When President Barack Obama visited Cuba in March 2016, the USA-imposed blockade or embargo or quarantine or whatever-else one wants to call it was the elephant on the island. It was the elephant in the room at every meeting between our officials (who numbered close to twelve-hundred) and theirs. We owe Cuba a huge apology. Of course, we didn’t offer one.
This billboard can be found in various places on the island of Cuba. In English it might be interpreted this way: The USA-organized embargo is the longest-lived genocide in world history. They intended to lynch us, but look; the noose is empty; Cuba swims free, beyond the yank of their rope.
Yes, Cubans once-upon-a-time tried to protect themselves from our overwhelming military power; our subversion; our unrelenting sabotage; our many plots to undermine and demoralize the Cuban revolutionary movement, which had overturned the Batista cartel and drove its Mafia friends off the island way back in 1959, a long time ago. We didn’t like it when the Cubans turned to the Soviet Union for help to defend themselves.
Let’s face some facts: It was 6 million of them against 220 million of us. It wasn’t going to be a fair fight. The Cubans were going to lose, and they knew it.
Terrorists fire-bombed El Encanto (a Havana department store) in 1961, just four days before the CIA-organized (and financed) Bay of Pigs invasion. This pic is from 1955.
Fifteen months after the revolution, in March 1960, someone blew-up a French ship in the Havana Harbor, which killed and wounded hundreds of civilians. Cuban police arrested a suspect who, it turned out, was an American with ties to organized-crime and CIA operatives; his team managed to infiltrate harbor-security, police said.
Strange people started flying airplanes over the island on a daily basis to bomb sugar refineries and drop napalm on sugar cane fields. The Cubans managed to shoot down one aircraft and rescue the pilot. He turned out to be an American. Authorities blamed the CIA.
Then, just a few days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, terrorists bombed and burnt to the ground El Encanto, one of Havana’s upscale department stores.
The destruction of El Encanto was part of an extensive campaign to destabilize the island of Cuba. A few days after the terrorist attack, the Bay of Pigs invasion began. The USA public would learn years later that the invasion force had been organized, trained, and paid for by the CIA. The invaders killed and wounded 5,000 Cuban citizens before they exhausted their ammunition and surrendered to Fidel Castro, who led the island’s defenders.
Cubans had no clear idea, even as late as April 1961, that the USA was systematically destabilizing the island and had already finalized plans to invade Cuba and assassinate its leaders.
A few days after the El Encanto firebombing, the invasion-force launched its assault — on Monday, April 17. It included close air-support, a squadron of B-26 bombers, and ships standing off-shore. The assault would come to be called the Bay of Pigs fiasco, mostly because the invaders ran out of ammunition and were forced to surrender.
Fidel himself led the island’s defense; Soviet intelligence informed him a few days in advance of the exact time and place; by some miracle related to our own incompetence, Fidel and his Cuban fighters repulsed the invasion.
Castro’s Cubans managed to capture 1,200 invaders, mostly CIA-trained expatriates, who they later traded for medicine. Afterwards, they begged the Soviet Union to get more involved, because they believed the USA would attack again. Maybe the next time the USA would send more ammo and a bigger air-force, and Cuban defenses wouldn’t hold up.
Our government wasn’t too happy about the deal Cuba made with the USSR. The Soviets took advantage of Cuba’s weakness, Che Guevara would later claim. Che told Fidel and the Soviets that the deal was one-sided and not good for Cuba.
The alliance between Cuba and the Russians almost started a nuclear war, because the Soviets insisted on putting nuclear missiles on the island and basing nuclear-tipped submarines in Cuba’s harbors.
The Russians believed that the island could not be successfully defended against a full-on USA invasion using conventional weapons alone. Had a nuclear-missile exchange occurred, neither Florida nor Cuba would be habitable places even today, fifty-four years later. Millions of Cubans and Americans would have died.
Fortunately, deals were made and tensions de-escalated. The Soviets loaded up their weapons and took them home.
For the United States the fight was just beginning. Although the USA promised the Soviet Union that it would not militarily invade Cuba again (rendering nuclear defense unnecessary), it did not promise anything about an embargo. The United States talked and threatened every country in the Western Hemisphere into imposing one. The only country that refused was Mexico.
The USA-led embargo has turned Cuba into a land frozen in time; a time-capsule from the 1950s, which has transformed the island into one of the world’s most sought after tourist destinations. Travel restrictions by the USA make visits by Americans difficult, but not impossible.
The embargo has never ended. It has lasted fifty-four years and turned Cuba into a time-capsule from the 1950s, which in one of the great ironies of world history has propelled Cuba into an elite group of the most-in-demand tourist attractions of modern times.
The Cubans have complained vociferously about the embargo at the United Nations, but they have never fought back in kind; even after we poisoned their sugar; even after we sunk the ships of their trading partners; even after the Bay of Pigs invasion, when we killed and wounded five-thousand Cuban citizens; all they asked was to be left alone.
Che Guevara resigned his Cuban citizenship in October 1965 and left the island never to return. He hoped to inspire revolutions closer to Argentina, his native country, but he also may have believed that his departure would help to take USA pressure off the Cuban people. It didn’t work.
A fifteen-hundred man force trained by the CIA in Guatemala hunted down the beloved hero of the Cuban revolution, shot him in the legs a few times just to hurt him, then they executed him. They cut off his hands and sent them to Fidel Castro. A CIA agent who witnessed the murder has been quoted as saying that Che never cried out in pain before he died. He died as brave as he lived, without fear, the agent said.
Cuba refused to even consider assassinating our leaders, even as we worked overtime in every depraved way we could think of to assassinate theirs; the assassination plots against Fidel Castro are in the public record and make a wicked read, if anyone wants to look them up.
People who visit Cuba will tell anyone who will listen that the Cubans are a friendly, peace-loving people who were brutalized by a ruthless cartel in alliance with powerful crime syndicates; crime syndicates which would years later come to be called the Mafia.
Everyone on the island (90%, anyway) joined in the effort to get rid of the thugs who were abusing the population on a daily basis. People who fought the Batista family and his cartel and were unlucky enough to be captured were routinely tortured, some to their deaths.
The island of Cuba is a kind of unspoiled paradise. May God bless and protect Cuba as the haters try to keep our fight with them going and going and going.
What kind of country keeps an embargo going for 54 years against another country that is no longer a threat?
The only threat Cuba poses to our billionaires is the example it has set; the lessons it has taught the world that it really is possible to create wealth cooperatively and share it; it really is possible to survive an assault by the most militarized and corrupt nation on planet Earth; it really is possible to choose a different path — a path that doesn’t involve capitulation to cartels and billionaires.
Is Cuba perfect? No; not even close. Of course they aren’t perfect. No nation, no individual, no organization that is shunned and impoverished for fifty-four years by a country as powerful and connected as the United States has any chance at all. How would anyone of us in the USA turn out if the full power the United States turned against us?
I will tell you. If you are lucky enough to survive, as Cuba has, you could turn old and sad. Maybe bitter. We have hurt the Cubans far more than they ever hurt us.
