Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  †7 “After the fall … the Communists were the only ones who still kept their faith and camaraderie, and are the only group who continued their work. … Sooner or later I will join the Party.” And he adds, in an outburst of candor and enthusiasm, “The only thing keeping me is that I want so much to travel in Europe.” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Celia de la Serna de Guevara, November 1954, quoted in Guevara Lynch, Aquí va, p. 80.

  ‡ “To be absolutely honest … Ernesto and I, though very much influenced by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, still had in our political thinking the populist ideas so much in fashion at the time.” Alfonso Bauer Paiz, interview with Aldo Isidrón del Valle, quoted in Testimonios sobre el Che (Havana: Editorial Pablo de la Torrente, 1990), p. 80. Bauer Paiz was a close friend of Che’s during his stay in Guatemala.

  *18 For instance, the following story taken from “research carried out by a team of officers from the History Section of the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba”: “The coup by the traitor Carlos Castillo de Armas [sic] took place the same day that Che, enlisted in the Guatemalan army, was going to be sent to the front.” Center for Military History Studies, De Tuxpan a La Plata (Havana: Editorial Orbe, 1981), p. 10.

  †8 “Che stayed until the end and then left. There was nothing against him in reality, no arrest warrant or anything. He was able to leave Guatemala legally.” Morán, interview with Francis Pisani.

  *19 David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 54. It is difficult to establish whether Phillips fabricated this memory years later as proof of his prescience—or whether he actually opened a file on Che in Guatemala. The file is not included in the CIA’s declassified archives; according to a member of the agency’s Historical Advisory Board who requested information about it, there is no trace of it.

  †9 “Che was not really an asylum-seeker, because he was an Argentine who was, we might say, under the protection of his embassy.” Morán, interview with Francis Pisani.

  *20 Nothing except drafting the outline of an ambitious book to be titled “The Physician in Latin America,” the writing of which he began during his spare time in Guatemala. It was planned to include fourteen chapters, including a short history of medicine in Latin America as well various reflections on the economic, social, and political context of medicine in the region. See María del Carmen Ariet, quoted in Claudia Korol, El Che y los argentinos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Dialéctica, 1988), p. 101.

  Chapter 4

  Under Fire with Fidel

  Fidel Castro arrived in Mexico City by bus on July 8, 1955, via Veracruz, Havana, and the jail on Isla de Pinos in Cuba. He carried a single suit, no money, and a head full of harebrained ideas that would catapult him into history in three brief years. He had spent twenty-two months in prison for masterminding the assault on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago on July 26, 1953; his release resulted from a foolhardy amnesty decreed by dictator Fulgencio Batista. He immediately headed for Mexico, with a single goal in mind: to launch an insurrection against the Batista regime.

  A former university student leader and young politician belonging to the traditional, corrupt Partido Ortodoxo, Castro came of age in an enchanting and cursed country of barely six million inhabitants, ravaged by half a century of late, troubled, and incompletely achieved independence. On March 10, 1952, Batista led a classic coup d’état on the eve of the scheduled presidential elections. Facing a dismal showing of his own, the former sergeant cut short the only period of democratic rule the country had ever known. The elections were suspended, and the constitutional government, in office since 1940, was ousted. Despite huge demonstrations and protests, just three years later the regime felt strong enough to pardon its principal opponents—a fatal mistake.

  A virtual semicolony of the United States, the largest island of the Antilles had benefited greatly from the U.S. boom of the fifties. The price of sugar—the only Caribbean crop since time immemorial—had been stable over the entire decade, allowing for modest but sustained per capita growth. The Cuban sugar harvest, stagnant between 1925 and 1940, had begun to grow again—a significant factor, given that half of Cuba’s arable land was given over to cane. The sugar sector represented 50 percent of Cuba’s agricultural production, a third of its industrial output, and 80 percent of its exports. It employed 23 percent of the labor force and generated 28 percent of GDP.1 Almost half the sugar produced was exported to the United States. The single crop amounted, in fact, to a single destiny.

