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

and compassion.’ ” 13
    “ ‘Che murdered hundreds,’ I said. ‘It’s fully documented. He urged the opposite of love. Hate as a factor of struggle. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm. Hate as . . . ’ ” But Santana wasn’t listening as Henry Gomez quoted Che Guevara. “Che fought for blacks, women, and Native Americans,” Carlos drawled. “Before the Cuban Revolution, women weren’t allowed to enter the casinos.”
    Now Henry Gomez himself stared vacantly. “Where do you begin with this kind of space-cadet drivel?” He laughs. “In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the United States. And Cuban women went into any casino they desired. If not many did, it wasn’t because they were barred.”
    But let’s give Che credit. He indeed opened some Cuban establishments to women—political prisons and the execution wall.
    Santana was also ignorant of Che’s famous racism, of his disparaging comments on blacks and Mexicans. “Like a fool,” recalls Henry, “I went on, trying to explain a few things to Carlos Santana, who was still annoyed with my T-shirt.”
    “You’re getting hung up on facts, man,” Santana slurred at one point. “We’re only free when we free our hearts.”
    “Santana had a point,” says Henry, nodding. “I was definitely ‘hung up on facts.’ So here I’m giving him facts—and he’s rebutting with flower-power slogans. I should have known better. My wife was standing there highly amused by it all, not being impolite at all, simply smiling in what must have seemed to Mister Santana and his wife the typical reverential smile they get from fans. My wife was actually very hard at work stifling guffaws.” 14

“We Gotta Get Outta This Place”
    When he hosted the PBS special “The 60’s Experience,” Eric Burdon’s Che shirt shamed even Carlos Santana’s, even Johnny Depp’s. This was no measly T-shirt, either. It was a collared shirt, very elegant, with a huge image of the hip fellow who criminalized rock music on both front and back.
    Eric was belting out the Animals’ classics on the show. So naturally he sang the incomparable “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”—the exact desperate refrain of Cubans when Fidel and Che took over.
    And certainly the phrase “the last thing we ever do” hits home for the families of the one in three desperate Cuban escapees who never make landfall. According to Cuban-American scholar Armando Lago, this hideous arithmetic translates into seventy-seven thousand deaths at sea over the past forty-six years—families perishing like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst, gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally give out and they gulp that last lungful of seawater. Still others are eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of hammerheads and tiger sharks. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. Sharks don’t dally at a meal.
    Every year in South Florida, the INS and Coast Guard hear scores of such stories. (Were the cause of these horrors more politically correct—say, if they could somehow pin them on George Bush—we’d have no end of books, movies, and documentaries.)
    A consistently hot item on Cuba’s black market is used motor oil. Why? It is the poor man’s shark repellent, they say. Desperate people cling to small hopes.
    “I Hate the Sea” is the title of a gut-gripping underground essay by Cuban dissident Rafael Contreras. It’s about some young men Rafael met on the beach near Havana. For most people, the sea soothes, attracts, infatuates. It is a symbol of liberation, travel, vacation. “Water is everywhere a protection,” writes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, trying to explain the lure, “like a moat. As a species we love it.” These young men Rafael met stared out to sea, cursed it, and spat into it. “It incarcerates us, worse than jail bars,” they said.
    So perhaps Che Guevara succeeded in