Exposing the Real Che Guevara

by Humberto Fontova

  “In fact, the few Bolivians Che managed to recruit were actually tricked into joining the guerrilla band. I interviewed several of them,” says Rodriguez. “Che had told them to make their way to his camp and meet with him and he’d see to it that they’d be sent to Cuba—and even to Russia and China—for schooling and training. Then when they got to the camp. ‘Cuba?’ Che would frown. ‘Russia? What are you talking about? Who said anything about going there?’ Then Che would hand them a gun and say, ‘Welcome! You’re a guerrilla now. And don’t you dare try to escape or the army will kill you.’ That’s why Che had so many deserters. And we took good advantage of those deserters. They were constantly feeding us information about the guerrilla group’s whereabouts. They felt they’d been duped, tricked. I took advantage of that feeling of betrayal in my intelligence work.”5

  Leave it to Che Guevara to then complain about his Bolivian “recruits.” “They do not want to work,” he whined in his diaries. “They do not want weapons; they do not want to carry loads; they feign illness.” On top of all this, one Bolivian, named Eusebio, was also a “thief, liar and hypocrite.”6

  “The peasant base has not yet been developed,” wrote Che in his diaries for early May. “Although it appears that through the use of planned terror we can neutralize some of them. Their support will come later.”7

  It never did. It was the campesinos themselves who kept reporting the guerrillas’ whereabouts to the army, with whom they were generally on good terms, and for an obvious reason: The Bolivian army was composed mainly of Bolivian campesinos, not bearded foreigners who stole their livestock. “Not one Bolivian enlistment has been obtained,” wrote Che, the liberator of Bolivian peasants.

  The East German female guerrilla Haydee Tamara Bunke, or “Tania,” who went to Bolivia a year ahead of Che to do advance work for his grand entrance, was actually a KGB-STASI-DGI (Cuba’s General Intelligence Directorate) agent sent to keep on eye on Che. The two had met on Che’s trip to East Germany in 1960 when Tamara acted as his translator. Much translating, they say, took place in bed. Bunke, born in Argentina of German communist refugee parents, a woman who fancied herself quite sharp, bookish, and worldly, hit it off immediately with Che. Their relationship continued during Tania’s lengthy stints in Cuba in the early sixties. Naturally privy to all this, Tania’s intelligence chiefs recognized her as the ideal person to keep them informed on Guevara.

  “Some claim Tania was a triple agent working also for the CIA,” says former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez. “But that’s untrue. She had been a longtime agent for the KGB and their allied East-bloc intelligence services. Castro knew this well. She was even a member of the Cuban Communist Party.”

  Alas, poor Tania (whose name would later become Patty Hearst’s Symbionese Liberation Army moniker) was originally slated to remain primarily in the Bolivian capital of La Paz and act as Che’s liaison with Havana and the city’s guerrilla network, such as it was. In March 1967 she made a trip to Che’s guerrilla camp at rural Nancahuazu to deliver the French journalist Regis Debray and the Argentine Ciro Bustos. Both were parlor leftists in thrall to the Cuban revolution and seemed poised to do for Che in Bolivia what the New York Times’s Herbert Matthews had done for Castro in Cuba. They were also ready to act in more official capacities as recruiters and messengers for the guerrillas.

  Bustos, in particular, was instructed to pay close attention to the Bolivian setup, because promptly after the Bolivian triumph he was to set up a similar brilliant operation in Argentina. From there the mighty Che would lead nothing less than the “liberation” of the entire South American continent! “The struggle in Latin America will acquire, in time, continental dimensions,” wrote Che. “It will be the scene of many great battles by humanity [no less!] for its liberation.”8

  And as this glorious conflagration spread like a wildfire across the Western Hemisphere, Che would ultimately lead “humanity” in battle against “the great enemy of the human species: The United States of America!”9 The whole project should have sounded eerily familiar to Bustos, who had tried infiltrating Argentina to start a guerrilla war at Che’s behest back in 1963. Now he was back with Che, escorted by Tania and ready for another go-round.

