Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie, “Che,” about the life of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, couldn’t be attacked — at least on a factual level. (CNN Entertainment, January 1, 2009)

“I didn’t mind someone saying, ‘Well, your take on him, I don’t really like,’ or ‘You’ve left these things out and included these things.’ That’s fine,” Soderbergh said. “What I didn’t want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, ‘That never happened.’ “(CNN Entertainment, January 1, 2009)

Well, Mr Soderbergh (and CNN), pull up a chair.

Soderbergh’s movie shows Che Guevara steely-eyed and snarling with defiance during his capture. Why, only seconds before, Che’s very M-2 carbine had been blasted from his hands and rendered useless by a fascist machine gun burst!

Then the bravely grimacing Guevara jerks out his pistol and blasts his very last bullets at the approaching hordes of CIA-lackey soldiers!

The (typical) viewer gapes at the spectacle. His eyes mist and lips tremble at Soderbergh and del Toro’s impeccable depiction of such undaunted pluck and valor.

OK, but just where did Soderbergh and del Toro—utterly obsessed with historical accuracy–obtain this version of Che’s capture?

Why the notoriously shrewd and canny, the immensely suspicious and cagey, the infamously clever and perspicacious, Steven Soderbergh transcribed this sterling and utterly indisputable account of Che’s capture exactly as penned by: Fidel Castro!

And you yokels who think that the testimony of a Communist dictator should merit the same skepticism as that of, say, a U.S. industrialist, have obviously never been subject to Soderbergh’s multiple-Oscar-nominated Erin Brockovich.

Why the man who mentored Soderbergh’s film for impeccable historical honesty is also on record for the following testaments:

“Again I STRESS! I am NOT A COMMUNIST!  And Communists have absolutely no influence in my nation!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959)

“Political power does interest me in the least! And I will NEVER assume such power!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959)

But as evidenced by Steven Soderbergh’s films, the author of these proclamations merits his version of Che’s capture transcribed on the silver screen as gospel. As for any skeptics…? Hah! Only those insufferable Tea-Partiers could conceivably swallow the laughable propaganda questioning Che’s heroism and Fidel Castro’s integrity and honesty!

Fidel Castro, you see, wrote the forward to Che‘s Diaries wherein this Davy Crocket-esque-at-the-Alamo version of events appears. These diaries were published in Castro’s Cuban fiefdom by the Stalinist dictator’s very own propaganda ministry. So lest they unwittingly fudge their film’s historical accuracy, Soderbergh and co-producer Benicio Del Toro were scrupulous in repeatedly visiting Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom to get the unvarnished truth straight from Castro’s own propaganda ministry!

On the other hand, a mental defect, diagnosed by my physician as “not believing Communist dictators, especially after living under them,” led your humble servant here, while researching my book, to dig-up and study the actual records of the men actually on the scene of Che Guevara’s capture, and who today live in places where they need not fear Castro’s firing squads and torture chambers for the crime of telling the truth.

As might be expected, (but mostly by Tea-Partiers and other such yokels,) this mental defect led to the discovery of major “discrepancies” between Soderbergh and del Toro’s Fidel Castro-mentored film and the historical truth.

In fact, on his second to last day alive, Che Guevara ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to the last breath and to the last bullet. With his men doing exactly that, Che, with a trifling flesh leg-wound (though Soderbergh’s movie depicts Che’s leg wound ghastlier than Burt Reynolds’ in “Deliverance”) snuck away from the firefight, crawled towards the Bolivian soldiers doing the firing, then as soon as his he spotted two of them at a distance, stood and yelled: “Don’t Shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

His captor’s official Bolivian army records that they took from Ernesto “Che” Guevara:  a fully-loaded PPK 9mm pistol. And the damaged carbine was an M-1—NOT the M-2 wrote he was carrying in his own diaries. The damaged M-1 carbine probably belonged to the hapless guerrilla charge, Willi, who Che dragged along—also to his doom.

But it was only after his (obviously voluntary) capture that Che segued into full Eddie-Hasquell-greeting-June-Cleaver-mode. “What’s your name, young man?!” Che quickly asked one of his captors. “Why, what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!”

