Companero
Page 17
Ramos Latour was Frank País’s closest collaborator within the urban front of Santiago. After País’s death he succeeded him as the clandestine leader of the 26th of July Movement in the cities. He traveled to the Sierra for the first time in 1957 and returned in May 1958, dying in combat in July of that year. At the end of 1957, he began exchanging letters with Che that underlined the serious divisions within the movement regarding what would be called the Miami Pact. Taking advantage of the agreement they had signed with Castro in July, Felipe Pazos and Raúl Chibas, along with other moderate opposition figures including former president Carlos Prío Socarrás, sought to push matters even further in October. They called for U.S. mediation in the civil war, a declaration of “independence” by the urban and civilian opposition vis-à-vis the military and rural sectors, and the designation of an interim president—none other than Pazos himself. The new pact was signed in October, and the first reports of it appeared in the U.S. press a month later. Weeks after the signing, Castro and the guerrilla command repudiated the Miami Pact, though it had been signed by their representatives.
Writing to “Daniel” on December 14, 1957, Che begins by laying out a number of minor technical and logistical disputes. He and Ramos Latour had already had their disagreements, especially regarding Che’s apparent compulsion to accept all sorts of combatants in his column, and to foster relations between “the Sierra” and “the plains” regardless of the national leadership. Guevara was continually going over the heads of municipal leaders, accepting recruits, support, or information from sectors independent of Ramos Latour.53 As Carlos Franqui recalls, “Che had unleashed a virtual war on the ‘plains’ 26th of July, and one of the ways he waged this war was by using people who had a bone to pick with the organization, instead of using the movement’s personnel.”54
In this letter, which he himself would later describe as “rather idiotic,”55 Guevara reveals the intensity of his own ideological beliefs and sets the terms of the debate between “the plains” and “the Sierra”—between the reformists of the cities and the revolutionaries of the mountains, the liberal nationalists and the emerging Marxist-Leninists. He terms the Miami Pact “unspeakable,” asserting that “in Miami [they] proffered their ass in the most despicable act of buggery that Cuban history is likely to recall.”56 He then states that Ramos Latour refused to reach a compromise solution, and launches into a ferocious diatribe which is also a confession:
Because of my ideological training I am one of those who believe that the solution to this world’s problems is to be found behind the so-called Iron Curtain. … I always viewed Fidel as a genuine leader of the bourgeois left, though his character is enriched by personal qualities of extraordinary brilliance which raise him far above his class. It is in that spirit that I joined the struggle; honestly without any hope of going beyond the country’s liberation, ready to leave when the conditions of the struggle would shift toward the right (toward what you represent). … What I never imagined was Fidel’s radical shift in his positions regarding the Miami Manifesto. I thought impossible what I later learned; to wit, that the wishes of he who is the genuine leader and sole motor of the Movement should thus be distorted. I am ashamed of what I thought at the time.57
Che reiterates his right to establish relations with whomever he pleases and to receive support (arms, money, supplies) from anybody—including alleged bandits from the plains. He is writing “for the record” (by now the idea of a personal destiny seems firmly established).*19 Though in his view the differences between them are probably unbridgeable, they must be set aside for the sake of Unity. He recognizes that Ramos Latour might break relations with him, but “the people cannot be defeated.”