  “Che planned on setting a Mount Olympus in the Andes with himself at the very top—with Che himself positioned higher than Fidel.” This according to Dariel Alarcon, a Cuban guerrilla who had fought with Che in the Sierra and Congo, and was one of the three guerrillas who managed to survive the Bolivian debacle.10

  Not a month into his Olympic venture, the few Bolivian “recruits” to Che’s band had already started deserting. These ingrates had notified the Bolivian army about Che’s camp just as Tania arrived with Debray and Bustos. Tania had also left a Jeep in the nearby town of Camiri full of guerrilla documents, photos, and her ID papers, complete with aliases. The Jeep and all its contents were found by the police, and were soon in the custody of the Bolivian army’s intelligence division, which tracked down and nabbed all of Che’s urban contacts (there weren’t many) in La Paz.

  Thanks to her incompetence as a spy, Tania was now stuck as a guerrilla. But Debray and Bustos schemed to sneak their way out of Che’s camp in clever disguises, Debray as a foreign journalist and Bustos as a traveling salesman who took a wrong turn during his business calls. The always-on-the-ball Che Guevara had even vouchsafed Debray and Bustos several important messages for the outside world.

  One was a bombastic “War Communiqué, No.2.” Another was a request to his friends Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre to start whooping up his Bolivian cause. And one more was a summons to Fidel to send him a new radio, more money, and to please, for God’s sake, hurry up and open that “second front” in Bolivia he’d long promised with all the Bolivian communists then training in Cuba.

  Mario Monje’s reaction to Che’s second-front message to Fidel is not on record. And chances are, as a communist, his sense of humor was severely atrophied. But still, we can assume he had to laugh. Not half a day out of Che’s camp, Debray and Bustos were nabbed by the Bolivian police and promptly turned over to Bolivian army officials, who gleefully pistol-whipped them. Within minutes, they were betraying Che’s whereabouts. Bustos, briefly reverting to his original calling as an artist, even helpfully drew likenesses of the men he saw at the guerrilla camp for his interrogators. Perhaps Bustos was acting out of terror. Or, perhaps having been sent now on two suicide missions, Bustos felt he should reap a little payback on Che.

  Bustos’s drawings confirmed to the CIA suits what the lower-level Cuban-American CIA men like Mario Riveron had long known—that Che was in Bolivia. The training of the Bolivian army by Shelton and the Green Berets then began in earnest, now with clear targets in mind. Felix Rodriguez convinced the Bolivian military to stop summarily executing guerrilla prisoners. Questioned properly and treated decently, they could provide valuable information and help close the net on Che.

  According to Dariel Alarcon, Che was at first furious with Tania for having shown up at the camp. “What the hell do I tell you things for!”11 he screamed at her as she burst into tears. But Che was soon making good use of her presence. The two were often noticed sneaking down to the swimming hole on many afternoons—not that Che ever got wet. Among the bourgeois debauchments most disdained by Che were baths. Tania and Che were also noticed slinking into Che’s tent many a night. This didn’t sit well with the rest of the guerrillas, who were utterly famished in that department.

  The erotic encounters with Tania revealed a new dimension of Che’s hypocrisy. From his Sierra days through the Congo, and into Bolivia, Che closely policed and attempted to thwart his men’s libidos, meting out harsh penalties for miscreants. His pathological despotism demanded it. “I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers, and no friends,” wrote Guevara. “My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.” Now the friendless Che had, as his men saw it, brought a woman into the camp to comfort him.

  Tania soon f
ell ill with a high fever. Che assigned her to his guerrilla “rear-guard” group, headed by the Cuban “Joaquin,” which he divided from the “vanguard” group, which he headed. Within days of this decision, both groups were hopelessly lost from each other, and from their camp. During their groping about in the jungle, they bumped into a couple of inexperienced Bolivian army patrols and scored a couple of successful ambushes. Better luck was not to come. Both groups continued to bumble around—half-starved, half-clothed, and half-shod—without any contact for six months, though they were often within a few miles of each other. Lacking even World War II vintage walkie-talkies, the two groups never knew how close they were to each other.

  Che’s diary entries for early May are unintentionally comical. “We walked effectively for five hours straight, and covered from 12-14 kilometers, and came upon a campsite made by Benigno and Aniceto.” These were men in Che’s own vanguard group, evidence they had been walking in circles. “This brings up several questions,” Che asks in his diaries. “Where is the Iquiri River? Perhaps that’s where Benigno and Aniceto were fired upon? Perhaps the aggressors were Joaquin’s people?”

