4
From Military Doofus to “Heroic Guerrilla”
Che waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill.
—Time MAGAZINE, HAILING ITS “HEROES AND ICONS OF THE CENTURY”
 

Che’s most famous book is titled Guerrilla Warfare. His famous photo is captioned “Heroic Guerrilla.” His Hollywood biopic is titled Guerrilla. And his most resounding failure came precisely as guerrilla warrior. There is no record of his prevailing in any bona-fide battle. There are precious few accounts that he actually fought in anything properly describable as a battle.
Had Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala in 1954, who later introduced him to Raul Castro and his brother Fidel in Mexico City, he might have continued his life as a traveling hobo, mooching off women, staying in flophouses, and scribbling unreadable poetry. Che was a revolutionary Ringo Starr, who, by pure chance, fell in with the right bunch and rode their coattails to world fame. His very name, “Che,” was given him by the Cubans who hobnobbed with him in Mexico. Argentines use the term “Che” much as Cubans use “chico,” or Michael Moore fans use “dude.” The term has an Italian rather than a Spanish pedigree. The Cubans noticed Ernesto Guevara using it, so it stuck. Fidel Castro recruited his new friend to serve as the rebel army’s doctor (on the strength of his bogus credentials) before their “invasion” of Cuba. On the harrowing boat ride through turbulent seas from the Yucatan to Cuba’s Oriente province in a decrepit old yacht, the Granma, a rebel found Che lying comatose in the boat’s cabin. He rushed to the commander. “Fidel, looks like Che’s dead!”
“Well, if he’s dead, then throw him overboard,” replied Castro.1 Guevara, suffering the combined effects of seasickness and an asthma attack, stayed on board.

Baptism of Fire

Guevara’s condition did not immediately improve upon landfall. At one point, he declared: “Doctor! I think I’m dying!”2 That was “doctor” himself, Ernesto Che Guevara, gasping to fellow rebel (and bona-fide physician) Faustino Perez during their Cuban baptism of fire. The Castro rebels had landed in Cuba three days earlier on the Granma from Mexico. The Cuban army, alerted by a peasant who didn’t seem to recognize his self-appointed liberators, had ambushed them near a cane field in a place named Alegria del Pio.
In Che’s Havana-published diaries (primary source for most of his biographers and media stories), he uses slightly different terminology regarding the incident. Much like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, Che recalls saying, “I’m hit!” But far be it from Che Guevara to stop there, so his official diary gushes forth: “Faustino, still firing away, looked at me . . . but I could read in his eyes that he considered me as good as dead. . . . Immediately, I began to think about the best way to die, since all seemed lost. I recalled an old Jack London story where the hero, aware that he is bound to freeze to death in the wastes of Alaska, leans calmly against a tree and prepares to die in a dignified manner. That was the only thing that came to my mind at that moment.”
In fact Faustino Perez later recounted that he was nearly wounded himself—not by the whizzing bullets, but by a hernia while trying to stifle his laughter at the look on Che’s face, especially after seeing the nature of Che’s wound. “It’s a scratch!” Perez blurted. “Keep walking.”3 A bullet had barely grazed the back of Che’s neck.
And what about Fidel? Upon hearing the first shots fired in anger against his glorious rebellion, this hands-on comandante-in-chief vanished, leaving his men to scramble and scrounge for themselves. The future Maximum Leader’s headlong flight from the skirmish site, through rows of sugarcane, leaping over brambles, dodging trees, was so long, and his speed so impressive, that one wonders if he really had missed his true calling, playing major league baseball, as urban legend has it.
None of his men, including Che, could find Castro for the rest of the day. But in the middle of the night, after miles of walking, Faustino Perez heard a tentative voice: “Mr. Perez? . . . Mr. Perez?” And out came Fidel Castro from a cane field, accompanied by his bodyguard, Universo Sanchez.4 “Later I learned that Fidel had tried vainly to get everybody together into the adjoining cane field,” is how the ever-faithful Che covers for Fidel in his diaries. Considering the length and breadth of Cuban cane fields in that area, “adjoining” is technically correct for a place three miles away.
A few weeks after this skirmish, when the only thing Fidel Castro commanded was a raggedy band of a dozen “rebels” in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains, he was approached by some of his rebel group’s many wealthy urban backers. “What can we do?” they asked. “How can we help the glorious rebellion against the upstart mulatto scoundrel Batista? We can write you some checks. We can buy you some arms. We can recruit more men. Tell us, Fidel, what can we do to help?”
“For now,” Castro answered, “get me a New York Times reporter up here.”
The rest is history. Castro’s July 26 Movement’s efficient and well-heeled communications network fell promptly to the task. Lines hummed from Santiago to Havana to New York. Within weeks, the New York Times’s ranking Latin American expert, Herbert Matthews, was escorted to Castro’s rebel camp with his note-pad, tape recorder, and cameras. Castro was being hailed as the Robin Hood of Latin America on the front pages of the world’s most prestigious papers. The following month CBS sent in a camera crew. Within two years Castro was dictator of Cuba, executing hundreds of political prisoners per week and jailing thousands more—all the while being hailed as “the George Washington of Cuba” by everyone from Jack Paar, to Walter Lippmann, to Ed Sullivan, to Harry Truman.
While Castro and Che failed to launch a successful military invasion, they invaded nonetheless, riding rivers of ink.

