Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  His departure from the capital was soon publicized by a critic of the regime, who questioned the assignment of a luxurious seaside residence to the notoriously austere Comandante Guevara. In response, Che published an open letter to the 26th of July’s daily newspaper in which he explained his ailment and his need for rest, but he kept silent about his other reason for leaving La Cabaña:

  I wish to explain to the readers of Revolución that I am ill, that I did not catch my illness in gambling dens or spending nights in cabarets but by working more than my system could endure, for the Revolution. The doctors recommended a house in a place removed from daily visits.53

  Che’s additional motive for quitting La Cabaña, aside from his need for rest due to illness—which was highly uncharacteristic of him—derived precisely from the essential task he fulfilled in Tarará, far from inquisitive eyes and ears.

  The very existence of the Tarará Group remained relatively unknown until the 1980s.*13 The seaside deliberations, which continued in Castro’s house at Cojímar after Che’s recovery, focused on several matters. Two of the lesser issues deserve special mention: the establishment of state security in Cuba and the first Cuban attempts to export revolution abroad. On January 14, Che met with Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ramiro Valdés (his closest collaborator in the Sierra and during the “invasion”), and Víctor Piña of the PSP, to begin building “a body with secret characteristics that will be responsible for the security of the revolutionary state.”54 Very soon, Valdés would be entrusted with the army’s G-2, and Efigenio Amejeiras with the police, while Raúl would work with the army and cadres from the Sierra to fulfill the security needs of the new state. Osvaldo Sánchez, a member of the PSP leadership who was in charge of the Party’s Military Committee and one of the first Communists to have made contact with the guerrilla fighters in the Sierra, was assigned to accompany Valdés.55 Angel Ciutah, a Communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War later exiled in Moscow, also lent a hand, having been sent to Cuba by the Soviet security apparatus. According to Carlos Franqui, he would play a key role in the construction of the notorious Cuban security machinery, thanks partly to his ties to Che, whose profound sympathy for the Republican cause in Spain dated back to his earliest childhood.†3 By November, when Huber Matos (the first son of the Revolution to be devoured by it) was arrested, tried, and sentenced to thirty years in jail, the new state security apparatus was in full operation. Che played a central role in its establishment, along with several of his collaborators—some Cuban and some foreign, including the sinister Frenchman Alberto Lavandeyra and Ciutah himself.

  A second task, of great significance for Che’s future though not terribly relevant at that time, centered on revolutionary expeditions to other countries. In 1959, the new Cuban regime helped organize attempts to export the revolution to Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Castro’s government proudly acknowledged its involvement in attempts to overthrow Anastasio Somoza and Rafael Trujillo, while denying any role in the other two nations. Che played a role in all four.*14

  In April, a group of 100 exiled Panamanians and Cubans landed in Panama. The revolutionary government denied any responsibility for it, but Raúl Castro made a lightning trip to Houston to meet with Fidel during the latter’s tour of the U.S. and Latin America, to report on the situation and be scolded once again by his brother. In June an officer of the Rebel Army and former combatant of the Sierra Maestra, Delio Gómez Ochoa, led an invasion of the Dominican Republic. The ten Cubans and 200 domestic opponents of Trujillo were massacred just hours after having disembarked.

  The Dominican expedition coincided with a similar attempt in Haiti. During the first days of January, a Haitian writer named René Despestre came to Havana from Port-au-Prince. A day after his arrival, Che received him at La Cabaña. They talked at great length about poetry, Jacques Roumain and the Governors of the Dew, Haiti and Latin America. Che was soon convinced of the need to overthrow Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the newly inaugurated dictator of Hispaniola’s French-speaking half. Among other misdeeds, he had been a staunch supporter of Batista. The writer organized a meeting between Che and Louis Desjoie, an elderly Haitian senator of the center-right who had run against Papa Doc in elections held during the mid-fifties. They agreed to organize and train a revolutionary contingent. During the months of April and May about fifty Haitians, both white and black, received military instruction in Cuba in the province of Oriente. According to Despestre, Che visited them and partly supervised the operation. The invasion of Haiti, including thirty Cuban veterans from the Sierra Maestra, was scheduled to take place a few days after the incursion into Dominican Republic, though it was planned more as an assault action than as an extended campaign of guerrilla warfare. The operation was canceled after the Dominican fiasco—though Desjoie had already begun to hesitate in light of the radicalization of the Cuban process.†4

  Lastly, on June 1, planes from Costa Rica airlifted a large number of “internationalists” into Nicaragua. After several skirmishes, they were expelled to Honduras. There they were captured by Honduran troops, who found on them a letter from Che Guevara to the Cuban authorities, asking them to help the Nicaraguans before their departure from Cuba.56 Thirty years later, the Sandinista leader Tomás Borge would recall the rout of June 24, 1959, in Honduran territory, when one of the Nicaraguan guerrillas

  fell firing an M-3 submachine gun. He had adopted it since the two planes had arrived from Cuba with a shipment of arms sent by Che Guevara, which was possible thanks to the complicity of [Honduran] president Ramón Villeda Morales, an admirer of Che’s.*15

  But meetings in Tarará and Cojímar were chiefly devoted to three larger issues: land reform, Castro’s alliance with the PSP, and the construction of the revolutionary army. Che played a key role in all three. As Antonio Nuñez Jiménez described the discussions twenty years later, “During two months we held night meetings in Tarará where Che was recovering his health. … Our work was secret.”57 The fact that these three tasks were all deliberated upon in the same place and with the same persons involved has confused many observers ever since.