“So what will they do with me?” Che, desperate to ingratiate himself, asked Bolivian Captain Gary Prado. “I don’t suppose you will kill me. I’m surely more valuable alive…. And you Captain Prado!” Che commended his captor. “You are a very special person!… I have been talking to some of your men. They think very highly of you, captain!.. Now, could you please find out what they plan to do with me?”

From that stage on, Che Guevara’s fully-documented Eddie Haskell-isms only get more uproarious (or nauseating). But somehow none of these found their way into Soderbergh’s film.

And oh!  Didn’t Che Guevara mount his steed and grab his lance as the (self-appointed) liberator of South America’s indigenous peoples fro  exploitation by the continents’ Europeans descendants?

Well, based on this picture, taken by the men who captured and killed him—Che’s message seemed woefully under-appreciated by his intended “beneficiaries.” I only note one obviously European-descendent person in the picture.

Hollywood doesn’t seem very interested in the life stories of conservative icons unless they’re slandering them as in Oliver Stone’s hit piece on George W. Bush called “W.” which was released (sheerly by coincidence) a month before the 2008 presidential election.

Stone is currently working on a documentary series about Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other fiends which is, in his own words, designed to educate the American people so we can learn to “empathize” with them. Well isn’t that just ducky? I can hardly wait to be taught how to empathize with Hitler and Stalin.

In recent years we were treated to biographies like Steven Soderbergh’s heroic homage to Che Guevara, the murderous villain whose face can be seen on numerous t-shirts at your local hipster joint. And who could forget the Ed Harris tribute to the poor misunderstood genius Jackson Pollock? He revolutionized the art world when he wasn’t getting drunk and abusing his wife.

The 1996 film “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” made some interesting points regarding the first amendment but otherwise portrayed Flynt as a victim of censorship and therefore some sort of hero. Couldn’t Director Miloš Forman find a better subject for a movie about free speech than a pornographer?

There’s a movie about Howard Stern but no movie about Rush Limbaugh, a man whose story of overcoming addiction and deafness is the very stuff great biopics are made of. There’s a movie about the Marquis De Sade but no movie (other than a television film) about the life of Pope John Paul II — a man whose leadership was pivotal in the liberation of Eastern Europe from Communism. There’s a movie about John Wayne Gacy but no movie about John Wayne — who’s as popular today as ever! Julia Child rates but not Margaret Thatcher?

Has anyone noticed that there’s not a single decent film about the life of Ronald Reagan? Is his life story not compelling enough? He only brought down the Berlin Wall, won the Cold War and led America to one of its most prosperous ages. Not to mention that prior to his political career, Reagan was a movie actor so well regarded by his colleagues that he was elected to leadership roles in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940’s.

Am I crazy for thinking that William F. Buckley’s life story would make a great movie? Here’s a man who spoke Spanish and French as his first languages and didn’t begin to learn English until he was seven, yet went on to become known for his brilliant writing and speaking style. Buckley had tremendous wit which he displayed on television as the host of “Firing Line” for over thirty years. Imagine the challenge to an actor to convincingly imitate Buckley’s distinct mannerisms and way of speaking. Buckley worked in the intelligence industry for the CIA and then went on to found National Review, a conservative political journal of unmatched regard.

Speaking of National Review, Heaven forbid anyone in Hollywood make a film about someone like Whittaker Chambers. An American Communist and Soviet spy, Chambers ultimately defected from Communism and became one of its fiercest opponents. He was befriended by William F. Buckley and was part of National Review’s founding editorial board. He was also responsible for identifying former assistant to the Secretary of State, Alger Hiss as a Communist spy in 1948. That’s a pretty compelling story.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Whittaker Chambers?

Maybe someone should make a movie about him.

Facts matters little to diehard, teen-beat type Castro/Che fans. Many “document” their rebuttals to my blasphemies with scenes from Godfather II, that famous documentary on pre-Castro Cuba. “Fidel, I love you,” gushed a young Francis Ford Coppola. “We both have beards. We both have power and want to use it for good purposes.” Not that such sentiments could have possibly flavored his masterpiece. 

