Exposing the Real Che Guevara

Monje, a Bolivian native and a shrewd and veteran communist, must have wondered what planet Che Guevara had been inhabiting lately. The local Indians seemed equally mystified. “Their silence was absolute,” wrote Che in his diaries about confronting the residents of a Bolivian village named Espina, “as though we were in a world apart.”² This unnerved Che. In keeping with this principle, he had diligently prepared his guerrillas by having them learn some of the Quechua dialect spoken by most Andean Indians.

There is no evidence that Castro took the Bolivian mission seriously except as a means to rid himself of Che Guevara. His Soviet patrons were certainly not behind it. They knew better. They’d seen every guerrilla movement in Latin America wiped out. The only thing these half-baked adventures accomplished was to upset the Americans, with whom they’d cut a splendid little deal during the Cuban Missile Crisis to safeguard Castro. Why blow this arrangement with another of Che’s harebrained adventures? Much better to work within the system in Latin America, reasoned the Soviets at this time, subtly subverting the governments by using legitimate communist parties. A few years later Salvador Allende’s victory in Chile bore fruit for the Soviet strategy.

The Bolivian Communist Party itself had very clear instructions regarding Che’s Bolivian adventure. Its head, Mario Monje, was a faithful follower of the Soviet party line who wanted nothing to do with Che, except to help him fail. As soon as Che entered Bolivia, Monje visited both Havana and Moscow for instructions. According to former CIA officer Mario Riveron, who headed the CIA group that tracked down Che in Bolivia, Monje was gratified to learn that he and Castro were in full accord. Fidel’s advice to Monje on helping Che was very explicit: “Not even an aspirin.”³

The Bolivian communist leader’s lack of commitment was so obvious that even the numbskull Guevara finally sensed it, but without at first grasping its origins in Moscow and Havana. After meeting with Monje in December 1966, Che wrote in his diaries, “The party is already against us, and I don’t know where this will lead.”⁴

It would lead, of course, to doom, to betrayal at the hands of Castro himself. That the “ardent prophet of the Cosmos,” “the noblest historical figure in all of Latin America” had secretly sent out word that the Heroic Guerrilla would soon “sleep with the fishes” wasn’t conceivable for Che—just yet. It would culminate in October 1997, with Castro shedding crocodile tears over his “very best friend” at Che’s reinterment and funeral extravaganza in Santa Clara.

According to Mario Riveron, as early as 1964 Castro was already grooming Che for the same fate as his revolutionary comrade Camilo Cienfuegos, who had come across in the Granma and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Castro brothers and Che. “Castro’s ego simply will not allow anyone to upstage him, even temporarily, even slightly,” according to Mario Riveron. “Because of Che’s fame by that time, eliminating him would be a more delicate matter than getting rid of Camilo. But get rid of him he would.”

Camilo had entered Havana a day before Che on January 3, 1959, where, acting on Castro’s orders, he promptly took command of Cuba’s military headquarters at Camp Colombia. Camilo was handsome and charismatic, and in the eyes of many, actually outshone Fidel and Che at early revolutionary rallies, often stealing the limelight with his ready smile and humor. Simpático is the term Cubans use for Camilo Cienfuegos’s personality. Castro seemed to recognize this and actually turned to Camilo on the podium during his first mass rally in Havana. “Voy bien, Camilo?” Fidel asked (am I doing OK, Camilo?). Such deference was—to say the least—not a Castro trademark.

A few months later, Camilo flew from Havana to the eastern province of Camaguey for the hateful task of arresting his friend and revolutionary comrade Huber Matos, who was being devoured by the revolution he helped seat at the table. On the flight back to Havana after he dutifully arrested Matos, Camilo Cienfuegos disappeared without a trace. His plane crashed and vanished, said the authorities, though the evening had excellent weather, according to all records. The Castro brothers made a big show of a search and rescue, but nothing turned up. To many, including Huber Matos himself, Camilo’s death seemed much too convenient.

Two of Camilo’s loyal lieutenants also died in “accidents” within days of their commander’s disappearance. The head of Camaguey’s small airport, from which Camilo had taken off on his doomed flight, was also suspicious and started to ask questions about the rescue effort. Two weeks after Camilo’s disappearance, this airport official was found with a bullet through his head. His death was ruled a “suicide.”