  Tourists from the U.S. East Coast made Cuba their playground. Hotel construction boomed; countless cabarets, summer villas, and brothels sprouted across the island’s beaches and coves. A middle class devoted to the service and pleasure of tourists grew apace. The fun capital of the Caribbean enjoyed a rush of consumption and prosperity that was misleadingly identified with the rest of the country. U.S. nationals, who had owned most of the sugar mills until the fifties, continued to dominate everything else: the economy, politics, and above all the collective psychology of Cubans—to the joy and fortune of some, the misfortune and humiliation of others.

  Rates for per capita income, literacy, urbanization, and overall standard of living were among the highest in Latin America. They concealed, however, an abysmal inequality between the capital and a few eastern cities and the rest of the country, between city and countryside, and, especially, between whites and blacks. Cuba’s exact ranking within Latin America would be hotly debated for years to come, but in 1950, its per capita income was surpassed only by that of Argentina and Uruguay—logically—as well as Venezuela and Colombia.2 Life expectancy reached almost sixty years in 1960—the highest in the hemisphere after the two republics bordering the River Plate.3 Figures for doctors and hospital beds per inhabitant were among the best in the region, and the principal causes of death among adults were those typical of rich countries: malignant tumors and cardiovascular disorders. Educational levels were also high, placing Cuba fourth in Latin America toward the end of the decade, after Argentina, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.4

  However, income distribution was among the most inequitable in the Americas, due to sugar monocultivation and the resulting unemployment during nine months of each year. In the late fifties, the share of national income going to the poorest 20 percent of the population was only 2.1 percent of the total—that is, a third of the equivalent in Argentina, and less than in Peru, Mexico, or Brazil.5 Almost all social and economic indicators registered huge discrepancies between town and country, between whites and blacks, and especially between Havana and the rest of the nation. With 26 percent of the country’s population, the capital province garnered 64 percent of national income in 1958. Thus, on the eve of the Castro conspiracy hatched in Mexico City, Cuba had a relatively broad middle class (about a third of the population) which was rather prosperous by Latin American standards. But it was also a terribly unequal country, deeply divided in terms of race, geography, and class.

  Understandably, then, Cuban politics were somewhat byzantine. Like the Cubans themselves, they were violent and passionate, intricate and personalized. The Moncada assault was exceptional because of the cruel reprisals exacted by Batista’s new dictatorship, but it was not an uncommon occurrence. Nobody was surprised that a group of agitators should attempt to overthrow the government in a spectacular coup de main. Nor was it unusual that Fidel Castro’s struggle should initially focus on restoring the constitutional order of 1940, as became clear during the epic defense he presented at his own trial. Certainly, by the time of the coup, the constitutional regime installed in 1940 had few supporters in Cuba. However, within a generalized climate of corruption, violence, and disorder, the 1940 constitution was a symbol of hope for broad sectors of the population.

  But the distinctive feature of Cuban culture and politics was without a doubt the interminable birth pangs of the republic. Since the 1898 Spanish-American War and the Platt Amendment of 1902 granting the United States the right to intervene in
Cuba’s internal affairs whenever public order was threatened, the island had experienced a sort of national purgatory. It had emerged from the hell of colonial rule without reaching the presumed paradise of independence. Cuba’s aspiration to become independent was frustrated. The United States won the war, and Cuba lost its bid for emancipation. In 1902 the survivors of the long struggle (its main heroes José Martí and Antonio Maceo were already dead, and Máximo Gómez was exhausted and isolated) were forced to choose between nominal independence under the terms of the Platt Amendment or a de jure colonial status, Cuba’s national sovereignty was thus severely curtailed at birth. The resulting trauma would last over half a century, and its sequels would extend to the end of the millennium. It is no wonder that the Cuban people should maintain to this day an obdurate—and often disconcerting—brand of nationalism.