Shooting Back at Che

On their march from the Sierra mountains of eastern Cuba to Las Villas province in central Cuba during the fall of 1958, Che’s “column” somehow ran into a twenty-member band of Cuba’s Rural Guard, who started shooting. Che and his band scattered hysterically, bewildered and shocked by hearing hostile gunfire. In this mad melee, they fled from a band of country boys whom they outnumbered four to one. In their fright, the gallant guerrilleros abandoned two stolen trucks crammed with arms and documents.
“We found Guevara’s own diary and notebooks in one of the trucks,” recalls Cuban air force lieutenant Carlos Lazo, who had made a recon flight over the area and notified the Rural Guard of the Che column.5 The sight of Lieutenant Lazo’s plane overhead had greatly exacerbated Che’s column’s panic attack and spurred on their frantic flight. The “Heroic Guerrilla’s” voluminous writings, and those of his biographers, somehow overlook this exhilarating military engagement.
Oddly, the notebook and diaries found by Lazo differ dramatically from the “Che Diaries,” the “Secret Papers of a Revolutionary,” and the “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” later published by Castro’s government under Che Guevara’s byline, with a foreword by Fidel Castro himself. It is at this juncture that we see how mainstream historical research was poisoned, and the myth of Che the heroic guerrilla was created. On one hand, historians had access to a mass of confidential memos snatched from a frantically fleeing Che. On the other hand, a Stalinist regime published—with a deafening fanfare of trumpets—Che’s “official” diaries and reminiscences. And which set of writings became the source material for all those hard-nosed New York Times reporters, all those diligent Che biographers and erudite Ivy league scholars? The propaganda, of course.
“Those confidential notebooks and diaries we found in Che’s truck confirmed everything we were already saying about Che,” says Lazo. “First off, Guevara complained that his column was getting absolutely no help from the country people, whom he claimed were all latifundistas (large landholders). The first part was true, the country folk mostly shunned them. The second part was patently untrue, these weren’t huge landholders. They were simply anticommunist. That was enough for Che to mark them for reprisal. I saw where several boys, one of them seventeen, another eighteen, had been marked for execution in his diary. These were not ‘war criminals’ in any sense of the word. They were simply country boys who had refused to cooperate with him. I guess these had really annoyed him somehow. Shortly after the rebel victory these were rounded up and executed as ‘war criminals.’ ”
The New York Times, Look, and CBS weren’t around for these murders. Even those labeled “war criminals” by the rebels were often simply Cuban military men who had shot back. If they’d actually taken their oath and duty seriously, if they’d actually pursued Che’s rebels, fought them, and inflicted casualties—well, then Che’s henchmen went after them with particular zeal. Lieutenant Orlando Enrizo was one such. “They called us Batista war criminals,” he recalls from Miami today. “First off, I had nothing to do with Batista, didn’t even like the guy. He didn’t sign my checks. Me and most of my military comrades considered ourselves members of Cuba’s Constitutional Army.
“The Castro rebels whom we knew to be communist-led—though many were not communists themselves, simply dupes—start ambushing us, start killing our men in their barracks, destroying roads and bridges, terrorizing the countryside, and we’re supposed to greet them with kisses? Not me,” says Enrizo. “I fought them. I met an ex-rebel in exile later who told me point-blank that Che’s people would murder campesinos for not cooperating, or for being suspected informers, or whatever. Then they’d promptly blame it on us.”
And sure enough, the media, both in the United States and in Cuba at the time, took the rebels’ word as gospel that the men of the Cuban army were the murderers. Castro and his network always had the media’s ear.
“Well, I’ll admit it,” says Enrizo. “I fought the rebels hard. I shot during combat when people were shooting at us. I pursued them. I’m damn proud of my record. Let Che’s biographers and anyone else call me a war criminal. I murdered no one. How many of the rebels—much less Che—can claim that?”
Che never forgot Lieutenant Enrizo’s assault on his “column.” “I knew the dragnet was out for us after the rebel victory and escaped to Miami,” Enrizo says. Like most Cuban exiles of the time, Enrizo expected his exile to be short. One day shortly after he arrived in Miami, Lieutenant Enrizo met two men in a diner he had known in Cuba as Castro rebels. “Just the man we’ve been looking for!” they said to Enrizo as they surrounded him. Che Guevara himself had sent these men to Miami on a special mission to kidnap Orlando Enrizo and haul him back to Cuba for a spectacular show trial and public firing-squad execution, much like the famous trial held in February 1959 for Cuban army commander Jesus Sosa Blanco for which the international press was invited to attend. The kidnappers had been jubilant with the assignment and expressed their excitement to Che himself.
“They were excited with the assignment all right,” says Enrizo, “because it allowed them to finally scoot out of Cuba, something they’d been planning for a while, but couldn’t find a way out. Those guys still live here in Miami. We’re friends.”6
Enrizo’s fellow fighter, Lieutenant Lazo, uncovered much of interest in Che’s personal papers. “Every last one of the contacts Guevara had listed in his notebooks was a well-known Cuban Communist Party member.” Cuba’s Communist Party was rigidly Stalinist and slavishly followed Moscow’s orders. But to this day, assert that Castro’s rebels had communist support or were communists themselves, and you will find yourself labeled a crackpot by mainstream academia.
All serious scholars will tell you that only “Yankee bullying” pushed a reluctant Castro and Che into the arms of the Soviet Union. This wall of resistance to the truth has proven more durable than the concrete and steel of the Berlin Wall. It has been impervious to a half-century of contrary evidence, including declassified Soviet documents that list Raul Castro as a reliable KGB contact since 1953. This myth persists in the face of innumerable telling details, like the fact that when Che Guevara was arrested in Mexico City in 1956, he was actually carrying the card of the local KGB agent, Nikolai Leonov, in his wallet.
In short, Lazo’s documents are the Cuban version of the Venona papers. Declassified in 1995, the Venona project was a U.S. intelligence project that broke Soviet codes and revealed Soviet spies in the U.S. It makes no difference to academia, the major media, or other apologists. “War with the U.S. is my true destiny,” Castro had written to a confidant in early 1958.
The Batista government made all the information found in Che’s private papers known to the U.S. government. It did no good. The U.S. government held tough on its arms embargo against Batista, while the U.S. media lionized Castro.

