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”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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