Whenever you feel like it, you look at things in the most whimsical conceivable way. Some of your attitudes make me fear that you shall gradually go completely blind. I think in my treatment of you I have always maintained a fundamental respect for the forms. … In yesterday’s letter you have violated all these considerations. I will not write to you in the language I might use with any other companion. … Unlike you, I do not write with the purpose of disappointing, or wounding, or worrying you, or without any concern at all. … Do I have any hopes that you will understand me? None at all! Because when I have written to you with greater clarity, you have chosen to understand whatever has best suited you.*23
Batista’s offensive in the Sierra Maestra was to last seventy-six days, involving over 10,000 troops. The guerrilla fighters, in contrast, barely totaled 321 men. The government forces suffered over 1,000 casualties; in addition, the rebels captured 400 prisoners, 500 modern rifles, and 2 light tanks. After the offensive failed, the outcome of the war became self-evident. The fall of Batista was now merely a matter of time. Who would replace him, and how, would depend on strength, skill, and daring.
The period in question also witnessed a game of hide-and-seek between Castro’s men and the United States government, as the regime weakened and a revolutionary victory became more plausible. The series of coy encounters, contacts, and controversies included messages that crossed each other; press interviews; incidents at Guantánamo, the U.S. base; kidnappings of American citizens; and attacks on property owned by U.S. companies. The guerrillas and their allies sought to stanch the flow of arms and munitions to Batista, as he tried to preserve it; the CIA dabbled in helping varying factions of the 26th of July Movement. Che’s role in this minuet with the U.S. was minor. For the moment, he stood in the diplomatic shadows, and he was neither a spokesman or negotiator nor a decisive influence in one direction or another.
He did, however, have a major impact, both substantive and lasting, on the switch in alliances that followed the breakdown of the Pact for Unity at the end of 1957. From then until mid-1959, when the revolutionaries had already taken power, a ferocious internal struggle raged within the 26th of July and the opposition front. This bitter conflict included, but also extended beyond, differences between the Sierra and the plains, revolutionaries and liberals, partisans of a military junta and defenders of a fight to the end. A gradual realignment emerged. Fidel Castro moved further and further away from his former liberal allies—Prío, Chibas, Pazos, the Student Movement, the 26th of July’s former national leadership—and drew closer to cadres of his Rebel Army and of the Popular Socialist Party. This was not a rapid or clear-cut process by any means. It did not have a definite beginning or end, nor did it necessarily derive from any plan concocted by Fidel beforehand and then deliberately executed.
The first contact between Castro and the PSP took place at the end of 1957 when a Communist labor leader, Ursinio Rojas, arrived in the Sierra. He informed Castro that the Party leadership had decided to allow its members to join the Rebel Army. One such recruit was possibly Che Guevara’s first link to the Cuban Communists. Pablo Ribalta arrived to join his column, along with a certain Hiram Prats. A young but experienced cadre from the PSP, Ribalta had traveled abroad and carried out Party work in Prague, as an aspiring soldier of the international Communist movement. He would stay by Che’s side for half a decade until he was appointed Cuba’s ambassador to Tanzania. There he would serve as liaison between Havana and Guevara’s expedition in the Congo. In mid-1957, he recalls, Che “asked for somebody with characteristics like mine: a teacher, with some political instruction and experience in political activism.”71 Che could have added a further characteristic: someone of African origin. According to Ribalta, Che instructed him to keep secret his membership in the PSP, and especially his leadership position within the Communist Youth. Ribalta obeyed him to the letter. The other members of the column learned of his Communist affiliation only in November of the following year.72
Strangely enough, the Americans were slow in detecting Che’s pro-PSP leanings.*24 The two intelligence reports that mention him during this period include the relevant facts: his close contacts with the Soviet mission in Mexico, the ideological orientation of Hilda Gadea, and his vehement antiimperialism. But they still fail to draw the logical conclusion. On the rare occasions when Che’s name is linked to Communist influence within the 26th of July Movement, the connection is far from clear. Thus, for instance, a cable from the U.S. consulate in Santiago, dated February 21, 1958:
The reporting official has asked several Cubans to respond to allegations that one of the most trusted lieutenants of Fidel Castro, Dr. Ernesto Guevara, an Argentinian, is a Communist or Communist sympathizer. They invariably respond with vehement denials, but admit that they know nothing of his background and prefer to avoid the conversation altogether, suggesting that Dr. Guevara is an idealistic adventurer.†15
Che drew even closer to the Communists in August of 1958, when his troops were separated from their mother column. Castro ordered Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos to “invade” the center of the island and split it in two militarily. At that time, Che drew even further away from the national leadership of 26th of July Movement and the liberals, incorporating ever more Communists into his guerrilla band. During the final discussions on the agrarian reform law—the most far-reaching legislation enacted by the guerrillas in the Sierra—Guevara laid the basis for an even closer alliance. He now stood clearly for the PSP and the most radical theses, and against the “plains,” the liberals and more cautious positions. But this phase belongs to a different tale: that of victory and the emerging legend, when Che, together with Fidel Castro, becomes the very emblem of the Cuban revolution. In this saga, his face is identified forever with the jubilant islanders, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, that greeted their triumphant entry into Havana in the early, heady days of January 1959.
