Exposing the Real Che Guevara

Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines in 1962. “Cuban militia units [whose training and morale, remember, Jorge Castañeda insists we credit to Che] commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counter-revolutionaries and bandits.”¹ Though it raged from one tip of the island to the other, most Cubans know this war as “the Escambray Rebellion,” for the mountain range in central Cuba where most of the bloodiest battles raged. Cuba’s country folk went after the Reds with a ferocity that forced Castro and Che to appeal to their Soviet sugar daddies for help. In the countryside, these Cuban rednecks often faced the firing squads untrussed, shoved in front of a recently dug pit with their hands free. “Aim right here!” was a favorite among some of these as they reached below the belt, “ ’cause you ain’t got any!”

“I was a poor country kid,” says Escambray rebel Agapito Rivera. “I didn’t have much, but I had hopes and aspirations for the future. And there was abosolutely no chance that I’d go work like a slave on one of Cuba’s state farms. I planned on working hard, but on my own, for myself, getting my own land maybe. Then I saw the Castro communists stealing everything from everybody. They stole my hopes. I had no choice but to fight them.”² Agapito Rivera had two brothers and nine cousins who took up arms in the anticommunist guerrilla war. He was the only survivor.

“It was hard to sleep in those days,” recalls Emilio Izquierdo, who was twelve at the time. He lived in the Pinar del Rio province of western Cuba where, in 1961, a fierce rural rebellion also raged. Cuba had been divided into three military zones, each with a member of the Holy Revolutionary Trinity in command. The eastern provinces were Raul’s, the center was Fidel’s, and the western, including Pinar del Rio province, was Che’s.

“All those Russian helicopters flying over day and night—whomp-whomp-whomp. I still remember the sound, almost like thunder. It was constant. And Russian trucks loaded with troops constantly passing in front of our house. They were all headed to the hills to fight the freedom fighters. It was a terrible thing to watch, because we knew the rebels got no support from anywhere, not from the Americans. They fought on a shoestring with very little ammunition and supplies. It’s amazing how they held out and the damage they caused the communists. Very few people on the outside know about this terrible fight. My family lost many friends in that fight.”³

One of these was Aldo Robaina. “My brother always said those communist SOBs would never take him alive,” recalls Aldo’s brother, Guillermo Robaina, who would bring the guerrillas supplies from time to time. “I remember the time I brought them a supply of bullets I’d managed to steal from Castro’s army. My brother’s little band of rebels divided them up right there—and it came to sixty-seven bullets per person. They were ecstatic. ‘Now we’ll see!’ they said, and everybody was slapping backs. They regarded it as an enormous amount of ammo. The following week my brother and his band were wiped out. One who made it out of the encirclement said they simply ran out of bullets but refused to surrender. They literally fought to the last bullet. My brother kept his vow—the communists never took him alive. We don’t know where he’s buried.”⁴

“My father took to the hills of Pinar del Rio as a rebel in 1961. We knew what he was up against because we could see the Russian helicopters and the convoys of Russian trucks constantly taking troops into the hills to pursue them. My mother, as you can imagine, was going through a living hell. But my father said he’d fight those communists as long as he had a breath in his body and a bullet in his gun. We lived in the country, had a small but comfortable house. We didn’t have a sugar mill or anything like that. When we came to the U.S. that’s all we heard, ‘Oh you people must be those millionaire plantation owners that lost your fortunes to Castro, huh?’

“We were very surprised by the ignorance, and even today we still hear much of the same things. One day I was out in front of the house playing and one of the Russian trucks braked to a halt in front of me. ‘Get your mother!’ some guy yelled from the window. I ran inside and my mother opened the door and peeked out. She was, of course, terrified. ‘You the wife of Piñeiro, right?’ the soldier shouted from the truck. My mom stood there stunned, but she nodded.

