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Exposing the Deceit and Lies of Che Guevara Barry Farber "Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him" Author: Humberto Fontova
Publisher: Sentinel HC Guinness will never add a category in the book of world records for anything like "Worst Person With the Best Reputation." Not because it's not interesting, but because there's one obvious winner for all time. That winner, far and away, is Che Guevara. The immense value of Humberto Fontova's latest work, "Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him," is that it isn't over. It's far from over. It may never be over. The grand-scam of Che Guevara throbs and pulsates forever; and not just in the hearts of the Berkeley crowd. There are stable students, balanced onlookers, even seasoned reporters who covered the Castro take-over of Cuba who have a lot to learn about Che Guevara. There's no better place to begin than inside Humberto Fontova's latest book. I impute "immense" value to Fontova's work because his documentation is bull-proof and pig-tight and his writing is slashing and deeply satisfying to those who know the truth about Che and have long since given up hope of any historical reconciliation with the truth. Che's lustrous, radiant, Christ-like image is a living target that's defied every attempt at historical halo-removal. Until Fontova, that is. Fontova's research and writing turn that fraudulent image into a smoking crater.
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Che was sexy. Fontova lets us in on the details of the origin of that famous and outrageously appealing picture of Che and how Fidel Castro suppressed it until Che was safely dead and no longer a threat to Fidel. If Che Guevara had looked like Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, or Josef Stalin, history would have clocked out his 15 minutes of fame long ago leaving millions of T-shirts, statuettes, lava lamps, skate boards, and even infantwear looking for other heroic attractions to emblazon upon themselves. How can a cowardly beet-red communist psychopathic sadistic murderer shockingly ignorant of Economics 101, and a military illiterate to boot, succeed in coming across to the world as a courageous, compassionate, idealistic, freedom-fighting leader whose military genius caused the collapse of Batista's armed forces? Actually it's not that hard if you have the right media and the right audience. Che had both. Fontova's demolition doesn't leave one single slat of the Che edifice standing. The cherry atop the Che sundae was always that, on top of everything else, he was a medical doctor. He was not. Debunking the Myths Fontova produces a battlefield admission by Che himself that he was no doctor and the medical school in Argentina could find no record of any Ernesto Guevara having graduated or even attended. Military genius? The legend has it that Che's masterful strategy in winning the all-crucial battle of Santa Clara won all Cuba for Castro. Fontova reveals there never really was a "battle for Santa Clara," all-crucial, kind of crucial, or even not crucial. The Batista generals were bribed into giving Che the town.
Courageous leader? Fontova gives us ample examples of Che's "courage" against defenseless men and women; never against anybody capable of fighting back. Idealistic ruler? Only if you consider Stalinist dictatorship an ideal. Che frequently scolded those who "blathered" about things like "proof of guilt" and "due process of law" when it came to the thousands and thousands of Cubans crumpled before firing squads. Che considered notions of "proof" bourgeois claptrap which he dismissed by shouting, "The only proof we need is proof that those people needed to be executed." Then he'd walk away without even explaining the absence of that. Freedom-fighter? Che's "freedom-fighting" scrapbook includes four Bay of Pigs-style invasions intended to bring Stalinist dictatorship to unfortunate countries; all of which fortunately failed. Compassionate human being? Fontova draws a fascinating distinction between the motives of mass-murderer Castro and mass-murderer Guevara. Spiders weave webs. Beavers build dams. Communist revolutionaries kill. That was the nature of Fidel's killing. Beards may grow in Castro-land, but the personnel of the revolution must be constantly and neatly trimmed. Che, on the other hand, seemed to relish the act of killing itself; so long as the victim was utterly defenseless. (Late in his career, Che faced combat odds of two against two and his courage drained from him as if he were a lone German facing a massive Soviet tank attack at Kursk.) Hard-Working Firing Squads Che's initial headquarters was the massive La Cabana fortress in Havana where his firing squads literally worked in shifts, their work occasionally slowed when Che's hand and wrist needed a rest from signing death warrants. Che had a slab-stone wall of his office turned into a picture window so he could enjoy watching the firing squads at work. Che's pattern of killing seems to suggest an erotic motive rather than an ideological or a juridical one. Most people, fortunately, prefer more salubrious kinds of sexual excitement. Killing seemed to do it for Che; killings he performed personally or merely ordered. A Cuban woman whose husband had merely been a policeman and in no way a "war criminal" under Batista was sentenced to death by firing squad. She somehow succeeded in making her way into Che's office to plead for his life. He