MIKOYAN: Of course, it is necessary to speak sincerely. It is better to go to sleep than to hear insincere speeches.
GUEVARA: I also think so. … The USA, by achieving the withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba, in a way received the right to forbid other countries from making bases available. Not only do many revolutionaries think this way, but also representatives of the Front of People’s Action in Chile and the representatives of several democratic movements. Here, in my opinion, lies the crux of the recent events. Even in the context of all our respect for the Soviet Union, we believe that the decisions made by the Soviet Union were a mistake. … I think that the Soviet policy had two weak sides. You didn’t understand the significance of the psychological factor for Cuban conditions. This thought was expressed in an original way by Fidel Castro: “The USA wanted to destroy us physically, but the Soviet Union with Khrushchev’s letter [to Kennedy on November 27, accepting the missile withdrawal—JGC] destroyed us legally.”
MIKOYAN: But we thought that you would be satisfied by our act. We did everything so that Cuba would not be destroyed. We see your readiness to die beautifully, but we believe that it isn’t worth dying beautifully.
GUEVARA: To a certain extent you are right. You offended our feelings by not consulting us. But the main danger is in the second weak side of the Soviet policy. The thing is, you virtually recognized the right of the USA to violate international law. This did great damage to your own policy. This fact really worries us. It may cause difficulties for maintaining the unity of the Socialist countries. It seems to us that there already are cracks in the unity of the Socialist camp.
MIKOYAN: That issue worries us too. We are doing a lot to strengthen our unity, and with you, comrades, we will always be with you despite all the difficulties.
GUEVARA: To the last day?
MIKOYAN: Yes, let our enemies die. We must live and let live. … Comrade Guevara evaluated the past events in a pessimistic tone. I respect his opinion, but I do not agree with him. I will try during the next meeting to convince him, though I doubt my ability to do that. … I am satisfied by my meetings with you. … Basically, we have come to an agreement on the protocol. Besides that, I must say that I thought that I understood the Cubans, and then I listened to Comrade Che and understood that no, I still don’t know them.
ALEXEIEV: But Che is an Argentine.
MIKOYAN, to Che: Let’s meet and talk a little. … Our stake in Cuba is huge in both a material and moral [sense], and also in a military regard. Think about it, are we really helping you out of [our] overabundance? Do we have something extra? We don’t have enough for ourselves. No, we want to preserve the base of socialism in Latin America. You were born as heroes, before a revolutionary situation ripened in Latin America, but the Socialist camp still has not grown into its full capability to come to your assistance. We give you ships, weapons, people, fruits and vegetables. China is big, but for the time being it is still a poor country. There will come a time when we will show our enemies. But we do not want to die beautifully. Socialism must live. Excuse the rhetoric.*11
Already, the Christlike image of a beautiful death could be read on Che’s face. Perhaps Mikoyan, a cultivated Russian Armenian, remembered the scene of Prince Andrei’s first wound in War and Peace. Napoleon inspects the battlefield after his defeat at the Berezina and while contemplating the inert body of Andrei (who is actually still alive), exclaims to nobody in particular, “Quelle belle mort!”
*1 Since January, a CIA memorandum had warned: “The Cuban air force and naval vessels capable of opposing our landing must be knocked out or neutralized before our amphibious shipping makes its final run into the beach. If this is not done we will be courting disaster. … The CIA wanted maximum air power; the State Department wanted it kept at a minimum so that the planes could ostensibly originate in Cuba.” Peter Wyeth, Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 135.
*2 A speech by Che a few days before the Bay of Pigs partly justified these fears. He referred to the Americans as “the new Nazis of the world … they don’t even have the tragic greatness of those German generals who thrust all of Europe into the worst holocaust the world has ever known, and destroyed themselves in an apocalyptic ending. These new Nazis, cowardly felons and liars … [have been] vanquished by history.” Ernesto Che Guevara, “Discurso a las milicias en Pinar del Rio,” April 15, 1961, quoted in Ernesto Che Guevara, Escritos y Discursos, vol. 5 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977), p. 73.
*3 Other journalists have provided a different version. One journalist present at the beginning of the meeting, Daniel Garric of Le Figaro, asserted that “President Kennedy had sought the meeting, and Guevara did not present any objections.” Daniel Garric, L’Europeo, Milan, September 14, 1967, quoted in Gregorio Selser, Punta del Este contra Sierra Maestra (Buenos Aires: Editorial Hernández, 1969), p. 111.
†1 To this day, Goodwin keeps in his house in Concord, Massachusetts, the more elaborate box designated for Kennedy; he kept it quite visible in his offices at the White House and the State Department during the time he worked there. Goodwin, interview with the author, Concord, Mass., May 5, 1995.
*4 A well-informed Western ambassador described the outcome in a confidential report to his capital, as follows: “The evidence suggests that a period of withdrawal from the public view was used by Castro both to rally the support of his personal followers and to prove to the old Communists that they could not maintain themselves in power without him. Finally, as an apparent compromise old Communists were given important positions in the economic sphere, most notably Rodríguez as President of INRA … while the new Communists were ceded a clear majority in the Directorate of ORI. Castro, with this majority support, was then able to drive out old Communist Aníbal Escalante, who was made the scapegoat for the policy of working to place control of the Revolution exclusively in the hands of old Communists, which Castro terms ’sectarianism.”’ Ambassador George P. Kidd, Canadian Embassy, Havana, to Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Ottawa, May 18, 1962 (Confidential), Foreign Office Archive, FO371/62309 Ref. 8664, Public Record Office, London. The term “old Communists” refers to the PSP leaders; the “new Communists” are Fidel’s men from the Sierra Maestra wing of the 26th of July Movement.