  Political life in Cuba between the Platt Amendment and its abrogation in 1934 reflected the original sin at the heart of the republic. From the end of Spanish rule until 1933, politics on the island were characterized by electoral fraud, corruption, and constant meddling by the United States to restore order, protect its interests, and mediate among the different factions of the Cuban elite. Widespread discontent among the people, the criollo ruling classes, and lower-ranking army officers finally reached a head in 1933. An inevitable uprising, led by Antonio Guiteras, ended this tragic phase of Cuba’s independent history. But the reformist coalition that emerged from the revolution proved short-lived. It barely had time to rescind the Platt Amendment before being overthrown by the so-called “sergeants’ rebellion” headed by Fulgencio Batista. The mulatto sergeant was the power behind the throne until 1940, when he was elected president under a new constitution.

  The advent of the military shifted the basic boundaries of political life in Cuba. The repeal of the Platt Amendment and consolidation of the economy’s domestic sector were accompanied by the emergence of a powerful labor force and Communist Party. Through the Workers’ Confederation of Cuba (CTC), the organized working class played a distinctive role in the coalitions supporting Batista and Ramón Grau San Martín, who succeeded him as president in 1944.*1 Though it never won more than 7 percent of the vote, mainly concentrated in Havana, the Communist Party (called the Popular Socialist Party, or PSP, after 1944) had a prominent place on the island. Its influence extended far beyond its numbers, thanks to the honesty and dedication of its cadres and militants and its sway over the labor unions.

  The Communists were also active in the Congress and within the governments of Batista and Grau. Their leader, Juan Marinello, was named minister without portfolio in February 1942; shortly afterward a thirty-one-year-old economist from the party, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, joined the cabinet.†1 The PSP and working-class sectors under its aegis were thus key actors in Cuban politics until their expulsion from the labor unions in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War. When they reappeared in 1958, just before the fall of Batista, and especially after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, they were not springing from a void. Their reemergence derived from a long tradition and a significant, if not always glorious, history.

  Corruption, gangsterism, and social unrest marked the successive four-year administrations of Batista, Grau, and Carlos Prío Socarrás, culminating in the coup of 1952. Cuba’s political parties and Congress were suspended; the posts of president and vice-president were abolished. A new constitutional code was enacted, which included the automatic repeal of individual rights and freedoms under certain conditions. Nobody stood up for the outgoing regime of Prío Socarrás, standard-bearer of the Auténtico Party and enemy of its Ortodoxo competitor. The two traditional parties had long since worn out their welcome with the citizenry. Their endless rivalry and internal divisions, garrulous but often groundless or irrelevant, had helped disillusion the population. Batista’s 1952 coup lacked popular support—but so did the status quo.

  Very soon, mid-level officers, old-time politicians, and young university students joined the struggle against the dictatorship, following different paths and with varying hopes of success. One of them, Fidel Castro, an Ortodoxo lawyer of Galician origin known for his fiery speech-making and muscular tactics from his student days, ran for Congress in 1952. When the elections were canceled, Castro promptly proceeded to organize over 150 angry opponents to the regime, in a desperate attempt to overthrow it by force of arms. They failed, were violently repressed and thrown in jail, but assumed a privileged place in Cuba’s popular imagination and among the middle classes of Havana and Santiago. The Moncada assault consecrated Fidel Castro as a central figure in Cuba’s turbulent politics. Once in Mexico, through his incipient 26th of July Movement (named after the date of the Moncada assault), he became the champion of the most principled and intransigent faction in the opposition, rejecting any compromise with Batista, marking a break from both the traditional parties and the Popular Socialist Party (PSP).*2

  In a country where corruption and institutional collapse had been endemic since independence, where personal loyalties counted far more than party affiliation, an acute hunger for honest, bold, and radical leadership prevailed. In an unformed nation, where U.S. intervention was an inescapable and congenital fact of life, there was enormous potential for a personality who could capture the people’s need to heal their wounded self-respect. Only some theoretical details, and a bit of luck, were missing. Fidel Castro’s meeting with Che Guevara would supply the former with both; it would provide the latter with the deep conviction that “it is worth dying on a foreign beach for such a noble ideal.”6

  Neither Fidel’s nor Che’s biographers are precise as to the exact date of their first meeting, usually placed in July, August, or September 1955. What is certain is that Raúl Castro met Che thanks to Ñico López, the Cuban exile friend from his Guatemalan days. Raúl was already an experienced militant in the international Communist movement, espousing Communist “ideas” (in the words of Hilda Gadea7), and attending the Vienna Youth Festival of 1951. During his return to Cuba by boat, he encountered a figure central to this story: Nikolai Leonov, then a young Soviet diplomat on his way to Mexico to study Spanish. Leonov would later work as a translator to the Soviet leadership and would be one of the first links between Moscow and the Cuban Revolution, before retiring as a KGB general in the eighties.

