Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  The attack was momentous for a number of reasons. First of all, it announced to the rest of Cuba, and especially the movement’s supporters, that the group was still operative and capable of inflicting casualties on the army. Secondly, it lifted their own morale, showing that with calm, determination, and daring they could succeed in reversing the December defeat and achieving victory. Finally, it demonstrated to local peasants that the rebels were a force to be reckoned with, able to wage war on the enemy while protecting supporters and punishing traitors. In fact, it was during the combat of La Plata that the 26th of July Movement carried out its first execution. Chicho Osorio, an army informer, fell into the guerrillas’ trap when he led them to the small military barracks and was shot as soon as the gunfire began.

  The Sierra Maestra and the eastern part of Cuba, where Che and his companions would spend most of the next year and a half, was a poor, sparsely populated, and almost exclusively rural region. It belonged to a handful of landowners; agriculture was limited to sugar cane and coffee; and social indicators lagged behind even the most destitute areas elsewhere on the island. The peasants—white, black, and mulatto in equal proportions—led a precarious, hard, and violent existence. They had nothing to lose and a lot to gain through a radical change in their living conditions. The guerrillas, as they themselves acknowledged, had never come into close contact with such an impoverished peasant population, much less lived among them. It was an emotional encounter. The solidarity, simplicity, and nobility of the Sierra’s guajiros were for many of them a true revelation. In the words of Raúl Castro, “It is admirable to see how these peasants of the Sierra go out of their way to tend to us and take care of us. All the nobility and generosity of Cuba are concentrated here.”38 For two years, Che’s knowledge of Cuba would be restricted to this area. Of course he would meet many other Cubans, from the city or other classes, who came to the Sierra for various reasons—but only briefly and sporadically. As “Pombo” (Harry Villegas), one of his closest aides from the Sierra Maestra all the way through to Bolivia, would remark later, Che himself would come to consider himself a native of the Sierra Maestra, not only because he came to love it, but because it was the only region of Cuba he knew at all.39 Given his predilection for otherness, his special affection for the peasants was logical, as would be his subsequent and mistaken overestimation of the campesinos’ role in the struggle.*14

  The first few months in the Sierra were bittersweet for Ernesto Guevara, encompassing a wide and quite diverse range of experiences. During his second combat, at a place aptly named Hell’s Ravine, he killed his first enemy. He met Frank País, who arrived in mid-February to coordinate the delivery of arms and reestablish contact between the Revolution’s urban and mountain groups. Che was also able to send a short note to his family in Buenos Aires, assuring them that he was still alive despite press reports to the contrary.*15 He requested books from the city, on algebra, Cuban history, and geography, as well as French texts to teach Raul Castro the language.†10

  During those months Che carried out the first execution of a traitor among the guerrilla ranks, Eutimio Guerra.‡3 He suffered a violent attack of malaria in early February, when the small band of rebels was subject to systematic raids by the army and air force. Toward the end of that month, he was felled by another asthma attack. The crises were becoming more frequent and intense, and the lack of epinephrine or even an inhaler prevented him from keeping up with the others:

  The asthma was so strong it didn’t let me advance. … I made it, but with such an asthma attack that every single step was difficult. … I had to make a decision, because it was impossible for me to go on … [without] at least buying medicines.40

  Finally, he was able to obtain medication. This, along with some rest and his indomitable willpower, allowed him to catch up with the thin column (of only eighteen men) by mid-March 1957. These were the worst days of the war for him. Within a short time he suffered military setbacks, asthma attacks, and a shortage of medicines. Fortunately, only three weeks passed between his bout with malaria and his arrival at the house of Epifanío Díaz, where he met up with Fidel and the others. He extracted contradictory lessons from the distressing experience. He learned that even under the worst conditions, he could overcome the effects of his illness and keep going. But he did not quite recognize that this was possible only under exceptional circumstances. His recovery occurred because he found somewhere to rest and a family to take care of him; because his companions lent a hand and he ultimately secured the necessary epinephrine or adrenaline in the city of Manzanillo; and lastly because his enemy, though near, did not concentrate its forces on tracking him down. These fortunate conditions would not necessarily be repeated. In the end, Che probably failed to assimilate a crucial point. His temporary incapacity did not affect the campaign, because it was led by someone else: Fidel Castro. But the same disability, whether temporary or lasting, slight or serious, would have had devastating consequences had Che himself led the column, movement, or struggle.

