Shadow Warrior

I can’t believe I haven’t done a blog on this, but apparently I haven’t.  So here you go.

Shadow Warrior is the now out-of-print memoirs of Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-born CIA operative responsible for hunting down and capturing Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.   It was fascinating, and not just for the Che Guevara angle.

He was born in Cuba, of all places – whereas Guevara is Argentinian.  The CIA sent him back for the Bay of Pigs operation.   Rodriguez was in Havana at the time, and if the invasion managed to get off the beach and reach that far, he would have coordinated with the invasion forces in the city itself.  Obviously things didn’t reach that level.

Rodriguez later went to Bolivia to help the Bolivian Army track down Che Guevara.   Oddly, Castro had given the Bolivian Communist Party explicit instructions NOT to give Guevara any help whatsoever.  Almost none of Che’s team in the forests of Bolivia were native Bolivians.  He had an East German woman with cancer, and a Bolivian named Paco, who would rather have studied Marxism in Moscow than have a gun shoved in his hands and told to traipse through the forest with no clue what he was doing.

Guevara separated his group into a vanguard, a rearguard, and a main group in the middle, which contained Guevara himself.   Rodriguez’ counter-insurgency team of Bolivian Army soldiers captured the vanguard team, who happily spilled the beans about the whole thing.  That included Paco.  Now Rodriguez knew Guevara would be arriving – but Guevara had no clue he’d be walking into an ambush.  Sure enough, he was captured.

The two of them talked at length, very friendly.  Che gave him his Rolex, which is now on display at CIA headquarters.  If it were up to Rodriguez, he’d have had Che sent to Panama to be interrogated by the CIA and who knows what else.  But it was the Bolivians who decided what to do, and they decided to shoot him.   Too bad.

Vietnam.  After Cuba, Rodriguez went to Vietnam.  There he turned a female NVA officer.  She was in love with the son of her NVA commander (Colonel Tu Ton), but he thought his son was too good for her, and forbid the relationship.  The colonel reassigned his son to a combat unit, and the boy was killed in a B52 raid.  She blamed Tu Ton for not only breaking up the relationship but also getting the boy killed.   So she helped the CIA arrange highly effective operations against him.  And there was much rejoicing.

Nicaragua.  By the 1980s, Rodriguez went to Nicaragua to help out with the Contras, who were trying to overthrow the communist Sandinista regime then in power.  Despite the notoriety back in Washington of some guy named Oliver North, Rodriguez said the Contras had no idea who North was.   Rodriguez considered North to be an arrogant idiot who had no idea what he was doing, nor that Secord and the rest of the Iran-Contra operation were making money behind his back, overall a pompous, incompetent assclown with a grossly inflated image of his importance.

If you’re interested in CIA covert ops, or in Che Guevara, by all means check this out.  His background is extensive and his stories are compelling.  

Che Guevara

Yet again I noticed someone on the street wearing a Che Guevara shirt. I had to wonder: what relevance does he have today, and what is the big deal anyway?

 Here are the most important facts regarding him:

1.         Born in Argentina, June 28, 1928.  Real name Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.  His nickname “Che” comes from his affectation of peppering his talk with “che”, a phrase meaning, “man” or “pal” and used often by South Americans.

2.         Toured South America in 1951 – the so-called “Motorcycle Diaries” reflect this voyage.  He also figures in the recent movie “Lost City”, which deals with not only the 1959 revolution but also much of the events in Cuba after that.  However, it does not focus on Guevara himself. 

3.         A medical student with asthma, he became a revolutionary.  He had no formal military training – the Argentine government exempted him from conscription because of his asthma.  Keeping this in mind, he was a modestly competent guerilla leader.

4.         The only successful revolution with which he is associated, and with which he admittedly had a major role, was the Cuban revolution in 1959.  He was highly placed within the Cuban government under Castro, but his actual role in the regime amounted to little more than summary executions of various political enemies.   As is so often the case, Marxist revolutionaries are fairly capable of overthrowing timid dictators like Batista but equally incompetent at successfully running a country once they take over.

5.         He left Cuba in 1965, tried, unsuccessfully to incite rebellion in the Congo, then tried, again unsuccessfully, to incite rebellion in Bolivia.

6.         He was tracked down and killed in October 1967 by Bolivian soldiers trained by the US Special Forces.  Various mementos, recovered by Rodriguez, the CIA operative who helped find him, are proudly displayed at Langley.

 So when you boil it all down, Che Guevara’s biggest and most important “legacy”, if you can call it that, is communist Cuba.  However, this seems to ignore an even larger and more important figure – obviously Fidel Castro himself.  Who led the rebellion?  Castro.  Who dealt with Krushchev?  Castro.  Who ran the country, all the way up to the present day?  Castro.  Who kept the country a going concern even after Soviet aid dried up following the fall of the Soviet Union? Castro.  Guevara left the country in 1965 and  hadn’t done a whole lot until that point anyway.  And as noted above, he was unsuccessful at the two subsequent revolutions he was involved with.

 As of today, Cuba is a poor, crappy country, second only to Haiti in poverty.  The Castro apologists blame the US for this; we embargo Cuba yet trade with Vietnam and China.  Ah...but we’re not refusing to TRADE with Cuba, we’re refusing to EXPLOIT Cuba.  Since, as they claim, the United States invariably unfairly exploits any country with which it conducts trade, Cuba should be prosperous and thriving without the yoke of Yankee imperialism upon its neck (and things are much worse for the Chinese and Vietnamese since “Tio Sam” became welcome there once again...right?).  How can we hurt Cuba if we’re not doing anything to it?  “Yankee go home”?  Fine, we went home.  So what’s the problem? 

 None of this, of course, is Guevara’s fault.  He left the country in 1965 and died in 1967.  Any success or failure of Cuba since then is the full responsibility of Fidel Castro.  So why is it Che Guevara on the t-shirts, and not Castro?