Free Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova Page A

shooting at us. I pursued them. I’m damn proud of my record. Let Che’s biographers and anyone else call me a war criminal. I murdered no one. How many of the rebels—much less Che—can claim that?”
    Che never forgot Lieutenant Enrizo’s assault on his “column.” “I knew the dragnet was out for us after the rebel victory and escaped to Miami,” Enrizo says. Like most Cuban exiles of the time, Enrizo expected his exile to be short. One day shortly after he arrived in Miami, Lieutenant Enrizo met two men in a diner he had known in Cuba as Castro rebels. “Just the man we’ve been looking for!” they said to Enrizo as they surrounded him. Che Guevara himself had sent these men to Miami on a special mission to kidnap Orlando Enrizo and haul him back to Cuba for a spectacular show trial and public firing-squad execution, much like the famous trial held in February 1959 for Cuban army commander Jesus Sosa Blanco for which the international press was invited to attend. The kidnappers had been jubilant with the assignment and expressed their excitement to Che himself.
    “They were excited with the assignment all right,” says Enrizo, “because it allowed them to finally scoot out of Cuba, something they’d been planning for a while, but couldn’t find a way out. Those guys still live here in Miami. We’re friends.” 6
    Enrizo’s fellow fighter, Lieutenant Lazo, uncovered much of interest in Che’s personal papers. “Every last one of the contacts Guevara had listed in his notebooks was a well-known Cuban Communist Party member.” Cuba’s Communist Party was rigidly Stalinist and slavishly followed Moscow’s orders. But to this day, assert that Castro’s rebels had communist support or were communists themselves, and you will find yourself labeled a crackpot by mainstream academia.
    All serious scholars will tell you that only “Yankee bullying” pushed a reluctant Castro and Che into the arms of the Soviet Union. This wall of resistance to the truth has proven more durable than the concrete and steel of the Berlin Wall. It has been impervious to a half-century of contrary evidence, including declassified Soviet documents that list Raul Castro as a reliable KGB contact since 1953. This myth persists in the face of innumerable telling details, like the fact that when Che Guevara was arrested in Mexico City in 1956, he was actually carrying the card of the local KGB agent, Nikolai Leonov, in his wallet.
    In short, Lazo’s documents are the Cuban version of the Venona papers. Declassified in 1995, the Venona project was a U.S. intelligence project that broke Soviet codes and revealed Soviet spies in the U.S. It makes no difference to academia, the major media, or other apologists. “War with the U.S. is my true destiny,” Castro had written to a confidant in early 1958.
    The Batista government made all the information found in Che’s private papers known to the U.S. government. It did no good. The U.S. government held tough on its arms embargo against Batista, while the U.S. media lionized Castro.

Stalinist Hit Man
    During the Spanish Civil War Stalinists attempted to ensure their future rule by butchering their leftist allies. This butchery commenced well before they foresaw any victory over the common rightist foe, Franco. One year into that war, Spanish Stalinists were already piling up the bodies of anarchists, Trotskyites, and socialists in mass graves, each with a bullet hole in the nape of the neck. This leftist rabble had been useful as cannon fodder against Franco for a time. But by 1937 the time had come to get the house in order.
    One leftist who narrowly escaped was George Orwell, who had volunteered for the anti-Franco anarchist militia and been wounded in battle. Unlike the rest of the literati (the always blustering Ernest Hemingway comes to mind here), Orwell actually enlisted in the Spanish Republican forces and fought—long, hard, and bravely. His Homage to Catalonia tells the whole