Guevara, never one to be left behind, immediately declared that “Cuba is now … a glorious island in the center of the Caribbean, defended by the missiles of the greatest military power in history.”39 A few days later, the two Cuban leaders backed down from their belligerent tone. Fidel clarified that Cuba’s independence rested upon the justice of its cause, not on Soviet missiles. Che announced that any attempt to transform Cuba into a Soviet satellite would be resisted to the last man.40 Regardless, once the brief brouhaha subsided and private visits to the U.S.S.R. by Nuñez Jiménez in June and Raúl Castro took place in July, it was only natural that Guevara should lead the regime’s first official delegation to the Soviet Union in October 1960. It was to be the culmination of Che’s love affair with real, live socialism.
As Fidel and Che drew closer to the Soviet Union, tensions with the United States were exacerbated. The revolutionaries had already acquired a safety net for Cuba’s sugar sales and its oil supply, and soon would also acquire weapons. They could now proceed to harden their domestic positions, in a crackdown which Che supported and, to some extent, inspired. It was he who set up Cuba’s first “labor camp” in those months, in Guanahacabibes.41 He spent a few days there, establishing one of the most heinous precedents of the Cuban Revolution: the confinement of dissidents, homosexuals, and, later, AIDS victims. His retrospective justification was frank, concise, and thoroughly regrettable:
[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway. Whether long-standing militants or whatever, they should go to jail. We send to Guanahacabibes those people who should not go to jail, people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a greater or lesser degree, along with simultaneous sanctions like being deprived of their posts, and in other cases not those sanctions, but rather to be reeducated through labor, It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions are harsh but they are not brutal. …*9
Freedom of the press was curtailed. The government shut down several newspapers, and nationalized the principal press agencies. It also pressured the university to toe the line; independent-minded professors proceeded to leave the country. Of course, the authorities’ radicalization affected both sides: liberals and dissidents from the 26th of July Movement joined Batista’s ex-henchmen, who were preferred by the CIA, in combatting their new enemies—the Castro brothers and Che. Counterrevolutionaries stepped up their opposition through sabotage, burning the sugar crops, murdering literacy workers in the Escambray mountains, and organizing armed expeditions from abroad. The United States, for its part, also made a series of irrevocable decisions, resolving to overthrow Fidel Castro by any means. Preparations began for what would become the Bay of Pigs. Everyone was caught up in the rush of events—but some knew where it was leading, while others did not.
Che was one of those who knew, and this gave him enormous political power. In a secret cable in July, Ambassador Bonsai reported a rumor that Che was sponsoring a sort of coup d’état, at a time when stories circulated about a serious illness befalling Fidel Castro. He did not venture to give further details, but explained, “I am convinced that Guevara is the real leader of this country at this time, though he would not be able to govern for long without Fidel.”42 On August 8, Time magazine devoted its cover story to Che Guevara, calling him the “brain” of the Revolution, while Fidel was its heart and Raúl its fist.43 As Henry Luce’s magazine pontificated,
Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor.44
So when Che Guevara arrived in Moscow for an official visit on October 22, he had the world and Cuba at his fingertips. His goal, in principle, was to ratify and extend Soviet-Cuban cooperation. This was the second stop in a two-month journey—once again, a long absence from Cuba. He left behind Aleida (who was eight months pregnant), a precarious economic situation, and a series of pending “internationalist” projects. No matter. As in his youth in Buenos Aires, he was sailing under the banner of Henry the Navigator and Caetano Veloso: “To navigate is necessary, to live is not.”
