The State Department actually gave Castro’s new government official recognition before Castro had even entered Havana. “We put Castro in power,” a bitter Smith said in Senate testimony two years later.
CHAPTER TEN
“WE FOUGHT WITH THE FURY OF CORNERED BEASTS”
Castro’s rebels
skirmished for barely two years; his rebels in arms numbered only four hundred in late 1958; and only 182 people died in Castro’s “war” (though thousands died afterwards to Castro’s firing squads).
But for some reason, most people don’t know about a much bigger war that lasted for six years (1960–66), which killed 6,000 government troops, and which Raul Castro himself estimated involved 179 different bands of
anti-
Communist guerrillas and rebels, mostly rural, mostly peasant. All this happened on our very doorstep, eight jet minutes away. Cubans know it as the Escambray Rebellion.
You see, friends, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s few military victories came not
as
guerrillas but
against
guerrillas, in the most brutal, cowardly, and disgusting type of
anti
-insurgency war—or really massacres. Who knows that one of the most protracted and brutal guerrilla wars in the Western Hemisphere was actually fought
against
Castro and Che by poorly armed, landless peasants in Cuba’s Escambray mountains? Collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine—but Cuba’s Kulaks had guns (a few at the beginning, anyway; the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal cut them off from American aid) and a willingness to fight.
For the Escambray Rebellion, no Cuban reporters existed, only Castro government propagandists and eunuchs. (Norberto Fuentes comes to mind here.) And the foreign reporters who rushed to Castro’s press hut never turned up for this war, though it took Castro six years; tens of thousands of troops; scores of Russian advisers; squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters, and flame-throwers; and a massive “relocation” campaign to finally crush these incredibly valiant and resourceful freedom fighters. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” says one veteran from Miami.
“Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn more than a hundred palm-thatched cottages on the edge of the Zapata swamps,” writes Paul Bethel. “The Guajiro occupants of the cottages were accused by the regime of feeding and giving comfort to counter-revolutionaries.”
1
“I’ll never forget it,” recalls Acelia Pacheco, who was a young girl at the time and was among the “relocated.” “The Communists would pull up and simply start yanking everyone out of the house at gunpoint, jamming them into trucks, into carts, even onto mules. I’ll never forget the sight of the little children, even babies, completely bewildered, crying, bawling, the looks on their dirty, tear-streaked little faces. The mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers—some crying, some shouting horrible curses at the Communists—all of us were dumped in concentration camps hundreds of miles away from our ancestral homes, with no food for days at a time. Most of the men were taken elsewhere and never seen again. . . . I
lived
through all that!”
2
“Twelve of us guerrillas might find ourselves surrounded by five thousand Communist troops,” recalls freedom fighter Guillermo Calzada. “We fought violent battles each and every day against these odds, without food, without water, without sleep.... I went thirteen days without eating. I had eight men with me for one battle and ended up the only survivor. We were in constant motion . . . Russian helicopters overhead strafing us. . . . Worst of all were our armaments. We didn’t have much. By 1963, the Escambray guerrilla who had a handful of bullets to his name considered himself damn lucky. We made every bullet count too, shooting the Communists well after we saw the whites of their eyes.”
3
And why did these men (and boys) fight? “I was a poor country bumpkin,” says Escambray hero Agapito Rivera from Miami today. “I didn’t have much, but I had hopes. I had aspirations. And I’d be damned if I’d go work like a damned slave on one of Castro and Che’s state farms. I planned on working hard—but on my own, for myself, getting my own land maybe. Then I saw Castro and the Communists stealing everything from everybody. They stole my hopes, my dreams . . . I had no choice.”
4
Agapito Rivera had two brothers and nine cousins who took up arms in the anti-Castro freedom fight. He was the only survivor.
“A bunch of wimps. That’s right—wimps,” oinks Michael Moore about these men in his book
Downsize This
. “These Cuban exiles, for all their chest-thumping and terrorism, are really just a bunch of wimps. . . . They grabbed their assets and headed to Florida. . . . They came here, expecting us to fight their fight for them . . . these Cuban crybabies.”
5
“I didn’t have anything Castro could
possibly
steal from me,” laughs Eusebio Peñalver from Miami today. “I was a country negro. No farm. No mansion, no sugar mill, no yacht, not even a car. None of that stuff—but goddammit, I had my
freedom
! My
self-respect
! Those Communist pigs wanted me to bow down before them like my great-grandparents who were slaves!”
Peñalver answered his would-be slavemasters with repeated blasts from an M-1 carbine. For almost two years he gave the Castro Communists holy hell with that carbine. “If the odds were only ten to one, we thought the battle a breeze,” he snorts. “Those Castro idiots came at us in waves, guess that’s how their Russian masters trained them. We Escambray rebels would shoot our way out of three or four encirclements by those imbeciles a week.... But we couldn’t go on—not without supplies. Surely we thought we’d get some from the Americans.... And we
did
, very early in the freedom fight. But it dried up.
Hombre
, we weren’t asking them to bleed and die for us. . . . But good grief, we
did
need arms and ammo. We had plenty of men who wanted to join the freedom fight with us. ‘Got any weapons?’ we’d ask. ‘No? Well then, let’s wait till we get some.’ ”
The wait was vain. The odds and strangulation of supplies finally took their toll and Peñalver was captured. He ended up serving longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela did in South Africa’s. But have you ever seen Peñalver featured at a UN, NAACP, or Congressional Black Caucus function? Peñalver is
the longest serving black political prisoner of the twentieth century
, yet our Castro-slobbering liberal media has made sure you’ve never even heard of him.
About a year into the Escambray Rebellion, who shows up in the area commanding government troops but the mighty Che Guevara himself. “And it couldn’t have come at a better time,” recalls a rebel. “We desperately needed some rest, some respite from the constant battles, to reorganize, try to resupply.”