Just two months after arriving in Bolivia and setting up camp in Nancahuazu, Che decided to leave a small crew at the camp and take his guerrilla band on a “conditioning” and “reconnaissance” trek through the surrounding area. “We’ll be back next week,” he told the others.

Not two miles from the camp, Che’s outfit lost its bearings. Two weeks later, they ran out of food. A month later, they were still stumbling around totally lost, eating monkeys and parrots for sustenance and constantly bickering. Several had caught malaria. Then two men drowned while trying to cross a river with a load of six rifles and ammo. Forty-eight days later, the rest stumbled back to the main campsite, with their masterful guerrilla chieftain at their head, demoralized, sick, and half-starved. Here they learned that the few Bolivian guerrillas in their band were already deserting and ratting them out, and that the local peasants had already alerted the army to their “liberators’ ” presence.

Che, the author of the century’s best-selling guerrilla guidebook, had gone into the jungle having learned the wrong local language and apparently lacking the ability to correlate a compass to a map. Che might have tried celestial navigation, or “steering by the stars,” a reliable form of guidance used since the Upper Paleolithic. He did not.

The only Bolivians Che managed to recruit into his doomed group were renegade communists and Maoists. Most of these were tricked into joining. Che’s guerrilla force, which averaged about forty-five members, was pompously titled the “National Liberation Army.” Yet at no point during its eleven-month venture did Bolivians make up more than half of its members. And these few Bolivians all came from the cities, tin mines, and universities far distant from the guerrilla base. The rural population shunned their “National Liberation Army” like a band of lepers. On March 25, 1967, Bolivia’s National Confederation of Peasants (as Latin American, as rural, and as indigenous an outfit as there is) mobilized its entire membership against Che Guevara, “against the intervention of foreign elements in our country’s internal affairs.”

Long before the Gap- and Birkenstock-clad tourists from Chelsea, Manhattan, and Malibu arrived on their Che tours, these Bolivian peasants were “on the trail of Che Guevara,” as the tourist brochures advertise their junkets—but with machetes, pitchforks, and a hang-man’s noose.

Six hundred peasants from Bolivia’s rural department of Cochabamba volunteered to form a militia to fight Che. This was three times as many guerrillas as Castro and Che’s rebel army ever numbered in Cuba, and over ten times as many as Che’s own Bolivian “National Liberation Army,” counted at its peak, including the snookered miners. Sweetest of all ironies—all of these six hundred Bolivians willing to fight Che were actually peasants, not unemployed lawyers, bored college students, and cashiered philosophy professors.

Yet Bolivian peasants did not scorn and resent all foreigners. When U.S. Army major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton of the Green Berets arrived in Bolivia with his sixteen-man crew to train the men who would hunt down and extinguish Che and his “National Liberation Army,” Bolivian peasants mobbed him at every turn. Everywhere “Pappy” and his men ventured in the Bolivian countryside the locals showered them with food, drink, song, and fond salutations.

“You hate to laugh at anything associated with Che, who murdered so many,” says Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA officer who played the key role in tracking him down in Bolivia and was a friend of “Pappy” Shelton. “But when it comes to Che as guerrilla you simply have to. In Bolivia he was unable to recruit one single campesino into his guerrilla ranks!—not one! I fought the Viet Cong, El Salvador’s FMLF, the Sandinistas, and with the Nicaraguan Contras. So I know about guerrilla movements. All of those—especially the Contras—recruited heavily from the rural population.

“In fact, the few Bolivians Che managed to recruit were actually tricked into joining the guerrilla band. I interviewed several of them,” says Rodriguez. “Che had told them to make their way to his camp and meet with him and he’d see to it that they’d be sent to Cuba—and even to Russia and China—for schooling and training. Then when they got to the camp. ‘Cuba?’ Che would frown. ‘Russia? What are you talking about? Who said anything about going there?’ Then Che would hand them a gun and say, ‘Welcome! You’re a guerrilla now. And don’t you dare try to escape or the army will kill you.’ That’s why Che had so many deserters. And we took good advantage of those deserters. They were constantly feeding us information about the guerrilla group’s whereabouts. They felt they’d been duped, tricked. I took advantage of that feeling of betrayal in my intelligence work.”⁵

Leave it to Che Guevara to then complain about his Bolivian “recruits.” “They do not want to work,” he whined in his diaries. “They do not want weapons; they do not want to carry loads; they feign illness.” On top of all this, one Bolivian, named Eusebio, was also a “thief, liar and hypocrite.”⁶

“The peasant base has not yet been developed,” wrote Che in his diaries for early May. “Although it appears that through the use of planned terror we can neutralize some of them. Their support will come later.”⁷

It never did. It was the campesinos themselves who kept reporting the guerrillas’ whereabouts to the army, with whom they were generally on good terms, and for an obvious reason: The Bolivian army was composed mainly of Bolivian campesinos, not bearded foreigners who stole their livestock. “Not one Bolivian enlistment has been obtained,” wrote Che, the liberator of Bolivian peasants.