  The guerrillas’ prospects began to improve in late February and March. That was when Fidel Castro granted his famous interview to Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, proving to the world that he was still alive and providing a vivid, if exaggerated, description of the Rebel Army’s forces.*16 The first reinforcements from the cities began arriving in March, under the command of Jorge Sotús. This occasion prompted one of the few quarrels between Che and Fidel in those years. Guevara was commissioned by him to receive the aspiring guerrillas from the urban wing of the 26th of July Movement. But Sotús “stated that he had orders to transfer the troops to Fidel and that he could not transfer them to anybody else, that he was still in command. At that time I still had my foreigner’s complex and did not want to take things too far, though one could see some discontent … among the troops.”41 The matter was finally resolved, but in a meeting ten days later when Castro reached the camp, he “criticized … my attitude for not imposing the authority he had conferred on me, and leaving it in the hands of the recently arrived Sotús, against whom there was no bad feeling, but whose attitude, in Fidel’s view, should not have been permitted.”42

  Che’s status remained undefined. He was already more than a medical officer, and his relationship with Fidel placed him in an exceptional position. But he was still a foreigner, and there was no formal recognition of the tasks he was performing. In addition, his views were often disregarded.†11 A first sign of Che’s changing fortunes occurred in mid-May of 1957 when, upon the arrival of an arms shipment, Castro assigned to Guevara one of the four heavy machine guns. “I was being initiated as a direct combatant, which I had already been on an occasional basis even though my fixed position was medical officer. A new phase was beginning for me in the Sierra.”43 At the same time, during those weeks he worked as a visiting doctor among the small villages in the area. In modern urban terms, his inexperience and shortcomings as a physician were undeniable.*17 But in huts and hamlets that had never seen a doctor before, his arrival was a major event.

  Che was beginning to take or propose initiatives outside his formal brief. At the end of May, he suggested to Fidel Castro that they ambush one of the many army trucks patrolling the zone. Fidel rejected the notion, arguing that an assault upon a nearby barracks on the coast would be more profitable. As Guevara himself expressed it, “his thirst for combat” was running away with him. He neglected the political and psychological aspects of military action, while for Castro they were of paramount importance. But the main point is not the military or political merits of each man’s position, but the fact that they were discussing such issues at all—as peers, if not equals. Furthermore, it reveals that they could resolve their differences quickly and effectively, without any lasting ill effects. So it would be for several years.

  Ironically, one of those who most benefited from Castro’s decision to attack the military barracks was Guevara himself. The battle of Uvero on May 28, 1957, marked the Rebel Army’s coming of a
ge. In it, Che attained a military rank in accordance with his talent, bravery, and responsibility. As Pombo recalled many years later, “He was a man who liked to take the lead in combat, to set an example; he would never say, go and fight, but rather, follow me into combat.”44 Though assigned a precise and limited task in the assault, in Castro’s words, “Che asked for three or four men and in a matter of moments started out to launch an attack from that direction.”45 He stood out not only in battle, but in tending to the wounded among both his men and the enemy’s. He was unable to save six of his companions though, and the army suffered total losses of fourteen lives, fourteen prisoners, and nineteen wounded. The combat pitted eighty guerrilla fighters against fifty-three soldiers—the largest battle in the war thus far.

