Che Guevara, Hemingway, and La Cabaña

Following publication of The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro, Humberto Fontova gave a memorable interview to The Daily Caller on September 4, 2013. The interview as well as an accompanying article that was published generated considerable attention. It was a veritable exposé not only of Che Guevara but also of Ernest Hemingway and his outlandish behavior following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Hemingway’s reputation was permanently stained, at least among independent thinkers and unprejudiced academic authorities.

The interview attracted the attention of the late Samuel Chi, the esteemed editor of RealClearHistory, who asked me to peruse the article. Let me quote from The Daily Caller:

While Fontova writes about influential Cuban agents in the United States and how the mainstream media continues to suck up to the Castro brothers in his new book, perhaps his most shockingly lurid anecdote is of writer Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Cuba at the time of the Cuban Revolution. Hemingway hailed Castro’s revolution as ‘very pure and beautiful,’ Fontova said. ‘He was also a guest of honor at many of Che Guevara’s firing squad massacres. Hemingway loved to watch Che’s firing squads murder hundreds of Cubans. Hemingway would watch the massacres from a picnic chair while sipping Daiquiris.’

Fontova’s source was a former journalist who worked for the late Paris Review editor George Plimpton, whose boss was invited to and feted along with Hemingway at one such firing squad massacre and was witness to the sanguinary soiree.

The incident took place at the Fortaleza de la Cabaña fortress. The historic Spanish Colonial fortress had been converted into a prison for enemies of the Revolution. The huge masonry walls became the firing squad wall and the courtyard became a killing field for the vengeful revolutionists.

The following account details another chilling incident perpetrated by Che Guevara, the “Butcher of La Cabaña”:

Several men who survived La Cabaña prison recall a night when a 14-year-old boy was shoved into their holding cell. When asked what he did, he gasped that he had tried to defend his father from the firing squad but was unsuccessful. Moments later, guards dragged the boy out of the cell, and Che Guevara himself ordered the boy to kneel down. The jailed men screamed, “assassins!” and watched out of their cell window as Guevara took out his pistol, put the barrel to the back of the boy’s neck, and fired.

It was indeed a disturbing interview, but the facts therein cited are consistent with what I know to be true. Hemingway enjoyed his Mojitos and Daiquiris while rubbing elbows with revolutionaries in the island paradise that the Cuban Revolution has since turned into a wasteland. Hemingway loved Fidel Castro as well as all left-wing revolutions, and the places he frequented in Cuba are communist shrines today.

It was a travesty that Hemingway, an intelligent person and great author, fell for tyrants like the Castro brothers and their henchman Che Guevara. But unfortunately, it was true. Hemingway fell for Fidel, hook, line, and sinker just like the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez did over the years.

Hemingway had favored the communist side in the Spanish Civil War where 500,000 people perished. He went out of his way to misreport the war and advised his fellow American correspondent John Dos Passos to do the same. Hemingway told Dos Passos that if he wanted his journalistic and novelistic work promoted by the print media and the publishing establishment then he had better toe the communist line! Dos Passos refused. Although both of them were initially men of the left, Hemingway’s writing career prospered while Dos Passos’s career stalled.

Additional tidbits come directly from Hemingway’s own pen. In the book, The Fifth Column: And Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway confessed his bias for the Republican (communist) side of the Spanish Civil War. In the autobiographical story, “The Denunciation,” Hemingway also confessed to turning in a “Luis Delgado,” a former friend, to the brutal Republican (communist) secret police that were supervised by Stalin’s dreaded NKVD. Hemingway wrote in a fictionalized account how he denounced Delgado, who he posited was a Nationalist spy on Franco’s side, even though he knew, “He is a spy. He will be shot. There is no choice in the matter.”[18] And in the story, Hemingway subtly exhorts others at the Spanish inn, Chicote’s, to inform on spies and traitors. I admit that it is somewhat difficult to tell where the line of demarcation is delineated between fiction and nonfiction in this volume of Hemingway’s autobiographical stories, but that murkiness seems to be the purpose of Hemingway himself. In fact, Hemingway stated that, “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened.”

The realities of the civil war in Spain, the communist treachery, and the crimes committed by the Loyalists (Spanish communists in power) supported by the NKVD turned Dos Passos and others, such as George Orwell, away from socialism and communism.

During the Spanish Civil War, there were systematic assassinations of fellow Republicans, men of the left, such as Dos Passos’ friend, José Robles, and numerous others, including Andrés Nin, who were accused of being Trotskyites by Stalin’s NKVD squads in Spain and executed.

Robles’ execution, probably ordered by Stalin’s NKVD General Alexander Orlov, caused a total rift between Hemingway and Dos Passos, who had been longtime friends and fellow travelers. Hemingway condoned the assassination as “necessary in time of war” while Dos Passos, who was embittered by the death of his friend, broke away from communism and began his remarkable odyssey to the political right. (Dos Passos moved politically to the Republican Party in America and supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 U.S. presidential election.)

Betrayal of friendship and assassination of “ideological deviationists” during civil wars and revolutions is a common practice among revolutionaries of the left, whether fascist, socialist, or communist. Following the line Vladimir I. Lenin delineated as far back as 1917, communists use assassinations and purges of fellow revolutionaries in their quest for ideological purity.

Returning to The Daily Caller article, an astute commenter, who was not at all happy with Hemingway sipping Daiquiris and being entertained by Che while watching the Cuban firing squads, wrote sardonically but with clarity: 

Hemingway like all Leftists was an endlessly self-promoting, cowardly narcissistic braggart of modest talent who bullied everyone around him. It is little wonder that when his time of terminal decline was upon him he used a shotgun to avoid the pain and indignity of death. Such a person would have no interest in the suffering of others because being near the power of life and death, and not be threatened by it because of your international status, is the ultimate Leftist aphrodisiac that made him appear to be actually alive.”[19]

The reader should consider the lessons of history, which also call to mind events that occurred during the French and Russian Revolutions and in the Weimar Republic where a democratic process paved the way to power for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party (the Nazis) in 1933.

The story of what transpired when the Castro brothers and Che Guevara fomented revolution in Cuba, overthrew the government, assumed power, and caused needless misery, desolation and death is part and parcel of the narrative documented in my book. These “iconic” communist revolutionaries need to be toppled from the pedestals where the popular culture, the media, and even misguided academicians have placed them.

Excerpted from Dr. Miguel A. Faria’s book’s Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and Espionage, (2023)