One may only speculate as to the real course of events. According to several historical accounts, Castro sent one of his closest collaborators, Lester Rodríguez, to Miami in order to negotiate and sign a Pact of Unity. When the agreement was reached, several of Fidel’s companions must have been indignant—beginning with Che. Already disappointed or angry at the Manifesto of July 12, perhaps they considered that the Miami conclave, the people involved, and the decision to proclaim the candidacy of Felipe Pazos for the post-Batista era constituted a series of concessions dangerously close to treason. They may have angrily reproached Castro for his apparent consent which, given the poor communications between Miami, the Sierra, and the plains, the caudillo almost certainly never extended.*20 After a cryptic silence of several weeks, Castro repudiated the agreement and realigned himself with his left wing, now headed by Guevara.†13 Che must have expressed in a note or message, if not in person, his disapproval or outright rejection of the Miami Pact.‡4 Perhaps Che never believed that Fidel signed the ill-fated document, but by now he knew his friend and boss well: he never shared anything with anybody. One can easily imagine the Argentine radical’s discomfort with Castro’s public statements against expropriations and communism, with Fidel’s custom of baptizing every peasant child born in the Sierra, and with the conservative decrees he issued in the mountains. From there to concluding that Pazos’s stay in the Sierra close to Fidel had contaminated him required no more than a small step.** Thus, Che’s claim to “Daniel” that Fidel was originally a “bourgeois leftist” (meaning, not a true revolutionary). In a letter to the commander-in-chief immediately after the event, Che summarizes his views:
You know that I had not the slightest confidence in the people from the national leadership, either as leaders or as revolutionaries. Nor did I believe that they would go to the extreme of betraying you so openly. … I think your attitude of silence is not the most advisable at this time. A betrayal of this magnitude clearly indicates the different paths that have been taken. I believe a written document can have the necessary effectiveness and later, if things get complicated, with Celia’s help you could remove the entire national leadership.58
The document suggested by Che had in fact been drafted the day before, on December 14. The removal proposed by him would take place on May 3 of the following year. When he discovered that Castro either had not actually signed the Miami Pact or had rescinded his signature, Che expressed his joy in a new letter to Fidel:
… I told you that you will always have the merit of having proven the possibility of an armed struggle supported by the people in America. Now you are on the even greater path of becoming one of two or three in America who will have taken power through a multitudinous armed struggle.59
To Ramos Latour he confesses his guilt, like the apostle Peter, for having doubted his leader. The “mistakes” that Che will refer to in his letter of farewell to Fidel in 1965 may be precisely these.*21 His remorse stems from Castro’s change of course, as he quickly returned to the revolutionary fold and reasserted his affinity with his Argentine friend and ally.
René Ramos Latour did not suffer Che’s onslaught in silence. He responded immediately, and his letter reveals the yawning schisms within the 26th of July Movement that would come to a head in 1959, after the triumph of the Revolution. Latour rejected Che’s imputations, explaining repeatedly that he did not feel they applied to him at all. Even if the cities do not offer the opportunities for the type of heroism prevailing in the Sierra, he wrote pointedly, those who raise funds, buy arms and supplies, and distribute them to the mountains are every bit as brave and revolutionary. Most important, wrote “Daniel,” salvation is not to be found behind the Iron Curtain. While he categorically refused to be classified as a “rightist,” he also marked his distance from Che Guevara:
In contrast, those who have your ideological training believe that the solution to our ills lies in liberating ourselves from a noxious Yankee domination, by means of a no less noxious Soviet domination.†14
Ramos Latour does not hesitate to criticize Che’s leanings in terms of alliances: “I am a worker, but not one of those who militate in the Communist Party and worry loftily about the problems of Hungary or Egypt, which they cannot solve, yet are incapable of leaving their jobs to join
the revolutionary process.”60 Finally, regarding the Miami Pact for Unity, he retorts that he never approved of Fidel’s association with former president Prío Socarrás. He reminds Che that he always rejected the Florida agreement as long as it did not clearly establish the leadership of the opposition forces on the island; the proposed “unity” should indeed be shattered. But he sets one condition: that there be a clear definition of “where we are going and what we seek to accomplish.”61
It was during this period that Che deservedly gained his reputation as the guerrillas’ “Communist” or radical. But he also became known for his sense of organization. He led his column with decisiveness and ingenuity. More than other commanders, he was able to consolidate his territorial gains, establishing schools, clinics, ovens, small workshops, hospitals, and imposing an iron discipline. He attended to the peasants and instructed the guerrillas in his free time. He had launched El Cubano Libre and, shortly afterward, Radio Rebelde. He began to receive foreign journalists, and turned his increasingly permanent camps into models of cleanliness, efficiency, and generosity. Legends proliferated, among troops and peasants alike. In the narrative and oral histories of the war, his military deeds became famous along with the meticulous organization of his camps and campaigns.
