BY MICHAEL BAUMANN
Vie et mort de la révolution cubaine (Life and death of the Cuban revolution), Fayard publishers, Paris, 1996, by Dariel Alarcón Ramírez "with the collaboration of Jean-Baptiste Grasset." 298 pages.

"Publication of this book is a political act; it marks my break with the regime of Fidel Castro." With these words Dariel Alarcón Ramírez opens his book, released in early May in Paris, and announces his defection from the Cuban revolution.

Vie et mort de la révolution cubaine, which has appeared only in French so far, seeks to capitalize on the credentials of its author. Better known by his nom de guerre Benigno, Alarcón is a veteran of the Cuban revolutionary war in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the late 1950s and one of three Cuban combatants to survive the 1966-67 guerrilla campaign in Bolivia led by Ernesto Che Guevara.

In July 1957, as a 17-year-old peasant, Alarcón joined the Rebel Army, which under the leadership of Fidel Castro led Cuba's workers and farmers to topple the U.S.-backed Batista tyranny. Serving under commander Camilo Cienfuegos, Alarcón won the esteem of his comrades through the courage, tenacity, and self-sacrifice he displayed in battle. After the revolution's triumph in 1959 he continued working in the armed forces, reaching the rank of lieutenant in the Cuban army.

Today Alarcón is a resident of France, a bitter opponent of Cuba's socialist revolution and an imperialist power he praises as "a democratic country" (p. 295). As a justification for his defection Alarcón recounts a familiar stew of slanders, lies, and distortions taken straight from Washington's propaganda cookbook, plus numerous concoctions of his own.

For a brief period, Alarcón's book received extensive press coverage in France and in the Spanish-language media internationally. Apart from fleeting coverage in the Miami Herald, however, most of the major U.S. media has not publicized his defection and allegations, some of which are too patently false to serve as effective propaganda against the Cuban revolution. Alarcón's attempt to pose as a still-loyal admirer of Guevara while echoing the anticommunist ravings of Cuban- American rightists is a bit too contradictory for the enemies of Cuba.

The guerrilla campaign in Bolivia is one of Alarcón's main targets. This heroic effort to extend the Cuban revolution, build a continent-wide movement of fighting workers and farmers capable of contending for power, and, in the process, relieve some of the pressure from U.S. imperialism on the revolutionary combatants in Vietnam, earned the fear and hatred of the U.S. empire. Since the October 1967 murder of Guevara by the CIA- directed Bolivian army, the U.S. government and its backers have churned out slanders against Fidel Castro and Guevara around these events.

Familiar lie about Castro-Guevara rift
Alarcón echoes one of Washington's well-worn lies about the Bolivian campaign. According to his book, Guevara left Cuba following sharp political disagreements with the rest of the leadership. Cuban president Fidel Castro and armed forces minister Raúl Castro knowingly sent Guevara and the others to their deaths "in order to get rid of them" (p. 167). The campaign was a hopeless adventure that by the end turned into a nightmare of desperation. And, to top it off, Havana sealed the guerrillas' fate by agreeing to demands from Moscow to cut off all aid to them (pp. 8, 170).

There is one problem with this account. It is contradicted by Guevara's own diary of the Bolivian guerrilla struggle. It is also refuted by the two other surviving combatants of that campaign - Harry Villegas and Leonardo Tamayo, known as Pombo and Urbano, respectively. Villegas, now a brigadier general in the Cuban army, and Tamayo, a colonel in Cuba's Ministry of the Interior, have both recently carried out international speaking tours on their experiences.

A vivid imagination
Alarcón throws in additional falsifications about the Cuban revolution every few pages of Vie et mort:

"More than 90 percent of the Cuban armed forces do not support either the government or Fidel Castro" (p. 13).

"Fidel and Raúl Castro organized the [1959 plane crash] disappearance of Camilo [Cienfuegos] because he was more popular than even Fidel" (p. 77).

The war against the counterrevolutionary bandits in the Escambray mountains in the early 1960s was misguided. "These people had a clearer appreciation than we did of what was going to happen in Cuba; that is why they decided to take up arms against Fidel" (p. 97).

The Cuban internationalists who fought alongside Guevara in the liberation struggle in the Congo in 1965 were "mercenaries" (p. 111).

Arnaldo Ochoa, the Cuban general executed in 1989 for drug trafficking and diamond smuggling in Angola, was only carrying out government policy in committing these crimes: "his orders were to obtain foreign currency by any means necessary" (p. 264). And the same was true of Ochoa's co-defendant, Col. Antonio de la Guardia, a Ministry of Interior officer executed for drug smuggling.

"The Americans have frequently been charged with pillaging Cuba. But hasn't Fidel opened the doors to the Japanese, French, British, Brazilians, and above all, to the Spanish, to the point that we are once again under the whip of the Spanish colonizer?" (p. 276).

In Cuban hospitals today, "80 percent of the nurses have walked off the job" and patients are routinely chucked out of hospitals four hours after surgery, major or minor (pp. 279, 280).

Some of the wildest claims are those Alarcón makes of himself: that he was at various times head of Guevara's personal escort, national prison director in Cuba, a member of Castro's personal escort, a fighter with Guevara in the Congo, and a combatant in Angola in the 1970s.

All these feats and titles, however, are true only in Alarcón's fevered mind, as Brig. Gen. Villegas - to cite one unimpeachable source - has noted (see interview with Villegas in the August 19 Militant).

One interesting biographical fact, reported in news accounts of Alarcón's defection, is that he is married to Ileana de la Guardia, Antonio de la Guardia's daughter, who joined him in France. Vie et mort describes his friendship with the Ochoa - De la Guardia gang.

Readers who want to know what really happened in Bolivia will find the story in Guevara's Bolivian Diary, published by Pathfinder. They will also get an accurate firsthand account in Villegas's new book, Pombo: Un hombre de la guerrilla del Che (Pombo: A man in Che's guerrilla army). Published in Cuba in February, it will be brought out in an English translation by Pathfinder later this year.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home