Heaven knows that Cuba, then as now, had a crying need for some foreign exchange. And here was an ocean of fresh, plasma-rich blood freed from its confines by bullets and spilling in torrents daily. Let’s collect it and sell it, reasoned the cash-hungry communist regime for which Che ministered.
Below is a court record from a lawsuit filed by the family of a U.S. citizen, Howard Anderson, murdered by a Cuban firing squad in April 1961.
Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Cir. April 13, 2003): “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”
After the volley at La Cabana’s blood-spattered wall, Howard Anderson’s sparse blood soaked into the same soil and bricks as that of Rogelio Gonzalez, Virgilio Campaneria, and Alberto Tapia, all Havana University students and members of Catholic Action. Like Howard Anderson, they refused blindfolds. These young men all died yelling, “Long Live Christ the King!”
Fourteen thousand young men would join them in mass graves shortly, on the orders of Ted Turner’s chum Fidel and the icon of Burlington Industries’ T-shirts, Che.
Herman Marks’s hound might have found less blood to lap up, but Havana’s birds were gorging on flesh. “Those firing-squad volleys rang like a dinner bell to the birds,” recalls Cuban freedom fighter Hiram Gonzalez, imprisoned in La Cabana at the time of Anderson’s murder, in the documentary
Yo Los He Visto Partir
. “Those firing squads had been going off daily since January 7, 1959, the day Che Guevara entered Havana. It didn’t take long for the birds to catch on. Flocks of them had learned to perch atop the wall that surrounded La Cabana fortress and in the nearby trees. After the volley they swooped down to peck at the bits of bone, blood, and flesh that littered the ground. Those birds sure grew fat.”
14
Paul Bethel was press attaché for the U.S. embassy in Cuba during the anti-Batista rebellion and the first years of revolution. Later he worked as head of the Latin American division of the U.S. Information Agency, where he interviewed hundreds of the Cuban refugees then landing in South Florida. Bethel also kept hearing accounts of this blood extraction from firing-squad victims. Finally he was able to question Dr. Virginia de Mirabal Quesada, who escaped Cuba through Mexico and had actually fled, horrified, after witnessing the process. “It’s absolutely true,” she told the U.S. Information Agency. “Before being shot, the men are taken to a small first-aid room at La Cabana, where the communists extract between a quart and a quart and a half of blood from each victim. It is then placed in a blood bank. Some of it is shipped to North Vietnam. Sometimes the victims are so weak, they have to be carried to the execution stake. Others, not healthy at the time from the prison ordeal, or with bad hearts, die during the extraction.”
15
On April 7, 1967, the Organization of American States Human Rights Commission finally issued a detailed report on the humanistic Cuban revolution’s long-practiced vampirism. The report was based on dozens of verified eyewitness accounts by defectors.
“On May, 27, 1966, from six in the morning to nightfall political prisoners were executed continuously by firing squad in Havana’s La Cabana prison,” the report read. “One hundred and sixty-six men were executed that day and each had 5 pints of blood extracted prior to being shot. Extracting this amount of blood often produces cerebral anemia and unconsciousness so that many had to be carried to the execution wall on stretchers. The corpses were then transported by truck to a mass grave in a cemetery outside the city of Marianao. On that day, the truck required seven trips to deliver all the corpses. On 13th Street in Havana’s Vedado district Soviet medical personnel have established a blood bank where this blood is transported and stored. This blood is sold at fifty U.S. dollars per pint to the Republic of North Viet Nam.”
Communist Cuba’s innovative blood-marketing program has received no attention from the mainstream media and “scholars” in general, though Cuba’s medical practices usually get no end of fawning coverage. Dr. Juan Clark, sociology professor at Miami-Dade Community College, Bay of Pigs veteran and former political prisoner, is the shining exception. His research included interviews with dozens of Castro’s and Che’s ex-political prisoners and defectors who confirmed the practice. Needless to say, in the thousands upon thousands of pages devoted to their subject, no Che “biographer” mentions Cuba’s blood trade, yet they all play up Che’s role as minister of industries starting in early 1961—
just when the blood-marketing campaign began.
Henry Butterfield Ryan, diplomat and scholar, in particular laments that Che’s glowing record as Cuba’s export manager at the time has largely gone unheralded. “Where Guevara shone,” he writes in his widely praised book
The Fall of Che Guevara,
“was in the role of a diplomat, especially on economic issues. He secured export and import deals for Cuba within the communist bloc on terms that no other countries received and that helped Cuba enormously.”
16
As we will see, Che was an economic disaster, wrecking every vestige of Cuba’s flourishing capitalism. But history should not overlook this signal economic achievement, that
Cuban
blood had a ready market in Cuba’s sister socialist republics on distant continents for ready cash.
A crowning irony: This was the same man who liked to proclaim that he helped free Cuba from the rapacity of those “blood-sucking Yankee imperialist exploiters!”
6
Murderer of Women and Children
Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che Guevara guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor.
—
Time
MAGAZINE, AUGUST 8, 1960
On April 17, 1961, a counter-reVolutionary named Amelia Fernandez García had her young body destroyed by a firing-squad volley.
On Christmas Eve of that same year, Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. She had been found guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (the term for Cuban farmers who took up arms to fight the theft of their land). When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso—remember, all ten executioners shot live ammo—Juana was six months pregnant.
Dr. Amando Lago has fully documented the firing-squad executions of eleven Cuban women in the early days of the regime. He documents a total of 219 female deaths, the rest listed as “extrajudicial.” (And we’ve seen what even a “judicial” execution meant to Che—the verdict announced before the trial.)
