Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  *7 As Che wrote in a later text, “One must … avoid all disruptions that might undermine the troops’ morale but, following the rules of guerrilla warfare, one must allow people without previous commitments who mutually love each other to contract marriage in the sierra and lead a married life.” Ernesto Che Guevara, “La guerra de guerrillas,” in Escritos y discursos, vol. 1 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977), p. 133. Che evidently considered his own marriage to Hilda Gadea emotionally canceled, though formally intact; so he does not appear to have been excessively strict in this regard.

  *8 Fidel Castro, letter to Ernesto Guevara, December 26, 1958, quoted in Franqui, Diario. The first forces to enter the capital were those of Gutiérrez Menoyo and the student organization. Despite Fidel’s orders, they occupied the university and the presidential palace.

  *9 Guevara’s biographers sidestep the matter entirely. Szulc, Quirk, and Geyer, who have narrated the life of Castro, simply ignore the issue. Jean-Pierre Clerc insinuates that Che’s marginalization was due to his foreign nationality. Jean-Pierre Clerc, Fidel de Cuba (Paris: Ramsay, 1988), p. 178.

  *10 Smith (Havana) to Secretary of State (Dept. of State), January 14, 1959 (Confidential), and Foreign Service Dispatch, Earl Smith/Embassy to Dept. of State, January 13, 1959 (Confidential), dispatch 725. In a cable dated December 29, 1959, the Embassy’s estimate rose to “over 500.” Braddock/AmEmbassy to Dept. of State, December 29, 1959, “Indications and Manifestations of Communism and Anti-Americanism in Cuban Revolutionary Regime.”

  †1 This figure is cited by, among others, Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, a Basque Catholic priest, who researched the matter in depth and from a stance sympathetic to the revolutionary regime. See Aspiazú, Justicia revolucionaria, quoted in Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, Anatomy of a Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960), p. 70.

  ‡1 Daniel James asserts that Guevara told Félix Rodríguez at La Higuera, on the eve of his execution, that Che himself had sent 1,500 enemies of the Revolution to their death. See Daniel James, Che Guevara (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), p. 113. But Rodríguez does not mention this in his memoirs, or in his report to the CIA, or in an interview with this author in Miami in 1995.

  *11 Huber Matos, interview with English journalists, London (transcription made available to the author, 1995). According to Franqui, “At a certain point Raúl and Che demanded Matos’s and the other conspirators’ execution. But then Che changed his mind when he saw the courageous way in which they all stood up to Fidel.” Carlos Franqui, interview with the author, San Juan, August 20, 1996.

  *12 The radiological report from the armed forces’ medical service says “double and diffused pulmonary emphysema.” See Adys Cupull and Froilán González, Un hombre bravo (Havana: Ediciones Capitán San Luis, 1995), p. 392.

  †2 “Che lived in a modern and comfortable summer residence on the beach of Tarará. … I visited him there on January 17, 1959.” José Pardo Llada, Fidel y el Che (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1989), p. 123.

  ‡2 The first revolutionary government included no members of the PSP and few leaders from the 26th of July Movement—quite to the contrary, it comprised many liberals and traditional moderates, starting with the president, Manuel Urrutía. The speed with which the Batista regime collapsed, and Castro’s intuitive caution, made this inevitable; but his vision for the future, as well as Che’s, made a parallel government equally unavoidable.

  ** “I thought of going with Fidel to Venezuela. Later events kept me from doing so; I thought of going shortly afterward, and an illness is keeping me in bed.” Ernesto Guevara, letter to Alberto Granado, quoted in Alberto Granado, Con el Che Guevara de Córdoba a la Habana (Córdoba: Ediciones Op Oloop, 1995), p. 87.

  *13 Hugh Thomas, for instance, lists the authors of the Agrarian Reform Law, but omits any mention of the house at Tarará or of the secret meetings held in it. Carlos Franqui was equally unaware of the group’s deliberations. Carlos Franqui, interview.

  †3 Carlos Franqui, interview with the author. It is unlikely, though, that Che knew of, or participated in, Ciutah’s apparent links to the Mercader brothers, Joaquín and Ramón, despite Franqui’s claim in his books. Ramón murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, spent twenty years in a Mexican jail, and then traveled to Prague through Havana in 1960; Joaquín was also a member of the Soviet security services.