  In other words, they were not only walking in circles. They were shooting at one another.

  Che’s masterful Guerrilla Warfare: A Method gives no explanation for these sly guerrilla tactics. But his diaries are often astonishingly frank. “A day of much confusion about our geographic position,” he wrote on May 2. Before he could liberate the continent, Che would have to figure out where he was. This is the same man who, in the words of Time, “waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill,” the man whom some scholars equate with Mao Zedong, and his thirty-eight-hundred-mile Long March.

  Now separated from Che, Tania’s rear-guard comrades found themselves in a position to vent their long-simmering resentment. They constantly tormented her. The Cuban guerrillas, in particular, liked to strip naked and surround her, laughing and gesturing lewdly. Tania was no delicate little flower, far from it. Her liaisons in amour ran from Che, to Cuba’s tough intelligence officer, the black Ulises Estrada, to Bolivian president René Barrientos.

  But the sexual threats and constant abuse from her revolutionary comrades wore Tania down. “Wait till we get back!” she’d cry. “I’m gonna report all this to Che!”12 But Che was nowhere around, as both groups circled each other, eating tree roots and armadillos while racked with dysentery and constant vomiting. Toward the end of her Bolivian misadventure, reports fellow guerrilla Dariel Alarcon, Tania would often explode in tears at the men’s crude insults and run off shrieking in rage. “Just shoot me—why don’t you!” she yelled.13

  The Bolivian army soon obliged her. After four months in the jungle, racked by fever, and rapidly starving to death, the “rear guard” blundered into an ambush by a Bolivian army patrol while crossing a river. There was more galling news for Che. An obviously unenlightened Bolivian peasant, Honorato Rojas, had set up the massacre.

  A few weeks earlier, Che’s own group had run into Rojas, who gave them some food and directions. In Che’s own words, Rojas gave them “a good welcome and a lot of information.” Heaven knows, this didn’t happen often. So they were elated. This peasant obviously recognized his benefactors! Sure, if they triumphed, their “revolution” would steal his meager holdings, and murder him if he resisted, as they’d done to thousands of similar country folk in Cuba. But how was he supposed to know that?

  In late August, Tania and the rear guard found Rojas again and asked him to point out a good place to cross the nearby Masicuri River. Once again, he obliged them. Rojas then scurried over to the headquarters of Bolivian army captain Vargas Salinas and gave him the precise location of the crossing. Honorato said he’d be wearing a white shirt to distinguish him from the guerrillas, so please be careful when they were mowing them down. Rojas went back home and waited for Che’s rear guard, which managed to arrive punctually.

  “Right this way, amigos!” and Honorato led them over to the shallow river crossing at the appointed time, bade them godspeed, and sat on a ridge with a clear view for the show. Only the popcorn was missing. When all ten members of the rear guard were sloshing through waist-deep water, Captain Vargas Salinas took the first shot. His soldiers had set up several machine guns. The ensuing crossfire was deafening and murderous. The water churned and frothed from the fusillade. Tania fell into the river, her body washed away by the current, along with the others.

  Only a Bolivian guerrilla code-named “Paco” survived the slaughter. Upon questioning him later, Felix Rodriguez learned that Paco was quite eager to rat out the location of his guerrilla group’s “vanguard” led by Che. Paco felt snookered and was bitter. Che, it appeared, had brought him on board, not as a proposed guerrilla at all, but with the bogus offer to send him to Cuba for schooling. As with others, as soon as Paco showed up at the guerrilla camp, Che reneged, virtually kidnapped him, and started treating him like a slave.

  But finding Che’s group wouldn’t be easy, explained Paco. Che’s location wasn’t a mystery only to the Bolivian army—it was a much bigger mystery to Che himself, and to everyone under his command. (For once, Che’s obtuseness was working in his favor.) Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence man, sensed that Paco was telling the truth. But nonetheless, the ring started closing on Guevara.