It’s time for this fight to be over. It’s time to make amends. Dispatching on Good Friday four men in their seventies to belch out songs about sex with girls before a modestly attended concert crowd isn’t a good way to start.
It’s time for us to say we are sorry, and mean it. It’s time to be friends. It’s clear to visitors that the Cuban people have in their hearts the desire to forgive us.
I believe that many Cubans want to forge their own path without their vision being twisted by the fear of subversion by U.S. spies and agents. They want to have fun and to be our friends; someday — hopefully sooner rather than later — they will.
The gifted female artist promised to build the monument using only the finest Carrara marble, quarried in Italy. It would stand sixty-six feet high and be mounted atop a marble platform ten feet tall. Its several sections, when assembled, would weigh 320 tons.
The committee selected a site on La Cabana Hill in the suburb of Casa Blanca. From a vantage point 260 feet above Havana Harbor, Christ Jesus would view the entire bay, the entrance to the harbor, and the city itself across the water.
The faithful of Havana could look across the bay toward the statue — blazing white under the Havana sun — and know in their hearts that Jesus loved them and watched over them.
Marta Fernandez Batista commissioned the Statue of Christ overlooking Havana Harbor.
It took nearly three years of hard work in both Italy and Cuba, but on Christmas day 1958 Marta dedicated the statue for the people of Cuba. From now on Jesus would defend them from every danger, including the danger posed by the brutal Communists against whom her husband’s army — with America’s help — battled valiantly on the eastern side of the island.
Marta didn’t know (how could she?) that six days after the dedication ceremony, she and her husband would find themselves scrambling into a convoy of planes to fly off the island with hundreds of their closest friends — fleeing for their lives — because guerilla soldiers had somehow overrun Santa Clara, her husband’s last line of defense.
The dirty unshaven mostly black soldiers, who belonged to the devil himself — Che Guevara — were poised to swarm into the city like the fire-ants every Christian knew they were.
Marta and her husband escaped the island after a New Years Eve party made famous in the 1974 classic movie, The Godfather Part Two, which featured Al Pacino. They took expensive art and the Cuban treasury with them, but left behind a 1.2 billion dollar debt as well as a history of annual deficits in the hundreds-of millions for the new government to repay.
In the meantime, while the Batista entourage continued to orchestrate its exile, during a freak storm, lightning struck Marta’s beloved statue of Jesus. Its head disintegrated some say and crashed to the ground.
Sculptress Jilma Madera constructed the Christ in the Harbor statue. Some have claimed that she modeled the face after her own.
It was just as well that Marta didn’t see it happen. She had worked so hard to bring this gift of God’s love to the citizens of Havana. The new government — it wouldn’t become a Communist government for a few more years — cleaned up the mess and rebuilt Jesus to his former glory.
As time went on, the powerful Batista family lived out its patriarch’s remaining years in various countries until Fulgencio died of a heart attack at age 72 in Marbella, Spain in 1973.
Marta moved to America where she lived quietly among the upscale and connected of Palm Springs, Florida. She continued giving to charity, the Church, and even hospitals until she too died, in 2006, from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
By all reports Marta was a beautiful Catholic, a Christian, a woman who loved Jesus. But she married a man who John Kennedy once said had run the most repressive and corrupt régime that South America had ever seen.
Havana, under Batista, became a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Sicilian Americans in crime syndicates (years later people started calling these groups, the Mafia) operated profitable casinos, as well as gambling, pornography, and prostitution franchises.
In those days, despite American investment (Americans owned three-fourths of pretty much every category of the economy, including land) dissatisfaction ran deep. Universities became hotbeds of discontent, protests, and demonstrations. Trade unions, the press, teachers, agricultural workers, priests, doctors, and lawyers vented their collective outrage at “yanqui” unfairness and domination.
The entire country, 90% of it anyway, congealed in disgust for the goons who ran everything; who stole the island’s wealth in a seemingly endless orgy of greed. Disgust turned to fear when thugs began a regimen of assassination and torture to keep dissenters in check.
Fidel Castro led a movement against the Batista cartel that included almost every person on the island.
Eventually, Fidel Castro, a brilliant attorney and son of a prominent land owner, stepped up to coordinate the opposition, which had become so complex and unwieldy that it was almost impossible to track, let alone direct. He hired a savvy Argentine physician, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, to help him. As time went on they became close friends and made history together.
After the Batista family and their closest friends fled the island, Castro arrested the men who carried out the assassinations and torture of civilians. The new government executed several hundred for capital crimes. It sentenced hundreds more to long prison terms.
Fidel then broke up his own family’s estate by distributing its land to his family’s employees. This generous act set the tone and example for the program of island-wide agrarian reform which followed.
Christ in the Harbor of Havana, Cuba
The elites in the United States were not impressed. They orchestrated a program of assassinations, sabotage, bombings, quarantine, and isolation against the island that included poisoning its agricultural exports and burning and sinking the ships of its trading partners.
The USA established an embargo so effective that some international companies lobbied Congress to make humanitarian changes, which they did.
The USA embargo continues to the present day despite resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries this year.
View of Havana Bay from the statue of Jesus. Click pic to view.
The decades-long barbarity of the war against Cuba by the United States shocked the modern world. Many observers (outside the United States) continue to wonder how well Cuba might have done had it not endured decades of ”dirty tricks” to undermine its vision.
Some of the methods used to destabilize the island have made it into the public domain where observers have labeled them ”diabolical.” The history of USA-Cuba relations continues to alarm people around the world. Folks wonder if the United States will ever change. They wonder if the empire to the north can change.
A few of the excesses of the fifty-five year war against Cuba are enumerated in my essay, Hey, Guevara.
But to conclude our story…
As for Marta’s statue of Jesus, it continues to guard Havana Bay to this very day. Despite fifty-five years of relentless attack from what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation ever, the island of Cuba and its statue of Jesus still stand.
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, more than any other two people, were responsible for throwing the Mafia out of Cuba in 1959. White (i.e.non-black) gangsters ran Cuba, some may recall. Watch the second Godfather movie, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
Cuban attorney Fidel Castro and Argentine physician Che Guevara expelled organized-crime bosses from Cuba in 1959. The 1974 movie The Godfather Part Two featuring Al Pacino conveyed some of the dangers these men faced and had to overcome, not only in 1959 but for years after when the CIA and organized-crime joined forces on behalf of the United States to kill them both and undo their revolution.
Race relations were terrible. One-third of Cuba’s six-million people were non-white, poor, and disenfranchised. Beaches were whites-only. Restaurants, clubs, casinos, hotels, and other businesses were off-limits to black families.
Castro racially integrated the Revolution by asking blacks to play prominent roles, which some did — like the military commanders Juan Almeida Bosque and Calixto Garcia. Non-whites made up one-half of the volunteer-soldiers in the Revolutionary Army. Cuba became the first predominately non-black country in the Western Hemisphere to include black people in leadership.
Juan Almeida Bosque stands next to Che Guevara. Juan Almeida was a Havana-born freedom fighter (and popular song-writer) who rose to the rank of General in the Cuban Army. He died on 11 September 2009 at age 82 of heart failure.