The East German female guerrilla Haydee Tamara Bunke, or “Tania,” who went to Bolivia a year ahead of Che to do advance work for his grand entrance, was actually a KGB-STASI-DGI (Cuba’s General Intelligence Directorate) agent sent to keep on eye on Che. The two had met on Che’s trip to East Germany in 1960 when Tamara acted as his translator. Much translating, they say, took place in bed. Bunke, born in Argentina of German communist refugee parents, a woman who fancied herself quite sharp, bookish, and worldly, hit it off immediately with Che. Their relationship continued during Tania’s lengthy stints in Cuba in the early sixties. Naturally privy to all this, Tania’s intelligence chiefs recognized her as the ideal person to keep them informed on Guevara.

“Some claim Tania was a triple agent working also for the CIA,” says former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez. “But that’s untrue. She had been a longtime agent for the KGB and their allied East-bloc intelligence services. Castro knew this well. She was even a member of the Cuban Communist Party.”

Alas, poor Tania (whose name would later become Patty Hearst’s Symbionese Liberation Army moniker) was originally slated to remain primarily in the Bolivian capital of La Paz and act as Che’s liaison with Havana and the city’s guerrilla network, such as it was. In March 1967 she made a trip to Che’s guerrilla camp at rural Nancahuazu to deliver the French journalist Regis Debray and the Argentine Ciro Bustos. Both were parlor leftists in thrall to the Cuban revolution and seemed poised to do for Che in Bolivia what the New York Times’s Herbert Matthews had done for Castro in Cuba. They were also ready to act in more official capacities as recruiters and messengers for the guerrillas.

Bustos, in particular, was instructed to pay close attention to the Bolivian setup, because promptly after the Bolivian triumph he was to set up a similar brilliant operation in Argentina. From there the mighty Che would lead nothing less than the “liberation” of the entire South American continent! “The struggle in Latin America will acquire, in time, continental dimensions,” wrote Che. “It will be the scene of many great battles by humanity [no less!] for its liberation.”⁸

And as this glorious conflagration spread like a wildfire across the Western Hemisphere, Che would ultimately lead “humanity” in battle against “the great enemy of the human species: The United States of America!”⁹ The whole project should have sounded eerily familiar to Bustos, who had tried infiltrating Argentina to start a guerrilla war at Che’s behest back in 1963. Now he was back with Che, escorted by Tania and ready for another go-round.

“Che planned on setting a Mount Olympus in the Andes with himself at the very top—with Che himself positioned higher than Fidel.” This according to Dariel Alarcon, a Cuban guerrilla who had fought with Che in the Sierra and Congo, and was one of the three guerrillas who managed to survive the Bolivian debacle.¹⁰

Not a month into his Olympic venture, the few Bolivian “recruits” to Che’s band had already started deserting. These ingrates had notified the Bolivian army about Che’s camp just as Tania arrived with Debray and Bustos. Tania had also left a Jeep in the nearby town of Camiri full of guerrilla documents, photos, and her ID papers, complete with aliases. The Jeep and all its contents were found by the police, and were soon in the custody of the Bolivian army’s intelligence division, which tracked down and nabbed all of Che’s urban contacts (there weren’t many) in La Paz.

Thanks to her incompetence as a spy, Tania was now stuck as a guerrilla. But Debray and Bustos schemed to sneak their way out of Che’s camp in clever disguises, Debray as a foreign journalist and Bustos as a traveling salesman who took a wrong turn during his business calls. The always-on-the-ball Che Guevara had even vouchsafed Debray and Bustos several important messages for the outside world.

One was a bombastic “War Communiqué, No.2.” Another was a request to his friends Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre to start whooping up his Bolivian cause. And one more was a summons to Fidel to send him a new radio, more money, and to please, for God’s sake, hurry up and open that “second front” in Bolivia he’d long promised with all the Bolivian communists then training in Cuba.

