Che Guevara:
Assassin and Bumbler
Humberto Fontova. NewsMax.com,
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004.
"SENTENCE first - VERDICT afterwards,"
said the Queen.
"Nonsense!" said Alice loudly.
"Off with her head!" the Queen
shouted at the top of her voice.
- Alice In Wonderland
They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope
fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium,
when he concocted "Alice in Wonderland."
A place where the sentence comes first and
the verdict afterward, where people who
protest the madness are sentenced to death
themselves - what lunacy!
If only Carroll had lived a bit longer.
If only he'd visited Cuba in 1959 when every
paper from the New York Times to the London
Observer - when every pundit from Walter
Lippman to Ed Murrow, every author from
Jean Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every
TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were
touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny
and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel
Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious
events since VJ day.
"To send men to the firing squad,
judicial proof is unnecessary," Carroll
would have heard from the chief executioner,
named Ernesto "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 paredon (The Wall)!"
To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted.
He saw through the murderous farce and was
not above a public act of contrition. Indeed,
two years later he featured several recently
liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters -
some hobbling on crutches, others missing
limbs - on his show for a fund raising where
he declared them heroes and led the thunderous
applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.
This from last week's AP:
"At The Sundance Film Festival Robert
Redford's film on Che Guevara "The
Motorcycle Diaries" received a standing
ovation." They say this was the only
film so raptly received.
For the first year of Castro's glorious
revolution Che Guevara was his main executioner
- a combination Beria and Himmler, with
a major exception: Che's slaughter of (bound
and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine)
exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter
of Germans - to scale, that is.
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 20,000 political prisoners.
Political executions up to the time might
have reached a couple thousand, and most
of these were of renegade Nazis themselves
during the indiscriminate butchery known
as the "Night of the Long Knives."
The famous Kristallnacht that horrified
civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand
total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of
70 million.
Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million 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 500 death warrants, another says
over 600. 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.
So the scope of the mass murder is unclear.
So the exact number of widows and orphans
is in dispute. So the number of gagged and
blindfolded men who Che sent - without trials
- to be bound to a stake and blown apart
by bullets runs from the hundreds to the
thousands.
But the mass executioner gets a standing
ovation by the same people in the U.S who
oppose capitol punishment! Is there a psychiatrist
in the house?!
The first three months of the Cuban Revolution
saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the
New York Times admits it. The preceding
"trials" shocked and nauseated
all who witnessed them. They were shameless
farces, sickening charades. Ask Barry Farber.
He was there.
But vengeance - much less justice - had
nothing to do with this bloodbath. Che's
murderous method in La Cabana fortress in
1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous method
in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's
massacre of the Polish officer corps in
the Katyn forest, like Stalin's Great Terror
against his own officer corps a few years
earlier, Che's firing squad marathons were
a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise
that served their purpose ideally. His bloodbath
decapitated - literally and figuratively
t- he first ranks of Cuba's Contras.
Five years earlier, while a communist hobo
in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan
officer corps rise against the Red regime
of Jacobo Arbenz and send him hightailing
to Czechoslovakia.
Che didn't want a repeat in Cuba. Equally
important, his massacre cowed and terrorized.
These were all public trials. And the executions,
right down to the final shattering of the
skull with the coup de grace from 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
paredon (The Wall, and Pink Floyd had nothing
to do with this one).
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."
This from Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of
the Soviet Cheka in 1918.
"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!"
This from Che Guevara's "Motorcycle
Diaries," the very diaries just made
into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford
- again, the only film to get that whoopin'
hollerin' standing ovation at last month's
Sundance Film Festival. Seems that Redford
omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's
diaries form his touching film.
The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood"
never reached Guevara's nostril 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 .....
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.
A real cutup, this Che Guevara. And now
the same crowd moaning and wailing about
the judicial rights of Guantanamo prisoners
give this sadist a standing ovation and
adorn themselves with his T-shirt! Again,
is there a Psychiatrist in the house?!
Che made "Alice in Wonderland's"
Red Queen look like Oliver Wendell Holmes.
His models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin.
The Cheka came to Cuba with Guevara.
But in actual combat, his imbecilities
defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted"
Guevara, Groucho Marx in "Duck Soup"
comes across like Hannibal.
His performance during the Bay of Pigs
invasion says it all. The invasion plan
included a CIA squad dispatching 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.
