Strictly speaking, Che played a minor part in the Bay of Pigs episode and in confirming the regime’s Socialist character. But he played a major role in defining the course that shaped these events. His ideas inspired the resolutions adopted by the revolutionary leadership; his predictions all proved true during that spring filled with hope and optimism. Two days before the Bay of Pigs, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Three months later, he would accompany Castro and Guevara in celebrating the anniversary of the Moncada assault. The future belonged to socialism. Everything seemed possible, and many of the decisions taken in subsequent years stemmed—inevitably and understandably—from the conceit of the Cuban leaders who had “defeated imperialism.” By mid-1963, their mistakes and recklessness would translate into shortages, internal division, and tensions with the USSR. But for over two years, Che Guevara had an opportunity rarely granted to a revolutionary and intellectual: to experiment freely with an entire economy, a society, and even, in a sense, with human nature. His place in the iconographic skies of the twentieth century is due, above all, to his emphasis on the latter—his attempt at social engineering.
It all began with the Bay of Pigs. The Eisenhower administration had been contriving to overthrow Castro by force since March 1960. The CIA recruited groups of Cuban exiles in Miami and trained them in various parts of Central America, especially Guatemala. This was no coincidence, since it was the scene of one of the Agency’s greatest victories in the Cold War, the overthrow of the Arbenz government seven years earlier. Several operators in this new U.S. undertaking, including David Atlee Phillips, had participated in the 1954 coup. When John Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower on January 20, 1961, plans for the invasion were already far advanced and diplomatic relations already broken. The only thing missing was the green light from Washington.
The plan was relatively simple, and ludicrous. It relied on a series of faulty and biased analyses asserting that the Cuban population, weary of the regime’s terror and privations, would welcome a brave and prestigious expeditionary force. According to CIA informers, division and unrest prevailed within the rebel armed forces; they would not hesitate to rise against the government. The plan called for the “freedom fighters” to establish a beachhead near the Escambray mountains where there was some armed opposition to the regime. There they would receive foreign (that is, United States) recognition and support, and deploy a massive propaganda campaign. This would suffice to topple the government, or at least involve it in a civil war which would quickly become internationalized.
The plan never called for more than a limited U.S. commitment. The United States would organize the Miami plotters, arm and train them, and supply them with the ships needed to sail from Central America. It would also provide the planes required to destroy the meager Cuban air force before it got off the ground. But there would not be any direct or explicit involvement. The State Department opposed it and Kennedy, despite his indecision, finally accepted the counsel of his diplomatic advisers. U.S. participation depended on the exiles setting up a provisional government, which would then call for assistance.
Kennedy’s misgivings led him to implement several changes in the plan. The landing point was shifted to the Bay of Pigs, in the Zapata Marsh—a strange choice, as it was Fidel Castro’s favorite fishing spot (and the site of the meeting with Anastas Mikoyan described in the previous chapter). The regime had invested a great deal of money in vast, outlandish schemes to develop the area. The destitute peat-and-tar collectors, the marsh’s only inhabitants, were among the favorite sons of the Revolution, owing to their poverty and marginalization, and to Fidel’s special affection. But neither the CIA nor the exiles knew this—or if they did, they did not share their knowledge with Kennedy or his principal advisers.4 Nor did they explain to the newcomer at the White House that, in choosing the Bay of Pigs, he had eliminated a key contingency plan for the invaders in case they were unable to hold their position on the coast. They could no longer seek protection in the Escambray mountains, as Castro had done in the Sierra Maestra.5 The new beachhead was miles away from the sheltering range, separated from it precisely by the impenetrable Zapata swamp.
On the U.S. side, the Bay of Pigs was a tragicomedy of errors. Reluctant to appear weak before the old cold warriors of the CIA and the Pentagon, Kennedy felt obliged to push ahead with the expedition. But he refused to provide it with the resources to succeed. The first air strike was launched from Nicaragua, and was immediately denounced at the United Nations by the Cuban Foreign Minister. Kennedy then postponed a second air strike (meant to destroy the Cuban air force on the ground) until the invaders’ brigade had captured a landing strip near the Bay of Pigs, so he could plausibly claim that the marauding B-26 bombers had taken off from there. But the brigade was unable to secure the strip. Short of ammunition, it could not be resupplied because the ships anchored at sea could not approach the coast, defended as it was by the Cuban air force. The latter had not been destroyed, after all, because Kennedy did not authorize the second air strike.*1 The Bay of Pigs, as seen from Washington, was nothing but a series of misunderstandings. The CIA spurred Kennedy on, convincing him that the Cuban population would rise up in arms, and Kennedy in turn deceived his intelligence services. The operators in the field never believed that the President of the United States would stand by passively while an expeditionary force of almost 1,500 men, armed and trained by his own government, went down to defeat. But he did.