Mario Monje’s reaction to Che’s second-front message to Fidel is not on record. And chances are, as a communist, his sense of humor was severely atrophied. But still, we can assume he had to laugh. Not half a day out of Che’s camp, Debray and Bustos were nabbed by the Bolivian police and promptly turned over to Bolivian army officials, who gleefully pistol-whipped them. Within minutes, they were betraying Che’s whereabouts. Bustos, briefly reverting to his original calling as an artist, even helpfully drew likenesses of the men he saw at the guerrilla camp for his interrogators. Perhaps Bustos was acting out of terror. Or, perhaps having been sent now on two suicide missions, Bustos felt he should reap a little payback on Che.

Bustos’s drawings confirmed to the CIA suits what the lower-level Cuban-American CIA men like Mario Riveron had long known—that Che was in Bolivia. The training of the Bolivian army by Shelton and the Green Berets then began in earnest, now with clear targets in mind. Felix Rodriguez convinced the Bolivian military to stop summarily executing guerrilla prisoners. Questioned properly and treated decently, they could provide valuable information and help close the net on Che.

According to Dariel Alarcon, Che was at first furious with Tania for having shown up at the camp. “What the hell do I tell you things for!”¹¹ he screamed at her as she burst into tears. But Che was soon making good use of her presence. The two were often noticed sneaking down to the swimming hole on many afternoons—not that Che ever got wet. Among the bourgeois debauchments most disdained by Che were baths. Tania and Che were also noticed slinking into Che’s tent many a night. This didn’t sit well with the rest of the guerrillas, who were utterly famished in that department.

The erotic encounters with Tania revealed a new dimension of Che’s hypocrisy. From his Sierra days through the Congo, and into Bolivia, Che closely policed and attempted to thwart his men’s libidos, meting out harsh penalties for miscreants. His pathological despotism demanded it. “I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers, and no friends,” wrote Guevara. “My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.” Now the friendless Che had, as his men saw it, brought a woman into the camp to comfort him.

Tania soon fell ill with a high fever. Che assigned her to his guerrilla “rear-guard” group, headed by the Cuban “Joaquin,” which he divided from the “vanguard” group, which he headed. Within days of this decision, both groups were hopelessly lost from each other, and from their camp. During their groping about in the jungle, they bumped into a couple of inexperienced Bolivian army patrols and scored a couple of successful ambushes. Better luck was not to come. Both groups continued to bumble around—half-starved, half-clothed, and half-shod—without any contact for six months, though they were often within a few miles of each other. Lacking even World War II vintage walkie-talkies, the two groups never knew how close they were to each other.

Che’s diary entries for early May are unintentionally comical. “We walked effectively for five hours straight, and covered from 12-14 kilometers, and came upon a campsite made by Benigno and Aniceto.” These were men in Che’s own vanguard group, evidence they had been walking in circles. “This brings up several questions,” Che asks in his diaries. “Where is the Iquiri River? Perhaps that’s where Benigno and Aniceto were fired upon? Perhaps the aggressors were Joaquin’s people?”

Che’s masterful Guerrilla Warfare: A Method gives no explanation for these sly guerrilla tactics. But his diaries are often astonishingly frank. “A day of much confusion about our geographic position,” he wrote on May 2. Before he could liberate the continent, Che would have to figure out where he was. This is the same man who, in the words of Time, “waged a guerrilla campaign where he displayed outrageous bravery and skill,” the man whom some scholars equate with Mao Zedong, and his thirty-eight-hundred-mile Long March.

Now separated from Che, Tania’s rear-guard comrades found themselves in a position to vent their long-simmering resentment. They constantly tormented her. The Cuban guerrillas, in particular, liked to strip naked and surround her, laughing and gesturing lewdly. Tania was no delicate little flower, far from it. Her liaisons in amour ran from Che, to Cuba’s tough intelligence officer, the black Ulises Estrada, to Bolivian president René Barrientos.

But the sexual threats and constant abuse from her revolutionary comrades wore Tania down. “Wait till we get back!” she’d cry. “I’m gonna report all this to Che!”¹² But Che was nowhere around, as both groups circled each other, eating tree roots and armadillos while racked with dysentery and constant vomiting. Toward the end of her Bolivian misadventure, reports fellow guerrilla Dariel Alarcon, Tania would often explode in tears at the men’s crude insults and run off shrieking in rage. “Just shoot me—why don’t you!” she yelled.¹³

The Bolivian army soon obliged her. After four months in the jungle, racked by fever, and rapidly starving to death, the “rear guard” blundered into an ambush by a Bolivian army patrol while crossing a river. There was more galling news for Che. An obviously unenlightened Bolivian peasant, Honorato Rojas, had set up the massacre.