The Battle of Santa Clara

Che’s most famous military exploit as a Cuban comandante was “The Battle of Santa Clara,” the December 1958 confrontation that caused Batista to lose hope and flee Cuba. “One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting,” blared a New York Times headline in a January 4, 1959, article about the battle. “Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties,” continued the article. “Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men.” “Santa Clara became a bloody battleground,” writes Jon Lee Anderson. “Pitched battles were fought in the streets. Tanks fired shells, airplanes bombed and rocketed . . . both civilian and guerrilla casualties began to pile up in hospitals.”
Exiles who were at Santa Clara tell a very different story. “I was there,” recalls Manuel Cereijo. “I lived in Santa Clara. Sure there was a little shooting, but people were actually going outside to see the show. Best I could gather, a grand total of two civilians and two or three rebels died.”
In fact, the Battle of Santa Clara—despite the reporting of ur-Jayson Blairs—was a puerile skirmish. The New York Times was still very much in Castro’s thrall and reported on that battle accordingly, though no reporters were actually on hand. So who were Anderson’s other impeccable sources? Che’s widow and the Castro regime, thirty years after the fact. Che Guevara’s own diary mentions that his column suffered exactly one casualty (a soldier known as El Vaquerito) in this ferocious “battle.” Other accounts put the grand total of rebel losses at from three to five men. Most of Batista’s soldiers saw no reason to fight for a crooked, unpopular regime that was clearly doomed, so they didn’t fire a shot, even those on the famous “armored train” that Guevara supposedly attacked and captured.
“Che targeted all enemy positions but concentrated on the armored train,” writes the ever-starstruck Anderson, who then resorts to quoting Che’s own Havana-published diaries. “The men were forced out of the train by our Molotov cocktails . . . the train became a veritable oven for the soldiers,”7 he claims.
Actually the men were “forced out of the train” by a bribe from Che to their commander before a shot was fired, much less any “Molotov cocktails” thrown.
Today that armored train features as a major tourist attraction in Santa Clara. The train, loaded with 373 soldiers and $4 million worth of munitions, had been sent from Havana to Santa Clara in late December by Batista’s high command as a last-ditch attempt to halt the rebels. Che’s rebels in Santa Clara bulldozed the tracks and the train derailed just outside of town.
Then a few rebels shot at the train and a few soldiers fired back. No one was hurt. Soon some rebels approached brandishing a truce flag and one of the train’s officers, Enrique Gomez, walked out to meet them. Gomez was brought to meet Comandante Guevara.
“What’s going on here!” Che shouted. “This isn’t what we agreed on!”
Gomez was puzzled. “What agreement?” he asked. Turned out, unbeknownst to the troops inside, the train and all its armaments had been sold, fair and square, to Guevara by its commander, Colonel Florentino Rossell, who had already hightailed it to Miami. The price was either $350,000 or $1 million, depending on the source.8 “The whole thing was staged for the cameras,” says Manuel Cereijo. “The train had already been sold to Che without a shot fired from either side. Then Che ordered the train to back up a bit so they could bulldoze the tracks, then have the train come forward so they could stage the spectacular ‘derailment,’ for the cameras.”9
Seems that Che was finally learning from Fidel how to wage a “guerrilla war.” Che had every reason to be upset. Actual shots fired against his troops? Here’s another eyewitness account regarding Che’s famous “invasion” of Las Villas province shortly before the famous “battle” of Santa Clara.
“Guevara’s column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camaguey. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista’s military commander in the city. The package contained one hundred thousand dollars with a note. Guevara’s men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops.”10
Francisco Rodriguez Tamayo was a rebel captain who had been in on many of these transactions, defecting mere months after the rebel victory. In an El Diario de Nueva York article on June 25, 1959, he claimed that Castro still had $4.5 million left in that “fund” at the time of the revolutionary victory. “I don’t know what might have happened to that money,” Rodriguez Tamayo adds.
“Castro kept the money in jute sacks at his camp,” recalls former rebel Jose Benitez. “I saw bags stuffed with pesos.”11
In January 1959, Che’s men arrested a Batista army colonel named Duenas at his office in Camaguey, Cuba. “What’s going on here!” the indignant colonel protested. “You people have to show me respect! I’m the one who let you through this province without a shot! Just ask Fidel! He’ll tell you!”12
Yet immediately after the Santa Clara bribe and skirmish, Che ordered twenty-seven Batista soldiers executed as “war criminals.” Gratitude was never his strong suit. Dr. Serafin Ruiz was a Castro operative in Santa Clara at the time, but apparently an essentially decent one. “But, comandante,” he responded to Che’s order, “our Revolución promises not to execute without trials, without proof. How can we just . . . ?”
“Look, Serafin,” Che snorted back, “if your bourgeois prejudices won’t allow you to carry out my orders, fine. Go ahead and try them tomorrow morning—but execute them now!”13 Che might have known Lewis Carroll as well as his Kafka, perhaps recalling the Queen of Hearts’s famous line to Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards!”
“Surrounded by death, it is a normal human reaction to reach out for life and even Che was not immune to this instinct,”14 Che hagiographer and New Yorker writer Anderson states, referring to Che’s actions during the apparently Stalingradesque battle of Santa Clara.
In fact, the only death Che was “surrounded by” was the flurry of executions without trial he ordered against his future enemies. “Damn, but Che has drowned this city in blood!” exclaimed his rebel comrade Camilo Cienfuegos upon passing through Santa Clara. “Seems that on every street corner there’s the body of an execution victim!”15
And that reaching out for life by Che was the ditching of his squat and homely Peruvian wife, Hilda Gadea, for an illicit affair with his new flame, the trim blonde Cuban Aleida March. Officials in Cuba’s U.S. embassy at the time became a little skeptical about all the battlefield bloodshed and heroics reported by the New York Times, CBS, Look, and Boys’ Life (honest, even they braved the perils of this war of bribery for a Castro interview). U.S. officials ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what the New York Times kept reporting as bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles. They found that in the entire Cuban countryside, in those two years of “ferocious” battles between rebel forces and Batista troops, the total casualties on both sides actually ran to 182.16
Che Guevara’s own diary puts the grand total of his forces’ losses during the entire two-year-long “civil war” in Cuba at twenty, about equal to the average number dead during Rio de Janeiro’s carnival every year. In brief, Batista’s army barely fought.

Stalinist Hit Man

During the Spanish Civil War Stalinists attempted to ensure their future rule by butchering their leftist allies. This butchery commenced well before they foresaw any victory over the common rightist foe, Franco. One year into that war, Spanish Stalinists were already piling up the bodies of anarchists, Trotskyites, and socialists in mass graves, each with a bullet hole in the nape of the neck. This leftist rabble had been useful as cannon fodder against Franco for a time. But by 1937 the time had come to get the house in order.
One leftist who narrowly escaped was George Orwell, who had volunteered for the anti-Franco anarchist militia and been wounded in battle. Unlike the rest of the literati (the always blustering Ernest Hemingway comes to mind here), Orwell actually enlisted in the Spanish Republican forces and fought—long, hard, and bravely. His Homage to Catalonia tells the whole story. Orwell scooted out of Spain in disguise and just in time—with Stalinist death squads hot on his tail.
There’s ample evidence that Ernesto “Che” Guevara was a very willing tool in similar Stalinist butchery against Cuban anticommunists and noncommunists during the anti-Batista rebellion. “For some reason,” recalls anti-Batista rebel Larry Daley, “it was always the known anticommunists who kept disappearing from our ranks. Che’s march from the Sierra to Las Villas and Santa Clara involved very little fighting by his column. His path had been cleared by another column led by rebel commander Jaime Vega, who was known as a noncommunist. Vega’s forces kept running into ambushes by the Cuban army and air force and took fairly heavy casualties (relatively speaking). We suspect they were being tipped off by Castro and Che confidants.”
From Havana to Santiago, the Castroites had a history of this type of treachery. Some of the known anticommunists among the rebels were executed by the rebels outright, but others, like Frank Pais and Rene Latour, kept running blindly into Batista’s army or police and were ambushed, or left to die in skirmishes where most communists survived. One entire boatload of eighty anti-Batista rebels who landed in Oriente province in a yacht known as the Corinthia from Florida was promptly defeated and captured by a Batista force. Heaven knows, such lethal efficiency was not characteristic of the bulk of Batista’s army. The Corinthia crew were known to be noncommunist, and had no affiliation with Castro whatsoever, but were probably infiltrated by his agents. Another tipoff? Many anti-Batista people of the time strongly suspect it.
A bit earlier, in the Sierra, a brave and well-known anticommunist named Armando Cañizarez had a famous run-in with Guevara at his camp. They didn’t see eye to eye on the recent Soviet invasion of Hungary. “Che was all for it,” recalls Armando’s brother Julio, who was also a rebel and witnessed the encounter. “ ‘The Soviets had every right—even a duty—to invade Hungary,’ Che said outright. The Hungarian rebels were ‘fascists! CIA agents!’—the whole bit. It sounded like he was reading straight out of Pravda or Tass. We gaped.
“Sure, to hear of Che Guevara reading straight from communist propaganda sheets may not sound odd now,” says Julio. “But remember, in 1957 Castro and all the rebel leaders claimed to be anti-communist, prodemocracy, etcetera. And many of us rank and file were indeed anticommunist.
“So Che’s attitude caught us off-guard. Armando kept getting hotter and hotter as he argued with Guevara. I could see it in his face. He couldn’t believe this Argentine guy—remember, this was early, Che wasn’t a famous comandante yet—was defending that naked aggression and terrible slaughter of Hungarians who were only fighting for their freedom and national independence, which we thought we were doing at the time ourselves. Armando stepped back and I could see he was balling his fist. He was preparing to bash Guevara—to punch his lights out!
“So I moved in and asked Armando to come over by me. But he was so worked up I had to grab him by the arm and drag him over. A little while later, after we’d cooled off a bit, another rebel soldier came up and whispered to us that we’d better get the hell outta there—and fast. We did get away from Guevara, but continued in the anti-Batista fight.”17
After the victory, the Cañizarez brothers watched in fury as Che and Castro implemented their covert plan to communize Cuba. They both came to the United States and promptly returned to Cuba with carbines in hand at the Bay of Pigs, where Armando gave his life for Cuban freedom after expending his last bullet. To this day, his family doesn’t know where Armando Cañizarez is buried.
“We have to create one unified command, with one comandante-in-chief.” Che laid down this Stalinist ground rule to his astonished Bolivian guerrillas shortly after he snuck into that country to start his guerrilla war. “That’s how we did it in Cuba. The guerrilla chief has to take all measures that will assure his future control of power, totally. We have to start early in destroying any and all other revolutionary groups that presume to exist outside of our control. Now, we may use other groups to help eliminate the primary enemy. But that doesn’t mean we’ll share any power with them after the victory. The Cuban experience is valid for the entire continent.”18