In the United States, the civil-rights movement lagged Cuba’s by many years. It was five years after the Cuban Revolution before black Americans got legislation to guarantee their right to move freely in public spaces and to vote. Some think our elites pushed the USA toward racial-integration to undercut propaganda advantages the issue provided the new Cuban government within the international community.
The move toward integration in the USA stalled after James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. One hundred and twenty-five cities erupted into racial violence during that summer. Today, 47 years later, large swaths of the United States of America remain largely segregated. Florida is the most egregious example. Florida owns the distinction for being home to the largest number of white Cuban refugees. It also protects the largest number of racially gated communities in the USA.
But Che had a different attitude than the present-day leaders of the state of Florida. According to historian Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara surrounded himself with peasants and black people. He embraced racial, social and intellectual diversity and never let go of this fundamental principle of equality, which undergirded the Cuban Revolution.
Che Guevara, the Cuban doctor-poet, is the one person besides Fidel Castro whose leadership made the Cuban victory possible. An argument can be made — were it not for Che, the Mafia would still run things in Cuba and be stronger internationally than it is now.
It’s possible that without Che and the Cuban Revolution, our elites would not have felt the same urgency to address the problem of racial segregation in the USA, and we would be even more divided today than we still are. It’s possible that the feudal-system in the Americas practiced during the past century would have remained in place.
Anyway, the Cuban Revolution succeeded and the rest, as they say, is history.
”Che” as a child. Ernesto Guevara’s parents were members of Argentina’s ”royal” class.
Ernesto Guevara spent the first twenty-five years of his life preparing for a career in medicine. He traveled the Americas and networked extensively. Through family connections and his personal charisma, Che was able to meet and interact with anyone he chose from the most exalted public figures to the most downtrodden peasants.
Who was Che Guevara? Most Americans have no clue because they don’t read about Che, and television doesn’t do shows about him.
People point out that Che is better known and understood outside the United States. The reason is this: Che thought that the answer to why the people of Cuba, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America were destitute was because powerful people — many of them, citizens of the USA — impoverished poor people on purpose to enrich themselves. It was a simple idea, unacceptable to our elites.
Greed is an easy concept to understand and compelling to anyone who thinks about it for very long. It’s an idea our leaders don’t want ordinary people in the USA to think about too much. The memory of Che Guevara will never be celebrated inside the United States as it is in some other places in the world. In fact, our media has successfully trained most people to forget all about him.
Billionaires, like some members of the Kennedy family, sensed that Che was right (and said so), but they also knew from the inside what it took to create wealth. They understood both the technical and political sides of wealth-creation. Generating and accumulating vast wealth is a complicated, fragile, and sacred process, apparently.
Revolution, they were sure, would screw things up big time.
It took energy, planning and cunning to protect fortunes from governments, but it could be done because governments can be bought for a price. On the other hand, it seemed to the wealthy that protecting their empires from communists, if they ever took over, might be impossible.
Communists believed wealth should be created cooperatively and then shared. It was a point of view opposite to that of our elites who believed wealth was best created by individuals motivated by profit. Riches were to be accumulated to purchase privileges, advantages, and the material pleasures of life for individuals, not society as a whole.
Joseph and Rose Kennedy pose in the lobby of the Colonial Hotel in 1940. Joseph was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James (the United Kingdom). His 23 year old son John would become our 35th President; his 15 year old Bobby would become Attorney General. Ernesto Guevara, 12 at the time, and Fidel Castro, 14, would grow up to confront John Kennedy** and his brother Bobby in the nuclear show-down known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The hatred some rich-folks felt for men and women who thought like Che Guevara was visceral. Ted Kennedy described in his book True Compass how his dad Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. — who made his fortune in movies, then liquor imports — hated communists with a passion that seemed at times unreasonable bordering on insane.
Many wealthy individuals feared that someone who possessed the trustworthiness of a doctor — a physician, for example, who had healthy hair, white teeth and the sparkle of truth in his eyes — might persuade ignorant people to believe pretty much anything.
Che Guevara was that kind of person — a gorgeous communist who believed that any economic system that prevailed because rich people dominated and hurt poor people was an abomination;an evil, which led to a kind of hell-on-earth for just-plain-folks.
Che was dangerous, they decided; truly dangerous.
Che Guevara was a yerba mate tea-drinker.
It’s probably correct to suggest that folks in the USA know very little about Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna because no one in leadership wants to feed Americans information about Che that can be easily understood and digested. Our billionaires would rather we forget all about Ernesto Guevara. I get that.
But a lot of time has passed. Yes, some old people are still left who knew Che. But most who knew him are now dead. Che has passed into the lore of ancient history, he really has.
The United States and Cuba established full diplomatic relations on July 1, 2015. The war between them and us is over. Yes, there are the details of making peace, like the embargo, yet to be unwound. But the war is over, it really is.
Are there hard feelings about how things turned out? Yes, of course there are; on both sides. Some wounds may never heal. War is like that. It’s cruel.
It’s sad that so many got hurt on both sides. But it’s time, we all know it, to allow ourselves to understand better this historical figure, this man, Che Guevara; who he was, what he did, what he stood for, and what he believed.
What follows is a bullet-list of facts we collected about ”Che.” Some facts, encountered for the first time, might surprise some people. Let’s hang onto our hats and keep an open mind. We are all adults here. We can handle the truth if we take the time to breathe deeply and not give in to fear or hate.
[For readers who may want to learn more about modern day Cuba from someone who travels there, click on this link. The Editorial Board]
Che Guevara with his second wife Aleida March. Aleida was an urban guerilla who worked as a courier for the Cuban Revolution. Batista’s secret police referred to her as ”Scarface.” An informer told them she had dog-bite wounds on her face.
Che was a human being — like everyone else. The difference is, he was a rare version of a human being; unusual and unique. His mother and his father, his wives and children have all insisted, Che was special. Aleida, his widow, said he was a perfect man. The people who would eventually murder him hoped to ensure that the world would never see another like him, perhaps to the end of time.
So let’s get started. These glimpses into the personality and skill-set that was ”Che” Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna are in no particular order.
Cuban ”Nico” Antonio Lopez gave Guevara his nickname: ”Che.”
— Ernesto Guevara’s close friend — known to many as the happy Cuban, ”Nico” Antonio Lopez — gave Ernesto his nickname because he thought it was funny that Ernesto always asked for people’s attention by calling out, che! — a Paraquayan Guarani word, which means something like hey you! or better translated perhaps, hey, bro!
It should be mentioned that Nico — ebullient and larger than life — made the initial landing with Che and eighty other fighters near Cabo Cruz lighthouse, which marked the beginning of the military phase of the Cuban Revolution.
During the following week, Batista’s army hunted down and killed 60 members of the landing party. Che, who was shot in the neck, found refuge in a cave. Nico did not survive. Two years later, Che led the survivors and the peasant army he helped build into Havana. The revolution was won.
— Che once worked as a professional photographer. He covered the Second Pan American games in Mexico City in 1955 for Agencia Latina, the Argentine international news agency at the time.
— Che, during his med-school years, flew glider-planes to relax with his uncle Jorge de la Serna.