  The radicalization of the regime during the first few months of the year, and especially after May 1959, was not due to any great Communist influence. The government’s alliance with the old PSP was an effect, not a cause, of its shift toward more extreme positions. The left wing, the Communist school of thinking, was in fact personified and promoted by two figures totally alien to the PSP: Raúl Castro and especially Che Guevara. Fidel Castro obviously oversaw the entire process, and made decisions for reasons of his own. But like any highly intuitive politician, he was sensitive to pressures, influences, opinions, and arguments presented to him by those he trusted with regard to training the new army and land distribution, although somewhat less in the area of relations with the Communists, and the person he most trusted was Guevara.

  Land reform was the most controversial item on the economic policy agenda and in Cuba’s relationship with the United States. Che first outlined his radical stance toward land reform during a lecture delivered on January 27 at the Sociedad de Nuestro Tiempo. His presentation has often been cited due to its content and its contrast with the public positions of Castro and his government at the time.58 But its significance goes even further than was assumed by analysts like Theodore Draper, who did not know then about the Tarará meetings. The Tarará deliberations on land reform included figures like Alfredo Guevara, a young Communist filmmaker who had been—and continues to be—a close friend of Fidel Castro since his university days; Oscar Pino Santos, an economics journalist with links to the Party; Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, a geographer who joined Che in Las Villas, also close to the PSP’s Marxist approach; Vilma Espín, the wife of Raúl Castro; and Che Guevara. They all worked together for several months, outside the margins of the official government institutions, excluding even the minister of agriculture, Humberto Sorí Marín, who had drafted the revolutionary agrarian reform decre
e issued in the Sierra Maes-tra in 1958. Alfredo Guevara recalls their work as follows: “We would meet every night until dawn at Che’s house, then Fidel would come and change everything. Nobody knew what we were up to.”59

  In his January 27 lecture and in an interview with two Chinese journalists published years later, Che was very explicit as to the shortcomings of the previous reform. He described the guiding principle of the new and definitive distribution of land: to replace latifundia with cooperatives. Che’s interview with the Chinese is significant because of its date.60 He granted it on April 16, a full month before the new law was passed; but he asserted categorically that the law would be enacted, describing its content and major dispositions in full detail. The law was conceived in his home and under his auspices. Its purpose was not to distribute small plots to the peasants, but rather to nationalize or transform the great sugar, coffee, tobacco, and other plantations into cooperatives.

  Guevara’s project was more political than economic. He sought to destroy the latifundia as a power base for the oligarchy and foreign landowners, rather than to redistribute wealth by dividing the land into thousands of small plots. Che realized that such a reform would imply a major confrontation with Cuban landowners, especially the sugar producers, and with the Americans. He also believed that, under the existing compensation scheme, land expropriation would be a long and tedious process. Finally, he understood that the mechanism intended to implement the law, the future National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), could become a powerful means to radicalize the Revolution.

  The economic problem was a very real one. The Cuban economy could not prosper on sugar alone. In 1925, the sugar harvest had surpassed five million tons; in 1955, it barely exceeded four million. In the meantime, the population had increased by 70 percent, and its requirements had grown even more. Diversification and industrialization were thus the catchwords of the day not only among revolutionaries and Marxists, but even within the technocratic and business community. But exports made up 40 percent of the national income, and sugar accounted for 80 percent of total exports. Thus, there could be no diversification, industrialization, or even higher growth rates without transforming the country’s agricultural structure.*16 As long as Cuban and foreign capital centered on sugar cane, allowing for high short-term profits with a stable market and attractive prices, and the sugar sector continued to dominate the island’s economy and politics, there could be no future for Cuba. Che’s real agenda was thus to break the power of the oligarchy, diversify the economy, and raise peasant incomes. It was critical, then, to expropriate the latifundia, collectivize land ownership, and diversify crops and exports. In Che’s lucid analysis,

  When we propose an agrarian reform and enact revolutionary laws to achieve this goal quickly, we give special consideration to land redistribution, the creation of a strong domestic market and a diversified economy. For the moment, the purpose of agrarian reform is to promote sugar production and improve production techniques. In the second place, we must allow farmers to have their own plots, promote the opening of virgin land, and cultivate all arable land. Thirdly, we must increase production, and reduce our imports of basic grains … we must undertake national industrialization … which requires the adoption of protective measures for new industries, and consumer markets for new products. If we open the doors of the market to guajiros without any purchasing power, there will be no way to expand the domestic market.61

  Che was fully aware of the implications of his position, and the direction in which it pointed. It was part of a long-term strategy which was self-evident to him and which, furthermore, would be in harmony with future revolutionary processes in other countries:

  Cuba’s anti-popular regime and its army have now been destroyed, but the dictatorship’s social system and its economic foundations have yet to be abolished. Many people from before are still working within the nation’s structures. To protect the fruits of the revolutionary victory and allow for a continuous development of the revolution, we must take another step forward.62

  The agrarian reform enacted on May 17, 1959—just days after Fidel Castro returned from a successful trip to the United States, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina—was moderate in certain aspects, but its implications were not. It sanctioned the expropriation of large sugar and rice plantations and allowed for compensation through high-interest-paying but long-term bonds. The United States nonetheless denounced the law in no uncertain terms, in a diplomatic note dated June 11. The sugar companies’ stock prices fell on the New York Stock Exchange, and firms whose assets had been confiscated—including United Fruit and the King Ranch—immediately prepared reprisals. The cattle ranchers of Camagüey, who were also affected, entered into all sorts of conspiracies; the region would remain a hotbed of counterrevolutionary activity for years to come.

  Following the protest unleashed by the Agrarian Reform Law, President Manuel Urrutía resigned on July 13, after a tactical and short-lived abdication by Fidel Castro from his post as prime minister. Many liberals were subsequently expelled from the government by Castro, leading to a much closer alliance with the Communists. The crisis was largely triggered by Che’s emphasis on radical land reform, promoted during the meetings at Tarará and then Cojímar. The establishment of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) in accordance with his plans completed the process. It was responsible for rural health, housing, and education; it was empowered to set up centers supplying machinery and services to peasants; and it was entrusted with the industrialization of the countryside.*17 The INRA’s first operational director, under the formal presidency of Fidel Castro, was Nuñez Jiménez, a close collaborator of Guevara’s since Santa Clara. Che himself was the first administrator of the Department of Industries, a virtual Ministry of Industry within the INRA.

  During his recovery at Tarará and until his voyage around the world in June, Guevara was also entrusted with another task central to the Revolution: the training of the new army, especially in ideological terms. At the fortress of La Cabaña, Che had already launched a series of educational projects. The leadership’s central thesis left little room for doubt. In the words of Raúl Castro, “The Rebel Army is a political army whose objective is to defend the interests of the people.”63 Che formulated its goals with greater precision and frankness:

  We must move rapidly toward restructuring the Rebel Army, because we improvised an armed corps of peasants and workers, many of them illiterate, without culture or technical training. We must train this army for the high duties entrusted to its members, giving them a technical and cultural education. The Rebel Army is the vanguard of the Cuban people.64

  The new armed forces became the main pillar of the revolutionary regime, and would remain so. This was partly due to the mission Che entrusted to them, and his way of instilling in them a certain ideology and motivation.

  Guevara soon organized courses for both officers and troops. Following the model of Raúl Castro’s Schools for Troops Instructors in his Second Front (led by members of the PSP), Che inaugurated at La Cabaña what would later become the Schools for Revolutionary Instruction (EIR). Armando Acosta and Pablo Ribalta, Che’s companions during the “invasion,” and Angel Ciutah formed the core of instructors, along with several other Soviet-Spanish veterans. The idea of linking the army’s ideological training to the Communists at La Cabaña made sense. Che’s differences with the PSP were mainly tactical; at the time, he was an orthodox Marxist-Leninist. Many of his best cadres were members of the PSP, and he did not have unlimited human resources to devote to the army training program. He had to work quickly, using whoever was available. Conviction and convenience coincided once again in Che’s decisions.

  It soon became public that a radical ideological training program was underway at La Cabaña. A first indication that something important was happening in the fortress appeared in a note from the American Embassy dated March 20:

  The Embassy has been receiving increasing reports during the past
few weeks of Communist penetration of La Cabaña Fortress, under the command of Major Ernesto “Che” Guevara. These reports cover the personnel which Guevara has brought in, the orientation of the education courses which are being given to the troops stationed there, and the manner in which the revolutionary tribunals at Cabaña have functioned. It has been very difficult, however, to obtain specific, concrete evidence of Communist penetration in that important military installation.65

  The cable later refers to a series of art exhibits, ballet performances, and poetry recitals organized by the Department of Culture at La Cabaña.*18 Another report drafted by the Department of Defense at about the same time mentioned the establishment of a new body within the armed forces. It stated that the Department of Culture, also known as G-6, had created a unit whose ostensible purpose was to teach illiterate recruits how to read and write, but it also offered Marxist instruction. The report concluded that “penetration of the Army has been especially effective in the Havana area because of the position as commander of the Havana garrison of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, a leftist if not an actual Communist, and probably still the Number Three man in actual power in Cuba.”66

  During those months, Che was also involved in a third task. In early January, Fidel Castro began consolidating his fragile alliance with the Popular Socialist Party. The basis for it lay in the partnership that had developed in the Sierra Maestra during the visit of Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, along with the incorporation of PSP cadres into Che’s column and Raúl Castro’s Second Front. It also stemmed from the creation in October 1958 of a Unified National Workers Front (FONU), which brought together PSP trade unionists and 26th of July militants. The process was not without friction and contradictions, giving rise to countless polemical articles in the PSP’s Hoy and the 26th of July’s daily Revolution; the “rapprochement” was also secret.