Castro’s Press Hut

At one point, when it seemed there were more newsmen in Cuba’s mountains than guerrillas or soldiers, it got so bad that a shack in Castro’s “guerrilla camp” in the Sierra Maestra actually had a sign, “Press Hut,” to accommodate the parade of American newspeople lugging their cameras, lighting equipment, sound equipment, makeup, and lunch baskets.19
In March 1957, CBS had sent two reporters, Robert Taber and Wendell Hoffman, into the Sierra with their microphones and cameras to interview Castro and his rebel “fighters.” The CBS men emerged with “The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters,” a breathtaking news-drama that ran on prime-time U.S. TV.
For the record: Botanically speaking, Cuba has no “jungle,” the “fighters” numbered about two dozen at the time (though both the New York Times and CBS mentioned “hundreds”), and the “fighting” itself up to that time had consisted of a few ambushes and murders of Batista soldiers, usually while they were asleep in their rural barracks.
CBS correspondent Robert Taber’s services to Castro had just begun, however. A few years later he was a founding father of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an outfit whose fifteen minutes of fame came in November 1963 when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines. Dan Rather soon picked up the torch from the “unbiased” Robert Taber.20
The U.S. embassy’s public affairs officer in Havana, Richard Cushing, even served as an unofficial tour guide for the throngs of American newspeople flocking into the Sierra to interview the Cuban rebels. And one rebel who hadn’t seen Castro since their days in joint Mexican exile met up with him in his mountain camp. “Pero Chico!” he blurted. “You’re getting so fat! How much weight you’ve put on!”
Didn’t he realize? Castro’s gut-busting “guerrilla war” was a moveable feast.
Typically, Che Guevara doesn’t even merit credit for the perfectly sensible scheme of bribing Batista’s army, then portraying little skirmishes to the international press as Caribbean Stalingrads. What about the source of these funds? They came, as we saw, from Fidel’s snookering of Batista’s wealthy political opponents. How had he convinced these hard-nosed businessmen to fund his July 26 Movement? By speaking the language of democracy and prosperity.
In late 1957, Castro signed an agreement called the Miami Pact with several anti-Batista Cuban politicians and ex-ministers in exile at the time. Che Guevara, never one to grasp the subtleties of Castro’s schemes, went ballistic over the Miami Pact, denouncing it as a shameful deal with “bourgeois” elements. “I refuse to lend my historic name to that crime!” he wrote. “We rebels have proffered our asses in the most despicable act of buggery that Cuban history is likely to recall!”21 Che underestimated the craftiness of Castro, mistaking the buggerers for the buggerees.
That a “guerrilla war” with “peasant and worker backing” overthrew Batista is among the century’s most widespread and persistent academic fables. But no Castroites who participated actually believed it—except, of course, Guevara. The Associated Press dispatches about Castro and Che’s “war” were actually concocted and written by Castro’s own agent in New York, Mario Llerena, who admits as much in his book, The Unsuspected Revolution. Llerena was also the contact with Herbert Matthews. (National Review’s famous cartoon in 1960 showing a beaming Castro saying, “I got my job through the New York Times!” nailed it.)
To give them credit, most of Castro’s comandantes knew their Batista war had been an elaborate ruse. After the glorious victory, they were content to run down and execute the few Batista men motivated enough to shoot back (most of these were of humble background), settle into the mansions stolen from Batistianos, and enjoy the rest of their booty.
British historian Hugh Thomas, though a Labor member who sympathized with Castro’s revolution in his younger years, studied mountains of records (outside Castro’s Cuba) and simply could not evade the truth. His massive and authoritative historical volume Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom sums it up very succinctly: “In all essentials, Castro’s battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington.”
“The Guerrilla war in Cuba was notable for the marked lack of military skills or offensive spirit in the soldiers of either side,” writes military historian Arthur Campbell, in his authoritative Guerillas: A History and Analysis. “The Fidelistas were completely lacking in the basic military arts or in any experience of fighting as a co-coordinated force. Their tactics . . . were confined to road ambushes which were seldom carried to close quarters, to patrols whose sole object was to fire at some isolated target far removed from the main communication arteries. . . . The Batistianos suffered from a near-paralysis of the will to fight . . . Fidel Castro was opposed by a weak and inefficient regime which had virtually worked its way out of power before the guerrilla war even started . . . this short campaign was noted . . . for its low number of casualties.”
As we shall see, Che Guevara possessed an immense capacity for self-deception regarding his “guerrilla war,” helping to set the stage for his doom in Bolivia. In Cuba few fought against him. In the Congo few fought with him. In Bolivia, Che finally started getting a taste of both. In short order, he would be betrayed by the very peasants he was out to “liberate.”

Che as Guerrilla Professor

Left-wing scholars also excuse Che’s radicalism as a response to the April 1961 Bay of Pigs attack against an innocent nationalist revolution that wished only to be left alone. They ignore the fact that every single invader, including the commanders, was a Cuban. If anything, the documentary evidence shows that Castro and Che dispatched five of their own versions of the Bay of Pigs invasions before the United States had even started contingency planning for theirs.
Shortly after entering Havana, Che had formed “the Liberation Department” in Cuba’s State Security Department and was already advising, equipping, and dispatching guerrilla forces to attempt to duplicate the Cuban rebellion (as he saw it) in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, and Nicaragua. Every one of those guerrilla forces, Cuban-communist led and staffed, was wiped out in short order, usually to the last man. Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Luis Somoza in Nicaragua weren’t about to follow Batista’s example in Cuba of pussyfooting around against guerrillas. A few years later Che equipped, advised, and sent more guerrillas to Argentina and Guatemala. Again, they were stomped out almost to a man. These guerrilla expeditions cost the lives of two of Che’s fatally credulous friends: the Guatemalan Julio Caceres and the Argentine Jorge Massetti. The story of the latter is worth retelling. Shortly after Che became the jailer and executioner of La Cabana, he flew in his Argentine flunkie friends. He ensconced them in stolen Cuban mansions and had them chauffeured around Havana in stolen Cuban cars. Che’s comrades were quite impressed with the local boy who had made good. Among these Argentines was an unemployed journalist, the ill-fated Jorge Massetti, whom Che had brought to Cuba to start a press agency, an unemployed lawyer named Ricardo Rojo, who later authored the reverential tome My Friend Che, and an unemployed caricaturist and ceramic artist named Ciro Bustos, who became a globe-trotting and self-professed intelligence ace.
One day in 1962, while meditating in his Havana office, Che had divined that “objective conditions for a revolution”22 had suddenly sprouted in his native Argentina and hatched a plan. He decided that his hardy and intrepid Argentine friends could be the revolutionary vanguard to hack their way into the northern Argentine jungle, set up a guerrilla foco and lead the masses to storm Buenos Aires’s Presidential Palace as boldly as Paris’s vainqueurs had stormed the Bastille.
Soon Che’s friends had graduated from Che’s Cuban academy of guerrilla war and proclaimed themselves “the People’s Guerrilla Army.” Weeks later, with the help of Cuban officers, they slipped through Bolivia and into northern Argentina, where they had set up a clever “underground” of rugged revolutionary sleuths and gun-slingers consisting mainly of professors and administrators from Cordoba University’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. A few philosophy students and bored bank tellers also rallied to the cause, hobbling into the guerrilla foco with severely blistered feet and plucking fleas from their legs—but boosting the ranks of “the People’s Guerrilla Army” to almost two dozen.
Soon all guerrilleros were issuing fire-breathing “War Communiques” from their bug- and snake-infested camp, poised to overthrow the democratically elected Argentine government.
The only Argentine “people” they ever recruited were a few more students and professional misfits like themselves. Within a month they were starving, aching from more blisters and sprained ankles, and scratching maniacally at mosquito and tick bites, all the while bickering and betraying each other. Within two months, and before a shot had been fired in anger against any Argentine force, three “guerrilla” slackers were executed by firing squad on Massetti’s orders. Che had taught Massetti well.
Local campesinos finally got tired of all the pasty-faced intellectuals skulking around. Buenos Aires dispatched a couple of patrols and wiped them out in a few days.
Che never got a chance to make his grand guerrilla entrance into his homeland, and the ever-acute Bustos had slipped away before things got really hot. (We’ll encounter him later in Bolivia.)
An escapee from one of Che’s “guerrilla schools,” Juan de Dios Marin, tells a blood-curdling story.
Juan was a Venezuelan recruit into one such camp that sprang up on the vast property of Che’s stolen luxurious seaside estate, Tarara, fifteen miles east of Havana, which Che had “requisitioned” for health reasons. “I am ill,” Che wrote in the Cuban newspaper Revolución. “The doctors recommended a house in a place removed from daily visits.” Apparently, Che’s doctors also prescribed a yacht harbor, as well as that huge swimming pool with the waterfall, and, of course, the futuristic television.
“This guerrilla school had fifteen hundred recruits,” recalls Marin. “We trained sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. The training lasts four months and six thousand communist guerrillas were turned out every year. The program was run by Spanish Civil War veteran Alberto Bayo. Our instructors were mainly Russians and Czechs. . . . The trainers and guides watched us constantly. Two boys who tried to sneak out one night were hauled in front of a firing squad and shot. The primary training manual is titled 150 Principles Every Guerrilla Should Know by Alberto Bayo.” Che did not instruct, and the Russians knew better than to use his manual.
Juan de Dios Marin finally became disillusioned and tried to escape. He was caught, savagely beaten, and finally lined up in front of a firing squad. “The wall was splattered with dried blood, and without a blindfold I found myself staring at the muzzles of six rifle barrels,” he recalls. “The shots went off and I thought I’d passed out. In a few seconds I realized they had shot blanks.”23
This was a favorite interrogation technique for the Che-trained police, a sort of good-cop/bad-cop ploy that often bore fruit when the rattled prisoner suddenly realized he was alive.
The only open skeptic of these revolutionary cadres was Castro. “These foreigners are nothing but troublemakers,” he told a Cuban rebel named Lazaro Ascencio right after the revolutionary triumph. “Know what I’m going to do with Che Guevara? I’m going to send him to Santo Domingo and see if Trujillo kills him.”24
How serious was Castro here? We can only guess. Castro’s immediate solution to occupying Che was to assign him as commander of La Cabana, an assignment shrewdly matched to Che’s aptitude and abilities.