Che climbed Mexico’s Mt. Popocatepetl three times. He planted the flag of Argentina at its summit in 1956. He was 28 years old.
— Che was an accomplished mountain climber. He climbed Mexico’s Mount Popocatepetl (altitude: 17,900 ft.), three times. He planted the Argentinian national flag at its summit in 1956. He was twenty-eight years old.
— Che, it seems, could walk a tight-rope. He wasn’t afraid of heights, anyway, or of taking risks. A photo exists of him crossing high above a river-chasm spanned only by a connected series of drainage-pipes.
— Che traveled extensively. He took three trips on different routes from south to north through the Americas by horse, motorized-bicycle, motorcycle, truck, bus, train, boat, raft, commercial tanker, cargo-ship, and airplane before his 25th birthday. He even hitch-hiked when necessary.
The hopeless poverty of the common people he met shocked him. Eventually, he would vow to do something to try to change the unfair way things were administered by people of wealth who he also met and spent time with during his journeys.
— Che’s first traveling adventure was during the winter of 1951 at age 22, when he took a job as ship’s nurse and traveled 5,000 miles by tanker along the east-coast (the Atlantic side) of South America making stops along the way from a port in Patagonia in the south to the tiny island nation of Curacao in the north near the coast of Venezuela.
— Che, during extended trips in 1952 and again in 1953, explored the Amazon, Inca and Mayan ruins, and Machu Picchu. He toured copper and titanium mines and visited remote, hard to find leper-colonies where he sometimes stayed for weeks to provide sufferers with needed medical attention.
Che loved archaeology and anthropology almost as much as medicine. He visited Machu Picchu in Peru several times as well as other Inca and Mayan sites. He wrote and published articles in magazines about what he learned.
— Che wrote daily in his diaries and journals for many years. He left behind an extensive and introspective record of his internal world as he developed his point of view and his place in history.
— Che published his first magazine article before age 23. Later, he published research in medical journals.
University of Buenos-Aires Medical School where Che graduated April 11, 1953 at age 25. He specialized in allergy-medicine and pediatrics.
— After graduating from medical school at the University of Buenos-Aires in Argentina, Che completed his internship in Mexico at the Mexico City General Hospital where he worked in the Department of Immunology. He also worked as a researcher at the nearby Pediatric Hospital.
— Che’s second love after medicine was archaeology; he was an expert in the Mayan and Incan civilizations. He visited Palenque and scoured sites at Chichen Itza and Uxmal, which he wrote about extensively. He published articles describing the dig-sites he visited.
— Che vacationed in Miami, Florida for three weeks during his twenties.
— Che was a talented writer and poet. He published several best-selling books during his lifetime. He also authored several unpublished works, which some hope will be published after Fidel Castro and his brother Raul retire from politics.
— Che visited Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed first-hand the CIA overthrow of its popularly elected government. CIA seizure of media enabled it to create in Guatemala an Orwellian aura of inevitability, which disturbed Che and depressed him.
Not to stray too far afield, but psy-ops in Guatemala should be of interest to US citizens for the simple reason that they were coordinated by CIA field officer David Atlee Phillips—later accused by discredited writers and some agency insiders of meeting with Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana Blanch and double-agent Lee Harvey Oswald to discuss details of possible assassination plots against both Fidel Castro and John Kennedy.
Anyway, CIA contractors, in a final humiliation, forced the popular President Jacob Arbenz to strip naked in front of reporters before they expelled him from the country. Sickened by the incident, Che wrote: The United States is the enemy of humanity.
— Che’s mom and dad were both members of Argentinian ”royal” families.
Che read constantly from an early age. Released CIA documents noted the depth and diversity of his literary interests.
— According to released CIA documents, Che was unusually well-read, especially in politics, history, philosophy, geography, medicine and psychology. A favorite book was the classic Argentine masterpiece ”El Gaucho Martin Fierro” by Jose Hernandez, published in 1872.
— After high school, Che read the entire 25 volume Contemporary History of the Modern World.
— Che spoke French and Spanish. He had an easy familiarity with English, though he refused to be interviewed using it. He also picked up a limited ability in Swahili, the lingua franca of Africa’s Great Lakes region, when he spent time there on assignment for Cuba. And the Soviet Union provided Che with a tutor who helped him become more proficient in Russian.
— Che was a skilled rugby player and coach. He founded and edited the short-lived (eleven issues) rugby magazine, Tackle.
— Che was a tournament-playing chess enthusiast.
— Che spent his high school years in Cordoba, Argentina, where his family belonged to the exclusive Lawn Tennis Club where Che learned to swim and play tennis.
— Che was a good golfer.
— Che passed a certification exam in civil engineering during high school. His first job after graduating was as a ”soils specialist.” He analyzed soils for road building companies.
— Che’s asthma enabled him to avoid Argentina’s military draft.
— In 1956, Fidel Castro — the well-connected Cuban attorney who belonged to a wealthy land-owning family — shared a cell in a Mexican prison with Che that lasted a month. Fidel and Che — close acquaintances before — bonded; they suffered together as political prisoners.
— After Castro’s release, Che and Calixto Garcia (a black freedom-fighter who would rise to the rank of Brigadier General in the Cuban defense forces) remained in prison for another month.
Che’s uncle, the Argentine ambassador to Cuba, wanted to use his influence to free his nephew but Che refused the help until Mexico agreed to release his friend. In a case of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction, Fidel paid for the two men’s release with funds he unwittingly received from the CIA.
— Fidel soon realized that Guevara could be far more than the physician-poet he had hired to care for his men. On 12 July 1957, Fidel asked Ernesto to command the army he was building. His decision to promote Che created the momentum necessary to secure victory for the Cuban Revolution.
This colorized photo shows a showered and cleaned-up Che following his triumphant entry into Havana, Cuba in January, 1959. He was thirty years old.
— Che was directly responsible for the success of the Cuban Revolution in this way: on 29 December 1958, his battle-group (the Eighth Column) ambushed and de-railed a key armored supply train loaded with weapons, munitions and troop reinforcements belonging to General Fulgencio Batista’s national army. Che and his guerilla fighters then took the city of Santa Clara, which was defended by a force more than ten times the size of their own.
This unexpected loss scared the Cuban dictator who fled the country two days later on New Years Eve (taking an entourage of over two-hundred people and the entire Cuban treasury with him).
On 2 January 1959, Che and his soldiers walked into Havana with their captured weapons and took control of government buildings and military bases without firing a shot. They seized a government that was 1.2 billion dollars in debt and running huge yearly deficits due in part to looting by Batista’s cartel.
— Che published the classic book Guerrilla Warfare in 1961. John Kennedy immediately read it. Based on what he learned, he organized a few weeks later the Green Berets from units of the 77th Special Forces Group, which he renamed the 7th Special Forces Group.
— Che married twice. He fathered one child by his first wife, four by his second.
— After the revolution, Che became the object of a CIA manhunt. Che continued to travel freely because of a disguise he designed that fooled even Fidel Castro and his closest advisors.