  During the month of June, Guevara stayed with the wounded, separated from the rebels’ main column. Lacking medication once again for his asthma, he was almost as incapacitated as his patients—and just as demoralized, despite the victory at Uvero. The small detachment recorded both desertions and new arrivals at a dizzying rate. After two weeks, contact was reestablished with the main column. Che’s first experience of independent command had gone smoothly, if not spectacularly. The guerrillas’ situation was stabilizing; they now controlled an area which the enemy could not penetrate, at least for the moment. There was thus a certain freedom to “talk during the night,” consolidating relations with the peasants and receiving political visitors in a context of relative calm.

  Thanks to his bravery and tenacity, Che was promoted to comandante on July 21, 1957. In his words, “the dose of vanity that we all have inside made me feel the proudest man on earth.”46 The Rebel Army’s second column was placed under his command. It consisted of three platoons of twenty-five men, relatively well equipped and possessing some autonomy of action and movement. Though Fidel gave the orders, in weekly or fortnightly dispatches carried by messenger, Che had a substantial measure of independence. Guevara led several battles, of varying importance, during the following months: at El Bueycito in July, El Hombrito at the end of August, Pino del Agua in early September. Some skirmishes turned out in the rebels’ favor, others did not. In some cases, the Fidelista combatants received praise from their commander, while in others his evaluation was more critical. Concerning his first experience in leading a battle, Che wrote to Fidel: “My inauguration as a comandante was a success from the point of view of victory, and a failure in terms of organization.”47 In December 1957, after one year in the Sierra, Che was wounded in the foot during a battle in the Altos de Conrado. Castro scolded him: “I seriously suggest that you be careful. I order you not to take on any combat role. Take charge of directing people well, which is the indispensable task at this time.”*18

  During the second half of 1957, Che’s position as column commander was firmly established. For the first time, he began to participate actively in the discussions, debates, and disputes within the 26th of July Movement. His diaries and letters expound positions often similar to those of Fidel Castro, but at times he takes more frank or radical stances. He begins to record his thoughts on delicate matters which would accompany the Cuban Revolution like a dark and sad shadow through the rest of the century. Soon after the Granma landing, the execution of traitors, informers, or particularly cruel enemy officers was instituted as standing guerrilla practice; that is how Raúl Castro presents it in his diary, right after the execution of the informer Chicho Osorio.†12 Soon after the battle of El Hombrito, when there was a pause in the war which, among other things, allowed him to settle down, build a bread oven, and launch a newspaper, El Cubano Libre, Che wondered whether capital punishment was fully justified.

  His analysis centers on a peasant named Arístido, a bandit who had joined the guerrillas for no particular reason, and who boasted of his intention to desert as soon as the rebel forces moved on. Guevara ordered him shot “after a very summary investigation,”48 and then entered into a tortuous process of self-doubt: “We asked ourselves whether he was really guilty enough to deserve death, and whether we couldn’t have saved his life for the period of revolutionary construction.”49 The brand-new comandante resolved the immediate dilemma with analytical and discursive panache. The execution, he explained, took place because the situation demanded it: the guerrilla army was both too weak to afford any other punishment, and strong enough to punish betrayal. Another troubling case involved a young man named Echevarría, whose brother had sailed with the Granma and who rapidly turned to banditry and pillage in the areas under revolutionary control. Che hesitated once again—but only in his mind:

  Echevarría could have been a hero of the Revolution … but he was unlucky enough to commit crimes during that period and had to pay the price for his wrongdoing. … He served as an example, in truth tragic but also valuable, so that people would understand our need to make of the Revolution a pure event and not contaminate it with the vandalism Batista’s men had accustomed us to.50

  Finally, Che analyzed another case, which then and today seems cruel and unnecessary: that of symbolic executions. These involved fake shootings, where the victims had no idea that the wall they were being marched to was a purely ceremonial one. Guevara rightly commented that this might seem a “barbaric” exercise, whose justification lay once again in the lack of any real options. On the one hand, they did not deserve to die; on the other, there were no alternative forms of punishment.