*1 Thus the rate of labor union affiliation on the eve of the revolution: in 1958, approximately a million workers belonged to one union or another. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: la lucha por la libertad, 1909–1958, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1974), p. 1512.
†1 The survival skills and diplomacy of Rodríguez would put Talleyrand to shame. Half a century later (until the early 1990s, when his health failed), he still held high government office, possibly the third most important within Cuba’s revolutionary hierarchy.
*2 The PSP publicly repudiated the attack on the barracks: “We condemn the putsch methods, typical of bourgeois factions, used in the Santiago raid. … The heroism displayed by the participants in this action is false and sterile, guided as it is by mistaken bourgeois thinking. … All the country knows who organized, inspired and led the action against the barracks and knows that the Communists had nothing to do with it.” Daily Worker (New York), August 5 and 10, 1953. Quoted in Thomas, p. 1090.
*3 His wife mentions other works, instead: Insurgent Mexico, by John Reed, and, in preparation for the Cuban expedition, Keynes, Smith, and Ricardo, as well as several Soviet novels. See Hilda Gadea, Che Guevara. Años decisivos (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1972), pp. 110, 147, 148. But Juan Ortega Arenas, a friend of Che’s in Mexico and one of his main suppliers of books, recalls that he mainly asked for Marxist literature. Juan Ortega Arenas, interview with the author, Mexico City, May 23, 1996.
*4 Hugo Gambini, El Che Guevara (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós, 1968), p. 105, Castro corroborates the tenor of this exchange in his interview with Lee Lockwood: “But in those days [in Mexico] we did not discuss these matters [revolutionary theory]. What we discussed was the struggle against Batista, the plan to disembark in Cuba, initiating guerrilla warfare. … It was Che’s fighting spirit, as a man of action, that led him to join me in my struggle.” Fidel Castro, quoted in Lee Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 143–144.
†2 If anything, Perón had just made his peace with Washington: and no historian even mentions a U.S. role in his overthro
w in 1955. On the contrary, in his search for foreign capital, Perón from 1953 sought a rapprochement with Washington. This rapprochement took place in the context of the failure to create a “Gran Argentina.” Marvin Doldnert, Democracy, Militarism and Nationalism in Argentina 1930–1966 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 122, 123.
‡1 According to Hilda Gadea, Guevara even blamed the FBI for a robbery at their Mexico City apartment, without any basis or later corroboration in the archives or other accounts. See Gadea, Años decisivos, p. 130.
