Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova Page A

glowing record as Cuba’s export manager at the time has largely gone unheralded. “Where Guevara shone,” he writes in his widely praised book The Fall of Che Guevara, “was in the role of a diplomat, especially on economic issues. He secured export and import deals for Cuba within the communist bloc on terms that no other countries received and that helped Cuba enormously.” 16
    As we will see, Che was an economic disaster, wrecking every vestige of Cuba’s flourishing capitalism. But history should not overlook this signal economic achievement, that Cuban blood had a ready market in Cuba’s sister socialist republics on distant continents for ready cash.
    A crowning irony: This was the same man who liked to proclaim that he helped free Cuba from the rapacity of those “blood-sucking Yankee imperialist exploiters!”

6
    Murderer of Women and Children
    Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che Guevara guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor.
    — Time MAGAZINE, AUGUST 8, 1960
     
On April 17, 1961, a counter-reVolutionary named Amelia Fernandez García had her young body destroyed by a firing-squad volley.
    On Christmas Eve of that same year, Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. She had been found guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (the term for Cuban farmers who took up arms to fight the theft of their land). When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso—remember, all ten executioners shot live ammo—Juana was six months pregnant.
    Dr. Amando Lago has fully documented the firing-squad executions of eleven Cuban women in the early days of the regime. He documents a total of 219 female deaths, the rest listed as “extrajudicial.” (And we’ve seen what even a “judicial” execution meant to Che—the verdict announced before the trial.)
    Lydia Perez also died “extrajudicially,” on August 7, 1961, while a prisoner at the Guanajay women’s prison camp. Eight months pregnant at the time, she somehow annoyed a young guard, who bashed her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach, and walked off. Lydia and her baby were left to bleed to death. Olga Fernandez and her husband, Marcial, were both machine-gunned to death on April 18, 1961, while rushing to the Argentine embassy for asylum. Amalia Cora was machine-gunned to death along with five others for the crime of trying to exit Cuba in a boat on February 5, 1965.
    Twenty-four-year-old Teresita Saavedra was a lay Catholic leader when the Che-trained militia arrested her in the town of Sancti-Spiritus in central Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion had just been crushed and a huge dragnet was sweeping Cuba for any who had sympathized with those abandoned freedom fighters. Teresita, who certainly qualified, was hauled away at Czech machine-gun point to the town’s police headquarters. In the interrogation room she was repeatedly raped by five milicianos, who then released her. Teresita committed suicide that night. “Without Che the militias would not have been reliable,” goes the refrain of Che biographer Jorge Castañeda. The recent foreign minister of Mexico is correct. The milicianos were unusually reliable. And diligent.
    Two Catholic nuns were part of the “extrajudicial” massacre of women. Sister Aida Rosa Perez kept getting on the authorities’ nerves with her anticommunist speeches. She was finally sentenced to twelve years at hard labor, despite her heart condition. Two years into her sentence, while toiling in the sun inside Castro’s Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister Rosa collapsed from a heart attack. The media are always ready to headline atrocities, such as the killing of Catholic nuns in El Salvador by “right-wing” death squads. When Salvadoran archbishop Romero was assassinated, it provoked a major Hollywood movie. Aside from independent efforts by brave