Che and “Imperialism’s First Defeat” (the Bay of Pigs)

Castro and his court scribes declare the Bay of Pigs invasion “Imperialism’s First Defeat.” This should have been Che’s crowning moment, the highlight of his career, such as it was. Instead, most of the fourteen hundred freedom fighters trapped on that bloody beach saw more combat in three days than the “Heroic Guerrilla” saw his entire life—probably twice as much.
The invasion plan included a CIA squad dispatching three row-boats off the coast of Pinar del Rio in western Cuba, 350 miles from the true invasion site. They were loaded with time-release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors, and a tape-recording of battle. This area of Cuba was closest to the United States, making it a logical choice for any amphibious landing. So the ruse made sense, just as in World War II when Hitler was tricked into believing that the main Allied landing was coming at Calais, even as the invasion stormed Normandy.
Castro, as well as Che, decided that the action three hundred miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse. The real invasion was coming in the western Pinar del Rio right on the Yankees’ doorstep and—as luck would have it—Che Guevara’s area of command!
Che stormed over with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded, and waited for the “Yankee-mercenary” attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs, and mirrors put on a show just offshore.
It was later revealed that during the smoke-and-mirror show Che had managed to almost lobotomize himself with a misfire. The bullet pierced Che’s chin and exited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post-April-1961 pictures of the gallant Che. Che hagiographers Jon Lee Anderson, Jorge Castañeda, and Paco Taibo all admit that Che’s own pistol went off just under his face.
That Che missed a direct role in the defeat of imperialism troubles his hagiographers almost as much as it troubled Che himself. Ivy League luminary, Mexican politician, and Newsweek writer Jorge Castañeda explained that “Che’s contribution to the victory was crucial” in his Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. “Cuba’s 200,000 militiamen played a central role in the victory. They allowed Castro to deploy lightly armed, mobile forces to all possible landing points, forming a huge early-warning network. The militia’s training was entrusted to the Department of Instruction of the Rebel Armed Forces, headed by Che since 1960. His contribution to the victory was thus crucial. Without the militias, Castro’s military strategy would not have been viable; without Che the militias would not have been reliable.”25
This is a lie of a sort to make Alan Dershowitz and the late Johnnie Cochran eat their hearts out.
In fact, all who were on that beachhead and are now free to speak could set Castañeda straight about that Che-trained militia’s military prowess. A couple of strafing runs by a couple of Skyhawk jets from the U.S. carrier Essex lying just offshore would have sent Castro’s Che-trained forces scrambling even more frantically than they had done at first anyway, when they thought they actually faced a fully backed invasion. Indeed, any show of force at all from the invaders’ “allies”—a few salvoes from the destroyers cruising just offshore, anything—would probably have done the trick.
“When we first hit the beach and started shooting, the milicianos surrendered in droves,” recalls Bay of Pigs survivor Nilo Messer. “One entire battalion of milicianos surrendered en masse. So a couple of our guys are sitting there guarding a few hundred milicianos! But finally the Castro troops caught on. They saw we’d been abandoned, saw nothing else was coming, and realized how badly they outnumbered us.”
Denied air cover and naval fire by Camelot’s best and brightest, Brigada 2506 took more casualties (proportionately) its first day ashore at the Bay of Pigs than the U.S. forces who hit Normandy took on June 6, 1944. But they sucked it up and ripped into Castro and Che’s forces with a ferocity that amazed their U.S. trainers, men who’d earned their spurs in such fights as the Battle of the Bulge and Iwo Jima.
The Castro-Che communist forces outnumbered these men almost fifty to one, and almost lost the battle, suffering casualties of twenty to one from the abandoned invaders. There was no navelgazing about “why they hate us” by these mostly civilian volunteers. They didn’t need a Frank Capra to explain in brilliant documentaries “Why We Fight.” They’d seen communism point-blank: stealing, lying, jailing, poisoning minds, murdering. They’d seen the midnight raids, the drumbeat trials. They’d heard the chilling “Fuego!” as Che’s firing squads murdered thousands of their brave countrymen. More important, they heard the “Viva Cuba Libre!” and the “Viva Cristo Rey!” from the bound and blindfolded patriots, right before the bullets ripped them apart.
“They fought like Tigers,” wrote their U.S. comrade in arms and trainer Grayston Lynch, who himself had landed on Omaha Beach, helped throw back Hitler’s panzers at the Battle of the Bulge six months later, and fought off human wave attacks by Chi-Coms on Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge six years after that.26 “They fought hard and well and inflicted terrible casualties on their opponents,” writes another of the Cubans’ trainers, U.S. Marine Corps colonel Jack Hawkins, who might also be considered judicious in these matters. Hawkins is a multidecorated veteran of Bataan, Iwo Jima, and Inchon. “They were not defeated,” continues Hawkins about Brigada 2506. “They simply ran out of ammunition and had no choice but to surrender. And that was not their fault. They fought magnificently. They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies, protection, and support that had been promised by their sponsor, the government of the United States.”27
“For the first time in my life I was ashamed of my country,” admits Grayston Lynch about the Bay of Pigs. “Tears filled my eyes.”28
An abandoned invader named Manuel Perez-Garcia, who parachuted into that inferno of Soviet firepower known as the Bay of Pigs, epitomizes the depth of this betrayal. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he had volunteered for the U.S. Army and made paratrooper with the famed Eighty-second Airborne Division. “The Philippine theater of operations is the locus of victory or defeat,” said General Douglas MacArthur. And it was exactly into that locus that Cuban-born Manuel Perez-Garcia parachuted after battling through New Guinea.
At war’s end the Eighty-second presented a special trophy to the U.S. soldier who had racked up the most enemy kills in the Pacific theater. Today that trophy sits prominently in Miami’s Bay of Pigs Museum, donated by the man who won it, Bay of Pigs veteran and Cuban-born Manuel Perez-Garcia. The trophy sits alongside the three Purple Hearts, three Bronze Stars, and three Silver Stars Perez-Garcia earned in the Pacific.
When Japan’s ferocious General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the infamous “Tiger of Malaya,” finally emerged from his headquarters to surrender his pistol, samurai sword, and battle flag to the first U.S. soldier he saw, he found himself facing Manuel Perez-Garcia. “Manuel was always out front,” recalls his brother-in-arms José M. Juara Silverio, a fellow paratrooper at the Bay of Pigs.29
“The tip of the spear,” military historian John Keegan calls the place Perez-Garcia always scrambled to occupy. In fact, Perez-Garcia ranks right behind Audie Murphy in the enemy kills by a U.S. soldier in World War II, with eighty-three Japanese soldiers killed in combat. (General Yamashita’s battle flag and sword, by the way, are also on display at the Bay of Pigs Museum.)
When Kim Il Sung blitzkrieged South Korea in June 1950, Manuel Perez-Garcia rallied to the U.S. colors again, volunteering for the U.S. Army at age forty-one. It took a gracious letter from President Harry Truman himself to explain that by U.S. law he was slightly overaged but that, “You, sir, have served well above and beyond your duty to the nation. . . . You’ve written a brilliant page in service to this country.”
Perez-Garcia’s son, Jorge, however, was the right age. He joined the U.S. Army, made sergeant, and died from a hail of bullets while leading his men in Korea on May 4, 1952. To fight America’s enemies, Perez-Garcia and his son were shipped thousands of miles to distant continents. When he tried fighting a tyrant every bit as rabid and murderous as Tojo or Kim Il Sung, but only ninety miles away, he was abandoned.