To depict Havana streets on New Year’s Eve 1958, Coppola cast more people than stampeded through a battle scene in Braveheart. For what it’s worth, Havana streets were deathly quiet that night. Not to be outdone, in his Havana, Sydney Pollack cast Cuban President, Fulgencio Batista, with light skin, blond hair and blue eyes. The late Cuban-exile novelist (and screenwriter for Andy Garcia’s The Lost City) Guillermo Cabrera Infante, later bumped into Pollack at a Hollywood party where the learned director flinched and went red-faced when a laughing Cabrera informed him that Batista was, in fact, a Black.  

“But these are merely movies, Humberto,” Some might counter. Yes, fine. But Pollack boasted of his knowledge of Cuba, often visiting Castro’s fiefdom starting in 1977 and even meeting with Fidel Castro himself. 

Well, prepare yourselves. I fear the imbecilities of both Coppola and Pollack (and perhaps even those of Soderbergh and Del Toro) will be seriously trumped in a forthcoming movie based on the bestselling Havana Nocturne; How the Mob Owned Cuba, and Lost it to the Revolution.  

This “owning,” of Cuba, as we all know from Copolla and Pollack and every MSM and “scholarly’ mention of pre-Castro Cuba, issued from the Mob’s oligolopic ownership of Cuba’s gargantuan gambling “industry.”  

“Havana Nocturne has the air of a thriller with the bonus of being true,” gushed Tom Miller in The Washington Post. 

“A multifaceted true tale,” boast the publisher, Harper Collins. 

“Thoroughly and impressively researched,” attests The Miami Herald. 

True to form, most of author TJ English’s sources for his recently-optioned bestseller are officials of Cuba’s Stalinist regime, which English visited often. Indeed, English dedicates his book to one such Castroite official, Enrique Cirules, who he calls a “Cuban author.” Fine, I’ll call Julius Streicher “a German author.” and Ilya Ehrenburg “a Russian author.” 

Now let’s have a look at English’s “research” and how his findings compare with those issued from all sources except the propaganda ministry of a Stalinist police-state. In 1955 Cuba contained a grand total of three Gambling Casinos, the biggest was at the Tropicana and featured ten gambling tables and 30 slot machines, the Hotel Nacional, featured seven roulette wheels and twenty-one slot machines.

By contrast, in 1955 the single Riviera Casino in Las Vegas featured twenty tables and 116 slot machines. This means that in 1955: one Las Vegas Casino had more gambling action than all of Cuba.

More interestingly, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Commission the typical tourist spends five days in their city and spends an average of $580 ($75 in 1957 dollars) on gambling, the main motive for 90 per cent of visitors.

Throughout the 1950’s Cuba averaged 180,000 tourists a year. For the sake of this “study” let’s forget Cuba’s beaches, fishing, dining, palm-studded countryside, old world architecture, sightseeing etc. etc. etc. Let’s say all those tourists—men, women, adolescents, children—did nothing but gamble, and at the Las Vegas’ rate.

Well, my calculator shows a total of $13 and a half million for Cuba’s gambling industry annually. But in 1957 Cuba’s Gross Domestic product was $2.7 billion, and Cuba’s foreign receipts $752 million . How could the beneficiaries of that tiny fraction of Cuba’s income OWN the entire ‘freakin country, and “infiltrate its levers of power from top to bottom,” as author TJ English (no-doubt goaded by his Castroite mentors) claims, and as producers Eric Eisner and Gil Adler will dramatize?

Another interesting statistic – in 1953, more Cubans vacationed in the U.S., than Americans vacationed in Cuba.

Also, there’s no mention by TJ English of how the Castroite nomenklatura, in cahoots with Colombia’s cocaine cowboys throughout the 70’s and 80’s, made multiple times that measly $13 million a year. “We lived like kings in Cuba,” revealed Medellin Cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials. “Fidel made sure nobody bothered us.”

The cocaine cartel’s deal with Castro made Meyer Lansky’s with Batista look like a nickel and dime gratuity. Now THAT would make a rollicking and intriguing film! But we all know better.

From its Castroite mentors and “consultants, the optioned book dutifully transcribes (and Eisner and Adler surely plan to show in tear-wrenching detail) pre-Castro conditions. “U.S. business owned much of the prime land in Cuba,” writes English.

