“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
Lazaro Piñeiro was only seven at the time, but the memories are still vivid.
“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
anti
communist 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,
anti
communist rebellion—that, again, according to Che’s accomplice Raul Castro, saw 179 different bands of
anti
communist “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
.
11
“The Brains of the Revolution” as Economic Czar
Che Guevara’s
Socialism and Man in Cuba
is one of the great documents in the history of socialism.
—FORMER
Time
AND
Newsweek
EDITOR AND
New York Times
WRITER JOHN GERASSI
Eleanor Clift has the power to make the worldly and garrulous John McLaughlin—host of the eponymous political chat show—gape in astonishment. Clift said on national television, “To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S.” McLaughlin had to ask her to repeat that to make sure he had heard her correctly.
Few myths are more persistent, or more rotten, than the myth of Cuban economic progress and egalitarianism.
In late 1959, Castro appointed Che as Cuba’s “Economics Minister.” Like a true child of the French Revolution, Che set out to re-fashion human nature, with hapless Cubans as his guinea pigs. His task was to create a “new man,” diligent, hard-working, obedient, free from all material incentives—in brief, lobotomized. And any shirkers, or smart-alecks who offered any lip, would quickly find themselves behind the barbed wire, watchtowers, and guard dogs of the prison camp Che christened at the harsh Guanahacabibes peninsula in extreme western Cuba.
“This multifaceted being is not, as it is claimed, the sum total of elements of the same category (and moreover, reduced to the same category by the system imposed upon them),” writes Che in his riveting and pithy
Socialism and Man in Cuba.
“The past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness—in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily—but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodity relations still persist, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized.
“It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms . . . and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel. In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken.” Jon Lee Anderson hails this pile of turgid, Marxist gibberish as Che’s “opus,” as “the crystallization of Che’s doctrinal message.” For once, Anderson is probably right.
“Man is an unfinished product,” Che wrote, “who bears the flaws of the past.”
1
Within months of Che’s appointment, the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba’s gold reserves, was practically worthless. In 1958, Cuba had 518 million pesos in circulation. A year later, 1,051 billion pesos were in circulation. A few months later 1,187 billion were in circulation and suddenly declared worthless, whereupon a new 477 million were printed up and distributed as replacements.
2
Talent like this begs for promotion. Castro promptly appointed Che as Cuba’s “minister of industries.” Che quickly wrecked Cuba’s formerly robust sugar, cattle, tobacco, and nickel export industries. Within a year, a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria, Japan, and Spain, a huge influx of immigrants, and the third-highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of its most productive citizens from every sector of its society.
The customary observation that this was “communist mismanagement” is wrong. In the service of the goal of absolute power, the Cuban economy was
expertly
managed in the tradition of Lenin, Mao, Uncle Ho, Ulbricht, Tito, and Kim Il Sung.
A less megalomaniacal ruler might have considered the Cuban economy a golden goose. Castro, through Che, wrung its neck. He methodically wrecked Latin America’s premier economy in order to disallow any other centers of power from developing. Despite a deluge of tourism and foreign investment from Canada, Latin America, and Europe for over a decade, Cuba is as essentially communist in the early twenty-first century as it was in 1965. The Castro brothers are very vigilant in these matters.
Castro’s rationale was simply to run Cuba as his personal hacienda, and the Cuban people as his cattle. His minister of industries, however, seemed to actually
believe
in the socialist fantasy. When Che pronounced in May 1961 that under his tutelage the Cuban economy would boast an annual growth rate of 10 percent, Che seemed to
believe
it.
This is where libertarian-free-market ideologues got it wrong. They insisted that with the lifting of the embargo, capitalism would sneak in and eventually blindside Castro. All the proof was to the contrary. Capitalism didn’t sweep Castro away or even co-opt him. He swept
it
away. He wasn’t a Deng or a Gorbachev. In 1959, Castro could have easily left most of Cuba’s economy in place, made it obedient to his whims, and been a Peron, a Franco, or a Mussolini. He could have grabbed half and been a Tito. He could have demanded a piece of the action from all involved and been a Marcos, a Trujillo, a Mobutu, or a Suharto. But this wasn’t enough for him.
Castro lusted for power on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao. And he hired a sadistic and pretentious true believer named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna y Lynch to help him get it; first as chief executioner of his enemies (real, imagined, and potential), then as economic wrecking ball. The task accomplished, Ernesto Guevara was himself liquidated as routinely and cleverly as Castro had liquidated many other accomplices, rivals, and even a few true enemies.
One day, Che decided that Cubans should learn to play and like soccer (
futbol
) like the citizens of his native Argentina. A sugar plantation named Central Macareno near Cienfuegos had recently been stolen from its American owners (contrary to leftist mythology, barely a quarter of sugar plantations were U.S.-owned). The plantation also included a huge orchard of mango, avocado, and mamey trees that were just starting to give fruit. Che ordered them all cut down and the ground leveled in order to construct a soccer field.