A few weeks earlier, Che’s own group had run into Rojas, who gave them some food and directions. In Che’s own words, Rojas gave them “a good welcome and a lot of information.” Heaven knows, this didn’t happen often. So they were elated. This peasant obviously recognized his benefactors! Sure, if they triumphed, their “revolution” would steal his meager holdings, and murder him if he resisted, as they’d done to thousands of similar country folk in Cuba. But how was he supposed to know that?

In late August, Tania and the rear guard found Rojas again and asked him to point out a good place to cross the nearby Masicuri River. Once again, he obliged them. Rojas then scurried over to the headquarters of Bolivian army captain Vargas Salinas and gave him the precise location of the crossing. Honorato said he’d be wearing a white shirt to distinguish him from the guerrillas, so please be careful when they were mowing them down. Rojas went back home and waited for Che’s rear guard, which managed to arrive punctually.

“Right this way, amigos!” and Honorato led them over to the shallow river crossing at the appointed time, bade them godspeed, and sat on a ridge with a clear view for the show. Only the popcorn was missing. When all ten members of the rear guard were sloshing through waist-deep water, Captain Vargas Salinas took the first shot. His soldiers had set up several machine guns. The ensuing crossfire was deafening and murderous. The water churned and frothed from the fusillade. Tania fell into the river, her body washed away by the current, along with the others.

Only a Bolivian guerrilla code-named “Paco” survived the slaughter. Upon questioning him later, Felix Rodriguez learned that Paco was quite eager to rat out the location of his guerrilla group’s “vanguard” led by Che. Paco felt snookered and was bitter. Che, it appeared, had brought him on board, not as a proposed guerrilla at all, but with the bogus offer to send him to Cuba for schooling. As with others, as soon as Paco showed up at the guerrilla camp, Che reneged, virtually kidnapped him, and started treating him like a slave.

But finding Che’s group wouldn’t be easy, explained Paco. Che’s location wasn’t a mystery only to the Bolivian army—it was a much bigger mystery to Che himself, and to everyone under his command. (For once, Che’s obtuseness was working in his favor.) Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence man, sensed that Paco was telling the truth. But nonetheless, the ring started closing on Guevara.

“Dear mother,” Tania had written only a few weeks before she was mowed down in the Bolivian ambush, “I’m scared. I’m always frightened and am always crying. My nerves are shot. I’m not a woman. I’m a girl who would like to hide myself in some corner where no one can find me. But where can I hide?”¹⁴

The terror and despair of her last days would certainly have been tinged with the realization that her fate was tied to that of a man who was increasingly delusional and certainly doomed. “The legend of our guerrilla group is growing like a huge wave,” Che wrote in his diaries for July. “We are already the invincible supermen.”

Perhaps she also finally grasped the nature of Che’s idealism. “Animalitos,” was how Che referred to the Bolivian peasants in his diaries. “The peasant masses do not help us in any way.”¹⁵ (Two years later, Rojas was captured at his home and murdered in front of his wife and children. This method of “fighting” was in complete keeping with Che Guevara’s legacy, as many a peasant family in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra could attest.)

Dariel Alarcon reports how, while lost and starving, Che was obsessed with posing for photos. One was of Che atop a (presumably stolen) horse on a ridgeline, where he was strategically silhouetted against the bare sky. Che handed Alarcon his Pentax and had him back off just the right distance to capture the entire scene. Che nodded, then plucked out a machete and waved it high over his head, shouting, “I am the new Bolivar!” as Alarcon dutifully clicked away.¹⁶

Meanwhile, Che’s men blundered around, lost, constantly bickering with each other, constantly losing recruits, terrorizing peasants, now eating cats, condors, and armadillos. This was not guerrilla war as Castro had “fought” it, amassing weight, feted by fawning reporters and duped financial backers, who paid bribes to keep Batista’s army from firing.