— Che felt that Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union was one-sided. The Soviets didn’t provide the support in personnel and financial aid needed to offset the international embargo coordinated against Cuba by the United States. Che complained, and it created a flap between the two governments.
— After the Revolution, the new government lowered the age requirement for ministerial service from 35 to 30 and granted Cuban citizenship to Che (who was 30 and Argentinian) so he could legally hold a number of administrative posts. One of the most important was Minister of the Cuban banking system — a position he earned by his reputation for integrity.
Fidel once said that Che Guevara was honest to a fault. True to his reputation, the first thing Dr. Guevara did as Central Bank Administrator was halt the scheduled construction of a new Central Bank complex and use the money saved to build a badly-needed hospital.
— Che, after visiting the Soviet Union, expressed outrage to confidants about the lavish lifestyles of the Russian leaders.
— When Cuba went to rationing after the United States impeded its right to buy food, Che insisted that his family receive the same food-coupons as every other family in Cuba. Despite his efforts, Russian officials later admitted that they smuggled food to his wife, Aleida, when he traveled outside the country.
— Che wrote privately to the Cuban minister of sugar, Orlando Borrego, that he believed — based on his observations of Russian society while visiting there — that the Soviet Union would fall back into Capitalism one day.
— Che returned all gifts showered on him and his family by foreign leaders while serving in Cuba’s ministries. Although the Cuban government provided him with a car, he used it for official duties only. He insisted his family use public transportation.
— When Che entered Havana for the first time, he wore a cast on one of his elbows; he broke it ten days earlier after falling off a wall in the city of Cabaiguan, one of the many towns that fell to his forces before the decisive battle of Santa Clara, which ended the military phase of the revolution.
Che drank yerba mate, a tea popular in Argentina.
— Although Che is often portrayed as a cigar-smoker, and sometimes posed with cigars, he suffered from chronic and severe asthma. He rarely smoked, or drank alcohol, because his health would not permit it.
During the most dangerous phase of the fighting when Che wasn’t sure each day whether he would live or die he did smoke according to at least one credible historian. When victory came, he was hospitalized for pulmonary distress and spent several months recuperating.
— Che was allergic to seafood.
— Che’s favorite beverage was yerba mate, a caffeinated drink brewed from the leaves and twigs of a rainforest tree in the holly family. Popular in Argentina, it was thought to have medicinal properties at the time. Che may have used it to treat his asthma.
— Che was a good swimmer. He used vigorous swimming to help strengthen his lungs.
— The Cuban government gave Che an airplane and a personal pilot to use for government business. He often flew the plane himself because he loved to fly.
— Che taught French to the current president of Cuba, Raul Castro, during their time in the Sierra Maestra, before the Revolution was won.
— Alberto Korda took the iconic photo above of Che (by which the world now identifies him) on March 5, 1960. It followed the state memorial service for the one-hundred people who died in the terrorist attack on the French freighter La Coubre in Havana Harbor the previous day. Two-hundred people were severely injured.)
Because Americans were napalming sugar-cane fields and sugar refineries to wreck the Cuban economy (one plane had been shot down and the pilot, an American, captured), Fidel Castro in his address to the mourners blamed the CIA for the attack on the French ship while Che Guevara stood next to him wearing the iconic expression on his face that became his brand.
Neither man knew at the time that in 13 months the United States would escalate the conflict by conducting a full-scale military assault on the island of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
The CIA continued to attack Cuban shipping through 1964 before international outrage over the killing of the captain and two crew members of a misidentified Spanish freighter — it was also set on fire and almost sunk — brought sufficient pressure on the agency to change its policies.
Che Guevara — a few hours before they killed him.
— In 1967, an 1800 man Bolivian Ranger Force trained in Guatemala by the USA hunted down Che in Bolivia and captured him. A small unit from this force tortured him by firing a half-dozen rounds into his legs, then executed him.
Those who murdered Che reported that he measured 5’8″ and weighed 155 pounds. These numbers are widely repeated on the Internet. The killers cut off his hands and sent them to Fidel Castro, then hid his body among six of his fighters in an unmarked grave. Some have wondered if truth was one of their core-values.
According to the killers, Che would have been seven inches shorter than Fidel, which doesn’t seem to match-up with the many photos of the two men together, including the lead photo in this essay. Based on photos I’ve reviewed, Che appears to be 4 to 5 inches shorter than Fidel, who was 6’3″. After reviewing photographs, my opinion is that Che was 5’10”.
Why Che’s executioners would misrepresent his height is anybody’s guess.
— The woman who fed Che a bowl of soup before his execution, Julia Cortez, said this about his appearance: He was an extraordinarily handsome man. He wasn’t the man depicted to us: black, ugly, evil. His eyebrows, his nose, his mouth — all of his features were perfect.
— Captain Gary Prado of Bolivia asked Che: Why didn’t you give up? Why didn’t you disband your unit and go home when you had the chance? Che answered: Where would I go?
According to Prado, that was Che’s dilemma in Bolivia. He was isolated, shunned by the international community of nations, and trapped. He had no place else to go.
Neill W. MacCaulay, Citadel graduate, Korean War Veteran, and trainer of the Cuban expeditionary force led by Fidel Castro.
— Fidel Castro hired a number of American Korean War veterans — among them Neill W. MacCaulay and Miguel Sanchez — to train his expeditionary force. In 1956, MacCaulay evaluated Che, writing that he was an ”excellent” marksman with ”excellent” discipline, leadership abilities, and physical endurance. The only negative: Che smiled a lot, which MacCaulay felt was an inappropriate facial expression for a guerrilla warrior.
— Neill W. MacCaulay, Jr. entered Havana at Che’s side in his moment of total victory. Years later he would teach Latin-American history at the University of Florida as professor-emeritus. Before he passed in 2007, Professor MacCaulay said in a filmed interview: Che’s troops knew what they were doing. They knew they had a good commander. They had Che, who was top of the line. They trusted him.
As for the victory parade into Havana, Neill said, We were received as liberators; celebrated; I mean people ran out with bottles of rum. People went wild.
— Six years and ten months after the Revolution on 3 October 1965, Che Guevara resigned his post as Minister, his rank of Commander, and his Cuban citizenship. He severed all ties to Castro and the country of Cuba. He followed the lead of every country in the Western Hemisphere except Mexico, which alone among countries resisted pressure from the United States to sever relations. Che turned his back on the protection offered by Castro and the Soviet Union.
No one to my knowledge knows for sure why Che made this break. What we do know is that Castro read Che’s confidential resignation letter on Cuban radio and television, perhaps without Che’s consent, and that two years later almost to the day — October 9, 1967 — Che lay dead in a Bolivian school house.
— Before the Revolution, Che’s fellow ”boot-camp” trainees, in a peer-review conducted by MacCaulay, agreed unanimously that Che possessed the skills and talents required to lead effectively at the highest level. His subsequent performance in the Cuban Revolution confirmed their judgment and propelled Che Guevara into the ranks of legendary warriors like Spartacus and Geronimo, who lost their lives fighting for hopeless causes and changed the world.
