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. . Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially those of Fidel.”
    “This is from Che Guevara!” 5 an enraptured Malcolm X finally yelled as the room exploded in applause.
    Columnist Laura Berquist conducted two reverential interviews with Che Guevara for Look magazine, one in November 1960, another in April 1963. Look ’s covers and interviews featured mostly movie stars. So a Che interview must have struck Look ’s editors as a simply mahh-velous idea. Berquist traveled to Havana for her interviews and in 1960 brought back the following scoop: “Che denies he’s a party-line Communist.” She then suggested the proper characterization for him as a “pragmatic revolutionary,” to which Che smilingly agreed. “When he smiles he has a certain charm,” Berquist reported. Overall she found him “fascinating . . . cool and brainy.” 6
    By 1963, with Cuba officially declaring itself to be a Marxist-Leninist state, a fact it celebrated with Soviet missiles and banners of Lenin, Berquist prudently shucked the “pragmatic revolutionary” label. But she still found things to admire in Cuba—the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for instance. They make up a network of government spy groups set up on every city block to promptly report any “counter-revolutionary” backsliding by their neighbors to the police. Depending on the severity of the infraction, penalties range from a cut in the weekly food ration, to a stint in a prison camp, to being riddled with bullets by a firing squad. The system is novel even for communist regimes, formerly in place only in East Germany where the STASI, who helped set it up in Cuba, grandfathered it from the Nazi Gestapo. Berquist seemed charmed by them. Their role, she reported in Look , was “to see that children are vaccinated, and learn to read and write. And that the local butcher doles out meat fairly.” 7
    The day after Che’s “ mueRRRRRRTE! ” oration at the United Nations, Laura Berquist arranged a splendid and celebrity-studded evening for Cuba’s mass executioner as guest of honor at the town-house of her friend, Bobo Rockefeller. In attendance were several black activists, beat poets, and assorted literary types—in short, the very people most passionate in their support of civil rights for all people, and opposed to the death penalty. Bobo Rockefeller hosted the classic scene from Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers six years before Tom Wolfe wrote the hilarious essay and book.
    Somehow, amidst all the media and social schmoozing, Che also found time for serious business. The details of his secret plotting were disclosed several months later when the New York Police Department uncovered a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. But for the joint work of New York’s finest, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Che’s terror plot would have brought the terror of September 11 to America decades earlier. The main plotters were members of the Black Liberation Army, who sneered at Malcolm X as an Uncle Tom. These American radicals were in cahoots with a Canadian separatist radical and Canadian TV anchorette named Michelle Duclos. According to the head plotter, Robert Steele Collier, who also belonged to the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the plot was hatched on his visit to Cuba in August 1964 when he met with Che Guevara. Collier, along with Duclos, met Che again on his New York U.N. visit and buttoned down the details for the explosions.
    Everything seemed set. Duclos had brought in the thirty sticks of dynamite and three detonators through the Canadian border and stashed them. After the blasts, she’d provide the Black Liberation Army plotters brief refuge in her Canadian apartment until they slipped into permanent refuge in Cuba.
    But the plotters had been infiltrated by Raymond Wood, a black NYPD cadet. The NYPD alerted the FBI, the Canadian