Hint: Not Che. The Cuban government's most shameless con.
Post Date Wednesday, October 31, 2007
PANAMA CITY, Panama--Thousands of Cubans and foreigners have been
flocking to a mausoleum in central Cuba to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of Che Guevara's death. For 10 years, the Cuban government
has been telling the world that the body inside the mausoleum is that of
the famous guerrilla.
It's a lie designed to bamboozle the population into worshiping the
Argentine-born revolutionary as if he were a saint--and the Cuban
Revolution as if it were a religion. A brilliant investigation by French
journalist Bertrand de la Grange, recently published in Spain's El Pais
newspaper, demolishes the official version.
In 1995, Bolivian Gen. Mario Vargas, who had fought Che's guerrillas in
the 1960s, revealed that the revolutionary's body was buried a few
meters from the airport runway in Vallegrande, a town close to La
Higuera, the village in eastern Bolivia where Guevara was killed on Oct.
9, 1967. (Guevara had been executed after the Bolivian president
ordered the soldiers who ambushed and captured him to get rid of him.)
Cuba sent a forensic, diplomatic and legal team to Vallegrande. On June
28, 1997, they claimed to have found the body, which was brought to Cuba
a few weeks before the 30th anniversary of the guerrilla's death.
Numerous facts belie the Cuban claim. Havana's envoys say they found the
body in the same grave in which six other guerrillas killed in La
Higuera were buried. However, Vargas says that Guevara's body was buried
separately--a fact confirmed by the widow of Lt. Col. Andres Selich, the
man who actually buried all the bodies in 1967.
A jacket and a belt were found on the body exhumed in 1997. But
Guevara's real body was buried without clothes: His jacket was removed
by Moises Abraham, the doctor who performed the autopsy in 1967. Abraham
now lives in Mexico, where he has been visited by Cuban emissaries
wishing to buy the jacket from him.
Erich Blossl, a German agricultural engineer who befriended Abraham in
the 1960s and saw Guevara's jacket in 1967, says that the garment found
on the body dug up in 1997 is not the same one. "It was a waterproof
cape, like the ones used by the military," he says in reference to the
clothes found on the body that was sent to Cuba. He had a chance to see
it because the Cuban team asked him to take a look at it.
No less significant are the gross inconsistencies between the autopsy of
Guevara's body conducted in 1967 and the forensic report of the body
exhumed in 1997. Three European doctors, two from Spain and one from
France, have compared the related documents. One, Jose Antonio Sanchez,
determined that the fractures present in the ribs, the collarbone, the
legs, and the vertebrae of the two bodies don't match, and that some
teeth missing in one body were not missing in the other. The report from
1997 does not mention any marks related to the amputation of Guevara's
hands, which were cut off in 1967 in order to verify that the
fingerprints matched those kept by the Argentine police.
"Che had to be in Havana before July 26, 1997, so Cuba could celebrate
the return of the prodigal son and lift the spirits of the Cuban
people," concludes de la Grange in reference to the holiest day in the
revolutionary calendar. "Those were Fidel Castro's orders. The fact that
it wasn't the real one was, after all, a minor evil."
It is not surprising, of course, that Che Guevara's remains are a myth.
Everything about this modern saint is a myth--his love of justice, his
romantic disposition, his goodness. The truth is that he executed
hundreds of people, ruined the Cuban economy, tried to turn Cuba into a
nuclear power and helped bring about many military dictatorships in
Latin America in reaction to the guerrillas he inspired in the 1960s and
the 1970s.
Guevara's false body reminds us that totalitarian power is built on the
abolition of historical truth and the psychological manipulation of its
citizens.
There is something at once terrifying and fascinating about the fact
that this act of propaganda was concocted by scores of scientists,
diplomats and jurists perfectly willing to make a mockery of their
professions in order to deliver a story that one man, Fidel Castro,
ordered them to deliver--and that they knew to be a colossal lie.
ALAVARO VARGAS LLOSA, author of Liberty for Latin America, is the
director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f25fe31b-3bbc-4d56-8d88-c3069b1fadbc
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