  Seemingly flawless, this reasoning is neither fair nor acceptable. Granted, the other leaders of the Cuban Revolution did not even pose the questions raised by Che’s inquiring mind. Yet merely analyzing the facts is not enough. Che’s reasoning was swift and peremptory. This tactical, simplistic, and bureaucratic logic would preclude any deeper reflection in other, graver circumstances. Not too far in the future—in early 1959—he held in his hands the fate of hundreds of men sentenced to death at La Cabaña, and he authorized with his signature one of the most unsavory episodes of the Revolution. The contradictory nature of Guevara’s thinking had become set by now. He would take note of the problem’s complexity, ponder it, and proceed to find a response that would allow him to go forward—without, however, really resolving the dilemma.

  ———

  Che’s growing participation in the political debate within the 26th of July Movement focused more on the larger issues: the direction of the struggle, policies for alliance, and the ideology of the leadership. Two key figures arrived in the Sierra in July 1957: Raúl Chibas, brother of Eddy Chibas, the old Ortodoxo leader and protagonist of the first live radio suicide in history, and Felipe Pazos. An economist, Pazos was a former director of the central bank and a prototypical development economist—progressive, but not revolutionary. Along with Regino Boti, a similar-minded economist, he had drafted the “Economic Theses of the Revolutionary 26th of July Movement,” published in Mexico in 1956. His intention—like Fidel Castro’s, when he received the two men in his mountain hideout—was simple. Their common goal was to forge and consolidate an alliance between the guerrillas of the Sierra and the reformist politicians of the llano, or plains (the urban cadres, chiefly), including urban leaders like Frank Pais (who would die a few weeks later) and the heirs of José Antonio Echevarría (who had perished in a failed attempt on Batista at the National Palace on March 13, 1957) within the Revolutionary Student Directorate. Chibas and Pazos did not belong to any of these branches of the anti-Batista coalition, but were important figures of the moderate opposition who could perhaps be coaxed into more radical positions, enabling Castro to put his stamp of approval on a written agreement dated July 12. Che expressed serious doubts about it, but finally accepted its necessity. In his own notes on the visit by Chibas and Pazos and their “caveman mentality,”51 Guevara revealed his intense dislike for them, and his adamant opposition to their reformist stances.

  Che also expressed his reservations and objections to the written agreement as such, especially the chapter on agrarian reform. He noted sarcastically, “it was a policy tha
t would have been acceptable to the [conservative] Diario de la Marina.” To top it all off, it established “prior compensation for previous owners.”52 The text included a series of promises: a pledge to hold free elections after the fall of the government, the return to a constitutional regime, and the establishment of a Revolutionary Civic Front consisting of representatives from all sectors of the opposition. Guevara ultimately understood that the alliance with Pazos and Chibas, like others, was necessary for the guerrillas to continue receiving arms and resources and avoid isolation. He also acknowledged that Castro’s undertaking required certain ruses and silences. He viewed the agreements as temporary, to last only as long as the revolutionary process permitted. They contained a measure of deceit—not toward the cosignatories, who were no strangers to Cuban politics, but toward certain sectors of public opinion. The latter could easily believe that the program of the 26th of July was limited to the text of the manifesto, published on July 28 in Bohemia, the magazine with the largest circulation in Cuba.

  The document was neither more cautious nor less extreme than any of the 26th of July’s previous declarations. What led Che to express his reservations was his new status within the guerrilla camp. He was no longer a foreign physician who could be expelled at any time, but a comandante who had won his star in combat and who now participated fully in the Revolution’s substantive debates. Perhaps the main difference between Che and Fidel and other revolutionaries lay in the well-defined and transparent goals the doctor-cum-guerrilla fighter had set for the struggle. He pursued a far more radical revolution. To attribute Fidel’s presumed gradual shift from democrat to hard-line Marxist-Leninist to the Argentine Communist’s influence is absurd, but Castro’s tactics did include a less clearly defined strategic orientation than Che’s abstract ideology. Che in turn was less concerned with immediate realities and more firmly anchored to a sum of ideas. The letters between Che and René Ramos Latour (“Daniel”) at the end of 1958 laid bare these differences.