FIDEL AND CHE WIN

Last night, I read the chapters, in Jon Lee Anderson's bio of Che, where he and Fidel's rag-tag, tattered, bloodied, out-manned, out-gunned band of rebels won the revolutionary war in Cuba, against Batista's brutal dictatorship.

I cheered, and I almost wept. Stunning. Unbelievable.

I don't know about you, but when I read a book like this, I feel like I live in that world. So the experience is profoundly moving, in a different way from real life, of course. Perhaps, in a way, you understand it better, because you aren't so close to it.

But I don't understand how those small bands of guerrillas won all those dozens or even maybe hundreds of battles against superior forces. They started out with 22 men, for Christ's sake. Often they would be out-numbered ten to one, or a hundred to one.

There isn't enough detail in the book, except for the taking of the armored train in Santa Clara, where they threw Molotov cocktails and the train got too hot for the soldiers inside.

When Che entered one city, I think it was Santa Clara, with 350 men, one of his lieutenants asked a supporter how many soldiers the Army had waiting to fight them. About 5,000, the supporter said. Oh, good, Che's man said, with our jefe, that's no problem.

I thought, holy Christ. What confidence, what audacity. But he was right. They won. 

I imagine that Batista's Army had never fought a war like this. They were used to brutalizing and terrorizing the people, so I imagine they were unprepared to face such intelligent and dedicated guerrillas. Also, I doubt the Army soldiers were willing to die for their cause, which the rebels were.

I was amazed at the amount of thought that Che and Fidel put into preparing to rebuild the country after they won. As they were fighting, against tremendous odds, they planned their new world.

They hit the ground running and began on day one to create a whole new society, a whole new economy, and a whole new government, in all its complexity, from the military to the schools to the infrastructure to the tax system. 

No vacations here. These men knew how to fight, how to work, and how to plan. They were amazingly intelligent in their forethought. 

Then came the bloodbath. Apparently, Raul was the worst, but Che and Fidel did it, too. I'm not sure they needed to kill so many. The firing squads were brutal. Trials lasted a few hours, and then, boom, you were dead.

Che and Fidel claimed it was necessary to kill the men who had tortured and killed thousands of innocent citizens under Batista. But the top dogs got away, many of them. Che said he had seen the government in Guatemala collapse because the president didn't eliminate his enemies.

How many were killed? Several hundred, in the first few months. Maybe that is not terrible, given the numbers of citizens who had been tortured and killed.

The Cuban revolution was bloody, that's for sure. But they won, they got rid of a brutal dictatorship, and they reformed Cuba, which had been known, under Batista, as "the whorehouse of the Caribbean."

Not any more.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

SO BRUTAL

As you may know, I have been reading Jon Lee Anderson's excellent biography of Che Guevara, and now I am up to Page 290, and they have been in the Cuban jungles and mountains fighting for about a year, supported by peasants and by sympathetic people in the cities and in the USA.

(At about this time, 1957 or so, it was my first or second year in college, and I remember seeing some Hollywood actor, I think it was Errol Flynn, on TV, I think it was The Jack Parr Show, talking about Fidel and the revolution. He made it sound romantic, glamorous and wonderful.)

Now, as I read the details of the fighting, I am appalled by the brutality, both by the revolutionaries Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and by the government of Fulgencio Batista.

Batista was a bastard. He and his men butchered thousands of people. They tortured people, executed people in the streets, and set fire to peasant villages. (Sound familiar? Much like the USA did in Viet Nam.)

But Che and Fidel summarily executed their own men if they deserted or if they disobeyed orders. On the good side, they dismissed volunteers who were not brave enough or committed enough, even if they wanted to say and fight.

And often, before a dangerous mission, they would let anyone go home who wanted to quit. But if any man betrayed the cause or was a spy or was suspected of treason, he was shot. Boom, dead. On the spot.

Che personally shot men in the head, maybe a dozen of them, up to this point in the book. It didn't seem to bother him. The brutality is horrific. I don't think I would have the stomach for it. You don't know what you would do, until you are there, with the gun in the your hand and the traitor at your feet.

You have to believe in the cause, I think, to kill anyone. Maybe that is the trouble. It wasn't my cause. Maybe you have to fight fire with fire. I don't know. But all this violence turns my stomach. Maybe that is what separates the men from the boys. If so, I am definitely one of the boys.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

LORD OF THE FLIES

I started reading Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara to find out if Che was a good guy or a bad guy.

Of course, it was a lot more complicated than that. Reading about Che and Fidel Castro training some 40 volunteers on a ranch outside Mexico City, in preparation for their invasion of Cuba, I am reminded more of "Lord of the Flies" than I am of King Arthur's roundtable.

Che would lead these all-day marches around the ranch, sometimes with little water and no food, to get the troops ready for the rigors of war, and one guy sat down in the trail and said, screw this. I'm not gonna do this crap.

Then they had a big debate about whether to execute him for insubordination. They had a court martial.

Hey, I want to say, give these guys a break. They are only volunteers. Fidel and his brother Raul voted to kill him, but Che talked them out of it. Later, supposedly, they did find a spy and kill him and bury him out there, on the ranch.

These guys remind me of children playing cowboys and Indians, only with real guns.

I suppose, since they won, a lot of people admire Che and Fidel. And history is written by the winners. But I didn't find these guys admirable. At first.

I do think the Latin American dictators, like Batista and Trujillo, created these revolutionaries, through their brutal and repressive policies. They tortured people and locked up anybody who didn't agree with them. 

So in a way, Batista brought about his own downfall. 

I'm glad I wasn't there. I don't think I would have joined either side. 

And the USA? What a joke. We were on the wrong side, protecting our business interests and those of the United Fruit Company. 

We were not heroic either.


-- Roger 

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

If you want to read more, here is a good article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

CHE: A YOUNG PLAYBOY?

When I was a young man, I hung out with some very rich people, part of the Coleman family in Wichita, KS.

I realized that I could be one of those guys who lives in the guest house, comes in after breakfast and says, "Anyone for tennis?"

As I'm reading the biography of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, by Jon Lee Anderson, I realize that young Ernesto had the same choice.

He was handsome, aristocratic, fun-loving, a potential playboy.

But injustice in the world moved him too much. On a trip through Chile, he went to visit a huge copper mine, and he saw poor, indigenous people being exploited by rich American capitalists.

He was outraged, and that sense of outrage eventually changed his life. Why did he care? Many other people saw the same thing and didn't lift a finger. Why him? Why did he care so much?

Years later, when he was 39 and had become famous as a revolutionary, and the Bolivian army and the American CIA were about to kill him, he said, "Come on, coward, pull the trigger. You are only killing a man."

What brought him to that point?

I'm reading the book to find out if he was a good guy or bad guy. To settle an old argument between two friends.

The jury is still out. It's still early in the story. At this point, young Ernesto has not met Fidel Castro yet. Castro has just gotten out of jail for leading a student revolt. Others were killed by the Batista government. Castro was one of the lucky few.

In the book, history is moving forward. Their paths are about to cross.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle