Read Online Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova - Free Book Online
Authors: Humberto Fontova
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Sangriento (the Blood Covenant). 4
The point was to make murderers to bond with the murderous regime. The more shooters, the more murderers. The more murderers thus manufactured, the more complicit people on hand to resist any overthrow of their system. The fanatic and suicidal resistance put up by Hitler’s SS troopers against the advancing Red Army saw the same theme at work. These SS troops knew they were fighting the sons and fathers of people they’d murdered in places like Babi Yar.
Under the Soviet Ciutat’s orders, all cadets to Cuba’s military academy were forced to serve on a firing squad. This became a prerequisite for graduation. We can imagine Che leaping in joy, slapping his forehead: “Now why didn’t I think of that!” This policy of slaughtering Cubans—dictated by a Soviet officer and implemented by an Argentine hobo—became official in newly “nationalist” Cuba in February 1959.
Soon, “for health reasons,” Che was forced to spend more and more time at his Tarara estate. But he began every day with an eager phone call to his hard-working crew in La Cabana. “How many did we execute yesterday?” he would ask. 5
Che Meets Papa Hemingway
Around the time Alberto Korda snapped the famous photo of Che—now helping to sell snowboards, watches, and thong undies—he also snapped several of Che and Fidel chumming it up with Ernest Hemingway on May 15, 1960, at Havana’s annual Hemingway Fishing Contest. Here, we may assume, was a mutual admiration society.
“The Cuban revolution,” Hemingway wrote in 1960, is “very pure and beautiful. . . . I’m encouraged by it. . . . The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time.” 15
Papa Hemingway’s on-again off-again friend, the novelist and author of Manhattan Transfer , John Dos Passos, once said that Hemingway “had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into.” 16
Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (Korda’s real name) himself was a longtime Hemingway drinking chum. So his pious objections in later years against Smirnoff ’s plans to use Che’s image on a bottle of vodka strikes many as fatuous. “I am categorically against the exploitation of Che’s image for the promotion of products such as alcohol, or for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che,” Korda carped to the U.K. Guardian . “To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka is a slur on his name and memory.” 17 (With Hemingway and Korda, vodka and slur were perhaps the right words. Apparently, though, Smirnoff considers it no slur to paste the image of a mass murderer on its product.)
But Korda did sue Smirnoff for slurring Che and won, on grounds of unauthorized use of the picture. After snapping his famous Che photo, Korda accepted a post as Castro’s personal photographer, in which post he groveled shamelessly as a Castro court eunuch until he died of a heart attack in 2001.
In a way, John Dos Passos was right about Hemingway. Dos Passos had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War along with Hemingway, but unlike him and unlike the New York Times ’s Herbert Matthews, who also ran in his circles, Dos Passos refused to turn his head when the communists began massacring the non-Stalinist left in Madrid and Barcelona. Dos Passos finally left Spain in disillusionment and disgust—a break that had begun when he visited the Soviet Union a few years earlier. Stalin was leaving nothing to chance in Spain. He was doing advance work for what he saw as an imminent victory against Franco’s forces.
As Dos Passos prepared to cross the French border out of the cauldron of murder and treachery known as Republican Spain, Hemingway’s shrewdness (in professional matters at least) manifested itself. “Look, Dos,” Papa warned him. “If you write negatively about the communists the reviewers will ruin you forever.” 18
Hemingway was proven right. Dos Passos’s literary career crashed and burned after his return.
The point was to make murderers to bond with the murderous regime. The more shooters, the more murderers. The more murderers thus manufactured, the more complicit people on hand to resist any overthrow of their system. The fanatic and suicidal resistance put up by Hitler’s SS troopers against the advancing Red Army saw the same theme at work. These SS troops knew they were fighting the sons and fathers of people they’d murdered in places like Babi Yar.
Under the Soviet Ciutat’s orders, all cadets to Cuba’s military academy were forced to serve on a firing squad. This became a prerequisite for graduation. We can imagine Che leaping in joy, slapping his forehead: “Now why didn’t I think of that!” This policy of slaughtering Cubans—dictated by a Soviet officer and implemented by an Argentine hobo—became official in newly “nationalist” Cuba in February 1959.
Soon, “for health reasons,” Che was forced to spend more and more time at his Tarara estate. But he began every day with an eager phone call to his hard-working crew in La Cabana. “How many did we execute yesterday?” he would ask. 5
Che Meets Papa Hemingway
Around the time Alberto Korda snapped the famous photo of Che—now helping to sell snowboards, watches, and thong undies—he also snapped several of Che and Fidel chumming it up with Ernest Hemingway on May 15, 1960, at Havana’s annual Hemingway Fishing Contest. Here, we may assume, was a mutual admiration society.
“The Cuban revolution,” Hemingway wrote in 1960, is “very pure and beautiful. . . . I’m encouraged by it. . . . The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time.” 15
Papa Hemingway’s on-again off-again friend, the novelist and author of Manhattan Transfer , John Dos Passos, once said that Hemingway “had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into.” 16
Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (Korda’s real name) himself was a longtime Hemingway drinking chum. So his pious objections in later years against Smirnoff ’s plans to use Che’s image on a bottle of vodka strikes many as fatuous. “I am categorically against the exploitation of Che’s image for the promotion of products such as alcohol, or for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che,” Korda carped to the U.K. Guardian . “To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka is a slur on his name and memory.” 17 (With Hemingway and Korda, vodka and slur were perhaps the right words. Apparently, though, Smirnoff considers it no slur to paste the image of a mass murderer on its product.)
But Korda did sue Smirnoff for slurring Che and won, on grounds of unauthorized use of the picture. After snapping his famous Che photo, Korda accepted a post as Castro’s personal photographer, in which post he groveled shamelessly as a Castro court eunuch until he died of a heart attack in 2001.
In a way, John Dos Passos was right about Hemingway. Dos Passos had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War along with Hemingway, but unlike him and unlike the New York Times ’s Herbert Matthews, who also ran in his circles, Dos Passos refused to turn his head when the communists began massacring the non-Stalinist left in Madrid and Barcelona. Dos Passos finally left Spain in disillusionment and disgust—a break that had begun when he visited the Soviet Union a few years earlier. Stalin was leaving nothing to chance in Spain. He was doing advance work for what he saw as an imminent victory against Franco’s forces.
As Dos Passos prepared to cross the French border out of the cauldron of murder and treachery known as Republican Spain, Hemingway’s shrewdness (in professional matters at least) manifested itself. “Look, Dos,” Papa warned him. “If you write negatively about the communists the reviewers will ruin you forever.” 18
Hemingway was proven right. Dos Passos’s literary career crashed and burned after his return.
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