Shortly after the bogus battle of Santa Clara, her grandfather Cornelio Rojas disappeared. He was a beloved pillar of the community, well known for his public service and philanthropy. He was also a colonel in Cuba’s police. “Naturally my mother, grandmother, and father all suspected he’d been arrested,” says Barbara. “But we heard nothing and all our inquiries turned up nothing.”
An entire week went by and the Rojas family was still in the dark about their patriarch’s fate. “We were all worried sick—especially my poor mom, who was six months pregnant at the time. My grandmother kept up a stoic front, but we knew what was going on inside. She was going to pieces.”
In 1959, most Cuban homes had three generations living in them at the same time. Families were very close. “Like most Cuban girls, I was extremely close to my granddad,” says Barbara. “We ate dinner together every night. I sat on his lap in the living room every night. He spoiled me absolutely rotten with gifts and constant attention. I was only seven at the time, but I remember all this vividly.”
37
A week after her grandfather’s disappearance, Barbara heard her mother calling excitedly from the living room. She rushed in and saw her mother pointing at the television and her grandmother staring wide-eyed and covering her mouth. There on the screen was her grandfather.
“And he was alive,” she recalls, “walking apparently freely, without handcuffs or anything. My grandfather had been an important figure in the province for decades. Our family had fought prominently in all of Cuba’s wars of independence. And this was a news show, so we thought nothing of it for a few seconds. We all looked at each other wide-eyed. My grandmother even put her hand to her chest and looked heavenward, apparently relieved. My grandfather as he appeared on the screen, didn’t seem scared at all—or that he was under any type of coercion.”
Then the camera angle changed and Rojas was seen standing and holding his hand aloft while saying something. “It took us a few seconds to realize that he was then standing in front of a thick concrete wall. My mother frowned. My grandmother squinted and leaned toward the television.”
Then the camera moved back, the angle changed again, and some rifles came into view—rifles that were pointing at Rojas. “ ‘No! No!’ My mother started screaming ‘No!’ My grandmother and my mom rushed to each other and hugged. My granddad was standing in front of one of Che’s firing squads! But—typical for my grandfather—he’d refused a blindfold and was facing the firing squad head on. He was preparing to give the order. . . .”
“Fuego!”
Colonel Cornelio Rojas gave the order and the firing-squad volley murdered Barbara’s granddad in front of his family’s eyes. It was a horribly graphic murder. The camera closed in to show the shattered head and body, blood oozing.
“My grandmother collapsed on the floor at the horrible sight,” recalls Barbara. “My mother was screaming. I’m crying. We rush over to my grandmother—remember, my mom was six months pregnant at the time, so I’m helping out here.
‘Abuela! Abuela! ’
I’m crying. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ ”
Barbara’s grandmother could not be revived. She had suffered a fatal heart attack from the diabolical vision she had just seen on Cuban national television. She joined her husband and constant companion of forty years.
“After a few minutes,” recalls Barbara, “my mom, horribly traumatized, as you might imagine—goes into labor. She managed to contact some neighbors and they rushed over to help. She delivered my brother, prematurely, right there in her bedroom, with my grandmom’s body still in the living room, with my grandfather’s bloody body lying in front of that bullet-pocked wall. To this day we don’t know where he was buried by Che’s firing squad. A mass grave, we imagine, like so many others. The murdering Che Guevara didn’t even give us the solace of a funeral, of allowing us to put a cross or flowers atop my murdered granddad . . . How can you expect someone to forget that? These things haunt me still.”
Caridad Martinez was ten years old in March 1959 when a crew of Che’s militiamen burst into her home carrying two crude wooden boxes roughly the shape of coffins and dropped them loudly on the floor of their humble living room. “That one’s Jacinto” (Caridad’s father), barked a bearded goon while pointing at a box. “And that one’s Manuel” (Caridad’s uncle). “We don’t want to hear of any funeral and we don’t want to hear of any major show of grief!”
38
They looked around at the ashen-faced women and the terrified children now clinging to them, then marched out and drove back to La Cabana, where lovable “Papa Che” had gleefully watched the executions of Caridad’s father and uncle from his favorite window.