  *14 A secret report by the U.S. Department of Defense, dated April 15, 1959, states: “Guevara also has control of the so-called liberation groups staging in Cuba presumably for two eventual invasions of Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He favors those with communist leadership and opposes others.” Department of Defense, “Working Paper for Castro Visit: Summary of the Present Status of the Cuban Armed Forces,” April 15, 1959 (Secret), RG 59, lot file 61d248, Reg. Affairs 1951/1952, box 16.

  †4 This account is from René Despestre himself, who over and beyond the license one would expect from a poet, seems to be a reliable source. Interview with the author, Princeton, N.J., October 27, 1995.

  *15 Tomás Borge, La paciente impaciencia (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1989), p. 149. Borge also mentions that Che “gave us 20,000 dollars … that were used in the guerrilla struggle of Rio Coco and Bocay.” Ibid., p. 167.

  *16 A mission from the World Bank visited Cuba in 1950 and concurred with this diagnosis and consequent remedies: “Cuba’s development should move toward the following objectives: 1. To make Cuba less dependent on sugar by promoting additional activities—not by curtailing sugar production. 2. To expand existing—and create new—industries producing sugar by-products or using sugar as a raw material. 3. Vigorously to promote non-sugar exports in order to reduce the emphasis of the country’s exports on one product. Among the most promising possibilities for achieving this aim are the promotion of mineral exports and the export of a variety of crude and processed foodstuffs. 4. To make further progress in producing in Cuba, for domestic consumption, a wide range of foodstuffs, raw materials, and consumer goods now imported.” World Bank, Report on Cuba, quoted in Huberman and Sweezy, Anatomy, p. 108.

  *17 In the words of Nuñez Jiménez, “The INRA, presided over by Fidel, was the bastion from which the Revolution was carried forward in those first few months. It was the body that finished off the bourgeoisie and imperialism. It was not expedient to suddenly change the Council of Ministers. Our people were not yet ready ideologically for us to stage an open battle between the Revolution and the counterrevolution, which was waiting in ambush within the government itself. Fidel replicated in the INRA the major functions of the Revolutionary Government.” Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, En marcha con Fidel (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), p. 309.

  *18 In a cable dated April 14, 1959, the U.S. Embassy confirmed that “Much of the strength of the Communist effort in Cuba is directed toward infiltration of the Armed Forces. La Cabaña appears to be the main Communist center, and its Commander, Che Guevara, is the most important figure whose name is linked with Communism. Guevara is definitely a Marxist if not a Communist. He is a frequent guest speaker before the Communist front organizations. Political indoctrination courses have been instituted among the soldiers under his command at La Cabaña. Material used in these courses, some of which the Embassy has seen, definitely follows the Communist line.” Foreign Service Dispatch, Braddock/AmEmbassy to Dept. of State, April 14, 1959, “Growth of Communism in Cuba” (Confidential), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Department of State Central File, LBJ Library.

  *19 When the Argentine ambassador in Washington met with Undersecretary of State Roy Rubottom on January 6, he told him that he “had spent two hours with General Montero, who is a friend of Guevara’s father. The Ambassador said that he had asked the General about young Guevara. The General had said that the Guevaras are an old and conservative family of San Juan, and that the boy’s sentiments are entirely democratic and not at all communistic. He had fought against Peron, and then had gone to Peru, where he married
a Peruvian girl. The Ambassador said he was repeating this to Mr. Rubottom because he knew there had been some thought that Guevara had communistic tendencies.” Department of State, “Memorandum of Conversation Between Roy Rubottom and Argentine Ambassador Barros Hurtado” (Confidential), January 6, 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960.

  *20 The report included comments by Che on the fall of Arbenz in Guatemala—a topic very much in fashion in Cuba during that period. According to the Embassy informer, Che believed that freedom of the press had been a decisive factor in the defeat of 1954. It should have been curtailed, in his view; and Cuba should avoid making the same mistake. Thanks to Rolando Morán’s earlier conversations with Che at the Argentine Embassy in Guatemala, we know that the young Guevara did indeed hold this opinion (see footnote on page 71, Chapter 3).

