In his spanking new Bestseller, Invisible Armies, Jeane Kirkpatrick (emphasis mine) Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations and WSJ contributror Max Boot describes Che Guevara's famous Battle of Santa Clara:

"Three bloody days of street fighting ensued that recalled (Giuseppe) Garibaldi's Redshirts assault on Palermo (Sicily in 1860.)"

For the record: Garibaldi's battle for Palermo featured 24,000 soldiers on one side and about 4000 on Garibaldi's side. It saw artillery barrages that killed 600 civilians, bayonet charges, and ended with thousands of casualties.

Che's battle of Santa Clara saw a few dozen actual trigger-pullers on each side and ended with from 6 to 9 total casualties. Some of these trigger pullers live in the U.S. today and many more residents of Santa Clara of the time reside in the U.S. today. Genuine research on this would not have been terribly taxing.

Che’s own diaries revealed that his forces suffered exactly one casualtyy during this alleged Caribbean Stalingrad. British historian Paul Johnson claims a grand total of six casualties for this alleged Caribbean Verdun. Your humble servant here interviewed several eye-witnesses (on both sides) to this “battle” and their consensus came to about five to ten casualties total for this alleged Caribbean Iwo Jima.

This means total casualties for this alleged Caribbean Gettysburg equal a slow crime week in Chicago.

Folks, Max Boot is no fool or pinko. He was was a defense policy adviser to candidates John Mc Cain and Mitt Romney. But when it comes to Cuba, as is so often the case with so many other "scholars, he stumbles into Castroite propaganda. Following his footnotes we find that his take on the Battle of Santa Clara seems to issue from a propaganda tract written by a Castro-sympathizer living in Cuba (obviously) with Castro's blessing at the time and who relied on the full cooperation of Che's widow and Castro's propaganda ministry for his "research." (Jon Lee Anderson's "Che, A Revolutionary Life.")

Absolutely Un-'Freakin Real....

“Much more valuable to us at that time [1957] than any military victory were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” (Che Guevara Diaries)

“We cannot for a second abandon propaganda--propaganda is the heart of our struggle.” (Fidel Castro to Melba Hernandez 1955)