Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him by Humberto Fontova

Author:Humberto Fontova
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781595230270
Publisher: Sentinel HC
Published: 2008-08-26T18:17:03.005000+00:00

7

The “Intellectual and Art Lover” as Book Burner and Thief

Che is not only an intellectual, he was the most complete human being of our time—our era’s most perfect man.

—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Jon Lee Anderson quotes a Che friend from the era of The Motorcycle Diaries, “For Ernesto Guevara everything began with literature.” Then Anderson goes on to rhapsodize about Che’s “voracious reading appetite” and immense “intellectual curiosity.”

Certainly, one of this bibliophile’s first acts after entering Havana in January 1959 was to stage a massive book burning.

We’ve all seen the newsreels of Nazi goons burnings books in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Probably no two weeks go by without the History Channel or PBS graphically reminding us of this intellectual atrocity, with either a voiceover or subtitles of Joseph Goebbels gloating that “these flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new!” Many have heard a somber voiceover quoting German philosopher Heinrich Heine: “If you burn books today, you burn people tomorrow.” In Berlin today, a “Submerged Library” monument stands in Berlin commemorating that outrage.

This is, of course, good history, necessary to remember and retell. Liberals are especially sensitive—and in some cases, oversensitive. Let some rural school board today refuse to assign Darwin or James Joyce in its curriculum and liberals quickly trot out the Nazi book-burning episode as the obvious next step by officials in the dark hinterlands of Red State America.

But regarding the intellectual atrocity by Che in Cuba? “The portrait of Che is now as complete as it will ever be,” says the London Times Literary Supplement about Anderson’s book.

You’ll search Anderson’s book, along with all the other massive and “scholarly” biographies of Che, in vain for any mention of his biblio-pyre.

It happened. On January 24, 1959, in the street directly in front of 558 G Street in Havana’s Vedado district—on Che Guevara’s direct orders—three thousand books were doused with gasoline and set ablaze, to the cheers and whoops of his communist toadies.

“I contacted several foreign correspondents in Havana at the time,” recalls Salvador Diaz-Verson, whose books, pamphlets, and files had fueled the blaze, and whose private office and library had been broken into and pillaged by Che’s armed goons. “Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune and Hal Hendricks of the Miami News were among the dozens of correspondents who came with me to inspect the ruins of my library and the ashes which had become of my books. None of them attached any importance whatsoever to the incident.”2

We can only imagine the U.S. media reaction had it happened a month earlier at the hands of Batista’s unbearded and unfashionable henchmen.

The Nazi book burning was public and theatrical, a naked attempt at rabble-rousing. Joseph Goebbels and the SA hoodlums mocked the books’ authors by name—Einstein, Freud, H. G. Wells—and displayed the book contents while scorning them and heaving them into the bonfire. Che’s motives were different; they had nothing to do with totalitarian pageantry. Indeed, Che tried to keep his bonfire secret. The very last thing he and Castro wanted was more exposure of the contents of Salvador Diaz-Verson’s library.

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