The trip had been well planned. On September 1, Che had notified the new Soviet ambassador that he would head the Cuban mission to Moscow.45 His first concrete goal was to ensure that the U.S.S.R. would buy the sugar that the U.S. was meant to purchase in the following year. Guevara presented his concerns to the Soviet ambassador: the United States would not be buying the 3 million tons of sugar projected for 1961, and so Cuba hoped that the U.S.S.R. would fill the gap.46 He accompanied Cuba’s request with the possibility of its joining the Socialist bloc, and proposed a series of “conferences or meetings with representatives of other Socialist countries in Moscow.” He suggested several other important items for the agenda, like Cuba’s request for Soviet banking specialists (a contradiction in terms), as Fidel was planning to nationalize all private banks by the end of the year. Lastly he wished to propose the resale of Cuban gasoline, derived from Soviet oil surpluses, to countries like Canada—a scheme which would last until the late eighties, providing substantial hard-currency revenues.47
The first stop on the trip was Czechoslovakia, where Che had his first direct taste of a Warsaw Pact country. There he signed a cooperation agreement which included a 20-million-dollar loan and the establishment in Cuba of a Czech automotive plant (basically for trucks and tractors). Then on to the U.S.S.R., where Che stayed for just over two weeks. The Cuban delegation visited all the obligatory sites: the Lenin Museum, the Moscow subway, the Lenin and Stalin mausoleums, Red Square on the anniversary of the October Revolution, eight Moscow factories, and a Sovkhoz on the outskirts of the capital. They also attended a philharmonic concert and two performances of the Bolshoi Ballet. The visit included talks with Khrushchev and Mikoyan—to discuss, among other things, the election of John F. Kennedy, which had just occurred. In Leningrad, they visited the Smolny Institute, where Lenin launched the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the battleship Aurora, the Hermitage, and the Winter Palace, before heading for Stalingrad and Rostov-on-the-Don.
In brief, Che was given the standard tour for friends of the heroic Soviet Union. Careful examination of his schedule suggests that because there were few substantive aspects to the trip, his time therefore had to be filled with activities and amusements. Perhaps he was not meant to have any free time, so he would not see things or people other than those programmed for him.48 Either way, Guevara was unable to break away from his hosts, and did not get a chance to see any typical Soviet housing, the countryside, Siberia, or the less glorious sides of daily life in the U.S.S.R. The Soviets thought that just fine, explaining that he did not “make contact with the humble man in the street, because he was not one of those populists.” Che spent his time in conversations with officials, where he could “solve problems for his government that he could not resolve in the street.”49
On November 16, he left Moscow with his admiration for the fatherland of socialism intact. Of course, certain details disconcerted him. At a supper for friends at Alexeiev’s home, he noted that the dinner service was made of the finest china, and asked, “Do the proletarians really eat on dishes like this?”50 Carlos Franqui recalls an episode even more revealing of Che’s ideological bent at the time:
Upon my return to Havana, I had a run-in with Che Guevara at a Council of Ministers meeting. I talked about our experience in Prague with the “tuzeras” (the Czech girls in the hotels). And the stores for the “tuzex” (Czech Nomenklatura officials). Che, who had been there at the same time as us, heading a delegation, contradicted me: “Those are lies. You and your prejudices.” “I’m not lying, Che. Nor am I prejudiced. I’m just not blind like you, who see everything in rosy colors.” “I say it’s a lie. I was there just as you were, and I didn’t see anything.”*10
His naïveté was understandable if inex
cusable: he did not know the Socialist world; he had not followed the great debates in Western Europe about the Eastern bloc, and his contacts with Marxist intellectuals from abroad were just beginning. The lack of a militant past made its weight felt. Che did not even notice the vigorous debates stimulated by the Khrushchev thaw. Less than a year after his visit, the Russian capital would see the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, along with other heretical works. During his stay in Moscow, the city hosted the Congress of 81 Communist and Workers Parties of the World, where Chinese and Soviet representatives engaged in a ferocious fratricidal and irreversible struggle. Che remained oblivious to it all. He rejected Cuban ambassador Faure Chomón’s advice against placing a floral tribute at Stalin’s tomb; he went anyway. There were both Soviet and Cuban reasons not to do so: barely a year later, in November 1961, the body of the Little Father of the People would be transferred from Lenin’s mausoleum to its current burial place in the walls of the Kremlin.