*5 Carlos Franqui describes how, the first time he met Che in Mexico in 1956, the Argentine was reading Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism. When Franqui asked him whether he had read Khrushchev’s report to the Twentieth Congress, Che replied that it was nothing but imperialist propaganda. Carlos Franqui, interview with the author, San Juan, August 19, 1996. A hostile biographer has a similar anecdote: “In October 1956, when the Soviet army intervened to crush the nationalist Hungarian revolt, Che Guevara had vigorous discussions with one of his companions in which he defended that intervention.” Roberto Luque Escalona, Yo el Mejor de Todos: Una biografia no autorizada del Che Guevara (Miami: Edicioties Universal, 1994), p. 71. Luis Simón, a university student who spent some time with Che in the Sierra in 1958, states that, on the contrary, Che criticized the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but he also said he had been a Trotskyist in Argentina, which was not true. Luis Simón, “Mis relaciones con el Che,” Revista Cuadernos (Paris), May 1961. In a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Havana to the Department of State dated July 31, 1959, a correspondent for Time magazine quotes an account given him by Andrew St. George, another correspondent and possibly a U.S. intelligence informant. According to St. George, in the Sierra Che defended before him the Soviet intervention in Hungary and stated that “the Budapest insurrection was a fascist conspiracy against the people.” Braddock/AmEmbassy Havana to Dept. of State, July 31, 1959 (Confidential), U.S. Department Files, vol. 8, dispatch 163.
†3 In a poem written upon the death of a patient at the General Hospital in Mexico City, Che plays upon all the strings of that era’s leftist sentimentalism: “pay heed, proletarian grandmother, believe in the man who is coming, believe in the future you will never see. … Above all, you will have a scarlet vengeance, I swear it to all the extent of my ideals, your grandchildren will see the dawn, die in peace, old fighter.” Ernesto Che Guevara, untitled poem, quoted in Gadea, Años decisivos, p. 232.
*6 Carlos Fazio, “Castro relata su primer encuentro con el Che en México,” Proceso, December 12, 1988. Dr. León Bessudo, a Mexican alpinist, contradicts Castro and asserts that Guevara did plant a flag in the crater of Popocatépetl on October 12, 1955. David Bessudo, quoted in Testimonios sobre el Che (Havana: Editorial Pablo de la Torriente, 1990), p. 121.
†4 Che’s father recounts that his failed expeditions to the volcano, even before he met Castro, were part of his guerrilla training. In reference to a letter from Che dated July 20, 1955, in which he mentions his “assaults” on the Popocatépetl, his father states: “Che was already in training with the Cubans to liberate Cuba.” However, this is contradicted by Castro himself. See Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Aquí va un soldado de América (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana/Planeta, 1987), p. 106.
*7 According to Castro, the four foreigners—Che, the Mexican Guillén Zelaya, the Italian Gino Doné, and the Dominican Ramón Mejías del Castillo—were quite enough. Che’s Guatemalan friend Julio Cáceres (“el Patojo”) was turned away by Castro “not due to any negative attribute of his own, but because we did not wish to make of our Army a mosaic of nationalities.” See Ernesto Che Guevara, “El Patojo,” in “Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria,” Escritos y discursos, vol. 2 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977), p. 292.
*8 Ernesto Che Guevara, “Pasajes,” p. 6. It is difficult to establish whether a poem Che dedicated to Fidel (which is proof that even splendid narrators are not necessarily good poets) was written just before or after Fidel’s act of solidarity with his Argentine friend. In any case, both the poem and the proof of Fidel’s loyalty took place within a few days of each other.
†5 According to Gutiérrez Barrios: “No, I don’t feel that the Americans exerted any pressure at all. Fidel was traveling to Miami to meet with the leaders, even with Prío who supported him to some extent, thanks to the Auténtico Party, and he also went to New York and had meetings with groups of Cubans, which means that the United States had nothing against him, aside from which the Batista government was collapsing on its own. The Americans were never present, and I do know that, because I was in control, especially at the Ministry of the Interior.” Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, interview with the author, Mexico City, July 28, 1995.
‡2 Fidel Castro, Prison of Miguel Schultz, Mexico City, July 9, 1956. Notes for the manuscript of Carlos Franqui, Diario de la revolución cubana, Carlos Franqui Archive, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., C0644, box 2, file 2. The vast majority of his notes for the Diario de la revolución cubana were donated by Franqui—the spokesman for the movement till the victory of the revolution and then the publisher of its main newspaper—to the Firestone Library at Princeton University, and were quoted verbatim in the published book. This was not, however, the case for this text by Fidel Castro—perhaps because of his comments on Mexico. Previous and later passages by Castro are to be found on p. 141 of Carlos Franqui, Diario de la revolución cubana (Barcelona: R. Torres, 1976). From now on, when I quote from Franqui I will refer to the Princeton archive only when the notes do not appear in his book; in all other cases, I will refer to the R. Torres edition of the book.