Here’s a summary of the battle of the Bay of Pigs, and the Che-indoctrinated militia’s performance: forty-one thousand Castro troops and militia with limitless Soviet arms, including tanks, planes, and batteries of heavy artillery, met fourteen hundred mostly civilian exile freedom fighters, most with less than a month’s training. These men carried only light arms and one day’s ammo. The Che-trained militia was immediately halted, before fleeing hysterically.
They were ordered back, probed hesitantly, got mauled again, and retreated in headlong flight. They marched back again, many at gunpoint, and rolled in battery after battery of Soviet 122mm howitzers. They rained two thousand rounds of heavy artillery fire into lightly armed men they outnumbered twenty to one. (“Rommel’s crack Afrika Korps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” writes Bay of Pigs historian Haynes Johnson.) Then Castro’s unopposed air force strafed the invaders repeatedly and at will.
The invaders stood their ground, and the militia was forced to probe yet again, but with heavy reinforcements (twenty-to-one odds weren’t enough). Then they rained another Soviet artillery storm on the utterly abandoned and hopelessly outnumbered invaders.
Finally they moved in and overwhelmed the freedom fighters—after three days of effort, and only when the invaders, who hadn’t eaten or slept in three days, were completely out of ammo with no more coming. When the smoke cleared and all their ammo had been expended, when a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after their very mortar and machine-gun barrels had melted from their furious rates of fire, after three days of relentless battle, barely fourteen hundred of them had squared off against fifty-one thousand troops trained by Che’s Department of Instruction of the Rebel Armed Forces, as well as Castro’s entire air force and squadrons of Stalin tanks. In the process, Castro’s forces took 3,100 casualties. The invaders took 114 casualties.30 They did it while being denied the air support and cover they expected from the Kennedy administration.
Nilo Messer, Jose Castaño, and Manuel Perez-Garcia, along with their thousand-plus surviving Band of Brothers from Brigada 2506, have never seen fit to write an instructional book an amphibious warfare. Manuel Perez-Garcia, in particular, might be expected to know a thing or two regarding combat. The few long-fighting Escambray rebels who managed to survive the Castroite massacres have also refrained from expounding in print on their experiences.
Leave it to Che Guevara (characterized as “modest” by his biographers), after a few skirmishes that the Cripps or Bloods would shrug off as a slow week, to deliver to the world his book Guerrilla Warfare, his opening chapter titled “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method.” “You really have to laugh at that book,” says retired CIA officer Mario Riveron (himself a Bay of Pigs survivor), whose job was to study, track, and finally capture Che in Bolivia. “Guevara’s name is certainly on the cover of that book. But no one who actually fought against him believes those were his ideas. The man was a complete failure as a guerrilla. He constantly got lost. He didn’t have reliable maps. He split his forces in two and they both got lost, without any contact with each other for several months, though they were often bumbling around a mere mile from each other. He abandoned camp-sites and carelessly left documents and pictures and supplies where we could easily find them. He knew nothing about the use of aerial reconnaissance or helicopters against guerrillas, which strengthens the suspicion that he lifted his stuff straight from Mao. Best of all, he was unable to recruit one single peasant into his guerrilla ranks. And here were the people he was there to ‘liberate.’ ”31
Many who fought alongside Che Guevara were also astounded by his thundering military ineptitude. “When I got to the Sierra,” recalls former rebel comandante Huber Matos in an interview with Pedro Corzo for the documentary Anatomia de un Mito, “Che had already been fighting for over a year. He commanded a column. I was assigned to form a defense line—a line of fortifications in an area under his command. So I consulted him, asked him about it, asked him to help me with the plan.
“ ‘Look Huber,’ he replied straight to my face, ‘I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.’ ‘But you’re the commander here?’ I answered. ‘I mean, we have to coordinate this thing, have to come up with some kind of tactical plan. I’m assigned to this so I’d like to know how many men to use, and where to place them. I want to make sure that my defense line is coordinated with your own defense plan for the area.’ ‘But I don’t have any plan,’ Che answered. Several times after that he confessed to me that he knew nothing about tactical military matters.”32
Che did show up at the Bay of Pigs battle site—on the day the shooting ended. He walked into a building strewn with captured and wounded freedom fighters and looked around with his wry Argentine smile. “We’re going to execute every one of you,” he barked. Then he turned on his heels and walked out.33 (As usual, Castro had a plan for these prisoners that was much shrewder. By returning them, Castro’s regime reaped a propaganda windfall, as well as a $62-million ransom payment from JFK.) Jon Lee Anderson describes the scene of Che’s arrival with ghoulish humor: “Upon recognizing Che, one of the POWs was so terrified he urinated in and soiled his trousers.”34 One of Anderson’s primary sources for his book was the Castro government, so the story should be suspect. No Brigadista I’ve interviewed recalled it. Assume, however, for the sake of argument, that this incident of the “terrified” captive actually happened. What this captive feared was Che’s well-known treatment of defenseless men. Anderson has a remarkable sense of humor, indeed.
Along with his fellow prisoners from Brigada 2506, Manuel Perez-Garcia lived for almost two years under a daily death sentence in Castro’s dungeons. Escaping it would be a simple matter of signing the little confession eagerly presented almost daily by his communist captors. The little piece of paper denounced the United States, the very nation that had left them to die.
Neither Manuel, Jose, Nilo, nor any of their brothers in arms signed that document. Many spat on it, figuring they were signing their own death warrants in the act. After all, Castro and Che’s firing squads were murdering hundreds of Cubans a week for trivial offenses. These men were avowed enemies of the regime.
“We will die with dignity!” snapped Brigada 2506 second-in-command Erneido Oliva to the furious communists day after day. An attitude like Brigada 2506’s not only enrages but baffles the likes of Castro—and Che, as we will see from his behavior in Bolivia.
The comrades of Manuel Perez-Garcia recall he was particularly defiant and scornful toward his strutting Castroite captors, who after the shooting stopped, lorded over captive men with new-found bravery. Having observed these Che-trained men in battle—and considering his own experience in battle—Perez-Garcia must have found a few snorts and wisecracks irresistible. General Yamashita himself, after conquering half of Britain’s Asian empire with a fraction of the empire’s Asian forces, never put on such airs as Fidel and Che as they toyed with these prisoners.
Fellow prisoner Jose Castaño recalls one morning in Havana’s El Principe prison when Manuel Perez-Garcia made a particularly snide comment to one of his captors. “That commie guard was probably around twenty-five years old, and held a loaded Czech machine gun,” Jose says. “He was still afraid of the fifty-one-year-old, half-starved prisoner, Manuel! So he called over a couple of his buddies and they were moving in on Manuel—who quickly jerked off his belt and wrapped one end around his fist. He sneered at them, ‘Come on!’ and started snapping the buckle end of the belt like a bullwhip. “Suddenly an officer rushes up and whispers something into the guards’ ears. This defused the scene immediately,” Jose recalls. “Manuel’s history was well known even by the Castroites.”35
In private, Castro was fuming at his own militia’s performance. A week after the battle, Castro visited some of the freedom fighters in their Havana prison cells. One had been an old acquaintance from college. “Hombre, if I had twenty thousand men like you guys, I’d have all of Latin America in my hands right now,” Castro told his old friend.36