Billy Lee
Post Script: Cuba buriedChe Guevara with full military honors on 17 October 1997 after his remains and the remains of six of his fighters were discovered in Bolivia and returned to Santa Clara, the site of the battle he conducted to win the Cuban Revolution. Che’s wife, Aleida, and his children — at the sides Raul and Fidel Castro — grieved in a more private ceremony three month’s earlier in July.
Although the CIA had an agent present and trained and equipped — in Guatemala, of all places — the Bolivian Special Forces unit that killed Guevara, the agency has always insisted it tried to save Che’s life. The President of Bolivia at the time, Rene Barrientos, demanded Che’s execution; it was Bolivia’s war, the CIA argued, and not their call.
They were powerless to save him.
On April 27, 1969, Rene Barrientos died in a helicopter crash. The Editorial Board
Ernesto ”Che” GuevaraSean Connery
— Some say that Sean Connery parodied Che’s personality and adopted one of his ”looks” to create the movie character, James Bond, in the 1960s movie-series.*
Ronald before.Ronald after.
No one ever suggested that Ronald Reagan used plastic surgery to make himself appear more Che-like. But look at Ronald’s before and after pictures. You decide.
* We investigated the assertion that Sean Connery’s James Bond is a caricature of Che Guevara. It turns out Billy Lee said this, and maybe a couple of his imaginary friends. The Editorial Board
Billy Lee’s Acknowledgement: The most important source of information for this essay was Jon Lee Anderson‘s Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life, published in 1997. The New York Times called it, the complete and definitive biography of Che Guevara.
I cut the disturbing cover off the book in order to read it (it scared me), and willed myself to peer through the negative colors its author used to paint Che’s portrait on its 780 pages. I believe I found the truth Anderson buried there.
Billy Lee
John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States. Here is a link to the quote below.
** October 24, 1963 I believe that there is no country in the world…where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies…. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.
… In any case, the nations of Latin America are not going to attain justice and progress…through communist subversion. They won’t get there by…a Marxist dictatorship.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy
35th President of the United States Assassinated November 22, 1963
The Cuban revolution was one of the most exciting news events of my childhood. Our family moved to Key West, ninety miles from Cuba, in 1960, shortly after the transfer of power.
My dad’s job was to run HS-1, the Navy jet-helicopter squadron that defended southern Florida from attack by Russian submarines. Some of these subs were hanging-out around Cuba, Dad said, so I took an interest in what was going on there.
Che Guevara, Argentine physician, and his Cuban friend, attorney Fidel Castro, enjoy a happy moment. Their joy in victory gave way to worry as two super-powers — the USSR and the USA — fought to take control of their revolution.
People born in the 1960s and later have no easy way to know that U.S. media once portrayed Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as heroes — at least during the early phases of their risky and dangerous attempt to unseat the president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. The two revolutionaries and ten of their close friends led the volunteers of a resistance they called Movimiento 26 de Julio to success on New Year’s Day 1959 — a month before my eleventh birthday.
To put some context on the Cuban revolution and its significance, recall that the land-mass of Cuba is almost four-fifths the land-mass of Florida. Florida is huge, as anyone who has driven its length or breadth knows. Cuba’s land area is an astonishing 42,426 square miles, which makes it one of the largest islands in the world. Only sixteen islands are larger.
Unlike Florida, Cuba has mountains, which add land area in the vertical direction. Florida lacks mountains. It’s flat. And Cuba is home to four-thousand satellite islands and cays.
Before the revolution, Cuba grew tobacco and sugar-cane. Pressures mounted on the country to grow more. By 1959, three out of four men in America used tobacco. Parents weaned their children off mother’s milk and replaced it with sugary cereals like Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes. The USA became the world’s most voracious consumer of sugar.
Americans no longer warred in Europe and Asia. It was time for fun; for new ways to enjoy life. Demand for the products of Cuban agriculture grew beyond sugar and tobacco, led by new patterns of consumption in the United States.
To take advantage of the boom in agriculture, non-Cuban farmers and ranchers (most from the USA) began buying-up the island’s arable land. By 1958, foreigners owned three-quarters.
American oil-companies located refineries in Cuba. Pornography was catching-on in America, so businessmen from the USA began producing “dirty movies” and magazines in Cuba to distribute illegally inside the United States. International cartels and American crime-families constructed gambling casinos on Cuban beach-fronts for newly affluent American tourists who were seeking good times in warm weather.
By 1959, Cuba was showing the first signs of developing into an economic power-house. Anyone who has viewed the Godfather movies from the 1970s knows that organized-crime bosses vacationed in Cuba before the revolution; they were in bed with General Batista, the island’s dictator-president.
It was difficult for most Cubans to believe that the young revolutionaries of the July 26th movement had overthrown the hated and feared Batista cartel. Some thought the revolution would be short-lived.
After the final success of the revolution on January 1 – 1959, everything changed. Sex-clubs and gambling casinos shut down never to re-open. Land-holders and business owners closed their estates and enterprises and fled the island for safe sanctuaries to wait for news about what might happen next.
At the same time, a holiday mood swept across the island. New Year’s celebrations in Cuba became ecstatic. The common people in their millions partied like it was 1959 in a kind of happy, helpless disbelief.
No one was sure the revolution would last, but most were grateful to the women and men who gave their lives to liberate them and throw out the hated and feared Batista family and their abusive friends. At one event in mid-January, a million people (one-sixth of the island’s population) gathered to hear Castro speak. It was the largest public demonstration in history up to that time.
For wealthy Cubans, events felt much different. They began flying off the island by the hundreds, leaving their property to lie fallow with relatives while they waited in the USA and other countries for the new government to collapse and fail.
Aleida March worked in the Cuban Revolutionary Courier Service (the rebel post office for classified communications). A few months after the revolution was won, she married Che Guevara and bore him four children.
But by autumn of 1960, despite a covert program of bombings and assassinations by the USA to destabilize the island, Cubans firmly established their revolution. When American oil-refineries refused to process Russian crude, Cuba nationalized them; the USA retaliated by unleashing an economic embargo, which remains in-effect (with some changes) to this day. When business owners refused to re-open their factories and farms, Cubans opened and operated them themselves.
I remember going to school in Key West with dozens of rich Cuban kids who all hated the revolution. In fact, I never did meet a refugee who liked Castro and his revolution despite the obvious benefits he promised (and later delivered) to average island residents who were impoverished at the time.
Come to think of it, I never met a black Cuban refugee either, though blacks and bi-racials made up a third of the island’s population. The role of race in the revolution is a part of the Cuban story that begs to be told, but I’m not the one to tell it, at least not yet. I need to do more research.
I didn’t live in Cuba.
The only black person I knew was our maid, and she was American. I do know enough to mention that Castro’s close friend and favorite military commander was Juan Almeida Bosque, the Havana-born freedom fighter (and song-writer) who was wildly popular among the then disenfranchised black population of Cuba. Enough said. I included Juan’s picture at the end of this post.
Fidel Castro was generally praised in US media until analysts discovered Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.
In the American press (which I read voraciously even at the tender age of eleven or twelve) adulation for the Cuban revolution went on pretty much unabated until the USA caught the Soviet Union installing missiles on the island, most probably in late 1960 or early 1961. By September, Congress would ban aid to any country that had relations with Cuba.