In fact, of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills 1958, only 40 were U.S. owned. And United Fruit – the outfit generally cast as the Snidely Whiplash/Darth Vader in this episode – owned only a third of these. And according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in 1958 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 13 per cent of Cuba’s GNP.

“The financial largess that flooded Cuba could have been used to address the country’s social problems” continues author TJ English, who lists them while checking off the list his helpful Castroite hosts so helpfully provided:

“High infant mortality” – (In fact, Cuba’s infant mortality in 1958 was the 13th lowest – not in Latin America, not in the Hemisphere – but in the world.)

“Subhuman housing” – (In fact, Cuba’s per capita income in 1958 was higher than half of Europe’s. “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class.” starts a UNESCO study of Cuba from 1957. “Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker was also among the highest in the world, higher than in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent.”

“Dispossession of small farmers,” continues Havana Nocturne. – (in fact, Cuba’s agricultural wages in 1958 were higher than half of Europe’s. And – far from huge latifundia hogging the Cuban countryside – the average Cuban farm in 1958 was smaller than the average in the U.S.)

“Illiteracy” – (In fact, in a mere 50 years since a war of independence that cost Cuba almost a fifth of her population, Cuba managed 80 per cent literacy and budgeted the most (23% of national expenses) for public education of any Latin American country. Better still, Cubans were not just literate but also educated, allowed to read George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara.

So just in case Eric Eisner and Gil Adler read Big Hollywood, I provide all of the above as a public service, so you wont go red-faced like Sydney Pollack.

Note:  No, I do not actually think that George W. Bush was a war criminal. Even though I was undercover, I felt dirty just wearing the shirt.

Late 1950s, Toledo, Ohio, USA.

The Hero, rugged, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, is a searcher, misunderstood by family and friends. He is a freewheeling, Kerouacian type who in his twenties never kept a job or stayed in one place for long. He did a stint in the US Army: stationed in Japan, he went AWOL, got himself time in the brig and a dishonorable discharge. The Hero tried working on a ranch, scratch. Joined the circus. Nope, not a fit. Everywhere the Hero goes, he confronts the questions: Why am I here? What do I do? Now 30-ish, he needs a purpose in life.

The Hero

One day the Hero learns that another American, a close friend from his Army days, has been murdered by goons of the corrupt dictator of an island nation. The Hero heads down to the Island and joins the rebels to fight against the dictator that killed his buddy. For perhaps the first time in his life, the Hero finds someplace where he is needed, and where he can make a difference. He’s had freedom all his life and has not known what to do with it; he finally finds his purpose: helping others fight for their freedom. The Hero’s military training proves invaluable to the rebels, among whom he eventually rises to the rank of Comandante, the highest rank in the rebel army. He falls in love with, and marries, Olga, a lovely 22-year-old rebel who is as fiery and committed as he is, and they have two daughters. The rebels triumph over the dictator and at first the Hero and his wife are happy in their new life, but the leader of the rebels in due time reveals himself to be a worse dictator than the one who preceded him, turning to the far-right and establishing not just a new authoritarian dictatorship, but an out-and-out totalitarian dictatorship.

The Hero sees that friends of his from the former rebels are being arrested, imprisoned and even executed for speaking out against the totalitarian tack of the new dictator. The Hero and Olga begin stashing away guns, preparing for the day when the disciples of the new dictator come for them. The Hero is now a man without a country, as he has been stripped of his American citizenship by the U.S. State Department, a bureaucracy that does not understand that the Hero was fighting for freedom and justice all along, that the Hero never stopped being an American. The Hero and Olga are captured, dragged from their home and separated. The Hero is given a trial but the verdict was ordained before the court even convened. He writes Olga a last letter, which will not reach her until more than ten years after his death. “You have been my love, my happiness, my companion in life and in my thoughts in my hour of death…do not let your life become lifeless and sad,” he pleads with her.

The Hero stands in front of a firing squad. By most accounts, the new dictator and his younger brother are present at the execution; by some accounts, so is a rather creepy, long-haired fellow who speaks in the sing-song accent of a faraway country.

The executioner orders the Hero to kneel; the Hero answers:

“I kneel before no man.”

