Michael Casey | The Image Mirror

A Reply To Bush’s Latin America Man

Author friends warn me against responding to critical reviews, but this one in the conservative biweekly The National Review is too tempting let pass. It is, after all, the first negative review that Che’s Afterlife has received. (Find links to a string of positive ones here). More important, it was written by Roger Noriega, who during his stint as Bush’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs was a highly polarizing figure in Latin America on account of his close ties to the Cuban-American lobby. It’s hard to allow a man with such conflicts of interests to confidently (and yet completely wrongly) assert that “the author’s own bias [as a Che worshipper] is clear.”

The review also coincided with a story in The Miami Herald about the presentation of my book at the U.S. Embassy’s stand during the Buenos Aires book fair on Friday – a harmless little affair that was spectacularly misinterpreted by the anti-Castro opinionators of South Florida. They saw it as a sign that the Obama Administration was openly promoting Che Guevara’s violent prescriptions for the world. One person who went by the name “Toni” let fly on the The Herald’s web site with this comment: “I can’t believe the US [is] sponsoring one of the worst assassins in the history of Latin America.” I’m quite sure Toni knows that Che was not there in person, in which case it would seem that the “assassin” to whom he refers is me. Now that’s a bad book review! A comment-poster at another widely read Cuban exiles blog called me a “bitch.”

The good news is that I can use this as another moment to investigate the fraught political culture of Miami-Cuban politics and examine how it helps sustain the ire of those on the left who support Castro and revere Che.

Mr. Noriega’s main beef is that I should have written “a valuable history” of a violent thug that detailed his extensive record of killings but that I instead “plumbed the depths of a ubiquitous two-dimensional image — the famous photograph of Guevara by Alberto Korda — and made an exhaustive examination of the origins and propagation of a caricature.”

Well, um, yes. That was the point.

There have been countless books about Ernesto Guevara and I cite many of them in the book to discuss the elements of his life that I believe are relevant to the development of Che’s posthumous iconic status, including frequent references to his violent record and the tragic loss of life among Latin American students who launched failed guerrilla insurgencies in mimicry of him. But, yes, I deliberately chose as my central subject a single photographic image and the reasons why people are drawn to it, not the complex and, indeed, very difficult, problematic life of the man behind it. So apparently my fault lies in the choice of topic. I should have written about what Mr. Noriega wanted me to write about, not what I wanted to write about.

One way to frame my book’s main question is: How did a picture of such a violent man ironically become a stand-in for a range of often pacifistic left-wing ideas and concepts. In pursuing it, I discuss in quite some detail Guevara’s record of violence, attempting to demonstrate how Cuba has distorted the myth of Che. On that and other matters to do with Cuba, Mr. Noriega supposes that I would agree with him that “thanks in large measure to Che Guevara, [it] is not like any other country in Latin America” but that I “prefer” not to go there. This is flat out wrong. He need not have made a supposition about my views on Cuba and Che’s role in its failure: I overtly state it in different parts of the book. More broadly, it has to be said that anyone who believes a book that demonstrates how the Cuban government encouraged and manipulated the myth of Che to patch over its own colossal screw-ups and maltreatment of its citizenry represents an endorsement of that system either gave it an extremely sloppy reading or is deliberately choosing to misrepresent its contents.

Whether the root cause of this flawed review is poor comprehension or deliberate distortion, it was quite probably motivated by the umbrage felt by Mr. Noriega and the Cuban-American lobbyists whose cause he upholds over my admittedly less-than-glowing account of their role in the Che story. (I describe them as foil characters who help burnish the mythical narrative of Che that is absorbed by his supporters.) Mr. Noriega played as big a part as any in giving the Latin American left stuff to be passionately angry about: In 1996, when he was working as a senior aide to Senator Jesse Helms, he helped draft the notorious Helms-Burton Act, an excessive piece of anti-Cuba legislation that did nothing but reward Fidel Castro with a tool for propaganda and thus probably did more than anything else to help in overcome the resentment that was building against his regime in Cuba in the chaos after the fall of its Soviet benefactor.