  *21 “In the Department’s opinion the Castro who came to Washington was a man on his best behavior who carefully followed the advice of his accompanying Ministers and accepted the direction of an American public relations expert. The result achieved by Castro in terms of a favorable reception by the public and the information media may therefore be considered as contrived. At the same time, we should not underestimate the effect on Castro of the friendliness and openness of the American people and officials and their willingness to hear his plea for an understanding of the Cuban revolution. When he departed from Washington for Princeton on April 20 he was certainly warmer in manner toward the Department officials who bade him farewell than he was in his greeting to them upon his arrival. By his apparent frankness and sincerity he succeeded in allaying much of the criticism which had arisen against him in the general press and public. With regard to his position on communism and the cold war struggle Castro cautiously indicated that Cuba would remain in the western camp.” Robert Murphy (Deputy Undersecretary of State) to Gordon Gray (Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs), May 1, 1959, “Unofficial Visit of Prime Minister Castro to Washington—a Tentative Evaluation” (Confidential), Declassified Documents Catalog, Washington, Jan./Feb. 1989, file series no. 137, vol. 15, no. 1.

  *22 “Che … did not agree with the idea of the trip, though he was careful not to say so.” Hugo Gambini, El Che, p. 231.

  *23 Jean Cormier, doubtless due to a mistake on the part of his sources, notes that Aleida was pregnant at the time of the wedding. He insinuates that Che married her because of the Sierra decree obliging any guerrilla fighter who made his companion pregnant to marry her. Jean Cormier, Che Guevara (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995), p. 265. Che’s first child with his second wife, Aleidita, was born in November 1960; her mother cannot have been pregnant with her in June 1959. The only other possibility is that Aleida March lost the first baby (voluntarily or not).

  Chapter 6

  The “Brain of the Revolution”;

  the Scion of the Soviet Union

  Che left for Africa on June 12, 1959, with his bodyguard, José Argudín, and two government officials, Omar Fernández and Francisco García Vails. They were joined in Cairo by a mathematician, Salvador Vilaseca, and in India by the journalist José Pardo Llada. The trip included countries either politically or economically important to Cuba—Japan, Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt—and others less significant, like Ceylon, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan, and Morocco. The true nature of the expedition was never entirely apparent, though speculation abounded. After Che’s victories on the domestic front, perhaps Fidel decided it was best to remove him temporarily from the public eye. Indeed, the first great crisis of the Revolution arose during his absence. Following the resignation of President Urrutía, several moderate or liberal ministers departed the government and the regime shifted to the left. On July 26, a huge celebration took place in Havana commemorating the assault on the Moncada. But nobody could blame Guevara for the government’s radicalization: he was thousands of miles away.

  Certainly the pressures on Guevara were mounting, imposed by Cuban and American critics alike. The serious setbacks suffered by the moderates and the concerns of the United States were increasingly—and with some reason—attributed to the growing influence of Che and of Raúl Castro. But if the trip was indeed a form of “semi-exile,” as Pardo Llada has stated, it did not last for long.*1 When he returned in September, Che took charge of the INRA’s Department of Industries and, weeks later, the National Bank of Cuba.

  Perhaps Che was the only close aide Fidel could count on to represent the Revolution abroad. Raúl Castro, who attended a special session of the OAS Council of Ministers in Santiago, Chile, on August 15, made a poor showing. He was unprepared, poorly dressed, and maladroit. Furthermore, Che’s responsibilities did not require his full-time presence. Fidel could manage without him for a time. Besides, the victorious rebels had no diplomatic skills or international expertise whatsoever. They might have imagined that the three-month trip would be of prime importance to the Revolution, though in fact, it was perfectly dispensable. Finally, there was the Argentine’s personal fascination with the rest of the world. After six months in Havana, he probably yearned for new horizons. The ports of call on the itinerary were too attractive to resist, in his first encounter with the world beyond Latin America.