They riddle one of the Hero’s knees with machine-gun fire. He staggers but props himself up on one leg. They riddle the other knee with machine-gun fire, and only now does the Hero fall to his knees.

They fire at his shoulders and knock him onto his back.

The executioner, carrying the pistol with which he will deliver the kill shot, approaches the dying Hero and taunts him, “See, we made you kneel.”

The Hero’s last words: “I didn’t kneel.”

The executioner, knowing he can deliver death but not dishonor to the Hero, angrily fires multiple shots into the Hero’s skull, destroying the Hero’s noble face.

Olga is imprisoned for twelve awful years. The dictatorship inflicts savage beatings and solitary confinement upon her, but they cannot make her kneel, either. She never accepts “reeducation,” even though it would make her life much easier. Her feet are firmly planted. She comes to be regarded as a leader, a woman deeply committed to her principles, by her fellow prisoners.

Finally, Olga is released. After several years she leaves her country and finds her way to Toledo, and makes a new home there. She remarries, and begins a new life, but remains committed to obtaining justice for the Hero, eventually winning the restoration of his U.S. citizenship, indeed, winning a statement from the Department of State that the Hero’s citizenship had never been lost at all. She continues to this day to plead for the release of the Hero’s mortal remains to the United States.

Fifty years later, the dictator and his brother are still in power; it’s evident to all but the most dogmatic and foolish that the Hero was right to turn against the new dictator.

It would make a hell of a movie, wouldn’t it?

It’s a true story, by the way, except for one thing: the new dictator did not turn to the far-right, he turned to the far-left. Maybe that’s why this jaw-dropping tale hasn’t been made into a movie yet.

The island nation is Cuba, the now-not-so-new dictator is Fidel Castro, and the Hero’s name is William Morgan. He was executed in Cuba on March 11, 1961.

“I loved him intensely,” Olga told me. Now in her early seventies, Olga Morgan Goodwin is still radiant, and beautiful. William Morgan’s fight was ended by a coward’s bullets; Olga’s fight continues.

I had the extraordinary honor of observing the First Congress of Cuban Political Prisoners (Primer Congreso del Presidio Político Cubano), held from the 3rd to the 5th of April 2009 in Miami, and that’s where I met Olga, who continues to lobby the Castro government to release William’s remains so she can properly bury them in his (and now her) hometown of Toledo.

Will this epic tale ever make it to the big screen? It should have been done a long time ago. Had the movie been made in the 1960s, Steve McQueen would have made an excellent William Morgan. Had the tragedy of the Cuban Revolution happened thirty years before it did, the go-to guy to play Morgan would have been Gary Cooper. My wife thinks DiCaprio could play Morgan. Great actor, certainly, but I don’t quite see it. Matt Damon, maybe, but he’s a committed lefty and probably would not want to participate in a film in which the Castros and Che Guevara (the long-haired fellow at the execution) were portrayed in the harsh negative light of historical fact.

To me, the reason the story of William Morgan has not been made into a movie is that it does not fit Hollywood’s ideological narrative. I have no doubt that if William Morgan had been shot by Pinochet, Hollywood would have made this movie a long time ago. They’d probably be remaking it by now. However, the villain in this story is not some right-winger, and not some American multi-national corporation, but an America-hating, communist tyrant. And the Hero is a man who believes, perhaps naively by Hollywood’s standards, in Democracy. Nah, Hollywood will never touch this story.

Or will it? There has been talk of a William Morgan movie in the recent past, but Olga has not been consulted. To attempt to make a Morgan movie and omit Olga would be like making “Gone With The Wind” omitting Scarlett O’Hara. It would never work. The story of William Morgan is as much a love story as it is an adventure/war story. To omit the love story would be to make half a movie- and box office receipts would reflect that. Anyone wanting to film the story of William Morgan needs to start by talking with Olga.

Unlike Soderbergh’s awful “Che,” this would be a Cuba movie that could actually make some money. If Hollywood wants to do this movie right, Olga Morgan Goodwin has quite a story to tell. William’s own words, in his letter to Olga: “I only ask that someday the truth be known.”

Amen, William.

William and Olga Morgan

Che Guevara, Bolivia, September 8, 1967.

