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

fashioning his “New Man” after all. In Cuba, Che’s totalitarian dream gave rise to psychic cripples beyond the imagination of even Orwell or Huxley: people who hate the sight of the sea.

Why Che’S Rocking Grandson Fled Cuba
    “Che exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire,” boasted Rage Against the Machine lead guitarist Tom Morello in a Guitar World interview. “He was an amazing example, a guy with humanitarian ideals and the will to act on them. Everywhere there was injustice, Che showed up. That’s a pretty good resume.” 15
    Tom Morello might benefit from a chat with a fellow heavy-metal rock guitarist named Canek Sanchez Guevara—Che’s own grandson. Morello might learn a few things about the regime his “honorary fifth band member” cofounded, from which Canek Guevara was forced to flee in horror and disgust. Among the many reasons for Canek’s flight was his desire to play exactly the same kind of music without being brutalized by the penal system and police put in place by his grandfather, Rage’s “fifth band member.” Are you listening, Tom Morello? Carlos Santana? Madonna? Eric Burdon?
    “In Cuba freedom is nonexistent,” Canek said in an interview with Mexico’s Proceso magazine. “The regime demands submission and obedience . . . the regime persecutes hippies, homosexuals, free-thinkers, and poets. . . . They employ constant surveillance, control and repression.” 16
    One day in 1991 leftist author and frequent Cuba visitor Marc Cooper was sitting on a Havana patio having coffee and chatting with the members of Cuba’s nomenklatura hosting him. Suddenly they heard frenzied footsteps. They turned around and there came Che’s grandson and a bandmate, stumbling, coughing, wheezing, and wiping their eyes. Finally catching his breath, Canek blurted that his rock band had set up to play in a nearby public square and had just started kicking out the jams when the police burst upon the scene, lobbing tear gas bombs and swinging billy clubs.
    “But I’m Che’s grandson!” 17 Canek protested to the cops who grabbed him.
    There is a delicious irony here. Canek’s grandfather had a major hand in training and indoctrinating Cuba’s police force. As far as these cops were concerned, they were dutifully carrying out Canek’s grandfather’s revolutionary mandate. Besides his affinity for rock music, Canek further tweaked the authorities by adorning his guitar with a big decal of a U.S. dollar bill. And he wonders why his grandfather’s disciples took such glee in pummeling him.
    On other occasions the longhaired and punkish-looking Canek was jerked out of a movie theater line and subjected to a humiliating rectal exam by cops, presumably looking for drugs. But, all in all, Canek was immensely luckier than most Cuban “lumpen” and “delinquents.” The notorious peligrosidad predelictiva law (rough translation: “dangerousness likely leading to crime”) never got him shoved into a prison camp.
    For what it’s worth, Canek Sanchez Guevara lives in Mexico today and fancies himself an anarchist, not a conservative, Yankee stooge. He’s adamant about distancing himself from those tacky and insufferable “Miami Cubans.” He believes Fidel betrayed the “pure” Cuban revolution of the early sixties inaugurated by his idealistic and heroic grandfather and replaced it with an intolerant and autocratic personal dictatorship.
    Canek, born in Cuba in 1974, might be excused from knowing that Cuba had never, before or since, been as vicious and Stalinist a police state as it was in the sixties. Canek’s grandfather was actually more ideologically rigid, more of a Stalinist than Fidel himself—only, to his eventual misfortune, far less shrewd.
    The lumpen remaining in Cuba still have Che’s number. A one-time Argentine Communist Party member named Hector Navarro, also a TV reporter and law school professor, visited Cuba in 1998 to cover Pope John Paul II’s