In his diaries, Che recounts Alarcon’s committing a major blunder by allowing himself to be seen by a peasant family fishing. “Benigno [Dariel Alarcon’s guerrilla name] let himself be seen, then let the peasant, his wife and kid all escape. When I found out I had a major tantrum and called it an act of treason. This provoked a fit of crying and bawling by Benigno.” Apparently, Alarcon should have murdered the family.

This entry is typical. Che’s diaries seem to revel in the punishment he doles out to his peons, along with the trivial infractions that provoked them. “Today there was an unpleasant incident,” Che wrote in September. “Chino came to tell me that Nato had roasted and eaten a whole piece of meat in front of him. So I yelled and stormed at Chino.”

Dariel Alarcon, who’d dutifully fought alongside Che from the Sierra Maestra through the Congo and into Bolivia, managed to escape Che’s final Yuro firefight, enter Chile after weeks of hiking, and eventually make his way back to Cuba (much to Castro’s apparent discomfiture). It took a little while, but Alarcon finally came to his senses. He defected in 1996 and lives in Paris today. He has no doubt Che’s fate in Bolivia was a deliberate setup by Castro, which provoked a resentment that fueled Alarcon’s flight to exile. Back in Cuba he even heard it from Che’s bodyguard, Alberto Castellanos, a friendly Cuban intelligence officer. “I’ll tell it right to your face,” Castellanos confided to Alarcon. “You people were dumped in the Bolivian jungle the same way someone throws a used bone into the garbage can.”

“Forget about any help!” snorted Alarcon’s fellow guerrilla Antonio Olo Pantoja. “Forget about it! Dammit! I’m telling you that over there in Cuba what they want is to get rid of us. It’s obvious!” ¹⁹ And Antonio was in an excellent position to know. He was a veteran Cuban intelligence operative who knew full well how these things worked. He’d planned the offing of many fellow revolutionaries himself. Now he recognized that his turn had come.

While Che was posing for snapshots by Dariel Alarcon, neither he nor anyone in his group had any way to communicate with Cuba. By late summer, their antique tube radio had finally sputtered out. Castro had sent an agent named Renan Montero to La Paz to keep in touch with Che, but Montero abruptly left Bolivia in July and returned to Cuba. Significantly, just a week earlier, Aleksey Kosygin had visited Cuba and met with Castro.

Kosygin had just come from a meeting with Lyndon Johnson, during which the U.S. president complained about what he saw as “Castroite subversion” in Latin America. (If he’d only known the real motive.) This “Castroite subversion” was a clear breach of the deal the United States and the Soviets had cut back in October 1962, which had left Castro unmolested. Now this mischief in Bolivia might force the United States into an agonizing reappraisal of that deal, LBJ explained.

Hearing this from Kosygin, Castro concluded that the time had come to speed things up and finally rid himself of Che. Within days, Montero came home and Che was cast completely adrift. Barely two months later, the “National Liberation Army” was wiped out and Che was dead.

On September 26, a Bolivian patrol, alerted by those chronically unenlightened peasants, ambushed Che’s vanguard near the village of La Higuera and killed three guerrillas. Felix Rodriguez, who had been getting a wealth of valuable information from the captured Jose Castillo Chavez, or “Paco,” identified one of the dead guerrillas as “Miguel.” This was a Cuban named Manuel Hernandez, a captain in Castro’s rebel army who was second-in-command of the “vanguard” right behind Che. Felix sensed that Guevara was nearby and advised the Bolivian military to send their U.S.-trained ranger battalion to the area.

“No matter!” answered Rodriguez. “I think we ’ve got Che pin-pointed! Send them in!” Barely a week later Che was yelling his pitiful plea to those Bolivian rangers. “Don’t shoot! I’m Che, I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

Che’s capture merits some clarification after the romanticization of his last day by his hagiographers. Che was defiant, they claim. Che was surprised, caught off-guard, and was unable to properly defend himself or to shoot himself with his last bullet, as was his plan. Jon Lee Anderson is particularly obsessed with this version. Jorge Castañeda has a machine-gun burst not only destroying Che’s carbine, but actually “blasting it from his very grip and wounding him in the process.”²⁰ Christopher Hitchens has written of Che’s “untamable defiance.”

In fact, Che, after ordering his men to fight to the last man and the last bullet, surrendered enthusiastically. His famous “wound” was a bullet graze near his calf that missed bone and most muscle. Che surrendered voluntarily from a safe distance, and was captured physically sound and with a full clip in his pistol.