He also became known for his egalitarian and honest dealings with his troops, which so impressed one of the youngest recruits in his immediate escort. As Joel Iglesias recalls it,62 they once came to a hut at the foot of Turquino Peak, where they negotiated food and rest with the guajiros. Guevara counted the mouths to be fed and waited with the peasants for the food to be cooked, so as to take it back to his troops. In the meantime, his hosts served up three portions and invited Che and his escort to sit down and have lunch while the rest of the food was prepared. Che refused. He gave orders that the three portions should be put into a large dish, so they could be shared among all later on. The peasants’ invitation would not have given him a larger share; it would merely have allowed him to save some time by eating earlier. But even this was unacceptable to him. All the food was carried to the bivouac and the troops stood in line to be served, Che among them.
There were few journalistic reports about Che himself during those months. A New York Times correspondent, Homer Bigart, was sent to the Sierra Maestra in 1958. He was accompanied by a Uruguayan journalist, Carlos María Gutiérrez, who later became a friend and aspiring biographer of the comandante slain at La Higuera. The Uruguayan recalls a sense of easygoing camaraderie in the camp. He found Che relaxed and natural, but with a series of defenses well in place to avoid any undue closeness or complicity. Physically, he was “very thin, with a sparse beard that barely framed an almost childlike face.”63 Only the later events of 1958 would begin to age Guevara, transforming him into the iconic figure of the triumphant entry into Havana.
For his part, Bigart reported to the U.S. Embassy in Havana on his conversations with Guevara, emphasizing his “rather strong anti-U.S. sentiment.” He also described his encounter with Fidel Castro, whom he asked how he could depend so much on an anti-U.S., Communist Argentine. Fidel answered that “in reality Guevara’s political convictions did not matter as it was he, Fidel Castro, who set the course for the guerrillas.”64 Indeed, Che still did not cut an awesome figure; the Argentine journalist Jorge Masetti, who also visited the camps in February 1958, remarked: “The famous Che Guevara seemed to me a typically middle-class Argentine youth. He also struck me as a rejuvenated caricature of Cantinflas.”*22
Ernesto Guevara still set aside time for reading and, according to one recruit, various girlfriends. He continually asked for books from the cities, including on one occasion Will Durant’s History of Philosophy, as well as works by Proust, Hemingway and Faulkner, Graham Greene and Sartre, and the poetry of Milton, Neruda, and Góngora.65 His asceticism was renowned, but never reached extremes; as Joel Iglesias describes it,
In Las Vegas de Jibacoa, Che met a black or rather mulatto girl with a very lovely body, called Zoila. Many women were crazy about him, but in that sense he was always very strict and respectful, but he liked that girl. They met and were together for some time.66
The girl’s name was Zoila Rodríguez Garcia and she doubtless, at age eighteen, reminded him of the “beautiful mulatto girls” of his youthful days in Porto Alegre and Trinidad. One may deduce from her account that the relationship lasted several months, from early 1958 until August, when Castro developed the plan to “invade” the center of the island and Guevara resigned himself to leaving her. According to the young woman, Che’s fascination with the exotic remained the same, if not stronger:
He was looking at me the way boys look at girls and I became extremely nervous. … He had a slightly mischievous look. … As a woman I liked him immensely, especially his look, he had such beautiful eyes, such a calm smile that he could touch any heart, move any woman. … He awoke in me a very great and very beautiful love. I pledged myself to him, not only as a combatant but as a woman.67
