Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  Before, I more or less devoted myself to medicine and spent my free time studying Saint Karl [Marx] in an informal manner. This new phase in my life requires a change in priorities: now Saint Karl comes first, he is the axis.18

  Ernesto Guevara was not yet a man of letters, or of endless theoretical speculation. That much is suggested by an exchange attributed to the two men by one of Che’s biographers, concerning the 26th of July Movement’s program. “FIDEL: So hey, aren’t you interested in all of this? GUEVARA: Yes, yes, I’m interested. … But I really don’t know. First I would create a good army and after winning the war, we’d have to see. …”*4 More than a theorist or thinker, Che at this time was seeking an exit from a dependent existence in Mexico and the unpleasant prospect of a premature return to Argentina. He projected conceptual serenity, a humanistic culture, and a historical and international framework capable of embracing a political program. Castro, in contrast, was eminently a man of action. He may have been dazzled by Che’s sophistication and cosmopolitan approach, one that Castro would always admire but never quite achieve, but he did not then, or later, fall under Che’s spell. The trust and respect Fidel developed for him, for these reasons as well as the Argentine’s natural charm, were but a starting point. A couple of years later, the líder máximo would pay a great deal of attention to Che, due to his bravery and dedication to the cause—but not to any political and theoretical expertise.

  Che’s reaction to the overthrow of Perón in September 1955—already touched on in Chapter 3—reflected the by now well-known stance of the newly recruited revolutionary. His comments to his family in Buenos Aires were acidly ironical, but not particularly lucid or penetrating. His emphasis on Washington’s supposed interference was logical and understandable but, by all accounts, totally off the mark.†2 Guevara had just arrived from Guatemala, and his anti-U.S. views were typical of that highly polarized period in the Cold War.‡1 But they had little basis in the reality of Argentina. His defense of the Communist Party and the importance he gave it—for instance, in an account to his mother of a lecture-debate he attended in November 1955—were characteristic of the time, but hardly relevant to his country’s political situation. In the final analysis, Ernesto Guevara was a brilliant and well-intentioned “fellow traveler” in the international Communist movement, as were millions of other young people throughout the world during those heady, innocent years of the Stockholm Appeal, the Peace Movement of Louis Aragon and Joliot-Curie, of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado, Palmiro Togliatti and Maurice Thorez, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, and the Vietminh victory at Dien Bien Phu. The Soviet Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress and its denunciation of Stalinism had not yet taken place; nor had the 1956 invasion of Hungary.*5 It was perfectly normal for a highly politicized and sensitive young man to believe in the infinite evils of imperialism and the countless virtues of the Socialist fatherland, and to see Communist activists as the harbingers of world revolution.†3 None of this, however, made Che a Marxist theoretician. It would take him another five years to attain this (self-taught) distinction.

  Ernesto Guevara’s life changed after his meeting with Fidel Castro. He married in August, as already noted. In November, while Castro was away on a visit to the United States, he celebrated his honeymoon with Hilda Gadea in southeastern Mexico (at Castro’s insistence, according to her). There he finally came around to exploring Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichen-Itzá, whose Mayan ruins cannot but have dazzled him, though he wrote nothing about them in his letters home. The only remark to his mother, in slightly derogatory terms, referred to his “little trip to the Mayan region.”19 At the end of his voyage he wrote a fair-to-middling poem entitled “Palenque” which, aside from its obligatory anti-American swipe (“the insolent offense of the gringo tourist’s stupid ‘oh!’ is a slap in your face”), its invocation of the mourned Incas (“long dead”), and a sagacious observation about the eternal youth of King Pakal’s city, deserves no further mention.20 Was this curious omission a sign of his ongoing Mexican depression, or of his concentration on the struggle ahead? Either way, the skillful, affectionate descriptions he devoted to the rest of Latin America are missing in the case of Mexico—a country that has enthralled far less sophisticated travelers than Che, and that should have fascinated him much more than the other stops in his Latin American wanderings. Either these pages were never written, or else they lie buried in the Cuban archives.

