Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova Page B

loners, like Andy Garcia’s The Lost City, few directors will touch a story that fairly portrays the victims of Che.
    A good case can be made that Castro and Che preempted the Taliban by a good forty years. The stifling economic and social conditions created by the Cuban Revolution leave Cuban women today as the most suicidal in the world. This does not, however, prevent the United Nations from naming Cuba to its Human Rights Commission. Nor does the regime’s treatment of women prevent UNICEF from naming an award in Castro’s Cuba’s honor.
    Certainly, Time magazine did not report how “devastating” Che actually was for many Cuban women.
    Evelio Gil Diez was seventeen years old when Che signed his death warrant and Marks blasted his skull apart in La Cabana’s killing ground, with Che watching from his window. Luis Perez Antunez was also seventeen when he stared his executioners boldly in the face, seconds before the volley riddled his body and ended his young life.
    Seventeen-year-old Calixto Valdes was found guilty of “crimes against the revolution” in the same mass trial that condemned his father, Juan. From his cell in La Cabana, Juan watched the guards stomp down the hall and enter the nearby cell that held his son. He heard a scuffle, then watched how they yanked his struggling boy from the cell in a chokehold. “Cowards!” yelled Juan in tears of rage, bashing the cell bars. “Miserable assassins!” While one guard bent his boy’s arms back and bound his hands, two more guards came into play. One grabbed his furiously struggling son’s hair and jerked his head back, trying to steady him. The other taped his mouth shut. (By then, the firing squads were becoming rattled by the defiant yells of “ Viva Cuba Libre! ” “ Viva Cristo Rey! ” and “Down with Communism!”)
    Juan watched helplessly as his son struggled. Three guards managed to drag him down the hall, and Juan tried to steel himself. A few moments later he shuddered at the blast that murdered his boy. A few seconds later he shuddered again at the coup de grace. Juan Valdes’s sentence had been twenty-five years in prison. Would a sentence of death have been any worse?
    Rigoberto Hernandez was also seventeen when Che’s soldiers dragged him from his cell in La Cabana, jerked his head back to gag him, and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched, and finally proved to his prosecutors that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “planting bombs.”
    But there was no bucking Che’s “pedagogy of the paredon !”
    “Fuego!” and the volley shattered Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bonds, blindfold, and gag. The revolutionary courts followed Che Guevara’s instructions that “proof is secondary and an archaic bourgeois detail.” Remember this, and remember Harvard University’s rollicking ovation to honored guest Fidel Castro during the very midst of this appalling bloodbath.
    The point lost on Harvard was the use of terror to cow the public, to let them know who was now in charge, and the fate that awaited any challengers. The more horrifying the murders, the better they served their purpose.
    One mother, Rosa Hernandez, recalls how she begged for a meeting with Che in order to try to save her seventeen-year-old son, who was condemned without trial to the firing squad. Guevara graciously complied. “Come right in, señora, ” said Che as he opened the door to his office. “Have a seat.” Silently he listened to her sobs and pleas, then picked up the phone right in front of her. “Execute