Like other tribes who feel under threat from a reviled “other” and who resent the lack of sympathy for their cause – orthodox Jewish settlers in the West Bank, for example, or the Serbs – hardline anti-Castroites in the Cuban-American community are so caught up in how they have been wronged that they fail to see how their own extremist actions are negatively perceived by others and provoke an ongoing backlash. Cuban exiles collectively share a long, sad story of loss – loss of loved ones, of property, of homeland – and many have accounts of suffering at the hands of Che Guevara himself. But as I point out in the book, they struggle to have these stories heard because they are drowned out by accounts of all the violence and corruption associated with the community’s political leaders over the past 50 years.

The vast majority of Cuban-Americans are decent, hardworking, peace-loving people. But they are not the ones who make the headlines. It’s people like admitted terrorist Luis Posada-Carriles and ex-CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, who was involved in the Bay of Pigs, Che’s execution and the Iran-Contra affair, along with many other Cuban-Americans who engaged in some of the dirtiest work of the Cold War – the Congo mercenary war, the 1976 car bomb that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in D.C., and the Watergate break in – who have unfortunately become its poster children. Sadly, that record diminishes outsiders’ capacity to reflect on the very real injustices suffered by this proud community.

My point – highlighted in a remark to Miami Herald reporter Vinod Sreeharsha about how Miami’s hyper-passionate “freedom fighters” often sound a lot like Che fanatics, and which riled readers of a prominent anti-Castro blog on Saturday – is that both sides in the tiresome left-versus-right Cuba conflict exploit distorted versions of the truth to discredit the other’s claims to own it. Mr. Noriega takes offense at my use of quotation marks around the word “true” to qualify the accounts that Cuban-Americans give of Guevara’s violent record. But rather than being “sneer quotes” as he would have it, this was to reflect the extremely wide-ranging estimates that these people use in tallying the number of lives that the Argentine revolutionary took and their treatment of intrinsically dubious information as if it were irrefutable fact. Case in point: Humberto Fontova and other Che iconoclasts’ claim that Guevara cowardly appealed to his Bolivian captors to spare him because he was “worth more to them alive than dead.” The third-hand source of those words can hardly be trusted: they were recounted in a press conference by officers from the Bolivian high command, men who were not present at the moment of Che’s capture and who days later would be shown to have made a clumsy, devastating lie that Guevara had died of his battle wounds and not in the cold-blooded, point-blank execution that they ordered. At the same time, I go to great lengths to show how the left, which goes to the other extreme and puts heroic dying words into Che’s mouth – “Shoot coward, you are only going to kill a man” – is equally capable of arguing their political position with the aid of apocryphal stories.

In her cutting-edge work on the two Cubas, Ann Louise Bardach has demonstrated that the cross-Florida Strait battle has the dynamics of a bitter family feud, an acrimonious divorce in which each side feels so passionately about the other’s flaws that they can’t step back and recognize their own role in perpetuating the fight. (One might have hoped, however, that a former senior member of the U.S. government like Mr. Noriega would be capable of just a little self-reflection.) To fix the Cuba problem, gestures of magnanimity are needed. Nothing big: no total cave-in to Castro, merely an attempt to understand why the left, however deluded it might be, continues to hold this negative view of the Miami “gusanos” and why Che, as a contrast to the image they represent, is so appealing to them. (Here, again, I’m talking not about the appeal of the real Ernesto Guevara, but of the idealized, myth-enriched story of a man who sticks to his convictions and dies a martyr fighting for a just cause.)

Obama is at least trying to learn from the other side and see things, however modestly, from their point of view. But some of those in Miami now attacking my book see such gestures, absurdly, as a move toward Castro-like totalitarianism in the U.S. It’s a pity that a group of Americans with the most to gain from a thaw in the bilateral relationship are so determined to keep it in the freezer