The situation was uncomfortable for the people
and for E, so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol
in the right side of the brain. In the early days of the Revolution, some Cubans called Guevara a Maoist. It’s not hard to see how they could have thought that about the charismatic young revolutionary. Like Chairman Mao, he preferred working among the peasants and rural poor and mistrusted the industrial working class. Like Mao, he was known for his austere and Spartan lifestyle; like Mao, he admired Comrade Stalin when many other communists were recoiling in horror from his crimes and Krushchev was warning about “cults of personality.” But they didn’t mean it as a compliment. This was the era of the Sino-Soviet split, and Cuba was firmly in the Russian camp. Castro may have shared many of Guevara’s Maoist sympathies but he didn’t share power well. And so the dashing Argentine radical wound up exporting the revolution, and conveniently dying in a Bolivian ambush. (Said ambush may be the only thing for which Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union and the CIA have all been blamed… ) To hear many in our State Department (not to mention many Cuban exiles in Miami), Cuba is one of the world hotbeds of terrorism, a veritable Maoist hellhole which exports more terrorists than sugar. The evidence suggests that most Cuban terrorism is of the right-wing variety, sponsored by the Imperialists to the North. In 1976 an Air Cubana jetliner exploded after leaving Venezuela, killing all 73 on board, including the Cuban Olympic fencing team. Right-wing Cuban nationalist Orlando Bosch spent 11 years in prison for the bombing; in 1992 George Bush Sr. granted Bosch American citizenship. The perpetrator of a 1997 series of Havana hotel bombings testified that he was paid $3,000 for each bomb by the Cuban American National Fund. Indeed, one of the reasons Guevara left Cuba was that he didn’t feel Castro was offering enough support to revolutions around the globe; he was calling for terrorism and world upheaval at a time when most Latin American Communists were trying to keep a low profile. Most Communists call Cuba a “failed revolution.” While they give Fidel credit for 40 years of thumbing his nose at the Yankee Oppressor, they note that Batista’s Cuba was an American satellite and Castro’s Cuba a Soviet satellite. Guevara was among the first to recognize that Cuba’s “communist” government was just changing masters. Today Guevara remains a potent symbol; his theory of “focos,” armed encampments from which the revolution can be exported to the populace, has been a major influence on guerillas around the globe. Fidel had the misfortune of coming to power, thereby tarnishing himself with the demands of realpolitik. Guevara died before he could put his dreams into practice. Given his penchant for iron discipline and his role in setting up Cuba’s first “re-education camps,” perhaps Cuba should be thankful for that. |