Exposing the Real Che Guevara

Officers Connolly and Marino were soon on their way to St. Clare’s Hospital for treatment of multiple scratches and gouges inflicted by the struggle. Gladys was telling the truth. Her knife did not touch the cops. The poor officers tangled only with the buzz saw of her teeth and fingernails as she struggled to get at Che.

Unscathed, Che Guevara entered the halls of the General Assembly and started his speech. “Executions?” He paused for effect at one point. “Certainly, we execute!” he declared to the claps and cheers of that august body. “And we will continue executing [emphasis his] as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the Revolution’s enemies!” The Spanish word for death is muerte, and Che rolled the Rs deliciously. The trilling of “mueRRRRTE!” resonated grandly throughout the hall.²

Che was merely proclaiming, of course, what the scholars of The Black Book of Communism would reveal—that fourteen thousand Cubans would be executed without anything smacking of due process by the end of the decade. For perspective, consider that Slobodan Milosevic went on trial for allegedly ordering eight thousand executions. The charge against Milosevic—by the same United Nations that applauded Che—was “genocide.” Che let the General Assembly’s ovation that greeted his “mueRRRRRTE! ” subside and proceeded to other favored themes. “The government of the United States is not the champion of freedom,” he said, “but rather the perpetuator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population!” More claps, more cheers. Yankee Imperialism was “a carnivorous animal feeding on the helpless.” Another ovation.³

Lisa Howard—Hollywood actress, Mutual Radio Network host, and ABC noontime news anchorette—hosted Che in her Manhattan penthouse. Howard had also invited Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, to fete Che. Howard, a self-appointed matchmaker between Cuba and the United States, achieved nothing but the encouragement of even more spirited denunciations of her country.

Such was Che’s New York social swirl that Malcolm X had to settle for a written message, which he read in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. “Dear Brothers and Sisters of Harlem,” Malcolm read without disclosing the messenger, “I would have liked to have been with you and Brother Babu . . . Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel.”

Columnist Laura Berquist conducted two reverential interviews with Che Guevara for Look magazine, one in November 1960, another in April 1963. Look’s covers and interviews featured mostly movie stars. So a Che interview must have struck Look’s editors as a simply mahh-velous idea. Berquist traveled to Havana for her interviews and in 1960 brought back the following scoop: “Che denies he’s a party-line Communist.” She then suggested the proper characterization for him as a “pragmatic revolutionary,” to which Che smilingly agreed. “When he smiles he has a certain charm,” Berquist reported. Overall she found him “fascinating . . . cool and brainy.”⁶

By 1963, with Cuba officially declaring itself to be a Marxist-Leninist state, a fact it celebrated with Soviet missiles and banners of Lenin, Berquist prudently shucked the “pragmatic revolutionary” label. But she still found things to admire in Cuba—the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for instance. They make up a network of government spy groups set up on every city block to promptly report any “counter-revolutionary” backsliding by their neighbors to the police. Depending on the severity of the infraction, penalties range from a cut in the weekly food ration, to a stint in a prison camp, to being riddled with bullets by a firing squad. The system is novel even for communist regimes, formerly in place only in East Germany where the STASI, who helped set it up in Cuba, grandfathered it from the Nazi Gestapo. Berquist seemed charmed by them. Their role, she reported in Look, was “to see that children are vaccinated, and learn to read and write. And that the local butcher doles out meat fairly.”⁷

The day after Che’s “mueRRRRRRTE! ” oration at the United Nations, Laura Berquist arranged a splendid and celebrity-studded evening for Cuba’s mass executioner as guest of honor at the town-house of her friend, Bobo Rockefeller. In attendance were several black activists, beat poets, and assorted literary types—in short, the very people most passionate in their support of civil rights for all people, and opposed to the death penalty. Bobo Rockefeller hosted the classic scene from Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers six years before Tom Wolfe wrote the hilarious essay and book.

Somehow, amidst all the media and social schmoozing, Che also found time for serious business. The details of his secret plotting were disclosed several months later when the New York Police Department uncovered a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. But for the joint work of New York’s finest, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Che’s terror plot would have brought the terror of September 11 to America decades earlier. The main plotters were members of the Black Liberation Army, who sneered at Malcolm X as an Uncle Tom. These American radicals were in cahoots with a Canadian separatist radical and Canadian TV anchorette named Michelle Duclos. According to the head plotter, Robert Steele Collier, who also belonged to the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the plot was hatched on his visit to Cuba in August 1964 when he met with Che Guevara. Collier, along with Duclos, met Che again on his New York U.N. visit and buttoned down the details for the explosions.

Everything seemed set. Duclos had brought in the thirty sticks of dynamite and three detonators through the Canadian border and stashed them. After the blasts, she’d provide the Black Liberation Army plotters brief refuge in her Canadian apartment until they slipped into permanent refuge in Cuba.