From the Cuban viewpoint, the Bay of Pigs proved two things: the Revolution’s popular support, and Fidel Castro’s political intuition. The Cuban leadership evidently knew about the bizarre landing before it happened. Its intelligence services had infiltrated the community of conspirators in Miami, and even the exiles concentrated in Guatemala. Cuba was ready to resist, and attempted to speed up arms deliveries from the Socialist bloc. But the Soviet MIG-17s, tanks, and armored transports did not arrive quickly enough. Nor was there enough time to train a regular professional army; the Rebel Army consisted of only 25,000 men. Castro had no choice but to arm the population. He would never have done so had he not been certain of their loyalty and support. The resulting 200,000 militiamen played a central role in Cuba’s victory. They allowed Castro to deploy lightly armed, mobile forces to all possible landing points, forming a huge early-warning network. The militia’s training was entrusted to the Department of Instruction of the Rebel Armed Forces, headed by Che since 1960. His contribution to the victory was thus crucial. Without the militias, Castro’s military strategy would not have been viable; without Che, the militias would not have been reliable.
As a U.S. historian has said, Castro had enough political instinct that “when Kennedy firmly excluded the use of U.S. forces against Cuba, Castro believed him.”6 He comprehended that the White House plan—and the CIA blueprint it was based on—was to duplicate the Guatemala operation of 1954. It would include an indirect invasion, a beachhead, and a provisional government, followed by foreign assistance and recognition. Castro realized that the invading force had to be crushed immediately, before all this could happen. He would have to deploy all his forces at the invasion beachhead as quickly as possible. He also needed to make the best possible use of his tiny air force (fifteen dilapidated B-26s, three training T-33s, and six Sea Furies) to sink or disperse the expedition’s supply ships, thus cutting off its reinforcements, communications, ammunition, and the fuel for its amphibious vehicles. To a large extent, the battle of the Bay of Pigs was won in the air.
Of course, Castro also had a strategy in the event of a direct American invasion. Raúl Castro would be in charge of defending Oriente province, Juan Almeida the center of the island, and Ernesto Che Guevara Pinar del Río, Havana, and the Occidente province as a whole. Thus, Che did not see combat at Playa Girón itself. Moreover, his sidearm accidentally went off when he dropped it a day before the battle, wounding him in the cheek, at the Consolación del Sur headquarters in Pinar del Río. He was forced to s
pend almost twenty-four hours in hospital, and was weakened for several days. In any event, Castro, convinced that Girón was the counterrevolutionaries’ principal theater of operations, concentrated all his forces there from the second day. Everything would be won or lost at the Bay of Pigs. As it turned out, Fidel won. The native Cubans lost 161 men, and the Miami exiles 107. But 1,189 invaders from the ill-fated 2506 Brigade were taken prisoner. Castro would later send them back to Kennedy, in exchange for 52 million dollars in food and medicines.
Months later, Che Guevara thanked Kennedy’s envoy to the Punta del Este Conference for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “Thanks to you,” he said only partly in jest, “we were able to consolidate the revolution at a particularly difficult time.”7 He was right. The Bay of Pigs allowed the regime to close ranks and tighten a few screws, mounting the formidable state security apparatus that would become the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the machinery of the Interior Ministry. In addition, from then on the government would—quite justifiably—be able to lambast all its opponents as U.S. agents or puppets. As the British ambassador informed the Foreign Office:
Fidel Castro has managed in 1961 to lead his country well and truly into the communist camp against the wishes and instincts of the majority of people. This was a tour de force which, I believe, not even the prodigious Fidel Castro could have brought off had it not been for that blue-print for disaster, the April invasion—an operation which, as seen from here, made the Suez campaign look like a successful picnic. … I doubt whether United States prestige has ever been lower in any country than it was here shortly after the invasion.8
Between April 15 and 17, over 100 thousand presumed conspirators against the regime were detained in Havana and taken to the Blanquita Theater, La Cabaña fortress, the Matanzas baseball stadium, and Principe Castle. Their leaders were shot immediately or shortly afterward. The shift toward greater rigidity, or “dogmatism” as it would later be called, became even more acute. As Che confided to the Soviet ambassador, Sergei Kudriavtsev, “Cuba’s counterespionage agencies were going to repress the counterrevolutionaries in a decisive way, not allowing them to raise their head again as had happened before the attack.”9 The government formalized its alliance with the Popular Socialist Party, which rapidly took advantage of the situation to attempt a takeover of it, the new Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORIs), the nucleus of the new party. As the British ambassador noted:
Already an interlocking network of revolutionary committees, organisations and movements such as the Committees of the Defense of the Revolution, Rebel Youth Movements, Revolutionary Women Societies, have spawned over the countryside forming cells in factories, collective farms, army, militia and trades unions. Such evidence as we have shows that they have been carrying out their functions with a great deal more resolution, order and discipline than was ever expected of Cubans. Through them the Government operates and organises everything from the nationwide literacy campaign to village protest meetings, from the implementation of security measures against counterrevolutionaries to the distribution of ration tickets. Through them the Government stays close to the people and knows what they are thinking. Through them again it is able to correct “wrong thinking,” stop dissatisfaction before it spreads and use all just and unjust means of persuasion for the good of the cause.10
Above all, the Bay of Pigs allowed the regime to reassert its economic and political course, and to face down the United States in the eyes of the rest of Latin America. Che was entrusted with two tasks in the latter regard. First, he headed the Cuban delegation to the Punta del Este Conference in Uruguay. There Douglas Dillon, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, announced the details of the Alliance for Progress, which had been launched with great pomp on March 13, 1961. Che was quick to denounce the entire initiative. Strengthened by the Bay of Pigs, he castigated Dillon and the so-called Latin American Marshall Plan, as well as the “weak and sycophantic” governments of Latin America. Castro also asked Guevara to try to make contact with the U.S. administration, preferably through one of Kennedy’s university-based, “best and brightest” young eggheads. Che accomplished both tasks with skill and assurance, though also with his characteristic hyperbole and intransigence.