“Our family was never the same,” recalled Caridad, now fifty-five but still weeping unapologetically at the memory. “My mother became a mere shadow of her former self, walking listlessly around until her death. I’d go in our patio to weep where no one could see me. I was a little girl and afraid Che’s men would come back to harm us if they saw me crying.”
39
Much like al Qaeda’s beheading of Nicolas Berg, Che’s murders were staged to cow and terrorize. The televised murder of Cornelio Rojas was a pioneer version of what would later become an Internet specialty of professional terrorists. (The murder of Cornelio Rojas, Barbara Rangel’s grandfather, on Che Guevara’s orders, can be viewed at
www.aguadadepasajeros.bravepages.com/menu1/fusivista.htm
.)
Thousands of other Cuban mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers simply got an anonymous phone call saying the bodies of their formerly imprisoned menfolk were now in Colon Cemetery. These were usually unmarked mass graves. To visit and place a cross or flowers over them was to invite retribution from “Papa Che’s” goons.
“I and thousands of other little girls in Cuba had the laps and kisses of our fathers and grandfathers stolen forever by that murdering Argentine coward,” says Barbara Rangel-Rojas. “When I recall my granddad’s and my uncle’s courageous death—then I think of Che Guevara’s famous words when he was captured: ‘Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!’ . . . Well, I’m torn between laughing and crying . . . not really . . . the truth is . . . I still cry.”
Heartbreak wasn’t over for the Rojas family after grandfather Cornelio’s public murder. Two years later Barbara’s seventeen-year-old uncle Pedro, who’d escaped to the United States, came back to his homeland by landing at the Bay of Pigs with a rifle in his hands, hell-bent on freeing Cuba from Che Guevara.
After three days of continuous ground combat on that doomed beachhead, Barbara’s young uncle was grim-faced, thirst-crazed, and delirious. A CIA officer named Grayston Lynch had trained, befriended, and even fought alongside these men. On the third day of battle he was on his U.S. flagship thirty miles offshore and had just learned from Washington that they’d been abandoned. No ammo was coming—no air cover, no reinforcements, no naval support. He was enraged and heartsick as he radioed his brothers in arms and offered to evacuate them.
“We will
not
be evacuated!” yelled Pedro Rojas’s commander into his radio, even as forty-one thousand communist troops and swarms of Soviet tanks closed the ring on him and his fourteen hundred utterly abandoned band of brothers. “We came here to
fight
! This ends
here
!”
“Tears filled my eyes,” recalls Lynch. “Never in my thirty-seven years had I been so ashamed of my country.”
After expending his last bullet on that bloody beachhead, seventeen-year-old Pedro Rojas was captured and murdered in cold blood by the Che-trained and -indoctrinated communist militia.
7
The “Intellectual and Art Lover” as Book Burner and Thief
Che is not only an intellectual, he was the most complete human being of our time—our era’s most perfect man.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
All Che biographers dwell on his affinity for matters intellectual and literary. “Che was interested in everything from sociology and philosophy to mathematics and engineering,” writes former
Time
and
Newsweek
editor John Gerassi, “there were 3,000 books in the Guevara home.”
1
“The asthmatic boy spent long hours . . . developing an intense love of books and literature,” writes Jorge Castañeda. “He devoured the children’s classics of the time, but also Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Jules Verne. He also explored Cervantes, Anatole France, Pablo Neruda. . . . He bought and read the books of all Nobel Prize winners in literature and held intensive discussions with his history and literature professors.”
Jon Lee Anderson quotes a Che friend from the era of
The Motorcycle Diaries
, “For Ernesto Guevara everything began with literature.” Then Anderson goes on to rhapsodize about Che’s “voracious reading appetite” and immense “intellectual curiosity.”
Certainly, one of this bibliophile’s first acts after entering Havana in January 1959 was to stage a massive book burning.
We’ve all seen the newsreels of Nazi goons burnings books in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Probably no two weeks go by without the History Channel or PBS graphically reminding us of this intellectual atrocity, with either a voiceover or subtitles of Joseph Goebbels gloating that “these flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new!” Many have heard a somber voiceover quoting German philosopher Heinrich Heine: “If you burn books today, you burn people tomorrow.” In Berlin today, a “Submerged Library” monument stands in Berlin commemorating that outrage.
