Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant by Humberto Fontova Read Free Book Online Page B

justice—was not the point behind Che’s murderous method. Che’s firing squads were a perfectly rational, cold-blooded exercise to decapitate—literally and figuratively—the first ranks of Cuba’s Contras. Five years earlier, when he was a Communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen Guatemala’s officer corps rise against the Red regime of Jacobo Arbenz, who fled to Czechoslovakia. Che didn’t want to repeat that experience in Cuba. He wanted to cow and terrorize the Cuban people against resistance to the revolution. These were all public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with 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 paredón .
    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.” That was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Soviet Cheka in 1918.
    This is from Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries , the very diaries just made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford: “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.” Seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che’s diaries from his touching film.
    The “acrid odor of gunpowder and blood” never reached Guevara’s nostrils 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, and 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. 4
    Che’s judicial models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Stalin. As they had used terror and mass executions, so did he. As they conducted show trials, so did he.
    But in actual combat, his imbecilities defy belief. Cuban American fighters who faced Che at the Bay of Pigs and later in the Congo still laugh. The Bay of Pigs invasion plan included a ruse in which a CIA squad dispatched 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 sounds.
    The wily Che immediately deciphered the imperialist scheme. That little feint three hundred 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. His men 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 warrior had managed to wound himself in this heated battle against a tape recorder. A bullet had pierced his chin and excited above his