Later, in early 1962, a friend of our family and former neighbor, Art Lundahl, uncovered possible nuclear missile-sites and the construction of submarine bases during photo-analyses of the island. (The British “knighted” Lundahl in 1974 for his discoveries as well as for contributions made in prior conflicts.)
After these unsettling discoveries, our leaders felt betrayed by Castro, to say the least. President Kennedy in April 1961 permitted the CIA to drag the USA into the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and, when that backfired — the USSR reacted by sending more military-aid, not less, including 42,000 soldiers, 42 MIG fighters, 42 bombers and, yes, the nuclear missiles — the stage was set for ensuing nightmare of October 1962, which is now called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After a couple of nervous (some would say terrifying) weeks — during which Cuba shot down one of our high-altitude spy planes — the Soviets offered to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba, if we removed ours from Turkey, a country near theirs. We agreed.
It’s a good thing, because we learned later that operational nuclear weapons had already been deployed on the island; weapons we knew nothing about. According to historian Richard Rhodes, three-megaton hydrogen bombs mounted on SS-4 missiles hid in Cuba’s tropical forests; the missiles when fired could reach Washington D.C and obliterate it. The missiles we photographed were not yet operational, which gave our leaders false confidence.
A preemptive military attack by the USA on Cuba would have precipitated nuclear war with the Soviets, according to former Defense Secretary William Perry, who operated a high-tech listening post during the crisis.
Because of anti-Castro hysteria developing in right-wing political circles at the time, government officials told the public only that the Soviet Union and Cuba capitulated to our demands after we promised not to attack the island. Full details of the quid-pro-quo weren’t released until years later.
The crisis ended, but both Kennedy and Khrushchev (the Russian leader) did not survive the aftermath. Khrushchev fell from power in a kind of coup by Communist Party leaders on the third anniversary of the missile-crisis. He became depressed and died in 1971 of a heart attack.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a former employee of US intelligence, assassinated Kennedy in 1963, almost exactly one year after the crisis and almost exactly two years before Khrushchev fell from power. Within two years of Kennedy’s assassination and coincident with Khrushchev’s fall, Cuba formally adopted Communism.
Cuba is a mountainous country with about 80% of the landmass of Florida.
After he captured 1,200 Cuban exiles who were fighting under the direction of the CIA during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Life Magazine led the media charge against Fidel Castro in its June 2, 1961 issue. Notice the photo-shopped grey tooth.
In those days, magazines like Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report were the main sources of in-depth news and analysis for most civilians. It was a time when electronic calculators, computers, IPads, IPhones, and Internet services simply did not exist.
Television news was little more than fifteen minutes of reading headlines interrupted by a few commercials. Half-hour news programs didn’t start until the fall of 1963 — just a few weeks before the Kennedy assassination. Newspapers were important, but many of the best reporters worked for the three news-magazines, which shared a huge readership by today’s standards.
These magazines ran adoring pictures of Cuba’s revolutionary heroes alongside in-depth analyses of all they did and were accomplishing, both before and after 1959. Our country’s pervasive print-media seemed fascinated by the idea of common people overthrowing an invincible dictator tied to organized crime.
This fascination continued for almost two years until the day of April 17, 1961 when Americans woke up to learn that Cuban exiles living in the United States had launched an invasion of their former country against Fidel Castro. Within three days, over 1,200 of these Cuban exiles were captured by Castro, who led the Cuban defenders. Almost instantly, USA media turned against Fidel and the Cuban revolution.
Cuba held nearly 1,200 CIA-trained fighters after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. By the time the invaders exhausted their ammunition and were captured, they had killed or wounded over 5,000 native Cubans. These POWs are being held in one of the island’s sports-arenas. Former Navy Commander James Donovan — played by Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Bridge of Spies movie — negotiated their release and the release of an additional 8,500 civilians in exchange for medical supplies.
The invasion came as a shock to the general public. No one knew at the time that the CIA had organized it. No one could understand why Cuban exiles would attack their own country in what was clearly a suicide mission — at least that is what the Bay of Pigs would have become had Castro not shown restraint.
Few civilians outside of government knew then that Castro was in the process of aligning himself with a Communist super-power, the Soviet Union, with whom we were then fighting a vigorous cold war. Apparently Castro and his advisors felt that in the contest between the USA and the USSR — where they found themselves toyed-with like a chess-game pawn — the USSR was the lesser of two evils.
I remember reading articles in Time magazine about Fidel and feeling thrilled that people like him actually walked the earth who weren’t afraid to stand up to the gangs we learned years later to call the Mafia and to all those other evil-monopoly-types who corrupted popularly elected governments.
The press in the United States covered Castro and Guevara in much the same way they covered, a few years later, the Beatles during the British Invasion of 1964. I found myself seduced by the good guys verses bad guys dichotomy described by the popular press.
Of course, everything changed after our family friend, Mr. Lundahl, discovered that the new Cuban government was in bed with our nemesis, the Soviet Union. Even today, people forget that Cuba did not become Communist until 1965, three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. American civilians had no idea that the USSR was trying to get a toehold in the western hemisphere through a military alliance with the Florida-sized island.
Government-analyst and family friend, the late Sir Arthur Lundahl, discovered nuclear-missiles in Cuba during a routine review of spy-plane photos.
As soon as Americans saw the photos of missile silos (or whatever those blurry images were that appeared ominously in Time and Life magazine in the fall of 1962) the honeymoon was over. Whatever good-will remained between Americans and Cubans after the Bay of Pigs now officially ended.
Overnight, Cuban heroes became in the eyes of our media reckless peasants who were in-over-their-heads and playing-with-fire as they entertained what were apparently their Russian suitors, mentors, and friends.
During the missile crisis, my dad led — from a military base on the island of Key West — the Navy anti-submarine helicopter squadron, HS-1.
HS-1 (de-activated in 1997) was tasked to keep under 24/7 surveillance the nuclear-armed Russian submarines then swarming the Florida keys and Cuba. I remember Dad scattering about on the islands in our area the squadron’s assets (including helicopters) to better protect them from a nuclear strike he believed might actually come.
I remember the military ordering everyone in Key West to fill their bathtubs with drinking water and to take other precautions they thought might help if the Russians shut-off our supplies. In those days all fresh-water came through a small above-ground pipe which ran alongside the only highway through the Florida keys.
Should the Russians cut both the water pipe-line and the highway — to isolate Key West from the mainland — we would at least have bathtubs of water to drink.
Well, as everyone knows, the crisis resolved. Neither side fired nuclear missiles.[In 1989, the Soviets revealed (and U.S. intelligence confirmed) that 24 locked and loaded nuclear missiles were already installed on the island of Cuba, which the Kennedy administration knew nothing about — according to historian Richard Rhodes. Had the USA attacked Cuba as advocated by some advisors, a nuclear exchange would have destroyed Florida and much of the Southern United States. The Editorial Board ]
The elites in both the USSR and the USA sobered up a little, thankfully, and endeavored to tighten their stewardship over these horrific weapons. We haven’t had a nuclear close-call (at least any known to the public) since.