This is, of course, good history, necessary to remember and retell. Liberals are especially sensitive—and in some cases, oversensitive. Let some rural school board today refuse to assign Darwin or James Joyce in its curriculum and liberals quickly trot out the Nazi book-burning episode as the obvious next step by officials in the dark hinterlands of Red State America.
But regarding the intellectual atrocity by Che in Cuba? “The portrait of Che is now as complete as it will ever be,” says the
London Times Literary Supplement
about Anderson’s book.
You’ll search Anderson’s book, along with all the other massive and “scholarly” biographies of Che, in vain for any mention of his biblio-pyre.
It happened. On January 24, 1959, in the street directly in front of 558 G Street in Havana’s Vedado district—on Che Guevara’s direct orders—three thousand books were doused with gasoline and set ablaze, to the cheers and whoops of his communist toadies.
“I contacted several foreign correspondents in Havana at the time,” recalls Salvador Diaz-Verson, whose books, pamphlets, and files had fueled the blaze, and whose private office and library had been broken into and pillaged by Che’s armed goons. “Jules Dubois of the
Chicago Tribune
and Hal Hendricks of the
Miami News
were among the dozens of correspondents who came with me to inspect the ruins of my library and the ashes which had become of my books. None of them attached any importance whatsoever to the incident.”
2
We can only imagine the U.S. media reaction had it happened a month earlier at the hands of Batista’s unbearded and unfashionable henchmen.
The Nazi book burning was public and theatrical, a naked attempt at rabble-rousing. Joseph Goebbels and the SA hoodlums mocked the books’ authors by name—Einstein, Freud, H. G. Wells—and displayed the book contents while scorning them and heaving them into the bonfire. Che’s motives were different; they had nothing to do with totalitarian pageantry. Indeed, Che tried to keep his bonfire secret. The very
last
thing he and Castro wanted was more exposure of the contents of Salvador Diaz-Verson’s library.
Diaz-Verson, a renowned Cuban journalist, scholar, and former public official, was president of Cuba’s Anti-Communist League, a private research organization and an early version of a think tank. Since the mid-1930s—labeled by Eugene Lyons as the “Red Decade”—the league had devoted itself to the study of communism. In the course of their investigations Diaz-Verson and his staff compiled detailed lists of Communist Party members and agents (both card carriers and secret) and their assorted front groups. By 1959 they had accumulated information on 250,000 Latin American communists, agents, and accomplices.
During World War II, the league had also investigated the activities of Nazi agents in Latin America (remember, Nazis and commies were allies from September 1939 till June 1941). Early in the war, the Florida Straits crawled with German U-boats playing havoc with Allied shipping. Cuba herself had four of her merchant marine fleet sunk. Salvador Diaz-Verson and his people uncovered a cell of Nazi agents who were passing along details about the ships’ schedules to their German masters.
The Nazi agents were rounded up and the problem nipped in the bud. Cuba’s death penalty, abolished in 1933, was very briefly reinstated just for the occasion. Diaz-Verson was often consulted on his work by a man who consequently became his friend, J. Edgar Hoover. The friendship and professional relationship had actually begun during the work against Nazis and grew afterward. The FBI chief began receiving reports from the Anti-Communist League every month.
Diaz-Verson’s books and files—notably his just-published
Red Czarism,
three thousand copies of which helped fuel the massive fire in front of his office—posed a bigger threat to Castro and Che’s plans for Cuba than anything written by Einstein, Freud, or H. G. Wells presented to Hitler and Goebbels’s plans for Germany. Both the Castro brothers’ and Che’s communist contacts and affiliations were heavily documented by Diaz-Verson, hence their urgency on the matter.
“I have never been a Communist,” the
New York Times
had dutifully quoted Ernesto “Che” Guevara as saying during an interview on January 4, 1959. “It gives me great pain to be called a Communist!”
At the time they were also parroting the line that “Castro himself is a strong
anti
communist.” (Nary a note of apology or “Oops! We goofed,” appeared afterward in the
New York Times
either. We’re going on forty-eight years of the most unrelenting communist regime in history, and the “Newspaper of Record” has yet to do a mea culpa on this one.)