BY STEVE CLARK
"A popular method always used by the bourgeois press in every country with unerring effect," wrote Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in 1917, "is to lie, scream, raise a hullabaloo, and keep on reiterating lies on the off-chance that `something may stick.' "
Last week's issue of the Militant printed in full a letter to the editor of the New York Times by Mary-Alice Waters rebutting an article aimed at perpetuating one such lie: that a deep political division existed between Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara. Waters was replying to "Mysteries of Bolivia: The Revised Che Guevara" by Thomas H. Lipscomb, which the editors of the New York Times had featured prominently in the November 26 issue of the Sunday "Week in Review." The Militant also reproduced the abridged version of Waters's letter that had been run in the December 2 issue of the Times.
Among other unsubstantiated claims published by the Times and challenged by Waters, she answered Lipscomb's assertion that "the Bolivian Army officer who captured Guevara, Capt. Gary Prado Salmon, has stated that Guevara said Castro failed him at a crucial time." As run in the Times, Waters's reply stated: "Mr. Lipscomb cites no source. Prado did write an account of his supposed conversation with Guevara in his 1987 book, `How I Captured Che.'(1) But nowhere does Prado say anything even vaguely similar to what Mr. Lipscomb claims."
Hearsay as a source
Several days later, the Times unearthed a
"source" - Daniel M. Collier, who describes himself as "the
co-author of a book on revolution." Colliers's
corroboration of Lipscomb's account was run by the Times,
under the heading "Guevara's last words," in the letters
column of its December 8 issue. It is useful to quote the
letter in full:
In her Dec. 2 letter, Mary Alice Waters disputes Thomas H. Lipscomb's account (Week in Review, Nov. 26) of Che Guevara's statement to Capt. Gary Prado Salmon, the Bolivian Army officer who captured Guevara. Ms. Waters is wrong.
In 1981, Prado was shot in the back while putting down a right-wing Falangist takeover attempt at an Occidental Petroleum site in Bolivia. He was sent to the Rusk Institute in New York for evaluation and therapy for an injury that left him paralyzed below the waist.
Knowing my interest in military history, a friend asked me to drop in on Prado at the Rusk Institute. I did so on several occasions in September and October 1981.
While we spoke about many subjects during these visits, Prado's account of Guevara's surrender and his conversation with him before Guevara's execution were of considerable interest to me because I'm the co- author of a book on revolution.
Prado told me Guevara had said that Fidel Castro not only failed him on the Bolivian campaign but also probably betrayed him.
Although Gary Prado Salmon may always be best known as the man who captured Che Guevara, I never had the impression that Prado considered this event the centerpiece of his life.
Prado's statement regarding Guevara's final thoughts about his relationship with Castro is an important historical account and should be a useful antidote to romanticized views of the Cuban Bolivia fiasco of 1966-67.
Far from presenting "an important historical account," Colliers adds nothing more than hearsay. Like Lipscomb before him, this expert on revolution and volunteer bedside counselor fails to explain two things.
First, why would Guevara have discussed such matters at length with Prado, an officer of the Bolivian dictatorship carrying out an operation directly organized by the CIA? Such conduct is out of character for any revolutionary cadre, much less a leader with the combat and political experience of Ernesto Che Guevara.
Nothing in writing
Second, why would Gary Prado - who wrote an entire book
on these events in order to line his pockets - have left
out the most sensational selling point?
In a portion of her letter not run in the Times, Waters pointed out that "in his preface to the book, Prado says: `There are no sensational revelations here, rather a series of small details.' " The revelation that Guevara told his Bolivian captors that Fidel Castro "had not only failed him... but probably betrayed him" hardly counts as a small detail.
As Waters explained, Prado presents an eight-page account of his alleged final conversation with Guevara that contains nothing whatever along these lines. "That same night and over the next few days," Prado explains in the 1987 book, "I reconstructed the dialogue in my campaign diary so as not to forget it. I transcribe it now with practically the same words that were used. This is neither a fictionalized version of reality nor a pure invention."
Prado's book, as Waters stated in her letter to the editor, "is hardly a reliable account, of course, since the other party in the alleged exchange was murdered by Prado's cohorts the next day."
Prado himself, nonetheless, contends his account is not only the truth but the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why, then, would he have told a visitor in a New York hospital room a spectacular tale he never tried to sell to a book agent or publisher?
Bay of Pigs, `October Crisis'
An even better question is: Why can the Times find no
stronger defense for Lipscomb's unsubstantiated article
than third-hand gossip?
One possible explanation was given in last week's Militant in an article commenting on the political character of the abridgment of Waters's letter by the Times. "Any reader of the Militant who doubts that the editors of the New York Times might falsify events about the Cuban revolution," I wrote in that article, "can refer to the documented record of at least two instances: the 1961 U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and the October 1962 `missile crisis.' "
Coincidentally, on the very day that issue of the Militant was printed, a front-page obituary appeared in the Times of James Reston, the paper's former Washington bureau chief and executive editor. Reston was a central figure in both these events.
In the obituary, the Times reviewed what it called the "two Cuba episodes," which had become publicly known later in the 1960s. Here is how the Times told the stories:
In the spring of 1961, The Times was preparing to publish an article by Tad Szulc reporting that 5,000 or 6,000 Cuban exiles who had been training in the United States and in Central America for nine months were about to launch an invasion of Cuba to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro.
The article was planned for page 1 on April 7, under a four-column headline. But Orvil Dryfoos, then the publisher, was troubled by the security implications of the report. On April 6, he and Mr. [Turner] Catledge, then managing editor, telephoned Mr. Reston, who advised them not to publish the article and cautioned against giving away the proposed timing of the landing as "imminent."
The article was published on April 7 under a one- column headline and with no mention of the invasion's date. The Bay of Pigs invasion took place 10 days later and ended in debacle. President John F. Kennedy, who took full responsibility, said that if The Times had published more about the operation, it might have saved the Administration from making such a colossal mistake.
"If I had it to do over, I would do exactly what we did at the time," Mr. Reston said later. "It is ridiculous to think that publishing the fact that the invasion was imminent would have avoided this disaster."
In 1962, Mr. Reston was apparently the only reporter who had found out that the Soviet Union, then under the leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev, had secreted nuclear missiles in Cuba only 90 miles from Florida. When Kennedy realized that Mr. Reston had the information, he telephoned him directly.
Four years later, Mr. Reston recounted the incident to E. Clifton Daniel, then managing editor of The Times.
"The President told me that he was going on television on Monday evening to report to the American people," Mr. Reston recalled. "He said that if we published the news about the missiles, Khrushchev could actually give him an ultimatum before he went on the air.
"I told the President I would report to my office in New York," Mr. Reston continued. "And if my advice was asked, I would recommend that we not publish. It was not my duty to decide."
Kennedy then called Mr. Dryfoos, the publisher, and asked him not to print Mr. Reston's article. Mr. Dryfoos left the matter up to Mr. Reston and his staff, and the article was withheld.
We can leave aside Kennedy's apocryphal regrets about the falsification of the Bay of Pigs article. And it takes immense gullibility to believe that the Kennedy administration and publisher of the Times "left the matter up to" the Washington bureau chief to decide whether or not to run the missile crisis story.
But the most illuminating aspect of the story in the Times is its matter-of-fact presentation. The editors expect their readership to understand that this is simply responsible journalism. Their obligation is to defend the class interests of the U.S. rulers on matters of deep-going bipartisan agreement.
And to this day, there are few questions on which there is as broad a consensus on Wall Street and in Washington as the need to overturn the first and, so far, only socialist revolution in the Americas.
1. Prado's 1987 book, Como capturé al Che, was released to take advantage of publicity around the 20th anniversary of Guevara's death. The book was published in English translation in 1990 by Praeger under the title, The Defeat of Che Guevara: Military Response to Guerrilla Challenge in Bolivia.