Companero
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There is also Che’s insistence on his Marxist-Leninist orientation during his interrogation at the Ministry of the Interior. Of course he had to admit it, but he went further. He debated with the authorities, defending various Marxist theses and arguing incessantly with Antonio Villalda, the public prosecutor. According to Gutiérrez Barrios,
At that time we proceeded to Miguel Schultz [an immigration services bureau] and took statements from all of them. The only one who confessed to his ideology was Che. When he was questioned by the public prosecutor he stated that his ideology was Marxist-Leninist, quite clearly. The others didn’t, because none of them had those characteristics. Fidel Castro was a follower of Martí. But Che made a statement about the situation, expressing the depth of his ideology and beliefs. The public prosecutor was someone I had categorized as our expert on communism, as we called it without any further qualification, and that specialist in communism was the man who questioned Che. Che had already confessed he was a Marxist-Leninist, and this lawyer proposed to discuss that philosophy, but his expertise was very limited compared to Che’s profound knowledge. When they entered into a discussion and I saw that, on top of everything, our lawyer was making a fool of himself, I called him over and said, “Counselor, he already told you he’s a Marxist-Leninist, just go directly to his offenses and nothing more.” Because Che was being very arrogant, with all the weight of his knowledge, and he was winning the entire discussion, in an ideological debate that was completely irrelevant.28
Che not only made no effort to conceal his ideological or political inclinations—as all the other detainees were doing—but also took pride in them, actually seeking to convert his captors.*10 One can hardly imagine the Castros or any of the other Cuban leaders boasting about their political or ideological convictions and holding a heated debate with their jailers. Che was bursting with his new Communist, Soviet, revolutionary faith: far from hiding it, he flaunted it. As long as his impact on the political thinking of the 26th of July Movement remained limited, his militant pride was of little consequence. But as his political influence grew, his ideological vanity would acquire considerable historical importance.
Guevara’s burgeoning enthusiasm for the Cuban venture was further strengthened by his physical and military training under the direction of Alberto Bayo, a former officer in the Spanish Republican army. Toward the end of April 1956, Castro obtained the money to purchase the Santa Rosa ranch near Chalco, in the state of Mexico, fifty miles east of Mexico City. By then he had persuaded Bayo to drill the recruits. Che received training in physical exercise and stamina, tactics, and target practice. As the group’s head of personnel, Che seems not to have experienced any major difficulties, and it must have been highly gratifying to him to find that, despite his asthma and the altitude, he was able to keep up with his companions and obtain the best grades in the group. In his notes, Bayo wrote of his favorite pupil: “He attended about 20 regular practice sessions, shooting about 650 cartridges. Excellent discipline, excellent leadership qualities, excellent physical stamina. Some disciplinary blunders due to small errors in interpreting orders and slight smiles.”29 Of course, by nighttime Che “looked tired from the marches … which left him in pieces.”30 However, Bayo recalls that:
Guevara was ranked first in the class. He had the highest grade, ten, in everything. When Fidel saw the grades he asked me, why is Guevara always number one? Doubtless because he’s the best. That’s what I think, I said. I have the same opinion of him, Castro replied.†6
Ever since his rugby-playing days in Córdoba and Buenos Aires, Guevara had tried to prove to himself that his asthma was not an obstacle to any of the physical activities he enjoyed. To a large extent he succeeded. His guerrilla exercises in Mexico constituted the hardest test he had ever set himself, and he passed it with honors. Che could no longer doubt his capacity to overcome the adverse effects of his ailment. It would have been senseless, after such a victory, to pull back for other reasons. Whatever doubts he might still have had disappeared during practice at Santa Rosa. His decision was sealed.
Last and probably least among the factors worth mentioning was the state of Guevara’s marriage. The views of Castro’s most recent biographer are doubtless extreme: Che did not enroll in the Granma expedition in order to leave his wife.31 But there is no doubt that he considered the relationship a failure, even if Hilda did not. Since the birth of their daughter, Ernesto had had serious misgivings. As he wrote to his friend Tita Infante in Buenos Aires,
[Little Hilda] has given me a double joy. First of all, her arrival put an end to a disastrous conjugal situation and secondly, I am now completely sure that I will be able to leave, despite everything. My incapacity to live with her mother is greater than my affection for her. For a moment I thought that a combination of the little girl’s charm and consideration for her mother (who is in many ways a great woman, who loves me in an almost pathological way) might turn me into a boring family man. Now I know this will not be the case, and that I will pursue my bohemian life until who knows when.*11
Once again, Che decided to flee the reality he could not live with. He could no longer tolerate married life, but adored the little girl. Unable to go or to stay, he avoided a clear-cut, explicit separation. What with his training, his fifty-seven days in jail, and increasingly clandestine life, Che was increasingly absent from home—but dared not take any drastic action. When Hilda left for Peru and Che for Cuba, the situation became even more equivocal. Matters were so unresolved that Hilda still believed, when she arrived in Havana after the Revolution, that the marriage could be saved.†7 Che, in contrast, considered it over as early as October 1956—as he said to others, though not to her, or to his mother. Celia remained unaware of her son’s separation until she joined him in Havana after the triumph of the revolution:
My marriage is almost completely destroyed and will break down completely next month, when my wife goes to Peru. … There is a certain bitter taste in this split, as she was a loyal companion and her revolutionary conduct was beyond reproach … but our spiritual discord was very great.32
Faced with this tangle of mixed feelings, it did not seem a bad idea for Che to break things off tacitly and embark on the Cuban expedition. Obviously, Guevara did not choose the path of revolution only to leave his wife. At the same time, it would be equally misleading not to include it in the reasons for the collapse of his marriage. Che was not a man driven by emotional impulses; yet the great dividing lines in his life were accompanied by moments of emotional distress or romantic disillusion. The essential point was always, however, his quest for a destiny. Purely political and strictly personal concerns were secondary in Che’s life.