  In his funeral oration for Che on October 18, 1967, Fidel Castro placed their first meeting in July or August 1955.8 It seems somewhat unlikely that they would have met so soon after the Cuban’s arrival, though in a speech in Chile in 1971 Castro mentions that he met Che “a few days after his arrival in Mexico.”9 Hilda Gadea states in her memoirs that Che recounted meeting Fidel “in early July,”10 but the Cuban armed forces’ semiofficial account asserts that the friendship began in September.11 Neither Che’s biographies nor the more recent ones of Fidel Castro give any additional information, though several of them point out that Che and Fidel were together at the small group of exiles commemorating July 26.12

  The exact date is important only if the consecrated description of an instantaneous mutual fascination is seen as exaggerated. Why wouldn’t the two young men have met or even exchanged a few words before the subsequently famous all-night conversation at the home of María Antonia that led to a decade of unflagging loyalty and respect? In any case, their alliance would add conceptual structure to Castro’s brilliant political intuition, and give meaning to Che’s life. Che recalled that evening shortly afterward:

  I met him during one of those cold Mexican nights, and remember that our first discussion was about world politics. After a few hours—by dawn—I had already embarked on the future expedition. Actually, after the experience I had had walking through all Latin America and the finishing touch in Guatemala, it wasn’t hard to talk me into joining any revolution against a tyrant, but Fidel impressed me as an extraordinary man. He faced and resolved the most impossible things. … I shared in his optimism. There was a lot to do, to fight for, to plan. We had to stop crying and st
art fighting.13

  In his travel journal, written on the spur of the moment, Guevara noted: “It is a political event to have met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, a young man who is intelligent, very sure of himself and remarkably bold; I think there was a mutual liking.”14 This comment, more spontaneous and immediate than the previous one, confirms the impact Castro had on the Argentine, and the admiration he awakened in him. It also reveals that Che detected Castro’s outstanding traits, both good and bad, from the outset.

  For his part, Fidel Castro kept a precise memory of the evening when they became friends and colleagues: “In one night he became a member of the future Granma expedition.”15 Castro also noted (in a confession all the more interesting because he made it ten years later) that Che’s “revolutionary development was more advanced than mine, ideologically speaking. From a theoretical point of view he had a better background, he was more advanced as a revolutionary.”16 One of Fidel’s girlfriends, who was also a friend of Che and his wife, corroborated Castro’s retrospective opinion:

  Fidel’s passion for Cuba and Guevara’s revolutionary ideas ignited each other like wildfire, in an intense flare of light. One was impulsive, the other thoughtful; one emotional and optimistic, the other cold and skeptical. One was attached only to Cuba; the other, linked to a framework of social and economic concepts. Without Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro might never have become a Communist. Without Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara might never have been more than a Marxist theoretician, an idealistic intellectual.17

  In fact, Che was not quite a well-rounded theoretician. Despite his reading of Marx and Lenin in Mexico,*3 he had only an unstructured, autodidactic background in Marxist theory, and a mere smattering of history, philosophy, and economics. His political experience in Guatemala and his approach to events resembled that of a passionate and perceptive spectator—but a distant one, nonetheless. The explanation presented by Castro’s biographers (or those who knew the two men at that time) is indeed tempting: it posits a friendship based upon matching talents and personalities. But the intellectual or theoretical eminence attributed to Che by Fidel and others must be qualified. In 1955, Che was a sporadic reader of Marxist texts, a man interested in world events within a broad humanistic culture. He came from a family of readers, had had excellent schooling and an adequate university education, and was immensely curious about everything. But, as he himself confessed a year later,