The Cuban government had resolved some time before to attend the conference. Che communicated the decision to Kudriavtsev on July 26, though he asked him to keep it secret. Cuba’s intention, he said, was to highlight the differences between the U.S. aid program, to be unveiled by Kennedy’s envoy, and Soviet assistance to Cuba.11 Che’s designation as head of the delegation followed the same rationale as in his previous missions abroad. He was the only high-level Cuban leader, aside from Castro himself, qualified to play an international role; Raúl Roa, the foreign minister, lacked the charisma for such missions.
By now, Guevara had sized up perfectly the rationale of Washington’s behavior. As he saw it, the Cuban Revolution was a major threat to U.S. interests in Latin America. The solution for the United States was to contain it by tolerating a lesser evil. The lesser evil involved transferring large amounts of resources to Latin America, while promoting limited social and political reforms to forestall any revolutionary aspirations within the Americas. As Che had foreseen almost a year before in his conversation with the Soviet ambassador in Havana,12 the U.S. government’s actual plan, derived from this strategy, was transparently obvious:
Give priority help to Latin America, especially during the next ten years, for improvement in health and education, reform of tax systems and administration, housing improvement, better and more equitable land utilization, construction of roads and other public facilities, establishment of productive enterprises and for better distribution of income.
Devote special attention to the improvement of rural areas and of living conditions of subsistence Indian and campesino groups.
Urge and assist all countries to establish long-term, balanced development plans.13
Che recognized that the U.S. strategy was ingenious, and accordingly designed an effective and far-reaching response. His plan reflected both the times and the prospects of the Cuban economy as he assessed them. This was the period when Nikita Khrushchev threatened to “bury” the Americans, and to surpass in ten years their production of steel (then considered by the Soviets the paradigm of modern industry). The Kremlin’s thesis of peaceful coexistence had unleashed a fierce competition between the two superpowers, especially in terms of economic performance. Thus Che’s reasoning at Punta del Este. The most incontrovertible proof of Cuba’s superiority over the other countries of Latin America (until they consummated their own revolutions) would be its economy. Thanks to the Revolution, socialism, and Soviet assistance, the island would attain levels of development and well-being unknown in the rest of the region, despite U.S. aid. Che chose this area above all others because it was the most important for Marxists at the time, because it was his area of responsibility, and because it seemed the best way to solve the critical problems of Latin America.
He arrived in Montevideo on August 4. He was received by a youthful crowd (huge in some accounts, disappointing in others) that escorted him to Punta del Este, a beach resort frequented by the oligarchy of the Plate River region. Normally shut down during the southern winter, it had been refurbished for the conference. Che’s trip was like a triumphant return home. His family and friends from school and university came from Argentina to see him. One of them recalls the scene: “He asked about his friends, though just the ones he was interested in, and the people he had loved, particularly Chichina and her uncles.”14
Once again, he traveled without Aleida. It was a chance for him to bask in his mother’s love and youthful memories, and in the adulation of personal and political groupies of both sexes. In a secret memorandum that Richard Goodwin sent to John Kennedy after meeting Che at a party, he reported that when the latter arrived “the women threw themselves at him.”15 His trip, then, had its social side, too, as he met with friends an
d family for long conversations in the hotels and casinos of the south Atlantic resort.
Guevara’s speech at the Conference of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council addressed several important issues. First of all, he repeatedly reminded the other Latin American delegates that they should thank the Cuban Revolution for whatever U.S. assistance they might obtain:
This new phase is beginning under the sign of Cuba, a free land in America; and this conference and the special treatment your delegations have received and whatever loans are approved, all bear the name of Cuba, whether their beneficiaries like it or not.16
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