  Training for the armed struggle in Cuba soon began. At first it was rudimentary and rather frivolous, consisting of walks along Avenida Insurgentes in Mexico City, rowing on the lake in Chapultepec Park, diet and exercise under the supervision of a Mexican wrestler, Arsacio Venegas. Then it turned serious, extending to a camp outside of Mexico City in Santa Rosa, a ranch near the town of Chalco. As Fidel Castro related during his first return to Mexico City in 1988, Che would try to scale the Popocatépetl every weekend, without ever making it to the top.*6 Once his association with the Cubans was underway, Che probably kept trying more as a training exercise than, as previously, as an individual challenge.†4

  It is clear, however, that Che did not really decide to join the Cuban revolutionary group on the night he met Fidel Castro. There are too many letters to his parents and other correspondents between July 1955 and early 1956 describing new, far-fetched plans for trips, scholarships, and life projects. In September he announced his intention to die fighting in the Caribbean—but also to continue traveling “as long as necessary to complete my education and give myself the pleasures I have allotted myself in my life project.”21 As late as March 1, 1956, he mentioned to Tita Infante that he was still trying to obtain a scholarship to study in France.22

  His entrancement with the project of revolution was tempered by the lucidity he had already displayed on several occasions. He had several good reasons for keeping his distance: his proverbial, sound Argentine skepticism and cynicism; his down-to-earth appraisal of the chances for a heterogeneous, inconsistent, and powerless group of Cubans adrift in Mexico City to overthrow a U.S.-supported military dictatorship enjoying an economic miniboom; and, finally, his own tendency always to seek another option. Che must also have reflected on the possibility that a foreigner in the expedition could be a political liability for Fidel, and indeed, several problems related to his nationality did spring up. The most important was the generalized discontent that Castro provoked when he named Che head of personnel at the Chalco training camp in April 1956. At least one other foreigner who wished to embark with the group in December 1956 was turned down by Fidel precisely because of his nationality.*7 Che himself, a couple of years later, would recall his initial reservations: “My almost immediate impression, when I attended the first classes, was about the possibilities of victory: I considered it very doubtful when I enlisted as a rebel commander.”23

  A handful of factors determined his commitment between July–August 1955, when he first signed up for the adventure, and the end of 1956, when the Granma actually sailed from the Mexican port of Tuxpan. His growing affinity with Cuban leaders traveling to Mexico to talk and forge alliances with Castro must have influenced the still skeptical Guevara. They included Frank País, the young urban leader of the 26th of July Movement; José Antonio Echevarría, head of the Revolutionary Student Movement, and later, the Communist leader Flavio Bravo, as well as (according to the English historian Hugh Thomas) Joaquín Ordoqui, Lázaro Peña, and Blas Roca, also of the PSR.24 Che got to know most of them during their visits (though not País, whom he would meet only in the Sierra Maestra), and soon grasped that the outcome of the imminent Cuban Revolution did not rest only on the broad shoulders of Fidel Castro and his band of daredevil conspirators. It hinged upon a vast network of opponents to the regime, including labor and student activists, Communists, and even a few business leaders.

  Che’s growing affection and admiration for Fidel Castro also played an important role. Castro’s loyalty and solidarity with his men, his increasing trust in Che—giving him ever greater and more
complex responsibilities, like renting the ranch for the training camp as well as naming him head of personnel—also helped dissipate the Argentine’s doubts, bolstering his decision to join the expedition. And a decisive element was Fidel’s behavior when the Cubans were apprehended by the Mexican police on June 24, 1956.