The wily Che immediately deciphered the
imperialist scheme! That little feint 300
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. They 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 Comandante had managed to
wound himself in this heated battle against
a tape recorder. The bullet pierced Che's
chin and excited above his temple, just
missing his brain. The scar is visible in
all post-April '61 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 may have come from a botched suicide
attempt.
"No way!" Say 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.
Fine, Che groupies. Maybe you're right.
Maybe we're being unduly harsh on the man.
Maybe the humiliation of being tricked into
missing the major battle against imperialist
mercenaries by an amplified tape recording
and a few Roman candles wasn't enough to
prompt suicide.
Instead, the sight of the bottle rocket's
red glare and the sound of tape-recorded
bombs bursting in air roused Che to a Pattonesque
fury. He drew his pistol and prepared to
lead the charge against the Yankee juggernaut.
"Arriba muchachos!" he bellowed
as his men sprung from their trenches with
bayonets gleaming and charged a tape recorder.
With the amplified soundtrack from "The
Sands of Iwo Jima" blaring in the background
Che stood atop a the tank turret and turned
to his men. "Let's wipe 'em out!"
he yelled while waving his pistol overhead
in the manner of Clevon Little in "Blazing
Saddles."
Then he managed to shoot himself through
the chin. Fine.
I've called him cowardly. Yet in all fairness,
we don't know. For the simple reason that
the century's most celebrated guerrilla
fighter never fought in a guerrilla war
or anything even approximating one. The
few puerile skirmishes again Batista's army
in Cuba would have been shrugged off as
a slow night by any Cripp or Blood. In Cuba
Che couldn't fight anyone to fight against
him. In the Congo he couldn't find any to
fight with him. In Bolivia he finally started
getting a tiny taste of both. In short order
he was betrayed, brought to ground and routed.
Sadly, Guevara's legacy of terror and torture
persists to this day and throughout the
world. I refer to the professors who assign
his writings.
I defy anyone to actually finish a Guevara
book. I defy them to hack their way through
the first five pages. Che's gibberish makes
Babs Streisand sound like Cicero. He makes
Hillary's ghostwriters read like Dave Barry.
Beside him Al Gore and Hillary Rodham shine
as the wackiest of cutups.
Food, drink, good cheer, bonhomie, roistering,
fellowship - Guevara recoiled from these
like Dracula from a cross. He went through
life with a perpetual scowl, like Bella
Abzug ... almost like Eleanor Clift.
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."
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."
Dude, this dork's image sells beer huggers
and vodka! Again, is there a psychiatrist
in the house?!
Throughout his diaries Che whines about
deserters from his "guerilla"
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 debauchments 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.
Nurse Ratched, Doug Neidermeyer, Col. Klink,
Maj. Frank Burns - next to Guevara they're
all the heartiest of partiers. Here's the
guy who helped turn the hemisphere's party
capital into a vast forced labor and prison
camp - into the place with the highest (youth)
emigration and suicide rate in the hemisphere,
probably in the world. In 1961 Che even
established a special concentration camp
at Guanacahibes in extreme Western Cuba
for "delinquents." This "delinquency"
involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect
for authorities, laziness and playing loud
music,
And Che's image adorns Grunge bands, jet-set
models and spring break revelers! Again,
is there a psychiatrist in the house?!
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 the Bolivian mission was clearly suicidal
was obvious to anyone with half a brain.
Fidel and Raul weren't about to join him
down there - you can bet your sweet bippy
on that.
But sure enough! Guevara saluted and was
on his way post haste. Two months later
he was dead. Bingo! Fidel scored another
bulls-eye. He rid himself of the Argentine
nuisance and his glorious revolution had
a young handsome martyr for the adulation
of imbeciles worldwide. Nice work.
Che Guevara was monumentally vain and epically
stupid. He was shallow, boorish, cruel and
cowardly. He was full of himself, a consummate
fraud and an intellectual vacuum. He was
intoxicated with a few vapid slogans, spoke
in clichés and was a glutton for
publicity.
But ah! He DID come out nice in a couple
of publicity photos, high cheekbones and
all! And we wonder why he's a hit in Hollywood.
Humberto Fontova holds
an M.A. in history from Tulane University.
He's the author of "Helldiver's Rodeo,"
described as "Highly entertaining!"
by Publisher's Weekly, "A must-read!"
by Booklist, and "Just what the doctor
ordered!" by Ted Nugent. You may reach
Mr. Fontova by e-mail at hfontova@earthlink.net
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