It was in Moscow that Che was first flustered by the intensity and complexity of the incipient conflict between China and the Soviet Union. Before his departure from Havana, Soviet diplomats there had insisted on holding a “roundtable” meeting of Socialist countries in Moscow. Their reasons were obvious: the U.S.S.R. wished to divide purchases of Cuban sugar among its allies. Of the 3 million tons Che had asked the Soviets to buy, Khrushchev had approved only 1.2 million tons. The other countries were asked to purchase the remaining 1.8 million.
The real problem, however, was China’s participation in the roundtable. Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet undersecretary of foreign affairs entrusted with the matter, summoned the Chinese ambassador in Moscow to inform him of Che’s visit and invite him to attend the roundtable. For his part, Che sent a note to Faure Chomón from Prague, instructing him to invite all the Socialist countries, and especially China.51 In a sense, Che fell into the Soviet trap. Moscow wanted Sino-Cuban cooperation to take place under its sponsorship. Of course, the Chinese were not taken in. Dobrynin informed Deputy Minister Pushkin on the day of Che’s arrival that, despite Moscow’s insistence, “there is as yet no reply from Beijing” on Chinese participation in the roundtable.52 Indeed, China did not attend the meeting.*11
This was not Che’s only faux pas within the complexities of the Sino-Soviet confrontation. According to Nikolai Leonov, who was Che’s interpreter and shadow during his Russian trip, Che requested that he accompany him to Beijing and Pyongyang. Guevara was worried that he would not find a Spanish-language interpreter in North Korea; Beijing, of course, angrily refused him an entry visa even for transit.53 The interpreter/spy did, however, go to North Korea with the Cuban delegation. Once there, he was forced to stay at the Soviet Embassy, while the Cubans were at an official residence. This was quite logical: neither the Chinese nor the Koreans wanted a KGB agent in the Cuban delegation, even if he was supposedly just an interpreter.
The Congress of 81 Communist and Workers Parties of the World began while Che was in Moscow and concluded after his “side trip” to Beijing and Pyongyang. The Soviets’ purpose in holding the meeting was to have the international Communist movement condemn the “war-mongering and reckless” theses of Mao Zedong. When Che returned from China and learned of the conference’s conclusions, he declared, “We did not participate in drafting the communiqué from the Communist and Workers parties, but we fully support it.” He also asserted that “the declaration by the parties [is] one of the most important events of our time,” and emphasized the “militant solidarity of the Soviet people and the Cuban people.” And he further backed the Soviet position, stating that “Cuba [must] follow the example of peaceful development provided by the USSR.”54
The Congress was Khrushchev’s first attempt to excommunicate the Maoists from the Communist church. Though he was not entirely successful, China found itself isolated and surrounded. Its only ally, Enver Hoxha of Albania, walked out of the Congress on November 25. Che was in the dark regarding the falling-out between China and the Soviet Union, and regarding the Congress itself, despite the attendance of a Cuban PSP delegation headed by Aníbal Escalante:
The fact that Che Guevara knew nothing of the Conference of 81 was explicitly confirmed to me by a member of his entourage in Moscow. It seemed surprising to me, as the conference had dramatic moments and its outcome was uncertain until the last minute. …
Incredible as it might seem, the hardly united family of the Communist parties followed its habit, amid this huge fight, of keeping its “secrets only for initiates.” Even Che Guevara, a progressive revolutionary who was a friend par excellence of the Socialist bloc, had no right to be informed of the situation, even partially. These methods would eventually have an impact on Che who, after having been one of the warmest supporters of the USSR in Cuba, became one of its harshest critics.55
Guevara spent almost two weeks in China. He met Zhou Enlai and an aging but still lucid Mao Zedong. The Great Helmsman, partially overshadowed by Liu Shaoqi, was still paying for the enormous mistakes of the Great Leap Forward with a virtual internal exile. It would end only five years later when he declared “war against the general headquarters” and launched the Cultural Revolution. Che held three meetings with Mao. According to a recent biography—which provides no sources—the Chinese leader confided his willingness to support the struggle of Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo. Che would leave Beijing convinced of the purity of contemporary Chinese Marxism-Leninism.56 China pledged that it would buy one million tons of Cuban sugar in 1961, and Che was feted by Zhou Enlai at the Great Hall of the People. In his speech there, Guevara drew several analogies between the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, extolled the example of Chinese communism, and stated that it had opened “a new path for the Americas.” All of this led the U.S. State Department—and undoubtedly several Soviet analysts as well—to conclude that Che had taken sides with Beijing in the Sino-Soviet conflict—an evaluation that was premature and superficial, but prophetic.57 Before leaving, Che received news on November 24 of the birth of his first daughter with Aleida. His absence from Cuba confirmed his proclamation to his mother: the only thing that counted for him was the Revolution. Everything else was secondary.