  At the urging of Batista’s intelligence services, and thanks to a betrayal within the ranks as well as the infinite corruption of most of the Mexican security apparatus, the authorities finally arrested Fidel Castro in Mexico City. After contemplating resistance, he decided—with the same daunting political instinct that has kept him in power for almost forty years—to surrender, avoid confrontation, and then secure his release through a combination of bribes, rhetoric, and the help of Mexican supporters. Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, then a young official at the Federal Security Directorate and a pillar of the Mexican government’s security and intelligence services for more than a quarter century, remembers his first conversation with Fidel Castro: “We found weapons in your Packard and some documents. What’s going on?” Castro remained silent for a few hours, but the police quickly discovered documents, a diagram of the highway exits, and the location of the Santa Rosa ranch in Chalco. Gutiérrez Barrios immediately dispatched his subordinates to the scene; they called back not long after: “Sir, there’s a little store near the Hacienda of Santa Rosa they say has been rented; that’s where they are training. The people at the little store say they are Cubans, because of their way of speaking and habits.” The security official hauled in Fidel for a friendly conversation, confronting him with the evidence and enjoining him to stop wasting time and avoid a firefight that would be neither in their individual interests nor in that of their respective nations. Fidel agreed; Gutierrez Barrios suggested they travel together to Chalco, where Fidel could order his men to surrender peacefully. They did, and Castro and Gutiérrez Barrios have remained close friends ever since.25

  Fidel gave in, negotiating with the Mexican authorities the surrender of the other revolutionaries at the Chalco camp, and began to discuss the terms for their freedom. He soon had them all back on the street, except for himself, Calixto García, and Che. Finally only García and the Argentine remained in jail, both in an immigration and political situation more delicate than that of their companions. Che recorded his feelings in his diary:

  Fidel did a few things which we could almost say compromised his revolutionary attitude, for the sake of friendship. I remember that I specifically presented my case to him: I was a foreigner, in Mexico illegally, with a series of charges against me. I told him the revolution should not in any way be impeded on my account and that he could leave me, that I understood the situation and would try to fight from wherever I was sent, and that he should only try to have me sent to a neighboring country and not Argentina. I also remember Fidel’s response: “I will not abandon you.” And that’s how it was, because valuable time and money had to be diverted to get us out of the Mexican jail. Those personal attitudes of Fidel, with the people he appreciates, are the key to that fanaticism he awakens in others. …*8

  The arrest of the tiny revolutionary army has a privileged status in this Mexican phase of Che and the Cubans. Though Guevara and Cuban historians referred several times to the possible role of U.S. intelligence services in the arrests and subsequent interrogations, everything points to a strictly Mexican-Cuban operation.†5 And a rather lenient one at that, except for the ill treatment given a few of the prisoners. Castro would later denounce it, in his devastating comments on the actions and practices of the Mexican police. Regarding the detention of three companions, including a Mexican, he notes:

  For over six days they were not given any food or water. In the freezing temperatures of early morning, they were tied hand and foot, completely naked, and lowered into tanks of icy water. They were submerged and then, on the point of asphyxiation, were pulled out by their hair for a few seconds before being immersed again. They repeated this operation many times, they took them out of the water and beat them into unconsciousness. A masked man, with a Cuban accent, was the one who interrogated them.‡2

  This was Che Guevara’s first contact with prison, police forces, and repression. Until the eve of his execution at La Higuera, it was the only time he would ever spend in jail. His prison stay proved crucial for Che. Not only did it demonstrate the solidarity of Castro and the other Cubans, it also provided him with a firsthand experience of jail and the direct, personal aggressiveness of law enforcement authorities. Immediately before, as well as during his arrest and interrogation, Che had the chance to state repeatedly his identification with the hard-line, Communist, pro-Soviet faction of the revolutionary movement.