Lydia Perez also died “extrajudicially,” on August 7, 1961, while a prisoner at the Guanajay women’s prison camp. Eight months pregnant at the time, she somehow annoyed a young guard, who bashed her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach, and walked off. Lydia and her baby were left to bleed to death. Olga Fernandez and her husband, Marcial, were both machine-gunned to death on April 18, 1961, while rushing to the Argentine embassy for asylum. Amalia Cora was machine-gunned to death along with five others for the crime of trying to exit Cuba in a boat on February 5, 1965.
Twenty-four-year-old Teresita Saavedra was a lay Catholic leader when the Che-trained militia arrested her in the town of Sancti-Spiritus in central Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion had just been crushed and a huge dragnet was sweeping Cuba for any who had sympathized with those abandoned freedom fighters. Teresita, who certainly qualified, was hauled away at Czech machine-gun point to the town’s police headquarters. In the interrogation room she was repeatedly raped by five
milicianos,
who then released her. Teresita committed suicide that night. “Without Che the militias would not have been reliable,” goes the refrain of Che biographer Jorge Castañeda. The recent foreign minister of Mexico is correct. The
milicianos
were unusually reliable. And diligent.
Two Catholic nuns were part of the “extrajudicial” massacre of women. Sister Aida Rosa Perez kept getting on the authorities’ nerves with her anticommunist speeches. She was finally sentenced to twelve years at hard labor, despite her heart condition. Two years into her sentence, while toiling in the sun inside Castro’s Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister Rosa collapsed from a heart attack. The media are always ready to headline atrocities, such as the killing of Catholic nuns in El Salvador by “right-wing” death squads. When Salvadoran archbishop Romero was assassinated, it provoked a major Hollywood movie. Aside from independent efforts by brave loners, like Andy Garcia’s
The Lost City,
few directors will touch a story that fairly portrays the victims of Che.
A good case can be made that Castro and Che preempted the Taliban by a good forty years. The stifling economic and social conditions created by the Cuban Revolution leave Cuban women today as the most suicidal in the world. This does not, however, prevent the United Nations from naming Cuba to its Human Rights Commission. Nor does the regime’s treatment of women prevent UNICEF from naming an award in Castro’s Cuba’s honor.
Certainly,
Time
magazine did not report how “devastating” Che actually was for many Cuban women.
Evelio Gil Diez was seventeen years old when Che signed his death warrant and Marks blasted his skull apart in La Cabana’s killing ground, with Che watching from his window. Luis Perez Antunez was also seventeen when he stared his executioners boldly in the face, seconds before the volley riddled his body and ended his young life.
Seventeen-year-old Calixto Valdes was found guilty of “crimes against the revolution” in the same mass trial that condemned his father, Juan. From his cell in La Cabana, Juan watched the guards stomp down the hall and enter the nearby cell that held his son. He heard a scuffle, then watched how they yanked his struggling boy from the cell in a chokehold. “Cowards!” yelled Juan in tears of rage, bashing the cell bars. “Miserable assassins!” While one guard bent his boy’s arms back and bound his hands, two more guards came into play. One grabbed his furiously struggling son’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut. (By then, the firing squads were becoming rattled by the defiant yells of “
Viva Cuba Libre!
” “
Viva Cristo Rey!
” and “Down with Communism!”)
Juan watched helplessly as his son struggled. Three guards managed to drag him down the hall, and Juan tried to steel himself. A few moments later he shuddered at the blast that murdered his boy. A few seconds later he shuddered again at the coup de grace. Juan Valdes’s sentence had been twenty-five years in prison. Would a sentence of death have been any worse?
Rigoberto Hernandez was also seventeen when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched, and finally proved to his prosecutors that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition,
couldn’t possibly
have been “planting bombs.”
But there was no bucking Che’s “pedagogy of the
paredon
!”
“Fuego!”
and the volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bonds, blindfold, and gag. The revolutionary courts followed Che Guevara’s instructions that “proof is secondary and an archaic bourgeois detail.” Remember this, and remember Harvard University’s rollicking ovation to honored guest Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath.
The point lost on Harvard was the use of terror to cow the public, to let them know who was now in charge, and the fate that awaited any challengers. The more horrifying the murders, the better they served their purpose.
One mother, Rosa Hernandez, recalls how she begged for a meeting with Che in order to try to save her seventeen-year-old son, who was condemned without trial to the firing squad. Guevara graciously complied. “Come right in,
señora,
” said Che as he opened the door to his office. “Have a seat.” Silently he listened to her sobs and pleas, then picked up the phone right in front of her. “Execute the Hernandez boy tonight,” Che barked, and he slammed the phone down. His goons then dragged out the hysterical Mrs. Hernandez. This happened more than once. These grieving people can be found today, wiping their red-rimmed eyes, ambling amid the long rows of white crosses at the Cuban Memorial in Miami’s Tamiami Park. It’s a mini Arlington Cemetery, in honor of Castro and Che’s murder victims. But the tombs are symbolic. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves in Cuba.
Some of these Cuban Memorial visitors kneel, others walk slowly, looking for a name. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies press their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders. Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother, or aunt are contagious. Yet he’s often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle, father, or cousin.
“
Fusilado,
” it says below the white cross. Firing-squad execution. The elderly lady still holds a tissue to her eyes and nose as they wait to cross the street, her grandson still has his arm around her. She told him how his freedom-fighter grandfather yelled,
“Viva Cristo Rey!”
the instant before the volley shattered his body.
Still escorted by her grandson, the woman crosses the street slowly, silently, and runs into a dreadlocked youth coming out of a music store. His T-shirt sports the face of her husband’s murderer. They turn their heads in rage and toward the store window. Well, there’s the murderer’s face again, on a huge poster; $19.95 it says at the bottom, right under the poster’s slogan: “Resist Oppression!”