Neither Che and Fidel, nor their companions in Mexico during those years, assign a major role to Guevara in the strategic debates within the 26th of July Movement. Of course, he was in charge of the future guerrillas’ political and ideological training; he imparted instruction at the Santa Rosa ranch, to the Cuban detainees at the immigration services bureau on Miguel Schultz Street, and at the various other places that sheltered Castro and his men before they sailed from Tuxpan. But beyond his teaching—separate from the strategic and tactical discussions within the movement, or between it and other Cuban groups—Guevara’s views did not play a prominent part. According to one of his Mexican friends, his silence was due to both conviction and convenience. As a foreigner, he had great respect for the Cubans and did not feel he should intervene in any immediate or important way: “I cannot tell them anything about their own land.” His stance was also a matter of convenience: his opinions might have led to disagreements and jeopardized his chief goal, which was to participate in the invasion of Cuba.33
Another possible reason for Che’s reserve was the frankly reformist nature of the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7), at least in its public manifestations. As has been broadly documented, the political, ideological, social, and economic theses of Fidel Castro and his companions (whether in the Cuban or Mexican
jails, in the Sierra Madre, or even during their first months in power) were anything but Marxist or revolutionary in any classical sense. Castro’s defense summation at his trial of October 1953, “History will absolve me”; the pamphlet he wrote under the same title, secretly published in April 1954; the Manifesto Number One of the M-26-7 issued in Mexico City, after Fidel’s arrival; and his letter of resignation to the Ortodoxo Party on March 19, 1956, are all moderate in their substance and orthodox in their thinking. Theodore Draper, one of the most conservative critics of Castro, even sees in them a growing moderation and “constitutionalism.”34 The sincerity of these texts is a different matter, as it relates to the biography of Fidel Castro and the debates over the nature of the Cuban Revolution. The issue here is Che’s position vis-à-vis the Cuban group’s program, and his hypothetical willingness to enter into an alleged falsehood or deception.
As it was initially designed, Fidel Castro’s program called for five broad reforms: the reestablishment of the 1940 constitution; an agrarian reform that would grant land to peasants with less than 150 acres; a profit-sharing scheme in the sugar mills; a limited reform of the sugar industry; and the confiscation of lands obtained through fraud. It also promised an educational reform consisting mainly of pay raises for teachers, the nationalization of public services and the telephone system, and a housing reform.35 In itself, this platform was no more radical than those espoused by classical Latin American populists like Perón, Cárdenas, Vargas, or Batista himself in 1940. Yet nothing in Cuba was really comparable to the rest of Latin America. As one of the most recent analyses of its history makes clear,
In the Cuban context of the fifties, the 26th of July Movement was not a reformist movement. … The substance of the reforms it posited was the core of similar reforms in other Latin American countries. But not in Cuba. … The Fidelistas called for change in a society where economic and social failings had considerably weakened the possibilities of reform, and used radical means to take power.36
Still, even after his resignation from the Ortodoxo Party, Castro continued to receive generous donations from figures like former president Carlos Prío Socarrás; the head of Líneas Aéreas Cubanas, López Vilaboy; and several Cuban expatriates in the United States. The revolutionary nature of the enterprise would thus reside either in the means used, or in the hope (based upon Castro’s personality and Che’s trust in him) that the struggle would take a more radical turn once victorious. Everything suggests that Guevara was fighting for an ideal of his own, and to be with Fidel, rather than for the Movement’s actual program or even the eventual transformation of Cuban society. This was not the first time Ernesto Guevara would emphasize the struggle’s method over its content. His decision in Mexico had little to do with any abstract conceptualization; it was based more upon political calculation and a certain emotional state. If Che had entered into prolonged discussions with the Cubans about their platform, he probably would not have agreed with them. Nor, perhaps, would he have convinced himself of the project’s viability and its inherent greatness.
The departure for Cuba was preceded by a long series of personal complications and political, logistical, and military setbacks: just days before D-day, the Mexican police confiscated twenty rifles and 50,000 rounds of ammunition from the Cubans in the capital. Finally the Granma sailed from Tuxpan, Veracruz, at dawn on November 25, heading for the eastern coast of Cuba. The boat, a recreational yacht purchased from a U.S. resident of Mexico City, had cost $15,000 and was woefully inappropriate for its task. It was small and unstable, and had too short a range. But Fidel was in a hurry—not so much due to the pressures exerted by the Mexican authorities,*12 or the dangers posed by Batista’s agents in Mexico,†8 but because of his own oftrepeated pledge: “In 1956 we will be free or we will be martyrs.” Thus, there was no alternative for the group but to cast themselves upon the Gulf of Mexico before year’s end, even if they were not ready for the crossing.
