"We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies' very home," raved Che Guevara in his "Message to the Tri-Continental Conference" published in Havana in April 1967, "to his places of work and recreation. We must never give him a minute of peace or tranquility. We'll attack him wherever we find him.
"The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we'll destroy him! These hyenas, are fit only for extermination. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm!"
Thus spoke the hero of the "Peace and Love" set -- and during that very "Summer of Love." And who was this imperialist enemy, who were these "hyenas?" to be 'exterminated?" why, "the great enemy of Humanity: the United States of America!"
Compared to Che Guevara, Ahmadinejad sounds like the Dalai Lama. After his whoopin hollerin reception at the U.N.'s General Assembly in December 1964, New York society's reception for Guevara -- with cocktail parties at "Bobo" Rockefeller's Manhattan suite and softball interview on Meet the Press -- shamed the sorry treatment accorded Ahmadinejad recently. If only Ahmadinejad had planned to incinerate his hosts (then boasted about it) he might have gotten a much warmer reception in New York.
According to In Touch magazine, Benicio Del Toro, who will play Che Guevara in two movies this coming year directed by Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh, has become positively smitten with his character and role. "Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked the talk," Del Toro chirped to In Touch magazine. "There's just something cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him. "
Thanks to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI the "walking of the walk" that Castro and Che had planned for those "hyenas" was uncovered in November of 1962. On Nov. 17 1962, J Edgar Hoovers' FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term "terrorist" was not used at the time) by Cuban agents that targeted Macy's Gimbel's, Bloomindales and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba's "Foreign Liberation Department" at the time.
A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2000 people, al-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day.
Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children, actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children, were to be incinerated and entombed.
Hitler, eat your heart out, Castro must have beamed. Germany's maximum leader had dreamed of pummeling New York as he pummeled London, but never came close. Despite the Luftwaffe's designers and engineers best efforts, the "Amerika Bomber" remained a mere gleam in Hitler's eye. His Yankee enemy's homeland remained infuriatingly out of reach.
Till his last day in the bunker, Hitler could only pound his fist and make faces at his American enemies (and perhaps curse they day he flippantly declared war on a nation who's public split 78/32 against going to war against him in a poll a mere month before that declaration. By the way: a U.S. poll from 1963 had almost the identical breakdown in favor of war with Castro!)
Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" they dreamt of yelling at the Yankee hyenas in October of 1962, right before the mushroom clouds. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest (Nikita Khrushchev) they might have pulled it off. "If the missiles had remained," Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker in November 1962 regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City."
Some think Fidel and Che's genocidal fantasy was a bigger factor in Khrushchev's decision to yank the missiles than Kennedy's so-called blockade.
This Cuban bomb plot was far from "irrational." Castro and Che weren't suicide bombers by any means. In blasting Manhattan and incinerating thousands of New Yorkers they sought to heat things up again, to rekindle all those thrills he'd experienced the previous weeks during the Missile Crisis.
Given the temper of the times, he knew his Soviet sugar daddies would be implicated too. Then the U.S. might retaliate. Then Castro and Che would have exactly what he'd dreamed about and tried to provoke a few weeks earlier: an intercontinental nuclear exchange.
Millions dead in the U.S. Millions dead in The Soviet Union. And almost certainly, millions dead in his own Cuba. But Castro and Che themselves would be nowhere near harms way.
Soviet ambassador to Cuba during the Missile Crisis, Alexander Allusive, reports a fascinating -- if unsurprising -- datum about those days. While Castro was begging, threatening, even trying to trick Khrushchev into launching a nuclear strike against the U.S., while he was ranting and yelling and waving his arms about grabbing his Czech machine gun and "fighting the Yankee invaders to the last man!" while frantically involved in all this, a "fearful" (Allusive's term) Castro and Che were also making reservations with Allusive for a first-class seats in the Soviet embassy's bomb shelter.
Thus they'd emerge into the smoldering rubble and millions of incinerated bodies and realize their lifelong dream: their names stamped in history as the gallant Davids against the yankee Goliath.
Cuba's agents for this Manhattan Thanksgiving bomb plot were members of the Cuban mission to the United Nations working in concert with members of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, an outfit that became much better known a year later when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines.
Incidentally, at the time of the Manhattan terror plot, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee also included among its members, CBS correspondent Robert Taber, (an early version of Dan Rather who conducted Castro's first network television soft-soaping on Aug. 30, 1957) along with The Nation magazine co-owner Alan Sagner. In 1996 President Clinton appointed the obviously unbiased Alan Sagner head of the head of the scrupulously even-handed Corporation for Public Broadcasting, at a time the FBI had long outed The Fair Play for Cuba Committee as a Castro-funded front group.
The FBI estimated that from 25 to 50 others may have been involved in the plot. As they questioned and dug up further documents, the target list expanded to include Manhattans's main bus terminal, several refineries on the New Jersey Shore and the Statue of Liberty.
Had those detonators gone off the day after Thanksgiving in 1962, 9/11 might be remembered as the second deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