“Then two guys in back of the truck hoisted a body like if it was a butchered animal. ‘Well here’s your husband!’ and they threw my father’s body out of the back of the truck into a ditch in front of our house and roared off, all of them laughing. All the neighbors came running to console my mother who was . . . well, as you can imagine, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. My father had over fifteen bullet holes in his body. He fought to his last bullet. He had always told my mother the communists would never take him alive. They certainly didn’t.”⁵

The Maoist line about how “a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people” fit Cuba’s anticommunist rebellion perfectly. Raul Castro himself admitted that his government faced 179 bands of “counter-revolutionaries” and “bandits” at the time.⁶

In a massive “relocation” campaign—reminiscent of that of the Spanish general Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler at the turn of the century—Castro’s armed forces ripped hundreds of thousands of rural Cubans from their ancestral homes at gunpoint and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba. One of these Cuban wives refused to be relocated. After her husband, sons, and nephews were murdered by the gallant Che and his minions, she grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip, and took to the hills. She became a rebel herself. Cubans know her as La Niña del Escambray.⁷

For a year she ran rings around the communist armies sweeping the hills in pursuit of her. Finally she ran out of ammo and supplies and was captured. La Niña suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons for years, but she survived to live in Miami today. Her tragic story would make ideal fodder for Oprah, for the professorettes of “Women’s Studies,” for Gloria Steinem, for a Hollywood movie, perhaps a Susan Sarandon role. Feisty female leads are big in Hollywood. They don’t come much feistier than Zoila Aguila, her real name. Had she been fighting, say, Somoza or Pinochet, or U.S. forces in Iraq, Hollywood and New York would be all over her story. But she fought the most picturesque poster boy of the left, so her story is deemed uninteresting.

The skirmishing of Castro and Che that set them up to occupy the vacuum of the Batista regime lasted two years. The anticommunist rebellion lasted six years, and involved ten times as many fighters as the Castro-Che rebellion against Batista. But you’ll search the New York Times, Look, Life, CBS, and Paris Match in vain for any stories on these rebels. In fact, you will not find any mention whatsoever of this fierce guerrilla war that raged for six years within ninety miles of America’s borders.

Che’s hagiographers aren’t much help either. Jon Lee Anderson’s eight-hundred-page biography devotes two hundred pages of hyper-ventilating prose to Che’s puerile skirmishes in the Sierra and Las Villas. Anderson covers Cuba’s six-year, islandwide, anticommunist rebellion—that, again, according to Che’s accomplice Raul Castro, saw 179 different bands of anticommunist “bandits” and cost the Castroites six thousand casualties—in two sentences. Jorge Castañeda skips the anticommunist rebellion altogether, though he was clear that Che was technically Cuba’s second-in-command at the time.

In 1987, the Cuban regime’s own press hailed Che Guevara’s role in the glorious slaughter of rural rebels. “Presencia del Che en la Lucha Contra Bandidos y Limpia del Escambray,” crowed the Castroite press (“Che’s Role in the War Against Bandits and the Escambray CleanUp”). The Castroites were “cleaning” the area, you see, of counter-revolutionary vermin and “bandits,” also known as brave peasants who took up arms and took to the hills to defend their humble family farms against the genuine bandits—Cuba’s Stalinist regime.

“With his great moral authority, tenacity and fine example,” says one of the Che-trained bandit exterminators quoted in the article, “Che came into our camp and compelled our combat spirit. He pored over all the battle maps. He pointed out the main points of bandit resistance. Che inquired about all of our recent actions. He instructed and investigated and greatly fortified us. He spurred us on to whip and whip the enemy until defeating him. Che’s lessons, his visits and his inspiration contributed much to the victory of the War Against the Bandits. When he was leaving our camp he turned around pointed to the hills and shouted, ‘The mountains are now ours!’ ”⁸

Indeed they were. According to evidence presented to the Organization of American States by Cuban-exile researcher Dr. Claudio Benedi, four thousand anticommunist guerrillas were summarily executed during this rural rebellion.

Here was a genuine rebellion with true battles. Cuba’s genuine Bravehearts, Davy Crocketts, and Patrick Henrys fought a desperate and lonely war against a Soviet-backed enemy, against outrageous odds. They died unknown to the world, many summarily by firing squad. Those interested in plugging this yawning gap in their historical knowledge should forget the mainstream media and academia. Consult Enrique Encinosa’s superb book, Unvanquished.