With the mighty Che commanding their opponents, the rebels got exactly what they needed—and
then
some. “At first we couldn’t believe it,” recalls the rebel. “Che’s men simply lined up elbow to elbow, right out in the open like that, then swept through an area they thought held some rebels!”
Andy Jackson’s men never had such easy pickings against redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans. “We slaughtered them,” recalls the rebel. “Even against those outrageous odds, we were prevailing for a while. And we all got new arms and ammo—by taking them from dead Communists. It was great.”
But it was short-lived. “Guess even by Russian standards Che was hopeless, and soon he disappeared from the battle zone,” says the rebel. “We’d always heard that Fidel couldn’t stand Che. Castro was always sending Che off on little errands—to give one of his long, boring speeches at the United Nations, at some Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Africa, to the Punta del Este Conference in South America, anywhere, just to get that imbecile out of his hair for a while. Che’s personality grated on many Cubans. He was the typical haughty Argentine, but with nothing really to be haughty about. He was great at massacring defenseless men at La Cabana, but that’s about it.”
Here he laughs. “A couple of years ago, my grandson comes home with some book assigned to him in a college class,
Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare
. I could only laugh—and loudly! Years ago when I was younger, crazier, I might have stormed over to the school and given that professor a piece of my mind, maybe slapped the living shit out of him too. Nowadays I can only laugh—and at all those Che T-shirts and watches and movies. Just laugh, laugh, laugh. I guess it’s better this way.”
Many a peasant hut was torched, villages destroyed, and villagers summarily executed during the Escambray Rebellion. Might
Platoon
’s writer and director offer some insight into these butcheries? Why yes, actually. Oliver Stone has a long association with the butcher himself. “[Castro] is very warm and bright... a very driven man, a very moral man. He’s very concerned about his country. He’s selfless in that way.”
6
Margarito Lanza Flores was another poor black Cuban. He reacted to the reinstitution of slavery in Cuba much like his brother in arms Eusebio Peñalver had, by raking the Communist enslavers with a Thompson machine gun. Soon Margarito was commanding a band of Escambray rebels himself, known as Capitan “El Negro” Tondique. His rebel band would pop up, blasting away, decimating Communist columns, and then vanish into the landscape. “El Negro” Tondique drove the Communists absolutely nuts
7
.
“The Castroites called us bandits,” snorts Tondique’s brother in arms Arcadio Peguero from Miami today. “In fact, we survived by relying on the support of thousands of small farmers in the Escambray.”
8
That famous Maoist quote about how a guerrilla is a fish that swims and hides in the sea which is the people, etc., actually described these anti-Communist guerrillas to a T.
And the Communists knew it damn well. That’s what led to the massive and brutal relocation campaign, in which they ripped thousands of farmers from their ancestral homes and lands in the Escambray and shipped them to concentration camps hundreds of miles away.
This made things much easier for the gallant Reds. And one morning, after a ferocious firefight, Captain Tondique found himself completely surrounded by hundreds of Russian-armed troops in a sugarcane field. Naturally, the Castroites were too scared to go in after the legendary “El Negro.” So they set the canefield on fire from every corner and sat back. Tondique saw the flames closing in and knew how many hundreds of Communists he was up against that day, so he started digging into the ground and covered himself up with the dirt as the roaring flames passed over him. He lived but was burned horribly. The Reds swarmed in after the fire, spotted the horribly wounded Tondique (his face was a mass of huge black blisters, his hair scorched and matted to his head), and yanked him out.
They dragged him under a nearby bridge, stood him up, and prepared a firing squad. “
Fuego!
” bellowed the Communist commander, and “El Negro” was instantly on the ground—but scurrying away! He’d managed to hit the deck at the
exact instant
of the volley and it went over him. Tondique threw himself into the surrounding bushes and started to escape. “Get him!” shrieked the rattled Communist commander, Victor Dreke. “Get him! Don’t let him get away!” The Communists surrounded the grimacing, limping Tondique in the bushes and emptied several clips from their Czech machine guns into his charred and shattered body.
9
Interesting postscript: On November 13, 2002, Tondique’s gallant murderer, Victor Dreke—a black himself but one who hired on at the Communist plantation as a guard and overseer—visited the United States as the guest of honor of Florida International University. Dreke was on a book tour, you see. He’d just written one detailing—among his other gallant Communist exploits—his massacre of Escambray peasants.
Zoila Aguila was a famous female guerrilla in the Escambray Rebellion (her moniker was “
la Niña del Escambray
”). After her family’s farm was stolen and several family members murdered, la Niña grabbed a tommy gun, rammed in a clip, and took to the hills. For a year she ran rings around the Reds. But trapped without supplies, she was finally run down. For decades, la Niña suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons, but she lives in Miami today. Seems to me that her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of “womyn’s studies,” for a Susan Sarandon role, for a little whooping up by Gloria Steinem, Dianne Feinstein, and Hillary herself. But whoever heard of la Niña?
Instead of la Niña, we got Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan feminist-Marxist who wrote the book
I, Rigoberta Menchu
, an autobiography chronicling the suffering of indigenous Guatemalans at the hands of Guatemala’s U.S.-backed military. The rotund Menchu (who resembles a well-tanned version of Bella Abzug) was showered with honorary doctorates from countless colleges, nominated as a United Nations “goodwill ambassador,” and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her book became required reading in practically every college and high school in the land.
But the book turned out to be a massive pile of baloney. This was exposed by—of all newspapers—the
New York Times
. One investigator, seeking to verify the book’s account of Menchu’s young brother dying of malnutrition, instead found the brother. But nothing changed for Menchu, nary an award or honor was rescinded. The Nobel Peace Prize stuck.