Che Thanks the Best and Brightest

Four months after the Bay of Pigs invasion the Organization of American States held a conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay. At this event, JFK’s special counsel and speechwriter Richard Goodwin represented the United States and had a long and amiable chat with the Cuban representative, Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
“Behind the beard his features are quite soft, almost feminine,” Goodwin wrote in a memo to JFK, declassified in 1999. Guevara “has a good sense of humor, and there was considerable joking back and forth during the meeting . . . his conversation was free of propaganda and bombast. He spoke calmly, in a straightforward manner, and with the appearance of detachment and objectivity . . . he went on to say that he wanted to thank us very much for the [Bay of Pigs] invasion—that it had been a great political victory for them—enabled them to consolidate. At the close he said that he would tell no one of the substance of this conversation except Fidel. I said I would not publicize it either.
“After the conversation was terminated I left to record notes on what had been said. [Che] stayed at the party, and talked with the Brazilian and Argentine representatives. The Argentine fellow—Larretta—called me the next morning to say that Guevara had thought the conversation quite profitable, and he told him that it was much easier to talk to someone of the ‘newer generation.’ ”37
In this recently declassified document, Goodwin revealed no discomfiture or skepticism regarding any of Che’s statements. Nor did he offer the mildest rebuttal to Guevara. Apparently they were occupied with all that “considerable joking back and forth.” Che indeed had ample reason to be grateful to the Best and Brightest of the Kennedy administration. As Castro often remarked during 1960, “We’d better hope Kennedy wins the election. If Nixon wins our revolution won’t last.”38 Goodwin, a Harvard Law School graduate, typified the indulgent attitude of many of the young, new left in America toward Castro. “I believe this conversation [with Guevara]—coupled with other evidence which has been accumulating—indicates that the Soviet Union is not prepared to undertake the large effort necessary to get [Cuba] on their feet,” wrote Goodwin, “and that Cuba desires an understanding with the U.S. They would have free elections—but only after a period of institutionalizing the revolution had been completed. . . . They could agree not to make any political alliance in the East. Che said they did not intend to construct an Iron Curtain around Cuba . . . [the U.S.] should seek some way of continuing the belowground dialogue which Che has begun. We can thus make it clear that we want to help Cuba and would help Cuba if it would sever communist ties and begin democratization.”39
Of course, Goodwin was outsmarted. At the time of that meeting, Che Guevara himself was the Cuban regime’s chief champion of a Soviet alliance—“the scion of the Soviet Union,” his biographer Jorge Castañeda labeled Guevara. Che was the “vital link” with the Soviets, was how Anderson put it. The Soviet ambassador to Cuba at the time, Alexander Alexiev, reports that while planning the secret placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, Che was consistently the most gung-ho—“the most active” is how Alexiev describes the eager Guevara during the meetings.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

During the October 14, 1962, broadcast of a Sunday chat show, Issues and Answers, a disdainful McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security advisor, told a national audience there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba. “Refugee rumors,” he called the eyewitness reports from Cuban exiles about those missiles—reports they’d been giving the State Department and CIA for months by then, after risking their lives to obtain them.
“Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued Bundy, barely masking his scorn. “There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba.”40 After all, at Punta del Este, Che Guevara had confided that valuable piece of information to Bundy’s colleague Richard Goodwin. And between those insufferable Cuban refugees and the “straightforward” Che Guevara, the Best and Brightest had chosen to trust the latter.
President Kennedy himself sounded off the following day. “There’s fifty-odd thousand Cuban refugees in this country,” he sneered, “all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They’re the ones putting out this kind of stuff.”41
Exactly two days later JFK had photos taken by a U-2 spy plane of those “refugee rumors.” He saw nuclear-armed missiles pointing at American cities. The response of Kennedy and his team to the Cuban Missile Crisis has been the stuff of legend, told and retold in movies as a victory of shrewd dealing and brinksmanship. In fact, the solution from the best and the brightest was to team up with the Soviets and grant the Cuban communist regime its mutually assured protection.
“Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said,” said Castro himself. “Perhaps one day they’ll be made public.”42
“We can’t say anything public about this agreement,” said Robert F. Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis. “It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.”43 For its part in the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal, the administration secretly agreed not to oppose Castro’s government in Cuba.
On October 28, 1962, when news that part of the “resolution” of the Cuban Missile Crisis meant removing the missiles from Cuba, thousands of Cuban troops suddenly surrounded the missile sites. A rattled Soviet foreign minister, Anastas Mikoyan, rushed to Havana and met with Castro. The KGB itself feared the Cuban commandos might attack, take control of the missiles, and start World War III.
Mikoyan somehow defused the situation during his meeting with Castro, no doubt explaining that his regime had come out of the deal smelling like a rose. “Mutually Assured Protection,” you might call it, with Castro and Che protected by both the Soviets and the United States. True to its word, the United States immediately started rounding up the Cuban exiles who had been launching commando raids against Castro from South Florida.
The Kennedy administration launched into this effort with gusto, giving the U.S. Coast Guard six new planes and twelve new boats and boosting their manpower by 20 percent. JFK called British prime minister Harold Macmillan and informed him that some of those crazy Cubans had moved their operations from South Florida to the Bahamas. Her Majesty’s Navy was only too happy to help. Thus, the very Cuban exiles being trained and armed to launch raids on Cuba by the CIA only the week before were now being arrested by U.S. and British forces.44
What about Goodwin’s belief that Che lacked “propaganda or bombast”? A month later—thinking he was speaking off the record to the London Daily Worker—Che Guevara explained: “If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims!”45
Che Guevara himself, of course, did not want to be one of the victims of a nuclear exchange he was only too ready to start. He and Fidel had priority reservations in the Soviet bomb shelter outside Havana. The Soviet ambassador of the day, Alexander Alexiev, reports that Castro and Che had made sure of that.46
As early as 1955, Ernesto Guevara had written to his doting mother that a struggle against the United States was his “true destiny.” “We must learn the lesson of absolute abhorrence of imperialism. Against that class of hyena there is no other medium than extermination!”47 In October 1962, Guevara had gotten tantalizingly close to that medium.
Richard Nixon summed up the Cuban Missile Crisis “resolution” best. “First we goofed an invasion—now we give the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard.”48
Safeguarded by U.S. policy and lavished with Soviet arms, the Cuban communists’ revolution had a secure base to hatch and breed guerrilla wars in pursuit of the dream of “continental liberation” with the Andes as the “Sierra of the continent.” All the odds were with them. With a halfway-competent guerrilla leader as head of the DGI’s “Liberation Department,” they might have pulled it off. Instead they had Ernesto “Che” Guevara.