Fidel's Executioner (Part IV)
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19823
By Humberto Fontova
October 14, 2005
One of the longest and bloodiest guerrilla wars on this continent was fought
not by Fidel and Che but against Fidel and Che -- and by landless peasants.
Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And
Cuba's kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway, and put up a heroic
resistance until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal during the "Cuban Missile
Crisis" finally starved them of supplies. Cubans know this war as "The
Escambray Rebellion."
It's rarely reported, but Che Guevara had a very bloody hand in one of the
major anti-insurgency wars on this continent. Seventy to 80 percent of these
rural anti-communist peasant guerrillas were executed on the spot on
capture. "We fought with the fury of cornered beasts" was how one of the few
lucky ones who escaped alive described the guerrillas' desperate
freedom-fight against the totalitarian agendas of the Cuban regime. (In
1956, when Che linked up with the Cuban exiles in Mexico city, one of them
recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as "Fascists!"
and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.)
In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. "Cuban
militia units (whose training and morale Jorge Castaneda insists we credit
to Che) commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the
palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants
were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits." [17]
The Maoist line about how "a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people,
etc.," 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.
So in a massive "relocation" campaign reminiscent of the one Spanish General
Valerinao "The Butcher" Weyler carried out against Cubans during their war
of independence at the turn of the century, Castro's Soviet trained 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.
According to evidence presented to the Organization of American States by
Cuban-exile researcher Dr. Claudio Beneda 4000 anti-Communist peasants were
summarily executed during this rural rebellion.
Time magazine notwithstanding, Fidel Castro -- and Fidel Castro alone -- was
the "brains" of the Cuban Revolution. And part of his acumen was his
proficiency at sizing up his revolutionary companeros, then delegating
jobs -- then eliminating them in various ways as circumstances dictated.
With Guevara he performed masterfully. First he assigned him to be commander
of Havana's La Cabana fortress, which Che promptly converted to a prison and
killing field.
"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that
falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of
gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for
the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"
Che Guevara wrote these lines while in his early twenties, before he had
gotten his hands on any such enemy. The passage appears in Che's Motorcycle
Diaries, recently made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford -- the
only film to get a whooping standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival.
It seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries
form his touching tribute.
Two weeks after Che entered Havana and took his post at La Cabana fortress,
Castro saw his instincts as a personnel manager fully vindicated. The "acrid
odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostrils from actual
combat. It always came from the close range murder of bound, gagged and
blindfolded men. "We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (firing
squad.)" Che instructed his Revolutionary Tribunals: "We don't need proof to
execute a man. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. A
revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."
[18]
Actually, Che Guevara was anything but a "cold killing machine." The term
implies a certain detachment or nonchalance towards murder. In fact Che gave
ample evidence of enjoying it. Almost all Cubans who knew him and are now in
exile and able to talk freely (Jose Benitez, Mario Chanes de Armas Dariel
Alarcon among others ) recall Che Guevara as a classic psychopath.
In January 1957, shortly after landing in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with
Fidel and Raul Castro, Che sent a letter to his discarded wife, Hilda Gadea.
"Dear vieja (i.e, 'Ole Lady' -- on top of everything else, Che was also a
notorious misogynist) I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for
blood." [19] His thirst would soon be slaked.
In that very month, January 1957 Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a
peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra who he accused of being an informer
for Batista's forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard,
Universo Sanchez. To everyone's surprise, Che Guevara -- a lowly rebel
soldier/medic at the time (not yet a comandante -- volunteered to accompany
Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were
glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm.
Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.
Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to
postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the
first execution of a Castro rebel by Castro's rebels. Suddenly without
warning Che stepped up and fired his pistol into Guerra's temple. "He went
into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were
mine." Che wrote in his Diaries.
Shortly afterwards, Che's father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his
prodigal son. "I'd like to confess, papa', at that moment I discovered that
I really like killing." [20]
This attitude caught Castro's eye. More executions of assorted "deserters"
informers" and "war criminals" quickly followed, all with Che's enthusiastic
participation. One was of a captured Batista soldier, a 17-years old boy
totally green to the guerrilla "war," hence his easy capture. First Che
interrogated him.