His military and organizational experiments in the Sierra were often emulated. Raúl Castro, in particular, reproduced many of Che’s innovations in the Frank País Second Front, opened in March 1958 on the Sierra de Cristal. Che made a qualitative change in the war, shifting from a strategy of “hit-and-run to a combat of positions, which must resist enemy attacks so as to defend rebel territory, in which a new reality is being built.”68 Of course, Guevara sometimes rushed ahead of himself. As Franqui says, he had good strategic sense, but little tactical intuition. He positioned his column prematurely, in an area that lacked the military conditions needed to defend occupied territory and installations. Fidel applied many of Che’s innovations, but in a better-thought-out fashion. Without Fidel, many of Che’s ideas would have failed. An ominous precedent was being set; in the words of Carlos Franqui:
If Che acted so differently when he was only two steps away from Fidel, outside of the Sierra this phenomenon was exacerbated for better or for worse. Insofar as the distance or situation was greater or more dissimilar, the difficulties and complications grew more serious.69
The idea of stable camps was attractive to Castro for many reasons. Stationary bases, subject only to sporadic movements while waiting for something to happen, presented a number of tactical benefits. Wrapped in Che’s conceptual packaging, the idea was even more attractive. Until the failed general strike of April 9, 1958, and the subsequent army offensive, the guerrilla leader in fact lacked a military strategy for taking power. His meager forces did not permit it. As a result, his only goal was to overthrow the regime through a general strike. After the strike failed, Castro moved to lay the blame on the “plains” leadership. In one of the revolutionary war’s many paradoxes, Fidel Castro became far more powerful after the failure of the April strike which he had in fact planned and ordered, By successfully pinning responsibility for the debacle on the 26th of July national leadership, he opened up a vacuum of power which he was then able to fill. As Che noted after the failed strike and subsequent finger-pointing within the movement, “From that time on, the war would be conducted politically and militarily by Fidel, in his double capacity as commander-in-chief of the rebel forces and secretary-general of the organization.”70
A stormy meeting took place on May 3 in the Altos de Mompié, at which the movement’s leaders hurled accusations at each other over the strike fiasco while each attempted to absolve himself. This gave rise to a double shift within the rebel coalition. On the one hand, the moderate, civilian elements from the plains were displaced by Fidel and his group. Che contributed decisively to this ouster, participating for the first time in a meeting of the national leadership. Together with Fidel, he acted as public prosecutor against the leaders from the plains: Faustino Pérez, René Ramos Latour, Marcelo Fernandez, and David Salvador. Coincidentally, there was a gradual shift in alliances. The Popular Socialist Party (PSP) began to acquire a presence it had previously lacked. In this realignment as well, Che played a crucial role. His column, along with
the Second Front headed by Raúl Castro, was chosen to incorporate the newly recruited Communist cadres.
The first eight months of 1958 were a time of consolidation, both for the Fidelista guerrilla forces and for Ernesto Guevara’s role in the war. From the general strike of April 9 and its failure until the desperate, broad-ranging, and ultimately futile counteroffensive by the army in May, the rebel forces in the Sierra lived through their worst hours. Their survival was in itself a guarantee of victory. Che participated in the defense against the Batista onslaught, though not in any spectacular way; his column fought at the battle of El Jigüe on July 20, and at Santo Domingo. But it was Fidel Castro who ensured the success of the resistance; with obsessive concentration he moved troops, arms, supplies, and resources from one sector to the other in the Sierra, requesting reinforcements, scolding his colleagues, and making all the major decisions. The dangers of the moment were reflected in Castro’s extreme irritability. He even went so far as to heap insults on Celia Sánchez, his closest and most loyal collaborator until her death in 1980. The following letter, dated June 18, 1957 (just one day before that which Fidel Castro would call the most critical of those months), at the height of the army offensive, illustrates another telling fact. There is not a single known letter in which Fidel Castro expresses the slightest anger, reproach, or exasperation at Che during all the time he spent in the Sierra. In contrast, the letter to Celia reveals his irritation: