CUBA NOSTRA [ENGLISH]
Communist Cuba: A Band of Assassins
Cuba Nostra - Fidel Castro’s State Secrets
September 15, 2005 - Salvador Allende did not commit suicide nor he died by the bullets of the coup d’état’s military on September 11, 1973. During the attack against La Moneda Palace ( Chile’s Executive Mansion), the President of Chile was cowardly assassinated by one of the Cuban agents assigned to his protection. Amid the bombardments of the military Air Force, the collaborators of the Socialist Chief of State panicked, and he, due to the desperate situation, requested and was granted brief cease-fires and at the end had decided to stop all resistance. According to a witness of the events, Allende, scared to death, was running through the halls of the palace’s second floor yelling: “We have to surrender!” Before he was able to do so, Patricio de la Guardia, Fidel Castro’s agent in direct charge of the protection of the Chilean President, waited until he returned to his desk and without any pause shot him in the head with a burst of machine gun. He immediately placed a rifle on top of Allende’s body to simulate that he was killed by the attackers and returned running to the first floor of the building on fire where other Cubans were waiting for him. The group left La Moneda Palace and several minutes later took refuge in Cuba’s Embassy located nearby.
This version of the dramatic end of Salvador Allende, contradicting the two almost official prior versions, provided either by Fidel Castro (the thesis of his heroic death in combat) or by the Chilean Military Junta (that of a suicide), comes from two former members of Cuban secret organizations, very well informed about this bloody episode, who are now in exile in Europe.
In a recently book published in Paris by Editorial Plon, entitled “Cuba Nostra, les secrets d’État de Fidel Castro”, Alain Ammar, a journalist specialized in Cuba and Latin America, analyzes and compares statements given to him by Juan Vives and Daniel Alarcon Ramirez, two former Cuban intelligence officers.
In exile since 1979, Juan Vives is a former secret agent of the dictatorship and a nephew of Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado, the puppet Cuban President who reigned from 1959 to 1976 who “committed suicide” in 1983 under suspicious circumstances. Vives says that on November 1973, in a bar at Habana Libre Hotel, where some members of State Security organizations would get together on Saturdays to drink beer and informally engage in gossip and all kinds of information, he heard that spine-chilling confession from the very Patricio de la Guardia, Chief of Cuban Special Troops, present at La Moneda on that fateful September 11, 1973.
For years, Vives did not want to divulge such information, because, as he says “it was dangerous to do so” and because up to that time, there was no other responsible Cuban in exile that could confirm the truth of such facts. When he found out that Daniel Alarcon Ramirez, alias “Benigno”, one of Ernesto Guevara’s survivors of his guerrilla in Bolivia, was also exiled in Europe, the idea of having such facts being known, gained strength again.
In Alain Ammar’s book, “Benigno” completely corroborates Vives’ narrative. Both knew Salvador Allende and his family. Both lived in Chile during Allende’s Government. Both heard, at different moments, Patricio de la Guardia’s confession when he returned to Havana.
Ammar’s book describes in detail the last months of the Unidad Popular’s Government (Popular Unity), and above all, it shows the advanced degree of direct control that Fidel Castro was able to exercise—due to the hundreds of DGI spies (a Cuban intelligence service), through his operatives and influence agents placed in Santiago—on President Salvador Allende, on his Ministers and even on his intimate friends and collaborators. As a matter of fact, Castroism had changed the so-called “Chilean Way of Socialism” to a point that within Allende’s government there were voices that criticized such brutal interfering.
Months before his death, Salvador Allende had been “instrumentalized by Castro” Juan Vives explains, “but Allende was not the favorite man that Havana wanted to have in power in Santiago. Castro and Piñeiro (Castro’s right hand man in espionage operations in Latin America, who recently died in Cuba of a heart attack) were preparing to replace him, even behind the back of President Allende, with Miguel Henriquez, principal leader of MIR and Pascal Allende, number two in MIR, as well as Beatriz Allende, the president’s oldest daughter, who also belonged to MIR”. Beatriz would die in Cuba in 1974.
This control over the Chilean Chief of State was notably increased after the first attempt of a military coup on June 29, 1973, better known as the “tancazo” (tank assault). When Havana found out that those Chileans around the President were scared, Fidel Castro let it be known that Allende could not in any case, surrender or request asylum in an embassy. “If he has to die, he has to die as a hero. Any other cowardly and less than brave conduct, would have grave repercussions in the fight in Latin America”, Juan Vives remembers. That is why Fidel Castro gave the order to Patricio de la Guardia to “eliminate Allende if at the last moment, he would become scared and try to surrender”.
A little after the first attacks on La Moneda, Allende had told Patricio de la Guardia that he had to request political asylum in the Embassy of Sweden. The head of state had already appointed Augusto Olivares, his Press Secretary, to do it. Probably that is why Olivares, alias “The Dog” was also assassinated by the Cubans before they did it to Chile’s President. “Olivares, recruited by the Cuban DGI, would transmit to Piñeiro even the smallest thoughts of Allende, who then would tell Fidel”, Juan Vives declares. Another Chilean bodyguard of Allende, called Agustin, was also “shot” by the Cubans in these dramatic moments, according to a declaration made by “Benigno” to the book’s author. Several weeks after the coup d’état, Patricio de la Guardia in effect had told “Benigno”, the end of Agustin, the brother of a friend of him that still lives in Cuba and he was given another important detail about the occurrences on that tragic morning in La Moneda Palace: Before machine gunning him, the Cuban agent had forcefully grabbed Salvador Allende who wanted to leave the palace and had seated him on the presidential chair, yelling “A president dies in his place!”
This version of Allende’s point blank murder was not totally unknown. On September 12, 1973 several news agencies, among them AFP, resumed in four lines such event. Published next day by Le Monde, the cable said: “According to sources from the Chilean right, President Allende was killed by his personal guard when he was requesting a five minutes cease-fire to surrender to the military who were about to enter La Moneda Palace”. Ammar indicated that such hypothesis “was immediately buried” because it was not convenient to anybody “neither to the collaborators of Allende, nor to the Chilean left, nor to his friends abroad, nor to the military and above all, to Fidel Castro…” The confirmation of such, until recently “hypothesis”, was made by Juan Vives and Daniel Alarcon Ramirez, and it could be reinforced in the future by the testimony of other Cuban personnel, kept silent up to now and by documents in existence outside Cuba. In effect, the masterpiece of this assassination could lie in a bank in Panama. According to the book’s authors, Patricio de la Guardia, sentenced to thirty years during the farcical process against Division General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, and today under house arrest, had placed in a safe deposit box in a Panamanian bank, a compromising document whereby he describes, among other things, Allende’s assassination by Castro’s order, document that should be revealed in case of Patricio de la Guardia’s death.
Fidel Castro, according to the book’s authors, had taken such threat very seriously and he made possible for Patricio to escape the firing squad, unlike Tony, Patricio’s brother who together with General Ochoa and two other members of the Interior Ministry, were executed on July 13, 1989.
The disclosure of what happened to Salvador Allende is of interest not only to historians of the calamitous adventure of Unidad Popular in Chile. It is also of interest, and to a great extent, to the new Latin American friends of Fidel Castro, especially President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
Hugo Chavez and the others, no matter how trustful Chiefs of State they could be in the eyes of Havana, as it was in his moment, at least on paper, President Allende, could be right now, the subjects of the same sinister controlling manipulations and physical and political domination by the same services that so brutally acted against Chile’s president. Alain Ammar’s book tackles, in its 425 pages, many other issues and episodes related to the complicated and not always successful Havana’s secret operations in Cuba and in several countries. It is hoped that a Spanish translation of such useful book would be placed in bookstores in the near future.