What about Cuba?
The United States imposed a naval blockade around the island during the missile-crisis. Under international law, a blockade is considered an act of war, so President Kennedy referred to it as a quarantine.
After it ended, the USA resumed the embargo first established in 1960 in response to oil-refinery confiscations. This embargo, with modifications, persists to the present day. More about the embargo later.
In the meantime, within a few short years, the USA interjected itself militarily into the Vietnam civil-war where our French friends and their South Vietnamese allies were suffering a catastrophic defeat at the hands of President Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, the charismatic leaders of the North.
The United States ended up conducting intensive military operations for eight years in Vietnam before abandoning the South to certain defeat in 1972.
To provide soldiers for this war, a military draft of hundreds-of-thousands of civilians began in the middle 1960s. Young people, especially students, got upset — livid, really.
By the time I started college, a few of my acquaintances were traveling to Cuba to train in the art of revolution. They went to learn how to challenge and transform the beast in whose belly they thought they lived.
What did the revolutionary leaders of Cuba teach them?
After the USA blockade (quarantine) and embargo, many Cubans preserved their US made automobiles. Some are now worth in excess of one-hundred thousand dollars.
It turns out, the revolutionary vanguard taught them how to work hard to plant and harvest sugar-cane. The Cubans told them that no one in a country as wealthy as the United States was going to revolt so why waste their time?
They said that working hard for the benefit of all, not the few, was the way to build a fair and just society. They taught service to society through hard work and good example; they advised students not to take all they could manage to pile-up for their efforts but only their fair share to avoid humiliating those weaker and less able than themselves. They advised their American visitors to share their wealth instead of sequestering and hoarding it.
Che Guevara, some years after the revolution. Che was executed by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, four years after the Kennedy assassination and four years before a heart attack killed Nikita Khrushchev.
Some of my friends were disappointed by the attitude of the Cubans, which they hadn’t expected. But others internalized what they learned and became the better for it.
As we mentioned earlier, the United States, after the missile-crisis, imposed an embargo that has lasted to the present day. Over the next fifteen years the United States sharpened the teeth of its embargo and ratcheted-up a covert program of sabotage and assassination to destabilize the island.
By 1975, the draconian features of the embargo were damaging not only Cuba but other countries and a number of international corporations. In 1976 a rogue CIA operative broke the final straw by blowing up Cuban Airways flight 455 killing all seventy-three passengers on board, including elite athletes. It was the first terrorist bombing of a civilian aircraft in our hemisphere.
The harsh conditions of the embargo might have forced the Cubans to their knees, but lobbying by the international community convinced Congress to tinker with the embargo details to make them more humane. Congress made changes to the embargo that enabled Cuba’s survival and ascendancy.
One exemption was permission for the Cubans themselves to buy food and medical supplies. Blocked from selling cigars, agricultural products, and everything else they made to the countries of the Western hemisphere and virtually the entire industrialized-world outside the Soviet-bloc, Cubans decided to enter the medical business.
Leveraging their freedom to buy food and medicine, they opened medical universities and started graduating doctors as fast as they could. They invited students from around the world to attend their medical schools. They started sending doctors on missions of mercy to needy countries in South America, Africa and anywhere else they might be welcome.
Then AIDs broke out, in 1981. A few years later, in 1995, Ebola struck big in the African Congo. Cuban doctors found themselves on the front lines fighting diseases that really scared people.
People began to take notice. Famous people like CNN‘s Ted Turner, Chrysler’s chief executive, Lee Iacocca, and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela made pilgrimages to Cuba to meet its leaders and to spend time hunting and fishing with its dynamic president, Fidel Castro.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, chats with Fidel Castro. Fidel has outlived his enemies, and is now retired. Editors Note — added 18 September 2018: Fidel passed on 25 November 2016 at age 90. Two months earlier, on 31 August 2016, Dilma Rousseff became the first democratically-elected female President in the world to be impeached and removed from office.
Influential people began to show concern for the people of Cuba, because Cubans chose to travel the humanitarian road of healing when other routes were blocked by the embargo and the efforts by the United States to shun and isolate them. To show respect and appreciation, leaders in countries around the world, some in Europe and the affluent West, decided to ignore the USA-led embargo and once again trade with Cuba.
Worried about Cuba’s growing prestige, the United States decided to undermine Cuban medical assistance to other countries by passing a 2006 law to grant automatic citizenship to any Cuban doctor who practices medicine outside Cuba and is able to find their way to one of its embassies.
Cuba’s response since 2006 has been to offer medical training to 30,000 students from 125 countries around the world — who aren’t covered by the act of Congress — even as they continue to add to their own legions of medical professionals.
In the spirit of the adage, when you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, about a thousand Cuban doctors have left foreign service during the past ten years to come to the United States, where they aren’t needed. Sadly, hospitals and licensing agencies inside the USA have been slow to recognize their credentials, according to the New York Times.
Most have taken jobs outside of medicine to keep themselves afloat while they hope for better days. In any event, the effect of the effort by Congress to undermine the Cuban world-healthcare delivery program, though annoying, has been largely unsuccessful.
Despite relentless programs by the USA to thwart everything Cuban, the island — with assistance from the civilized world — has begun to blossom. Today it is blooming into a splay of color and opportunity even the United States cannot ignore.
One indicator is its HDI (Human Development Index) rating, which has risen to 81.5%. Cuba is now in third place behind Canada and the USA in the Western Hemisphere. It stands 44th among the 187 countries on the HDI list; all this improvement in the face of a ruthless fifty-four year embargo by the United States and its allies.
Juan Almeida Bosque, Castro’s close friend and favored General, passed away on 11 September 2009 from heart failure. He was 82.
A princess is emerging onto the world stage, and many countries seem to want to dance with her. The United States, her abuser — the country who told all the others to hate, forsake, and despise her — has found itself the odd-man out.
And the money! The money to be made is enormous. Our elites don’t want to miss the boat. They don’t want the choo-choo train of opportunity to leave them standing at the station, hat in hand.
They plead with princess Cuba. Let’s pretend the past is over and let bygones be bygones.No hard feelings, they insist. Can we visit from time to time?
They bat their lashes and bow their heads. They upturn their eyes and fill them with crocodile tears. They whisper seductively. They implore with outstretched hands.
Do you mind? We’ll build family-friendly casinos on your best beaches. It will be like old times — just the two of us, once more and forever.
Billy Lee
Post Script:The Cuban Revolution was a complex and drawn-out affair. To help readers better understand its twists, turns, detours, course-corrections, intrigues, betrayals, successes and failures, Billy Lee has, as usual, provided links to some good articles. For readers who may want to learn more about modern-day Cuba from someone who travels there, Billy Lee has provided this link. The Editorial Board.
Hanabanilla Lake in the Escambray Mountains, Cuba. In 1961, the United States planned to use the Escambray Mountains as a base of operations for a counter-revolution after a successful landing-assault at the Bay of Pigs. The plan depended on defections by Cuban military officers, assassinations of key political leaders and support from the indigenous population, none of which materialized.