“Che fired his M-2 carbine but it was soon hit in the barrel by a bullet, rendering it useless,” writes Anderson. “The magazine of his pistol had apparently already been lost; he was now unarmed.”²²

And where did Che’s diligent and hard-nosed biographers get this heroic version of events? Their source reads: “We have been able to precisely determine that Che had been battling even while wounded until the barrel of his M-2 carbine was damaged by a shot that made it totally useless. And his pistol was without a clip. These incredible circumstances explain why Che was captured alive.”²³

After all, PBS, in its 1997 special on Che commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of his death, informs us that “Mr. Anderson . . . gained unprecedented access to both Che’s personal archive through his widow and to formerly sealed Cuban government archives.” Aleida March, of course, is now a Castro regime official who chairs the Ernesto Guevara Research Center in Havana. Anderson received unprecedented access to the propaganda of one of the world’s most censored societies. It’s as if historians were to uncritically accept neo-Nazi claims that Hitler had died battling Soviet troops, instead of commiting suicide.

What really happened? Castro, obviously, wasn’t at the scene. The three Cuban guerrillas who escaped Bolivia were nowhere near Guevara at the time of his surrender. Willy, a Bolivian miner and guerrilla captured with Che, was executed along with Che the following day.

Bolivian army officers Captain Gary Prado and Colonel Arnaldo Saucedo Parada both inspected and listed all of Che’s personal effects upon his capture. Both list his Walther PPK 9mm pistol as containing a fully loaded clip.²⁴

More tellingly, though he was in the bottom of a ravine during the final firefight and could have made a fighting escape in the opposite direction like a few of his men, Che actually moved upward and toward the Bolivian soldiers who had been firing, ordering his comrade at the time, the hapless Willy, along with him. Yet Che was doing no firing of his own in the process. Then, as soon as he saw soldiers he made that yell, “Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” and came out of the brambles completely unarmed, having dropped his fully loaded weapon.

“We represent the prestige of the Cuban Revolution!” Che had thundered to his men hours before. “And we will defend that prestige to the last man and to the last bullet!”²⁵ But he himself was ready to do no such thing.

Again, these unattributable stories conflict with those from the men who were actually there. “Che made his position known to our soldiers well in advance so that they would stop firing,” writes Colonel Saucedo Parada, “yelling, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Che!’ Then he came out unarmed.”²⁷

“Che raised his carbine from a distance,” says Bolivian general Luis Reque Teran, who commanded the Fourth Division. “Then he yelled: ‘I surrender! Don’t kill me! I’m worth more alive than dead!’ ”²⁸

“When captured all of Che’s and Willy’s weapons were fully loaded,” writes Colonel Saucedo Parada, further demolishing the media’s titillating fantasy of Che’s “untamable defiance.”²⁹ Also overlooked by his hagiographers is that the fully armed Che and Willy were confronted by only two Bolivian soldiers. That makes two Bolivian rangers against two armed guerrillas. But then, even odds were never to Che’s liking.

What about Che’s “damaged” carbine? Castro’s account has Che armed with an M-2 carbine, as were all Cuban guerrilla officers. Captain Gary Prado lists a damaged carbine, but it is a damaged M-1 carbine, which may have been that of Willy, Che’s partner in the final firefight. Naturally, none of Che’s diligent biographers care to speculate on the above discrepancies.

Immediately after his capture, Che’s demeanor was even more telling. “What’s your name, young man?” Che asked one of his captors. “Why what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!” he blurted after hearing it.³⁰ The firefight was still raging after Che’s surrender. His men, unlike their comandante, were indeed fighting to the last bullet. Soon a wounded Bolivian soldier was carried by.

“No, but I have some knowledge of medicine,” answered Guevara, resuming his pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with his captors, and admitting on the record that he was not, in fact, a doctor.³¹

A bit later, Che asked again, “What will you do with me? I’d heard on the radio that if the Eighth Division captured me the trial would be in Santa Cruz, and if the Fourth Division captured me, the trial would be in Camiri.”

