Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova Read Free Book Online

TA-DA! There it was: Carlos’s elegantly embroidered Che Guevara T-shirt. Half of Miami was sitting on the couch, wishing someone would say, “Tune in to this, Carlos—your T-shirt icon set up concentration camps in Cuba for anyone like you, including ordinary rock and roll fans who bought your album.” A lumpen was any hapless youth who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music in Cuba. Would Carlos Santana still be grinning if he knew that Cuba criminalized Carlos Santana and most other rock music?
    “The stuff we had to go through!” recalls Cuban rock-and-roller Carmen Cartaya. “If you were known to have rock records, if you wore blue jeans, if you were a boy with longish hair, the police were on your tail constantly. My friend Juan Miguel Sanchez always managed to get his hands on the latest Beatles album. This wasn’t easy in Cuba, believe me, but he was a resourceful guy. Usually the only people with access to rock albums back then were the kids of the party members, the regime people, who traveled abroad. Juan Miguel wasn’t one of those.”
    One fine day in 1965 Carmen’s friend Juan Miguel vanished. “They grabbed him in one of the ‘roundups,’ as they called it when a group of army trucks and soldiers would surround an area known as a hangout for lumpen and round everyone up at gunpoint,” recalls Carmen.
    “We still had a piano in our house in 1965 and a friend had a guitar, another drums. All this was prerevolution gear, needless to say. So we’d get together and play Beatles songs; ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was a favorite. Then my mother would come running in. ‘STOP! Are you crazy! Those so-and-sos from El Comité [the regime’s neighborhood snitch groups] will hear it! We’re in enough trouble already!’ My dad was in a concentration camp at the time. My mother, as usual, was right. Listening to rock was bad enough. Listening and playing it was a quick way to find yourself in serious trouble with the police. Our little band didn’t last long.” 11
    True, Santana didn’t hit it big till Woodstock in 1969, at a time when Che had already received a heavy dose of the very medicine he had dished out to hundreds of bound and gagged men and boys. This means the first inmates of his concentration camps were probably guilty of the heinous crime of listening to the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, and the like. But the regime Che cofounded kept up the practice of jailing roqueros well past the time Santana was hot on the rock charts.
    Still, ignorance flourishes. Rage Against the Machine plaster Che’s image on their shirts, guitars, and amps. “We’ve considered Che a fifth band member for a long time now,” gushes lead guitarist Tom Morello. “Che was an amazing example .”
    Morello, whose music inspires so many head-banger balls, raves, and mosh pits, might be amazed to learn that upon taking over the Cuban city of Santa Clara, Che’s first order of business (after summarily executing twenty-seven “war criminals,” after a battle with four casualties) was to ban drinking, gambling, and dancing as “bourgeois frivolities.” “I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers, and no friends,” wrote Che. “My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.” 12 In short, Che, the fifth band member of Rage Against the Machine, took one of the world’s most culturally vivacious countries and transformed it into a human ant farm.
    “Carlos Santana smiled vacantly and gave me the peace sign,” recalls a young Cuban American named Henry Gomez about a run-in with the hip guitarist in San Francisco shortly after his 2005 Oscar gig. Henry was wearing his homemade “Che’s Dead—Get Over It” T-shirt when he passed the famed guitarist as he sat in a café. Santana immediately noticed the shirt and walked over.
    “ ‘Che may be dead for you,’ he said in a classic hippy-dippy drawl,” says Henry. “ ‘But he lives in our hearts . . . Che is all about love