  Since December 1955, Che had been studying Russian at the Mexican-Soviet Institute of Cultural Relations in Mexico City. His pro-Soviet leanings were already clear, but this additional step deserves emphasis. All Mexicans and foreign exiles living in Mexico at that time knew that the various Soviet missions in the capital—the Embassy, Intourist, Tass and Pravda, the cultural and language institutes—were carefully watched by the Mexican authorities and their U.S. “partners,” as would be evidenced a few years later by the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in Mexico. It is highly unlikely that Che would have attended classes at the Institute solely to read Pushkin and Lermontov dans le texte. His desire, unconscious or not, was to assert in a public and provocative way his respect and attachment to the Soviet Union. In this he certainly succeeded. One of the first U.S. intelligence reports mentioning Che Guevara emphasizes his visits to the cultural institute. When Mexican authorities and the Batista propaganda machine made a distinction between him and the other detainees, precisely because of his constant visits to the Soviet missions, Che was either paying a perfectly predictable price or achieving exactly what he wished: to be seen, much to his honor, as a Communist and defender of the Soviet Union, though not a card-carrying Party member.*9

  A similar thread runs through his meetings with Nikolai Leonov. As the former KGB official stated both in his memoirs and in an interview with the author in Moscow, his whole affair with the Cubans began with the friendship he struck up by accident with Raúl Castro in 1951. Leonov was on his way to study Spanish and work at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. Four years later, he happened to meet Raúl in the streets of Mexico City, where they renewed their friendship. The Cuban explained the ostensible reasons for his stay in Mexico, as did Leonov. Neither one was exactly forthright, but they obviously hit it off. During one of their many get-togethers at the home of María Antonia, hostess and guardian angel of Fidel and his followers in Mexico, Che suddenly appeared. In the words of Leonov,

  Che looked very well, radiant with happiness because here was a representative of the other world, of the Socialist camp, and we began discussing everything. I approached Raúl for the same reason on the boat, and talked with Che upon the same basis, our conversation taking place in a location where we were equals. He asked me about the Soviet Union because in that year, 1956, a great many things had happened. He was basically well informed, though concrete matters, the Central Committee meetings, did not interest Che. He knew a lot about the Soviet Union, how the society was structured, how the economy functioned, that is, he had a basic understanding of what was then the Soviet Union. At that time everybody had the same vision, the same admiration. He was an admirer of [the Soviet Union].26

  They talked for a long time. Guevara expressed his interest in Soviet literature and asked if he could visit Leonov at the old house in Tacubaya where the Soviets were quartered, and borrow some books that would help him understand the Soviet people. Leonov handed him the plain business card he carried, identifying him as an attaché at the Embassy, and forthrightly replied, Why not, what books would he be interested in? Che indicated three titles: Ostrovsky’s Thus Is Steel Tempered, Polevoi’s A True Man, and The Defense of Stalingrad. One day Che simply showed up; as Leonov recalls now, he had the books “ready for him. He was in a great hurry
, he surely had more important things to do, and when I invited him to come in for a while and talk he said he had to go.”27

  When Guevara was taken into custody a few weeks later, the Mexican authorities raised an outcry upon finding the Russian diplomat’s card in his wallet, immediately accusing Che of being an agent of international communism. Actually, according to Leonov, they had met only a couple of times; and if he himself was quickly dispatched home by an angry ambassador as punishment for the ensuing uproar, this was only a mark of his superior’s excessive prudence.

  It is absurd to suspect that, thanks to Leonov’s delicate footwork, Che was recruited by the U.S.S.R. during those months. However, his account is either specious or simplistic. Che must have been aware that any contact with Soviet personnel at the height of the Cold War, in an arena as important as Mexico (comparable to Vienna or Berlin in those years), was likely to be detected by U.S. and/or Mexican intelligence. He must have known, in one way or another, that the mere fact of having in his possession the card of a Soviet diplomat—while secretly training for guerrilla warfare thirty kilometers from Mexico City—could only be seen as a provocation. It practically guaranteed that he would be accused of links with Moscow, if arrested—which could happen any day. Furthermore, even if Leonov did not originally intend to recruit the Argentine, his conversations with him and growing knowledge of the Cuban group’s plans almost demanded that he approach Guevara. He was after all more ideologically committed, more accessible and talented, than most of the other revolutionaries-in-training. One might speculate that if Leonov did not recruit Che, it was not out of indifference; and if Che was not recruited, it was not out of a lack of willingness.