But the plotters had been infiltrated by Raymond Wood, a black NYPD cadet. The NYPD alerted the FBI, the Canadian Mounties, and the U.S. Border Patrol, which tailed Duclos as she crossed from Canada and watched her stash the dynamite. The FBI then staked out the locale and watched Collier drive up, look around furtively, and slink out of his car.

Had everything gone according to plan, Che Guevara would have destroyed America’s greatest monuments, killed hundreds if not thousands of visitors from around the world, and allowed the killers to slip into Cuba for safe haven. If the facts of the attack had become publicly known, President Johnson might have been forced to repudiate the Kennedy administration’s noninterference agreement with the Soviet Union following the Cuban Missile Crisis. The result could easily have been catastrophic. Of course, the plot had no effect, either on American security or on Che’s reputation. It fell to twenty-four-year-old Gladys Perez to wear the label “terrorist.” While being booked for felonious assault, Gladys said she had arrived from Cuba two years earlier. In Cuba, as a political prisoner, she had been tortured and raped. Asked by a court interpreter if she regretted her actions, Gladys snapped, “No! If Guevara were here now I’d kill him!”

Consider the facts: A Cuban woman is imprisoned, tortured, and raped by communist goons. She seeks revenge on the chief executioner of the regime that tortured her, raped her, jailed and executed thousands of her countrymen, and brought the world a hair away from nuclear holocaust. The woman is committed for mental observation.

Immediately after he boasted of those very executions for a worldwide forum in the heart of their city and after he insulted his hosts as “hyenas,” fit only for “extermination,” New York’s media and high society fetes Cuba’s chief executioner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Their honored guest had twice plotted to incinerate and entomb the very New York now feting him. He was plotting more terrorism for New York during the very feting. Time magazine, headquartered in New York, then hails him as a “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.

Should, perhaps, a city that continues to adore a man who wanted to destroy it be corporately committed? In 2004, the New York Public Library was selling Che watches in its gift shop—not unlike the British Museum selling collector’s items bearing the image of Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Perhaps the library management can be forgiven for not knowing about Che’s plans for them. Less forgivable was their benefit gala in 2005, “An Affair in Havana,” which celebrated “Literary Havana.” Was the intention to celebrate Che’s book bonfire? Or was it to celebrate the sixteen librarians who today sit in Castro’s dungeons with twenty-five-year prison sentences for attempting to disseminate such subversive literature as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights? Even liberal columnist Nat Hentoff tried to make the library see reason, by calling it plainly “stupid,” to no avail. And just last year Manhattan’s International Center of Photography packed in the crowds for its exhibition titled “Che! Revolution and Commerce.”

“Tomorrow New York is going to be here,” Rudy Giuliani assured his stricken fellow citizens on 9/11. “And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before . . . I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can’t stop us!”⁹

New York-based Time, which places Ernesto “Che” Guevara among “The Heroes and Icons of the Century,” also hailed Rudy Giuliani as its “Man of the Year” in 2001 for being 9/11’s “crisis manager” and “consoler in chief,” and for “teaching us how to respond to a terrorist crisis.”

“We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home, to his places of work and recreation,” Che Guevara declared in his “Message to the Tri-Continental Conference” published in Havana in April 1967. “We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. This is a total war to the death. We’ll attack him wherever we find him. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him!”

Among the many future luminaries who attended Havana’s Tri-Continental Conference was a promising young man, Abu Am-mar, who would later become known as Yasir Arafat. Also in attendance was a young Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, who became “the World’s Most Wanted Terrorist.” In 1967, Ramírez Sánchez was an eager recruit into Cuba’s terror training camps started by Che in 1959. Through these connections, one can trace a very straight line from Che to 9/11. “I’m proud of the path of Osama bin Laden,” Ramírez Sánchez told the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in an interview from a French prison in 2002. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed . . . I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States nonstop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief.”¹¹

Historians of the Cuban Missile Crisis have firmly established that New York’s 9/11 explosions would appear like an errant cherry bomb if Che had succeeded in goading the Soviets and Americans into all-out war, which he tried to do. Only the prudence of Nikita Khrushchev stayed Che’s ambitions for a red apocalypse. Nor was the Black Liberation Army plot the only terror plot Che aimed at American citizens.

On November 17, 1962, the FBI cracked another terrorist plot by Cuban agents who targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and five hundred kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.

A little perspective: For their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts—all ten of them—that killed and maimed almost two thousand people, al Qaeda’s Spanish allies used a grand total of one hundred kilos of TNT. Cuban agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day.

Was this the handiwork of Che? All his biographers admit—grudgingly—that Che had a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery, including the DGI’s (Dirección General de Inteligencia) Liberation Department in charge of “guerrilla” training and foreign “liberation” plots. So it’s inconceivable that Che didn’t sign off on this early New York terror plot, much less that he opposed it.

The Toast of Manhattan