listened, then without saying a word to her picked up the phone and barked orders for his execution to be moved up to that very night. He heard the plea of a young boy prisoner who told Che his mother needed his meager earnings for support. Che murdered him on the spot. Che got annoyed when a group of women gathered outside the prison to claim the bullet-ridden bodies of their husbands. Che yelled there'd be no "visits" that night and had his goons tear-gas the widows. These are only a sprinkling of the less gruesome tales of Che; all are well corroborated. Che says it best himself. "Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red by slaughtering any enemy that falls into my hands. My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood." That's written in his "Motorcycle Diaries," just one of many similar passages sure to make Robert Redford throw himself on the floor and abandon his Che-praising ways once he reads Fontova's book. The number of deaths reliably chalked up to the Castro-Che revolution is 112,000. That includes those drowned or eaten by sharks trying to flee Cuba. Che and Castro slaughtered tens of thousands of Cubans, only a handful who could qualify as war criminals by any reasonable definition. If the Allies had used Che's playbook for post-World War II retribution, they'd still to this day be lining up for hanging deep into the millions in Nuremberg. There should be a Hollywood studio, maybe called Upstream Productions, willing to put Fontova's latest on the big screen. If Che hadn't committed so much wanton slaughter of innocent and defenseless people it could even make it as a comedy. Once a Dog . . . For starters, this military mastermind shot himself with his own pistol, then staggered around as though he had mere seconds to dictate his military will while suffering a wound that didn't even require stitches. Che's many maneuvers to arrange to be where the fighting wasn't remind one of a certain craven Civil War general whose critics described him as "Invincible in peace; invisible in war." Che's physical inability to see prostitutes in the hotel lobbies of good sister communist allies like Czechoslovakia even though they were slap-stick blatant gives the concept of denial a new dimension. Che's male entourage saw them and joked about them when they returned to Cuba and they were lucky to get off with only the slightest form of revolutionary justice – a stern insistence from Che that there were no prostitutes in Prague. A Che shoe factory scenario offers a familiar laugh to everybody who grew up under communism. Che's stormed into the factory and demanded to know why their shoes came apart after a six-block walk. "It's that awful Russian glue," explained the director, using a much stronger adjective for the glue. "Before the Revolution we used that good American glue." "Why didn't you report this to us?" thundered Che. "We did, Comandante. Often," replied the manager. Che ordered his goons to take him away. He was never seen again. Che's vanguard and rear-guard in Bolivia got separated from each other and wandered around looking for each other for half a year. The reason the Bolivian army had such a hard time finding Che's army is Che didn't know where he was himself. The biggest laughs, though, will come from the Congo scenes where Cuba's communist allies, the Simbas, all done up in monkey fur and chicken feathers, were promised by their "muganga" (witch doctor) they would all be protected by a "dawa," an invisible shield that made them bullet-proof. The dawa, it was explained, would work unless they lost their nerve or touched a woman. After a devastating raid by the anti-communist forces the muganga scrambled desperately to try to explain away the faulty dawas. The closest Che's Congo forces ever came to a victory was the hijacking of a truck loaded with whiskey. The simbas decided to celebrate; first by drinking, then by drinking more, then by shooting their weapons into the air, finally by shooting whoever was around. If only Humphrey Bogart could be brought back, this time as a Hispanic, he'd be ideal to play the role of Felix Rodriguez, the anti-communist fighter since age 17 who infiltrated Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion and miraculously escaped, made it to America, joined the CIA and masterminded Che's capture in Bolivia where Che's attempt at pulling off another communist revolution started out weak and gradually tapered off. Felix is president of the organized veterans of the Bay of Pigs. He celebrated his achievement of American citizenship by volunteering that same day for combat duty in Vietnam. He returned highly decorated. Guevara wound up abandoned by the Soviets, his own guerrillas, the Bolivian Communist Party, and Fidel himself who'd long wanted Che out of the way and was now being nudged by his Soviet sugar daddies to get him out of the way. Rodriguez was the last man to interrogate Che before his execution Did you ever wonder what a rat who can talk will say when he's trapped? Che, with a fully-loaded pistol, told his captors, "Don't shoot. I am Che. I'm worth more to you alive than dead!" In this corner, the world-wide image of Che Guevara. In that corner, Humberto Fontova with his brilliantly written, colorful and almost neurotically well-documented truth about Che Guevara. It is said a truth dashed to earth will rise again. Alas, Che's lingering image proves a lie will do the same thing.
Editor's note:
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