  “Dear mother,” Tania had written only a few weeks before she was mowed down in the Bolivian ambush, “I’m scared. I’m always frightened and am always crying. My nerves are shot. I’m not a woman. I’m a girl who would like to hide myself in some corner where no one can find me. But where can I hide?”14

  The terror and despair of her last days would certainly have been tinged with the realization that her fate was tied to that of a man who was increasingly delusional and certainly doomed. “The legend of our guerrilla group is growing like a huge wave,” Che wrote in his diaries for July. “We are already the invincible supermen.”

  Perhaps she also finally grasped the nature of Che’s idealism. “Animalitos,” was how Che referred to the Bolivian peasants in his diaries. “The peasant masses do not help us in any way.”15 (Two years later, Rojas was captured at his home and murdered in front of his wife and children. This method of “fighting” was in complete keeping with Che Guevara’s legacy, as many a peasant family in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra could attest.)

  Dariel Alarcon reports how, while lost and starving, Che was obsessed with posing for photos. One was of Che atop a (presumably stolen) horse on a ridgeline, where he was strategically silhouetted against the bare sky. Che handed Alarcon his Pentax and had him back off just the right distance to capture the entire scene. Che nodded, then plucked out a machete and waved it high over his head, shouting, “I am the new Bolivar!” as Alarcon dutifully clicked away.16

  Meanwhile, Che’s men blundered around, lost, constantly bickering with each other, constantly losing recruits, terrorizing peasants, now eating cats, condors, and armadillos. This was not guerrilla war as Castro had “fought” it, amassing weight, feted by fawning reporters and duped financial backers, who paid bribes to keep Batista’s army from firing.

  Dariel Alarcon also remembers Che browbeating him savagely. “One day I was cooking at the camp,” he recalls, “and Che walks up. ‘What you doing?’

  “ ‘I’m getting ready to cook.’

  “ ‘Well, what are you going to cook?’

  “ ‘I think I’m gonna rustle up some boiled potatoes and a little meat.’

  “ ‘No!’ snapped Che. ‘Don’t cook any meat. Cook some rice and beans with some sardines.’

  “ ‘Fine, whatever you command, Che,’ I replied, and for some reason that set him off.

  “ ‘It’s not whatever I command, Chico!’ Che raved. ‘It’s whatever comes out of my goddamned balls to command! You got that?’

  “ ‘Yes, but wait a minute now. I have not insulted you in any way, comandante? Why are you raving at me like this?’

  “ ‘I said you got that?’ �
��

  Che spun around and stomped off.17

  In his diaries, Che recounts Alarcon’s committing a major blunder by allowing himself to be seen by a peasant family fishing. “Benigno [Dariel Alarcon’s guerrilla name] let himself be seen, then let the peasant, his wife and kid all escape. When I found out I had a major tantrum and called it an act of treason. This provoked a fit of crying and bawling by Benigno.” Apparently, Alarcon should have murdered the family.

  This entry is typical. Che’s diaries seem to revel in the punishment he doles out to his peons, along with the trivial infractions that provoked them. “Today there was an unpleasant incident,” Che wrote in September. “Chino came to tell me that Nato had roasted and eaten a whole piece of meat in front of him. So I yelled and stormed at Chino.”

  “Every time Che sent for you it was to pull your ear about something or other,” said his former Cuban bodyguard Alberto Castellanos.18

  Dariel Alarcon, who’d dutifully fought alongside Che from the Sierra Maestra through the Congo and into Bolivia, managed to escape Che’s final Yuro firefight, enter Chile after weeks of hiking, and eventually make his way back to Cuba (much to Castro’s apparent discomfiture). It took a little while, but Alarcon finally came to his senses. He defected in 1996 and lives in Paris today. He has no doubt Che’s fate in Bolivia was a deliberate setup by Castro, which provoked a resentment that fueled Alarcon’s flight to exile. Back in Cuba he even heard it from Che’s bodyguard, Alberto Castellanos, a friendly Cuban intelligence officer. “I’ll tell it right to your face,” Castellanos confided to Alarcon. “You people were dumped in the Bolivian jungle the same way someone throws a used bone into the garbage can.”

  “Well before the final ambush and Che’s death it looked to us like Cuba had abandoned us,” recalls Alarcon about a campfire discussion among the guerrillas one night.