Fidel's ender (Part II) By Humberto Fontova October 14, 2005
As for the rest of Time's buttertions, other than his competence at liquidateing bound, gagged and blindfolded men, Che Guevara failed spectacularly at everything he attempted in his life. First he failed as Argentine medical student. Though he's widely described as a medical doctor by his hagiographers (Castaneda, Anderson, Taibo, Kalfon) no record exists of Guevara's medical degree. When Cuban-American researcher Enrique Ros inquired of the Rector of the University of Buenos Aires and the head of its Office of Academic Affairs for copies or proof of said document, Ros was variously told that the records had been misplaced or perhaps stolen. 4
In 1960 Castro appointed Che as Cuba's "Minister of Economics." Within months the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba's gold reserves, was practically worthless. The following year Castro appointed Che as Cuba's Minister of Industries. Within a year a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria and Japan, a huge influx of immigrants and the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of it's most productive citizens from every sector of its society, all who were grateful to leave with only the clothes on their back.
Most observers attribute this to "Communist mismanagement." Che himself confessed to his multiple economic errors and failings. Actually, given the goal of Cuba's ruler since January of 1959 -- i.e., absolute power -- the Cuban economy has been expertly managed. Castro inherited a vibrant free market economy in 1959 (something unique among communist rulers). All the others -- from Lenin to Mao to Ho to Ulbricht to breasto to Kim Il Sung --took over primitive and-or chaotic, war ravaged economies.
A less megalomaniacal ruler would have considered that a golden goose had landed in his lap. But Castro wrung its neck. He deliberately and methodically wrecked Latin America's premier economy. A Cuban capitalist is a person that couldn't be controlled, Castro reasoned then, and continues to do so to this day. Despite a flood of tourism and foreign investment for over a decade, Cuba in 2005 is as essentially as poor (and Communist) as it was in 1965 or worse. The Castro brothers are vigilant in these matters.
Che actually believed in the socialist fantasy. When he pronounced in May of 1961 that under his tutelage the Cuban economy would boast an annual growth rate of 10% he seemed to believe it.
Castro didn't care. He simply knew as a result he'd be running Cuba like his personal plantation, with the Cuban people as his cattle.
This is where libertarian-free-market ideologues get it wrong. They insist that with the lifting of the embargo, capitalism will sneak in and eventually blindside Castro. All the proof is to the contrary. Capitalism didn't sweep Castro away or even co opt him. He blindsided it. He swept it away. He's not Deng or 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, a Mussolini - the idol of his youth. He could have grabbed half and been a breasto. He could have demanded a piece of the action from all involved and been a Marcos, a Trujillo, a Mobutu, a Suharto. But this wasn't enough for him.
Castro lusted for the power of a Stalin or a Mao. And he got it
Che Guevara's most famous book is breastled Guerrilla Warfare. His famous photo is captioned "Heroic Guerrilla." On the other hand his most resounding failure came precisely as a guerrilla, while there is no record of him prevailing in any bona-fide guerrilla battle. In fact, there are precious few accounts that he actually fought in anything properly described as a battle. The one that describes his most famous military exploit is referred to as "The Battle of Santa Clara," which took place in December 1958. The loss of this "battle" by the Batista forces is alleged to have caused Batista to lose hope and flee Cuba. To commemorate this historic military engagement, Castro has built a Che Guevara museum in Santa Clara.
"One Thousand end in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting," proclaimed a New York Times headline on Jan 4, 1959 about the battle. "Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties" the articles continued. "Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men."
"Those of us who were there can only laugh at this stuff," say participants on both sides who live in exile today. 5 In fact, the Battle of Santa Clara--despite what those early versions of Jayson Blair reported -- was a puerile skirmish. Che Guevara's own diary mentions that his column suffered exactly one casualty (a soldier known as El Vaquerito) in this ferocious "battle." Other accounts put the grand total of rebel losses as from three to five men. Most of Batista's soldiers saw no reason to fight for a crooked, unpopular regime that was clearly doomed. So they didn't fire a shot, even those on the famous "armored train," that Guevara supposedly attacked and captured.
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Today that armored train is a major tourist attraction in Santa Clara. The train, loaded with 373 soldiers and $4M worth of munitions, was sent from Havana to Santa Clara in late December of 1958 by Batista's high command as a last ditch attempt to halt the rebels. Che's rebels in Santa Clara bulldozed the tracks and the train derailed just outside of town. Then a few rebels shot at it and a few soldiers fired back. No one was hurt. Soon some rebels approached brandishing a truce flag and one of the train's officers, Enrique Gomez, walked out to meet them. Gomez was brought to meet Comandante Guevara.