"I haven't killed anyone, comandante," the terrified boy answered Che. "I
just got out here! I'm an only son, my mother's a widow and I joined the
army for the salary, to send it to her every month...don't kill me!" He
blurted out when he heard Che's unmoved reply, "Don't kill me!--why?"
The boy was trussed up, shoved in front of a recently dug pit and murdered.
[21] Fidel was privy to these events. He thought executing Batista soldiers
was incredibly stupid, compared to the propaganda value of releasing them
since most weren't fighting anyway. But recognized the value of executions
in intimidating other Cubans, and recognized Che's value as someone who
enjoyed the job. By the summer of 1957 Che Guevara had been promoted to
full-fledged Major or "comandante," the Rebel army's highest rank. His fame
was spreading.
But not all the revolutionaries were favorably impressed. In mid-1958 one of
the rebels was wounded and made his way to a Dr. Hector Meruelo in the
nearby town of Cienfuegos. The good doctor patched him up and a few weeks
later informed him that he was well enough to return to Che's column.
"No, doctor," the boy responded. Please be discreet with this because it
could cost me my life, but I've learned that Che is nothing but a murderer.
I'm a revolutionary but I'm also a Christian. I'll go and join Camilo's
column (Camilo Cienfuegos) --but never Che's." [22]
As commander of the La Cabana prison, Che often insisted on shattering the
skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other
duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself
with watching the executions. Che's office in La Cabana had a section of
wall torn out so he could watch his firing squads at work.
A Rumanian journalist named Stefan Bacie visited Cuba in early 1959 and was
fortunate enough to get an audience with the already famous leader, whom he
had also met briefly in Mexico city. The meeting took place in Che's office
in La Cabana. Upon entering, the Rumanian saw Che motioning him over to his
office's newly constructed window.
Stefan Bacie got there just in time to hear the command of fuego, hear the
blast from the firing squad and see a condemned prisoner man crumple and
convulse. The stricken journalist immediately left and composed a poem,
titled, "I No Longer Sing of Che." ("I no longer sing of Che any more than I
would of Stalin," go the first lines.) [23]
A Cuban gentleman named Pierre San Martin was among those jailed by Che
Guevara in the early months of the Cuban Revolution. In an El Nuevo Herald
article from December 28, 1997 San Martin recalled the horrors: "Thirteen of
us were crammed into a cell. Sixteen of us would stand while the other
sixteen tried to sleep on the cold filthy floor. We took shifts that way.
Dozens were led from the cells to the firing squad daily. The volleys kept
us awake. We felt that any one of those minutes would be our last.
One morning the horrible sound of that rusty steel door swinging open
startled us awake and Che's guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. He
was a boy, maybe 14 years old. His face was bruised and smeared with blood.
"What did you do?" We asked horrified. "I tried to defend my papa," gasped
the bloodied boy. "But they sent him to the firing squad."
Soon Che's guards returned. The rusty steel door opened and they yanked the
boy out of the cell. "We all rushed to the cell's window that faced the
execution pit," recalls Mr. San Martin. "We simply couldn't believe they'd
murder him.
"Then we spotted him, strutting around the blood-drenched execution yard
with his hands on his waist and barking orders--Che Guevara himself. 'Kneel
down!' Che barked at the boy.
"Assassins!" we screamed from our window.
"I said: KNEEL DOWN!" Che barked again.
The boy stared Che resolutely in the face. "If you're going to kill me," he
yelled, "you'll have to do it while I'm standing! Men die standing!"
"Murderers!" the men yelled desperately from their cells. "Then we saw Che
unholstering his pistol. He put the barrel to the back of the boys neck and
blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.
"We erupted.'Murderers!--Assassins!'" His murder finished, Che finally
looked up at us, pointed his pistol, and emptied his clip in our direction.
Several of us were wounded by his shots."
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multiculty
"Abolish Multiculty and String Up The Traitors!"
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