  In Cairo, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, by then a hero of Arab and pan-Islamic nationalism, received Guevara with full honors. Che toured the Pyramids and Alexandria, where he spent a night in the royal palace of Montaza. He visited the Aswan Dam, still under construction, as well as the Suez Canal and Port Said. During his two weeks in Egypt he forged a close bond with Nasser, which would lead him to return five years later. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 and Britain’s boycott of Egyptian cotton made a strong impression on him: “[they] provoked an extremely dangerous situation from which [Egypt] was able to emerge thanks to the appearance of a buyer that purchased the entire harvest, which was the Soviet Union.”1 He might have reached the same conclusion regarding Aswan. When Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles decided to terminate U.S. funding for the dam, Nasser turned to Khrushchev. A year later, the United States boycotted Cuban sugar, and Esso, Shell, and Texaco refused to refine Soviet oil in Cuba. In both cases, the Soviet Union stepped into the breach.

  The U.S. State Department considered the visit to Egypt a success for the Cubans,†1 but Nasser himself was left with a different impression. Che was doubtless careful not to argue with his hosts. Salvador Vilaseca recalls that Guevara specifically pointed out to him a number of delicate matters, and instructed the members of his delegation as to what they should not talk about, in each country. For instance, Cuba had carried out a radical land reform, but in Egypt the visitors were ordered not to discuss the issue because, according to Che, many Egyptian leaders were large landowners. As Vilaseca recalled: “Our goál was not to fight but, on the contrary, to make friends.”2

  However, in his memoirs (actually written by Mohammed Heikal), Nasser relates a brief exchange precisely about land reform, following a rather strange question posed by Che Guevara:

  “How many Egyptian refugees had to flee the country?” When President Nasser answered that they had been very few, and that most of them were “white,” naturalized Egyptians of foreign origin, Che became upset. “That means,” he said, “that your revolution has not accomplished much. I measure the depth of change by the number of people it affects, who feel that there is no place for them in the new society.” Nasser explained that he was trying to “liquidate the privileges of one class, but not of the individuals in that class. …” Guevara insisted on his point of view and, as a consequence, not much came of the visit. President Nasser paid scant attention to the Cubans and their policies.3

  In India, Che’s group devoted twelve days to tourism (Agra and the Taj Mahal), to the economy (with visits to airplane factories and research centers), and to sociology (the poverty in Calcutta). The stifling heat provoked repeated asthma attacks. Despite Che’s efforts, Pardo Llada considered the trip unproductive. He describes a long dinner with Nehru at the former residence of the imperial viceroys, du
ring which Che tried to coax the founder of the republic to express a substantive opinion about any one of the topics of the day—but in vain.4 The U.S. intelligence services similarly found little of value in the visit to India, noting that “no trade relations were established with India, where the Cuban mission met with little success.”5 Che’s culture and sensitivity allowed him, however, to explore the complexities of Hindu civilization. He also learned lessons that he would take back to Cuba—not necessarily apt, but logical nonetheless: “the basis for a people’s economic development is determined by its technical advances.”6

  Che made “a good impression” in Japan, according to the Americans, though again he did not achieve any trade or financial agreements.7 The twelve-day stay combined work (visits to factories, ports, businessmen), tourism (Mount Fuji, sumo wrestling), and political activity (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). The visit was educational, enriching his own sense of culture and preparing him for the political tasks ahead: “We must recall that determination is far more important in the modern world than the existence of raw materials. … There is no reason for our country not to develop its iron and steel industry.”8 The secret of Japan’s success, in Che’s view, was willpower. To emulate it, a country needed only to deploy the same prodigious combination of desire and discipline. Of course, Che’s travel notes, published after his return to Cuba in Verde Olivo, the armed forces magazine he had just founded, did not allow for much depth or subtlety. But his social and cultural sensitivity far outweighed his economic or even political understanding.

  Che’s apparent admiration for Sukarno’s regime in Indonesia further illustrates this dichotomy. He established the following analogy: “Of all the countries [we] have visited, the Republic of Indonesia is perhaps the one that has developed in recent times a social historical project most like ours.”9 Drawing a parallel between the Cuban and Indonesian struggles for national liberation, he discovered in Sukarno “a genuine national hero.” The latter, “interpreting the popular will and the true needs of the people,” denied the “counterrevolutionaries’ right to sow discord and attack the regime which is the expression of the people’s armed struggle.”10 Guevara bestowed upon the Indonesian leader an arguable privileged status when he asked rhetorically, “Is Fidel Castro not a man of flesh and blood, a Sukarno, a Nehru, a Nasser?”11