"What's going on here!' Che shouted. "This isn't what we agreed on!"
Gomez was puzzled. "What agreement?" he asked.6 It turned out, unbeknownst to the troops inside, Guevara had used funds the revolutionaries had raised from anti-Batista Cubans to buy the train and all its armaments had from its corrupt commander Colonel Florentino Rossell, who had already fled to Miami. The price was either $350,000 or $1,000,000, depending on the source. 7
Actually Che had every reason to be upset. Actual shots fired against his troops? Here's another eye-witness account regarding Che's famous "invasion" of las Villas Province shortly before the famous "battle" of Santa Clara. "Guevara's column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camaguey. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista's military commander in the city. The package contained $100,000 with a note. Guevara's men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops." 8
Francisco Rodriguez Tamayo was a Rebel captain who had been in on many of these transactions but he defected mere months after the Rebel victory. In an El Diario de Nueva York article dated June 25th 1959 he claimed that Castro still had $4,500,000 left in that "fund" at the time of the Revolutionary victory. "I don't know what might have happened to that money." Rodriguez Tamayo adds.
Yet immediately after the Santa Clara bribe and skirmish, Che ordered 27 Batista soldiers executed as "war criminals." Dr. Serafin Ruiz was a Castro operative in Santa Clara at the time, but apparently an essentially decent one. "But Comandante" he responded to Che's order. "Our revolution promises not to execute without trials, without proof. How can we just....?"
"Look Serafin" Che snorted back. "If your bourgeois prejudices won't allow you to carry out my orders, fine. Go ahead and try them tomorrow morning--but execute them NOW!" 9 It was a Marxist version of the Red Queen's famous line to Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first--verdict afterwards!"
Che Guevara's own diary puts the grand total of his forces' losses during the entire two-year long "civil war" in Cuba at 20, about equal to the average number dead during Rio de Janeiro's carnival every year. To put it briefly, Batista's army barely fought.
Officials in Cuba's U.S. embbutty at the time became a little skeptical about all the battlefield bloodshed and heroics reported in the New York Times and investigated. They ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what the New York Times kept reporting as bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles.
They found that in the entire Cuban countryside, in those two years of "ferocious" battles between rebel forces and Batista troops, the total casualties on both sides actually amounted to 182. 10 New Orleans has an annual liquidate rate double that.
Typically, Che Guevara doesn't even merit credit for the perfectly sensible scheme of bribing rather than fighting Batista's army. The funds for these bribes derived mostly from Fidel's snookering of Batista's wealthy political opponents, convincing them that he was a "patriotic Cuban, a democrat," and that they should join, or at least help fund, his 26th of July Movement in order to bring democracy and prosperity to Cuba.
In late 1957 Castro signed an agreement called "The Miami Pact" with several of these were quite wealthy. Indeed if the term, "rich, white Miami Cuban exiles," that liberals scornfully use against current Cuban-Americans ever fit -- it was for the mulatto Batista's liberal opponents, for Fidel Castro's early backers. Among these was former president Carlos Prio who Batista had ousted in his (bloodless) coup in 1952, along with many of Prio's ministers and business cronies.
In fact, Guevara went ballistic over the Miami Pact, when he first learned of it, over this shameful deal with "bourgeois" elements. "I refuse to lend my historic name to that crime!" he wrote. "We rebels have proffered our buttes in the most despicable act of buggery that Cuban history is likely to recall!" 11
It was despicable buggery for sure. But Che had the buggerers and the buggerees reversed. Lenin coined the term "Useful Idiots," but to this day Castro remains history's virtuoso at snaring and employing them.
That a "guerrilla war" with "peasant and worker backing" overthrew Batista is among the century's most widespread and persistent academic fables. No Cuban Castroites who participated actually believe this. The buttociated Press dispatches about Castro and Che's "war" were actually concocted and written by Castro's own agent in New York, Mario Llerena, who admits as much in his book, The Unsuspected Revolution. Llerena was also the contact with Castro's most famous publicity agent, the New York Times, Herbert Matthews. National Review's famous 1960 cartoon showing a beaming Castro, "I got my job through the New York Times!" nailed it.
-- Jim Unite Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"