On the night of November 25, the Granma glided through the estuary of the Tuxpan River with lights dimmed and motors muffled. Che was leaving Mexico forever, without ever having lived in or loved the country. His stay of over two years was made meaningful by its ending, not by his initially monotonous life in the city. In Mexico, toward the end of his stay, he experienced some of the most meaningful moments of his twenty-eight years: there he had met Castro and joined the Cuban Revolution. But, the country itself had little to do with these events; they could just as well have happened anywhere.
Che enlisted in the expedition as its medical officer. Given the rank of lieutenant, he was in charge of medical supplies and tending to possible casualties among the eighty-two men. He was able to carry out his duties only with great difficulty. He was soon floored by a merciless asthma attack on the high seas, aggravated by the lack of epinephrine or an inhaler. The other members of the crew became seasick almost as soon as they lifted anchor. The ship’s doctor was unable to help them, discovering to his dismay that the anti-seasickness pills had been left behind, along with prudence and sound planning. The boat should not have taken on more than twenty passengers; aside from eighty-two men, it carried food and water, arms and ammunition: two antitank guns, thirty-five rifles with telescopic sights, fifty-five Mexican rifles, three Thompson submachine guns, and forty light machine pistols.
The scheme had been closely coordinated with Cuba. The 26th of July Movement on the island, led by Frank País, was ready to launch a popular uprising in Santiago on November 30. It fulfilled its task, though part of the responsibility for its action was mistakenly attributed to others.*13 The Granma was supposed to have moored at Niquero, in the Oriente province, on the same day. Instead, it landed seventy-two hours later on December 2, at Los Cayuelos near Colorados Beach, far from Niquero and in the middle of a nightmarish mangrove swamp. The plans laid in Mexico met with one obstacle after another: the slowness of the boat due to its defective motors and overloading; the bad weather, more or less typical for the season; and navigational errors. Nor did the landing itself go according to schedule. Because of the inhospitable terrain, the rebels had to abandon part of their supplies, struggle through a mangrove swamp for hours on end, and break up into several isolated groups. In addition, because the boat made landfall after the scheduled date, Batista’s regime was alerted and ready to counterattack.†9 Disaster seemed inevitable; indeed, it was not long in coming.
During the hours and days after going ashore, the Granma’s crew was dispersed throughout the swamp, where many of its members were rapidly spotted and picked off by government forces. Che Guevara’s own baptism of fire took place in the cane fields of the Niquero plantation owned by the Lobo family, one of the wealthiest on the island. The first combat of the revolution broke out on December 5 in Alegria de Pío. Che was caught in a burst of machine-gun fire, receiving a flesh wound in the neck which, though slight, was gory and frightening. It was Che’s first brush with death; he would later evoke Jack London’s classic lines on dying of cold in the Great North as the first thought that came to him. But the more appropriate passage defining his state of mind and his sense of destiny and a preordained death lies in the verses of the Spanish poet León Felipe found in his knapsack a decade later, after his capture in Bolivia:
Christ: I love you, not because you came down from a star, but because you showed me the light. You taught me man is God, a poor God in sin like You, and he on Your left on the Golgotha, the evil thief, is God too.
The skirmish ended with the revolutionaries’ disorderly flight. Some of them, including Ñico López, Che’s first Cuban friend, fell beneath the gunfire and shells deployed by Batista’s army and navy. Others were captured. The rest were split into small, isolated, and demoralized groups. Che, by now in terrible physical shape, began the march toward the Sierra Maestra, Cuba’s highest mountain range, with four companions, joined by three others the next day. Traveling without water and almost no food, with rudimentary arms and very little ammunition, they headed for the m
ountains hoping to meet with the others—if they were still alive—and evade a new offensive by the army. Che’s companions included Ramiro Valdéz, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Juan Almeida, all destined to play key roles in the coming months and years. Sixteen harrowing days later, beset by hunger, thirst, fatigue, and dejection, they arrived at the farm of a peasant named Mongo Pérez, near the foot of the eastern mountain range. There they regrouped with the other survivors, including, among others, Fidel and Raúl Castro. They had previously left their arms at a peasant’s home along the way, where they were almost immediately confiscated in an army raid. Fidel Castro was furious: one must never abandon one’s arms, and “to leave them was a crime and a stupidity.”37
Two things kept the Granma revolutionaries alive; the remarkable willpower and self-confidence of Fidel Castro, who declared their survival a triumph and promised certain victory to the tiny band of exhausted guerrillas; and the help of the local peasants. Both factors allowed the rebels to make contact with the movement’s urban groups (especially that of Celia Sánchez in the neighboring city of Manzanillo) and to reassemble under cover of the Sierra Maestra. There, Fidel Castro’s formidable sense of opportunity led to a successful assault on a military position in La Plata, a village near the coast, in mid-January—barely three weeks after the survivors’ rendezvous.