Depending on the source, Che’s visit to Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang has been variously perceived as a success, a failure, or none of the above. The Americans considered it rather positive for Cuba, though they doubted whether the accords reached would actually bear fruit: “[CIA Director] Mr. [Allen] Dulles reported that Che Guevara had returned to Cuba with many agreements which, if they were fulfilled [which was unlikely, in Dulles’s view], would result in over half of Cuba’s trade taking place with the [Socialist] Bloc.”58 The British held a different view:
One of my colleagues is said to have been told by the Cuban Ambassador [in Moscow] that Guevara’s mission left for Peking disappointed with the practical results of their visit to Moscow, despite the extreme warmth of their public reception. Another of my colleagues claims to have been informed by sources close to Khrushchev that Soviet policy is now to avoid any action which could seriously jeopardize relations with the [incoming] Kennedy administration and that Cubans have therefore been told to avoid undue provocation, while keeping the kettle nicely on the boil. … The Cubans are now suffering from a serious shortage of dollars. … The Soviet Government … has, so far, been unwilling to do anything to relieve the dollar shortage. … Guevara may make another effort to secure dollars from the Soviet Union when he returns to Moscow from Peking.59
Che undoubtedly impressed his interlocutors. They did not expect a visitor from a Caribbean island to show such a substantive and orderly approach to his work. He knew the value of time; he kept his delegation on a short leash and followed the protocol’s schedule to the hour and minute. As Leonov recalls, “Contrary to Mexican and Latin American custom, he was very punctual; he hardly seemed Latin American at all.”60
All the same, some of his economic views were so o
utrageous that they can only have mystified his hosts:
He wanted to transform Cuba into an industrialized state overnight. Cuba has no metal which might serve as a basis for … machinery and transport. He intended to make Cuba into an exporter of metal and sheet steel in the Caribbean area. All the Soviet technicians opposed this; they said it was economic folly, that there is no coal or iron ore in Cuba, that everything has to be shipped there and that makes iron production much more expensive. Besides, Cuba does not have a skilled labor force. Che could not find arguments strong enough to convince them. They gave him more and more calculations showing that it would be anti-economic. The discussion lasted days. He insisted. He explained that this would help him create a working class and a market. … He insisted on the social, or rather the strategic, aspects, while the Soviets looked at economic calculations, costs, markets: You don’t even have a market for an iron and steel plant, for one million tons a year. Imagine, in 15 years you’ll have 15 million tons of steel! What will you do with it?*12
After visiting China and North Korea, Che returned to Moscow, where, on December 19 (two months after his arrival), a joint communiqué was finally signed and issued announcing the sugar accord. During his stopover in East Berlin, he found another client for Cuba’s principal export. The only other event of note during his visit there was that he met a young German-Argentine translator, Tamara Bunke. She would die six years later, under the name “Tania,” in a hail of machine-gun fire while crossing the Rio Grande in Bolivia; her association with Che began then, long before she joined him in the Andean highlands.*13
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