Exposing the Real Che Guevara Read Online Free PDF Page A

even the famously dour Nikolai Lenin might have erupted in horselaughs if he could have seen the unbridled success of Che propaganda.
    Some Che biographers uncritically absorb the lies they are told by authoritative people and pass them on. Of the two most voluminous and best-selling biographies of Che, one was written by a contributor to Newsweek and the New York Times who is also a former Mexican Communist Party member and fondly recalls plastering Che’s poster in his Princeton dorm room. The other, written by a columnist for The New Yorker , was written mostly in Cuba with Castro’s full cooperation and with Aleida Guevara—a high-ranking Cuban Communist Party member—as a primary source.
    Che Guevara’s diaries were published by the propaganda bureau of a totalitarian regime, with the foreword written by Fidel Castro himself. Yet all Che “scholars” and the mainstream media take them at face value. Indeed, with regard to the unvarnished secrets of Che Guevara’s history, his scholarly biographers treasure these Havana editions as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. Might there be some embellishments or omissions in these Che “diaries”—in these documents that feature so prominently in the liberal media’s versions of Che’s brilliance and heroism? Not according to Che “scholars.” But as we’ll see in the coming chapters, Che’s early revolutionary colleagues, now in exile, along with the men actually on the scene of Che Guevara’s capture, have a very different story to tell.
    The book you’re holding relies on testimony from people who are now free to tell the truth without fear of Castro’s torture chambers and firing squads. Normally, eyewitnesses to a Hero and Icon of the Century would have to bat away the journalists, biographers, and screenwriters. Instead, for forty years, the mainstream press, scholars, and scriptwriters have shunned these invaluable sources. It appears that the journalists and scholars, no less than the screenwriters, do not want to entertain facts that conflict with the narrative they have jointly constructed with one of the century’s top manipulators of the intelligentsia, Fidel Castro.
    Since Castro’s famous interview with Herbert Matthews of the New York Times in 1957, through all the fawning interviews with Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, and Andrea Mitchell, Castro always had the international media eating out of his hand like trained pigeons. The process cranked up several notches when CNN opened its Havana bureau in 1997. This was shortly after Ted Turner, during a packed speaking gig at Harvard Law School, bubbled to the crowd, “Castro is one hell of a guy! You people would like him!” (Another gushing accolade for Cuba’s Maximum Leader came from the gentleman known, at the time, as “Mr. Jane Fonda.” His praise was evoked by a recent hunting trip to Cuba. During Tom Hayden’s expedition with Castro, military helicopters drove thousands of ducks in front of their shotguns, allowing them to slaughter hundreds of hapless birds. Where was PETA on that one?) At any rate, Che lives on in part because he had Fidel Castro as a press agent.
    From Castro’s fervid devotion to democracy and well wishes for the United States in 1957, to his regime’s glorious achievements in health care and education, to Elian’s father’s heartfelt yearning for the return of his son, Castro’s every whopper has been respectfully transcribed and broadcast for half a century now—and by the same journalistic Torquemadas who wouldn’t allow an American president to finish a sentence without erupting in cynical snorts and rude interrogations.
    Much credit for the remarkable afterlife of Che Guevara goes, of course, to The Picture. To his credit, Guevara understood his role. He performed magnificently at his photo shoot in March 1960 for Alberto Korda. His “faraway eyes” and high cheekbones were perfectly highlighted. Today that’s often all it takes for media stardom. Few