“And you, Captain Prado,” said Che quickly. “You are a very special person yourself. I’ve been talking to some of your men. They think very highly of you, captain. And don’t worry, this whole thing is over. We have failed.” Then to further ingratiate himself, “Your army has pursued us very tenaciously . . . now, could you please find out what they plan to do with me?”³²

A young Bolivian schoolteacher named Julia Cortes from the village of La Higuera had brought the captured Che some food on his last day alive. “He seemed to think he’d come out of it alive,” she recalls. “They might take me out of here,” Che told her. “I think it’s more in their interest to keep me alive. I’m very valuable to them.”³³

Like an actor, Che was warming up to his new role as captured hero. In fact, he was captured wearing his famous black beret, sporting a bullet hole, yet those on the Bolivian mission with him, such as Dariel Alarcon, attest that Che never once wore that beret during the Bolivian campaign. Che had always worn a military cap. All pictures of him in Bolivia back this up. Marcos Bravo, an anti-Batista operative now in exile who knew many of Che’s Cuban revolutionary comrades, speculates that Che put on his famous black beret (and even shot a hole in it) to make a dramatic celebrity surrender and impress his captors. Che probably expected a few snapshots in the process.

After a peaceful capture, Che expected a celebrity trial erupting into a worldwide media sensation. Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre would issue eloquent pleas for his freedom. Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag would lend their voices from New York. Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald, and Wavy Gravy would hold a concert and candlelight vigil in Golden Gate Park. Ramsey Clark would take a leave of absence as LBJ’s attorney general to assist William Kunstler in Che’s courtroom defense. And above all, college students around the world could be counted on to protest, riot, and disrupt their campuses until Che was released.

“Finally I was face to face with the assassin of thousands of my brave countrymen,” recalls Felix Rodriguez. “I walked into the little schoolroom and he was tied up lying on the ground. My boots were next to his face—just like Che’s boots had been next to my friend Nestor Pino’s face after he was captured at the Bay of Pigs. Che had looked at Nestor with that cold sneer of his and simply said, ‘We’re going to shoot every last one of you.’ Now the roles were reversed, and I was standing over Guevara.”³⁴

Both CIA officers involved in his capture, Felix Rodriguez and Mario Riveron, affirm that—leftist legend to the contrary—the agency happened to agree with Guevara. They wanted him alive and made strenuous efforts to keep him that way. “Handled decently, a prisoner talks sooner or later,” says Riveron, “a dead prisoner, obviously, won’t.”

Despite attempts by Felix Rodriguez to dissuade the Bolivian high command, the orders came through to shoot the prisoner. Rodriguez reluctantly passed them on to his Bolivian colleagues. “I was their ally in this mission, an advisor,” he says. “I wasn’t the one who gave the final orders. But I operated the radio at that location and had the official rank of captain. The orders came to me: Che to be executed.”

Felix passed the order along as he was duty bound, but kept trying to change the Bolivian officers’ minds. “Felix, we’ve worked together very closely and very well,” replied the stern Bolivian Colonel Zenteno. “We’re very grateful for the help you and your team have given us in this fight. But please don’t ask me to disobey a direct order from my commander-in-chief. I would be dishonorably discharged.”

Now that Che was gone from his command post, the fight by his guerrillas back at Yuro was really raging, and the Bolivian rangers were taking casualties. Unlike their gallant commander, Che’s men were holed up and defiantly blasting away to the last bullet. So Colonel Zenteno had urgent business at his own command post.

“Felix, I have to go back to my headquarters now,” Colonel Zenteno said. “But I’d like your word of honor that the execution order will be carried out by two this afternoon. We know the terrible damage Guevara has done to your country, and if you’d like to carry it out personally we’d certainly understand.”

“Actually, I knew that execution order was coming a little before I got it,” says Rodriguez, “when I heard on the Bolivian radio station that Che Guevara had been killed in combat. So I asked Sergeant Teran to shoot Che below the neck to simulate combat wounds. Then I walked back into the little schoolhouse to break the news to Che. ‘Look, comandante,’ I said. ‘I’ve done everything in my power to try and save . . .’ At that moment Che turned white. He knew what was coming. So I asked Che if he had any last words he’d like me to pass along.

“He told me: ‘Yes, tell Fidel that the armed rebellion will eventually triumph,’ but Che said this very ironically, with a sad smirk on his face. I’m convinced that Che finally—at long last—realized that Castro had deliberately sold him down the river. For some reason, here I was finally face to face with one of my bitterest enemies, yet I felt no hate for Che Guevara at the moment . . . It’s hard to explain.

Che’s biographers, basing their accounts on Castro’s fictions, tell a different, more edifying story. When it comes to heroism, perhaps it is better to remember the courageous and defiant yells of Che’s firing squad victims.