“No rapport had been established with the locals…” Anderson, p. 722

As I said in part one of my review of Soderbergh’s “Che,” The film gives us no idea of what happened after the Cuban Revolutionary government took power. Quite a lot did happen. We all know about the Bay of Pigs invasion, which deserves its own four-hour movie, hopefully directed by someone other than Soderbergh. We also all know that hundreds of thousands of people left Cuba in the early 1960s. People have never stopped leaving.

What’s less known to outsiders is that under Castro’s command, the Cuban Revolution began, very early on, to eat its own. The highest rank in the Revolutionary army was then the rank of “Comandante.” Here’s what happened to a few Revolutionary Comandantes:  In October 1959, Comandante Huber Matos, who is omitted from this film, criticizes the influence of Communists in the Revolutionary Government, and tenders his resignation. He is arrested, and serves twenty years in prison, during which time he endures severe torture. The dashing Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos is killed in an airplane crash within a week of the arrest of Huber Matos. The wreckage has never been found. Matos, who along with Camilo flanks Fidel in the famous photographs of Fidel’s entry into Havana, is among many who have never accepted the plane crash story. In March of 1961, Comandante William Morgan, of Cleveland, Ohio, also omitted from this film, is arrested and executed.

Revolutionaries were now being eliminated as well, not just Batistianos. In this dangerous atmosphere of Revolutionary cannibalism, Che recklessly blasted the Soviet Union in a speech in Algiers in 1965. Guevara was famously an admirer of Mao; Fidel in those days was firmly in the Soviet column, and with good reason: the Soviets were pumping massive amounts of capital into Cuba. In Cuba, when you disagree with Fidel, guess who wins? Che’s attack on the absolutely vital Soviet Sugar Daddy was nothing short of foolish.

Without knowledge of these important events, largely omitted from the film, one simply cannot observe Guevara’s Bolivian debacle from an informed perspective.

Furthermore, we have to understand that the Cuban Revolution has always lied, beginning in the fifties with the notorious “we are not communists” (and yes, even Guevara told this whopper, telling Abuelo, my grandfather, that he believed in democracy, and that there would be elections within six months of the overthrow of Batista) all the way through to 2006’s “Raul will be temporarily in charge.” The official account, which this movie rehashes, of the Bolivian campaign, is therefore suspect.

However, a sliver of truth does manage to peek through the darkness of disinformation in a scene in which Guevara, asthmatic, undernourished, gaining no traction in his insurgency against the Bolivian government and unable to make his horse move another inch, slides off of the poor creature and begins stabbing her. (This event, by the way, apparently really happened). Some in the audience moaned empathetically, as if the whole thing was so, so sad: first, el Vaquerito, now the horse! Yes, the incident is sad, but it’s not merely sad. It’s abnormal, terrifying. What kind of sadist stabs a horse just because he can’t make it walk? The answer is this: the same kind of sadist that presides over a gulag in which executions are carried out with dreadful, cold efficiency.

And Che did preside over a gulag. He was the first Revolutionary Comandante in charge of La Cabaña fortress, the old Spanish fort that became ground zero in the Cuban gulag archipelago. My father was home from college for the Christmas holidays of 1958-59, and he, a friend and Abuelo visited Che Guevara at La Cabaña on or before January 5th, 1959. As they were driven to Guevara’s office, Dad heard multiple volleys of rifle fire. Wondering why rifles were being fired, when after all the war was over, Dad asked a Captain Sanchez, who was driving them to the main barracks where Guevara had his office, “Captain, what are those shots?” Sanchez replied, “Ah, we’re shooting those sons of bitches,” meaning officers and soldiers of Batista’s army. Che had taken charge of La Cabaña on January 3rd. Again, hardly time for due process. Before long, the prison cells of La Cabaña began to fill not with Batistianos, but with former comrades of Fidel and Che. My cousin, Oscar Plá began his odyssey through the Cuban gulag at the age of 15, in October of 1961, and finally emerged for good at the age of 33; his initial incarceration was in La Cabaña. Oscar knew no fewer than eight Revolutionary Comandantes in La Cabaña.

