Free Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova

they outnumbered four to one. In their fright, the gallant guerrilleros abandoned two stolen trucks crammed with arms and documents.
    “We found Guevara’s own diary and notebooks in one of the trucks,” recalls Cuban air force lieutenant Carlos Lazo, who had made a recon flight over the area and notified the Rural Guard of the Che column. 5 The sight of Lieutenant Lazo’s plane overhead had greatly exacerbated Che’s column’s panic attack and spurred on their frantic flight. The “Heroic Guerrilla’s” voluminous writings, and those of his biographers, somehow overlook this exhilarating military engagement.
    Oddly, the notebook and diaries found by Lazo differ dramatically from the “Che Diaries,” the “Secret Papers of a Revolutionary,” and the “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” later published by Castro’s government under Che Guevara’s byline, with a foreword by Fidel Castro himself. It is at this juncture that we see how mainstream historical research was poisoned, and the myth of Che the heroic guerrilla was created. On one hand, historians had access to a mass of confidential memos snatched from a frantically fleeing Che. On the other hand, a Stalinist regime published—with a deafening fanfare of trumpets—Che’s “official” diaries and reminiscences. And which set of writings became the source material for all those hard-nosed New York Times reporters, all those diligent Che biographers and erudite Ivy league scholars? The propaganda, of course.
    “Those confidential notebooks and diaries we found in Che’s truck confirmed everything we were already saying about Che,” says Lazo. “First off, Guevara complained that his column was getting absolutely no help from the country people, whom he claimed were all latifundistas (large landholders). The first part was true, the country folk mostly shunned them. The second part was patently untrue, these weren’t huge landholders. They were simply anticommunist. That was enough for Che to mark them for reprisal. I saw where several boys, one of them seventeen, another eighteen, had been marked for execution in his diary. These were not ‘war criminals’ in any sense of the word. They were simply country boys who had refused to cooperate with him. I guess these had really annoyed him somehow. Shortly after the rebel victory these were rounded up and executed as ‘war criminals.’ ”
    The New York Times , Look , and CBS weren’t around for these murders. Even those labeled “war criminals” by the rebels were often simply Cuban military men who had shot back. If they’d actually taken their oath and duty seriously, if they’d actually pursued Che’s rebels, fought them, and inflicted casualties—well, then Che’s henchmen went after them with particular zeal. Lieutenant Orlando Enrizo was one such. “They called us Batista war criminals,” he recalls from Miami today. “First off, I had nothing to do with Batista, didn’t even like the guy. He didn’t sign my checks. Me and most of my military comrades considered ourselves members of Cuba’s Constitutional Army.
    “The Castro rebels whom we knew to be communist-led—though many were not communists themselves, simply dupes—start ambushing us, start killing our men in their barracks, destroying roads and bridges, terrorizing the countryside, and we’re supposed to greet them with kisses? Not me,” says Enrizo. “I fought them. I met an ex-rebel in exile later who told me point-blank that Che’s people would murder campesinos for not cooperating, or for being suspected informers, or whatever. Then they’d promptly blame it on us.”
    And sure enough, the media, both in the United States and in Cuba at the time, took the rebels’ word as gospel that the men of the Cuban army were the murderers. Castro and his network always had the media’s ear.
    “Well, I’ll admit it,” says Enrizo. “I fought the rebels hard. I shot during combat when people were