that house arrest that a seriously chastened and apparently frightened Che composed his famous “farewell letter to Fidel,” in which he groveled shamelessly.

  “I deeply appreciate your lessons and your example . . . my only fault was not to have had more faith in you since the first moments in the Sierra, not having recognized more quickly your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary. I will take to my new fields of battle the faith that you have inculcated . . .” and on and on in unrelenting obsequiousness. 7

  Che’s few public appearances between his return from Algeria and his departure for the Congo always found him in the company of state security personnel. His Cuban adventure had come to an end.

  What Che Had to Work With

  In 1957, a UNESCO report said: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers . . . the average wage for an eight-hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 68 per cent. In Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans were covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time.”8

  In fact, Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933—five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. Forty-eight hours of pay were due for that forty-hour week, with one month’s paid vacation. The lauded social democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this until thirty years later. Many Cubans enjoyed nine days of sick leave with pay, compulsory unemployment insurance paid by management, and—get this, Maxine Waters, Medea Benjamin, and all you feminist Castro groupies—three months’ paid maternity leave. This was in the 1930s.9

  Pre-Castro Cuba’s labor laws led to a frequent lament in Havana’s Yacht Club: “It’s easier to get rid of a wife than an employee!” (This yacht club, incidentally, denied membership to the mulatto Batista himself—Cuba’s president!)

  In the 1950s the average farm wage in “near-feudal” Cuba, as the New York Times described the nation in 1959, was higher than those of France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba in 1958 was $3.00. The average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73; in Belgium, $2.70; in Denmark, $2.74; in West Germany, $2.73; and in the United States, $4.06.10

  With the term “near-feudal,” the New York Times also implied a Cuban countryside monopolized by a tiny number of millionaire absentee landlords, their vast estates worked by stooping legions of landless serfs. Jon Lee Anderson also describes Cuba’s “wealthy class of land barons . . . consigning the workers to lives of endemic poverty.”11

  Actually, the average Cuban farm in 1958 was smaller than the average farm in the United States, 140 acres in Cuba versus 195 acres in the United States. In 1958, Cuba, a nation of 6.4 million people, had 159,958 farms—11,000 of which were tobacco farms. Only 34 percent of the Cuban population was rural.

  In the 1950s, Cuban longshoremen earned the highest wages in Latin America and among the highest wages in the world for their trade, higher than those in New Orleans at the time. In 1958, Cubans owned more televisions per capita than any other Latin Americans, and more than any other continental Europeans. And Cubans owned more cars per capita than the Japanese and half of the countries of Europe.12

  In short, Cuban workers had purchasing power. In 1958, Cuba had the hemisphere’s lowest inflation rate—1.4 percent. The U.S. rate that year was 2.73 percent. The Cuban peso was historically equal to the U.S. dollar, completely interchangeable one to one.13

  Cuba had its two top years economically in 1957-58, when, according to the New York Times and leftists in general, Cuba was not only “near-feudal,” but in the midst of a ferocious “guerrilla war” at the hands of the masterful guerrilla chieftain, Che Guevara.

  “Cuba is not an underdeveloped country,” concluded the 1956 U.S. Department of Commerce guide for businesses. After Che became economic czar, Cuba was soon in a league with the poorest nations.

  The country that in 1958 had the third-highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere would soon be on government rations.14 And what were these rations? It is instructive to compare the daily rations imposed on Cubans by the brilliant Argentine’s ministry to the daily rations of Cuban slaves as mandated by the Spanish king in 1842.15

  Cuban slaves actually ate better than Cuban “citizens” under Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s economic overlordship. These levels of rations persist to this day. Lincoln once said, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” Undoubtedly, many Cuban Americans watching The McLaughlin Group had an impulse to see Eleanor Clift have to choke down her daily ration of beans and starch, with a little stringy meat.

  People never vote as candidly as when they vote with their feet. In the twentieth century, before Castro and Che marched into Havana, Cuba took in more imm
igrants per capita than any other country in the Western Hemisphere—more than the United States, including the Ellis Island years. In 1958, the Cuban embassy in Rome had a backlog of twelve thousand applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to emigrate to Cuba. From 1903 to 1957 Cuba took in over 1 million immigrants from Spain and sixtyfive thousand from the United States.16

  Jamaicans and Haitians jumped on rafts trying to enter Cuba. Now, not only do people risk their lives to flee, 2 million as of 1992, but half-starved Haitians a mere sixty miles away turn up their noses at the place. People used to be almost as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to escape.

  Here’s another example of actions speaking louder than statistics: When Castro’s rebel movement called for a “National Strike” against the Batista dictatorship on August 5, 1957—and threatened to shoot workers who reported to work—the “National Strike” was completely ignored. Another was called for April 9, 1958. And again Cuban workers blew a loud and collective raspberry at their “liberators,” reporting to work en masse.

  The anti-Batista rebellion was staffed and led overwhelmingly by college students and professionals. Unemployed lawyers were prominent, beginning with Fidel Castro himself. “Workers and peasants” were conspicuous by their scarcity. The Castro-Che regime’s initial showpiece cabinet consisted of seven lawyers, two university professors, three students, one doctor, one engineer, one architect, one former city mayor, and one captain who defected from the Batista army.17 They were a notoriously “bourgeois” bunch, as Che himself might have put it. By 1961, it was the workers and campesinos, or country folk, who made up the overwhelming bulk of the anti-Castroite rebels, especially the guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains.

  No discussion of Cuba is complete without mentioning Cuba’s vaunted “health care.” Colin Powell himself, at the same time he was making his case against Saddam Hussein at the United Nations, was quoted as saying that “Castro had done some good things for Cuba.”18 Chances are he was anticipating some comment on Cuba’s “health care” from the reporter and answered on reflex.