In prison Oscar got to know several people who had direct contact with el Che. Two, Bernardo Paradela, and Raul Venta del Mazo, both veterans of the struggle against Batista who later turned against the Revolution, were hung upside down for over a month and interrogated. Guevara came to taunt them every single day of their ordeal. Oscar gave me the name of another man whom he had met in Gallery Seven of La Cabaña, a man who had been a Revolutionary Postal Service bureaucrat with whom Guevara had quarreled, then personally sentenced to torture. This poor wretch had lost fifty pounds in 30 days; he was never well liked by the other prisoners because even as a political prisoner he remained a committed ideological communist. The man was released only after Guevara was killed in Bolivia. This fellow is apparently still in Cuba; I have found a phone number for the man, which I am not going to call. Nor am I going to print his name. These are just three men; according to Sociologist Juan Clark, the population of political prisoners in Cuba in the 1960s swelled to 60,000, among them, women and children.

This is why the most jarringly false moment in the film comes in the first half when someone mentions Stalinists in the Cuban Communist Party. Guevara asks, “Stalinists?” as if to say subtextually, “Hold on here, there are Stalinists in this movement? Listen buddy, I ain’t down with no Stalinists.” This is an absolute howler, inanity of a very low order. Che Guevara was in fact the most Stalinist of all the early Revolutionary Comandantes, with the exception of Raul Castro himself. There is a reason why Guevara was put in charge of La Cabaña, and not Camilo, or Huber Matos. But there’s no room for this ugly reality in Soderbergh’s film about Guevara, whom we are led to believe was kind as Saint Francis of Assisi. But back to Bolivia.

Cinematically speaking, the problem with the Bolivian portion of the film is that there is simply not two hours of movie to be squeezed from this disaster. If the first two hours of the film are boring, the second two are stuporific.

Historically speaking, Guevara’s attempt to incite an insurrection among the Indigenous people of the Ñancahuazú region could never have succeeded. Many of these people didn’t speak Spanish, and the Cuban guerrillas did not speak the Guaraní dialect of the region. One can only imagine what the Indigenous Bolivians thought of the loud, smelly, bearded foreigners who suddenly appeared in their midst: “Saludos, comrades, we’re here to liberate you. Do you have anything to eat? Listen, don’t tell anyone you saw us, or we’ll kill you. By the way, I am not Che Guevara. What’s that? Oh, you don’t speak Spanish?”

Things deteriorated from there. No less than the now-exiled Dariel Alarcon, codenamed “Benigno” in Bolivia, and one of only three survivors of the expedition, today believes that Fidel set Che and the rest of his guerrillas up for failure, and death. He also has interesting things to say about the death of Camilo Cienfuegos.*

The grim photos of Guevara’s emaciated corpse stretched out in a washbasin lead one to wonder how long would it have taken for Guevara to simply starve in Bolivia. Contrast that with the pictures of the happy, healthy guerrillas who rolled into Havana in January of 1959. Photos of Fidel in particular are hilarious. He’s a good 60 pounds overweight. Whatever “the Cuban experience” as Guevara referred to the guerrilla war of 1956-1959 was, it was nothing like Bolivia, and Guevara’s experiences in Cuba in no way prepared him for what he encountered in South America.

At the end of the film, a Bolivian soldier asks Guevara if there was religion in Cuba. Guevara answers that yes, there are many religions in Cuba. Guevara’s answer here is, ahem, incomplete, and I wish to address this issue. Apparently, the Bolivian government and military had told the peasantry, and the soldiers, that under a Cuban-style regime, the Bolivian people would not be free to practice their religion. Soderbergh would have us believe that this is some vile calumny against the Cuban Revolution. In fact, religious persecution in Cuba at the time was a terrifying reality. From training fire hoses on a group of twelve to fourteen year old girls on their way into the Church of La Caridad del Cobre, a place sacred to Cubans since the 1600s, to teach Catechism class (this happened to my cousin Oscar’s wife, Miriam) to the internment of thousands in the UMAP camps of 1965 – 1968, where Jehova’s Witnesses in particular had it very rough, tortured with fire ants until they renounced their faith, religion was under fire in Cuba.

A more honest answer from Che would have been, “yes, there is religion in Cuba, but we’re doing everything we can to get rid of it.” The Bolivians had every right to fear for their religion, and their culture, under a Cuban-type regime.

At the end of the film, the Bolivians treat Che Guevara to exactly the same justice that the real Ernesto Guevara gave to Villaya, almost eight years earlier. Not exactly a miscarriage of justice.
I have just one more thing I’d like to say about Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro. I don’t mean this maliciously, as I think that the experience would be very good for the emotional, intellectual and artistic growth of these two men. I wish that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro could live in Cuba, not as the pampered VIPs that they are when they visit today, but as Cubans do, with no United States Constitutional rights, with ration cards entitling them to tiny portions of provisions that the stores don’t even stock anyway, with chivatos surveilling them constantly. How long would it be before Mr. Soderbergh started sizing up inner tubes, speculating on the durability and buoyancy of them, asking himself, could I make the crossing on that? How long before Mr. Del Toro started gazing soulfully at divorced or widowed tourist women, hoping to seduce and marry one of them and get out? Only then could they see why this insipid, frivolous and pretentious movie they have made is nothing less than an insult to millions of people, who really do live like that, and who’ve lived like that their entire lives.

Maybe then, they could put their considerable talents into making a Cuba movie worth watching.
The world so needs to take off those dumb Che t-shirts, and grow up. We face serious problems, and totalitarianism isn’t a solution to any of them, even when it’s dressed up in a beret and given a wispy beard, flowing locks and a surly stare, and looks really, really cool.

By the fall of 1960 my father had changed his mind about Castro. My uncles Jorge and Ricardo came to the States in September 1961, Abuelo and Abuela got out in November. They all moved into a small house on North Street in Baton Rouge. Dad started his own consulting firm. Jorge went to work at a department store in Baton Rouge called Godchaux’s, Ricardo graduated from Baton Rouge High, and they both went on to LSU. All three of the Lima boys became not only Americans, but full-on gumbo-eating Louisianans who married and had families and successful businesses of their own. Dad married a woman with deep roots in South Louisiana, and together they raised a family of four children, of which I am the first. Dad says, “your mother is fixin’ to make some jambalaya” with a Cuban accent. Mom learned to cook black beans so tasty that Cuban-born women ask for her recipe. Nowhere but in America do cultures collide so deliciously. Abuelo was too much of a fighter to be anything other than a cheerful man; he was not a bitter man, but all his life he felt betrayed by the Revolution, which had promised free elections and a return to the Constitution of 1940.

Abuela to her last day hated beards on men.

I was out for a walk in the cool of a Southern California evening with my soon-to-be-three-year-old daughter, the great-grandchild of José Francisco Lima, and the calamitous events of now more than fifty years ago, that so shaped who I am today came into my head. How fortunate we are to be able to walk down the street and talk to each other without having to worry about being overheard by a snitch, without having to show up at public demonstrations and pantomime a revolutionary ardor that after more than half a century, nobody really feels anymore. How fortunate we are to be free of the caprices of angry, vain men who think that they are entitled to shoot people and confiscate their property. How fortunate we are, to have been born in a country where freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right to due process are assured all of us thanks to the United States Constitution.

We didn’t have to build a raft and brave the Gulf of Mexico to get here. We lucked out: we were born here. We won the lottery. I certainly didn’t deserve to. Nobody can possibly deserve to. All we can do is thank God for it, and try to be worthy of it, by living a good life. Gratitude. Gratitude to be a free man, married to a lovely free woman, who has given me a beautiful daughter, who will grow up in a free country. Gratitude is what the Cuban experience taught me. I have a deep sense of how fortunate we as Americans are because I am just one generation removed from firing squads and re-education camps. And for creating that nightmare world of totalitarian Cuba, which I remember with a shudder even though I was spared the experience firsthand, I must credit Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Ernesto Guevara Serna, “el Che.”

*The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara, Daniel James, 1968, Stein & Day

**If you speak Spanish and want to hear what Dariel Alarcon aka Benigno has to say, I urge you to watch the following video:

***If you would like to read more about political prisoners and human rights abuses in Cuba, I direct you to Armando Valladares’ “Against All Hope,” “Contra Toda Esperanza” in Spanish.