*9 In what is probably the first reference to Che Guevara in an official U.S. document, the “Argentinian Communist” is accused of being a protégé of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Mexican labor leader, intellectual, and politician. The document asserts that Che belonged to the latter’s People’s Party, and found employment in Mexico thanks to him. Everything indicates that this was not the case: Che was not a member of the People’s Party, was not a friend of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and did not find employment thanks to him. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), Daily Report, July 25, 1956, no. 145, p. 5. Quoted in “Possibility of Communist Connections,” Department of State, National Archives, lot 60 D 513, MER 1137, box 7–8.
*10 There is another fact which supports this analysis. In his Sierra Maestra interview with Jorge Masetti, Che said, with regard to his role in Guatemala: “I never held a post in the Arbenz government.” Ernesto Che Guevara, interview with Jorge Masetti, reprinted in Granma (Havana), Oct. 16, 1967. However, his statement to the public prosecutor in Mexico asserts that “he arrived in this capital approximately a year and a half ago, from Guatemala, which he left at the fall of the Jacobo Arbenz government, of which he was a sympathizer and in whose administration he had served.” See Adys Cupull and Froilán González, Un hombre bravo (Havana: Editorial Capitán San Luis, 1994), p. 384.
†6 Alberto Bayo, Mi aporte a la revolución cubana (Havana: Imprenta Ejército Rebelde, 1960). In his memoirs, published in 1960 with a preface by Che, Bayo recalls his own appraisal of Che’s political affiliation, which is different from the official Cuban description and from the one proposed here: “He had no sympathy for Perón, the dictator who had thrown him in jail [sic]; he called him a Communist and I deduced on a hundred occasions that Guevara, like myself, was not a Communist and had never been one.” Ibid., p. 77.
*11 Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Tita Infante, March 1, 1965, quoted in Adys Cupull and Froilán Gonzaléz, Cálida presencia (Havana: Editorial Oriente, 1995), p. 80. The same letter quoted in Guevara Lynch, Aquí va, p. 129, does not include this passage. As already noted, Che’s father shared the Cubans’ compulsion to strip their heroes of any trauma, dilemma, or contradiction.
†7 Hilda Gadea’s account in her memoirs is elliptical but revealing: “When I arrived in Havana … Ernesto told me he had another woman … and with great pain o
n my part … we decided to divorce. … When he saw my pain, he said: ‘It would have been better to die in combat.’” Gadea, Años decisivos, pp. 201–202. Che’s father presented a fictive view of the relationship. Speaking in 1957—months after the couple’s physical and emotional separation—he wrote: “I had my daughter-in-law Hilda Gadea and our granddaughter Hildita come to stay. They traveled to Buenos Aires to join us. …” Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo el Che (Barcelona: Planeta, 1981), p. 23.
*12 Gutiérrez Barrios asserts that the Mexican government did not pressure the Cubans into leaving, and that he helped Castro avoid problems in Tuxpan by calling the men he had there back to Mexico City. Gutiérrez Barrios, interview with the author.
†8 The official Cuban account attributes their hasty departure to the desertion and subsequent betrayal of two members of the Abasolo camp, in the state of Tamaulipas, on November 21. Without questioning this fact, one can confidently state that many other factors were also involved—including the beginnings of an uprising in Cuba itself. See Centro para el estudio de la historia militar, De Tuxpan a La Plata (Havana: Editorial Orbe, 1981), p. 70.
*13 A confidential report dated January 4, 1957, addressed to Roy Rubottom, assistant secretary of state for American Republic Affairs, states that “there is proof that the Popular Socialist Party participated in the terrorist activities in Cuba during the last month.” Murphy to Rubottom, January 4, 1957, Department of State, National Archives, lot 60 D 513, MER 1137, box 7–8.
†9 “We ran around at a muddy place, only to get into the worst swamp I have ever seen. … we had to leave almost all our supplies in that accursed mangrove swamp … to get through that hell.” Raúl Castro, “Diario de la guerrilla cubana,” quoted in Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, La conquista de la esperanza (Mexico City: Ediciones Joaquín Mortiz, 1995), p. 75.
Companero Page 18