*5 “The almost permanent mobilization of many young men in the army or the people’s militias had a negative impact on the performance of industry in general.” Ernesto Che Guevara, quoted in MID-1904-30-1-62, Sergei Kudriavtsev, “Memorandum of Conversation of December 8, 1961, with the Minister of Industry Ernesto Guevara,” December 18, 1961 (Secret), Archives of the Foreign Ministry, Moscow.
†2 In fact, Che tried to moderate Fidel Castro’s initial antisugar compulsion. Carlos Franqui recalls a meeting in 1961 in which Che objected to Fidel’s publicly censuring cane production “because with Fidel’s influence on cane in Cuba, there was a real danger that if he spoke against it, it would disappear. He made his antisugar speech anyway and the consequences were disastrous.” Carlos Franqui, interview with the author, San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 20, 1996.
*6 In recent years there have been many lectures and seminars about those memorable “Thirteen Days.” While not everything has been clarified, a great deal of information has become available that was previously unknown. The following pages are based largely upon recent sources; they attempt to reconstruct Che’s participation, rather than the crisis as a whole.
*7 The Americans have always questioned the veracity of Adzhubei’s account, but they have not yet declassified their own official memorandum of the conversation. The history of Kennedy’s conversation with Adzhubei began with a report by French journalist Jean Daniel, published shortly after JFK’s death. Daniel quoted Fidel Castro as saying that the Adzhubei report convinced him of a new U.S. invasion plan. In December 1963, Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and McGeorge Bundy, his National Security Adviser, both asserted (the former in public, the latter in a privat
e memorandum to columnist Walter Lippmann) that Kennedy never used the Hungarian analogy as Adzhubei interpreted it. Kennedy never meant it as a threat, but as an example of how a superpower can become nervous when it sees a hostile group emerge near its border. Both Salinger and Bundy insisted that Kennedy was categorical in his statement to Adzhubei, when he said that the United States had no intention of invading Cuba. See McGeorge Bundy, Memorandum for Walter Lippmann, December 16, 1963, and Transcript, White House News Conference with Pierre Salinger, December 11, 1963, pp. 9–10.
*8 One Che biographer asserts, without providing sources, that Che said in 1960, in Moscow, “This country is willing to risk everything in an atomic war of unimaginable destructiveness, to defend a principle and protect Cuba.” Philippe Gavi, Che Guevara (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1970), p. 96.
*9 As Castro later stated: “The USSR could have declared that an attack on Cuba would have been the equivalent of an attack on the Soviet Union. We could have had a military accord. We could have achieved our goal of defending Cuba without the presence of the missiles. I am absolutely convinced of it.” Fidel Castro, “Transcripción de sus palabras en la conferencia sobre la Crisis de Caribe,” Havana, January 11, 1992, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, quoted in The National Security Archive, Lawrence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: The New Press, 1992), pp. 336–337.
†3 Emilio Aragonés, interview. It is worth noting an element that careful readers will already have noticed: the accounts given by Emilio Aragonés and Aleksandr Alexeiev are virtually identical, including details, sequence, and causal explanations. Needless to say, there is no longer any communication between them. Aragonés lives in Havana, a semi-outcast retiree; Alexeiev, now elderly and ill, spends much of his time in a nomenklatura hospital on the outskirts of Moscow. The two men’s accounts are remarkably similar, because they were both marked by the events in question—and because they are true.
*10 Che’s letter to Anna Louise Strong in Beijing, on November 19, 1962, reflects his terrible ambivalence: “The situation here in Cuba is one of combat alert; the people await an attack on a war footing. … If we come to lose (which will happen after selling our lives very dear) people will be able to read in every nook of our island messages like those of Thermopylae. But anyway, we are not studying our pose for a final gesture; we love life and we will defend it.” Ernesto Che Guevara, letter to Anna Louise Strong, November 19, 1962, quoted in Ernesto Che Guevara, Cartas inéditas (Montevideo: Editorial Sandino, 1968), p. 14.
†4 Ernesto Che Guevara, “Interview with the Daily Worker,” November 1962, reproduced in Foreign Broadcast Information Service Propaganda Report, Changing Pattern of Fidel Castro’s Public Statements, December 7, 1962, pp. 23–24. The report asserts that the first three sentences quoted here were not included in the published text of the interview, though the Daily Worker correspondent did transmit them to London. Ibid., p. 25. Carlos Franqui has corroborated this omission, suggesting that Castro may have spoken to Guevara on the phone in this regard, perhaps regretting how Che always said what he thought. Carlos Franqui, interview with the author, San Juan, Puerto Rico, August 20, 1996.
*11 “Memorandum of Conversation: Anastas Mikoyan with Osvaldo Dorticós, Ernesto Guevara and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez,” November 5, 1962 (Top Secret), quoted in Cold War International History Project Cold War Crises, Bulletin No. 5, Spring 1995, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., p. 105. The quoted text is from the archives of Russia’s Foreign Ministry. It has undergone two translations: Alexeiev’s translation of his notes of the conversation, from Spanish to Russian, in 1962; and from Russian to English, in 1995.
Chapter 8
With Fidel, Neither Marriage
Nor Divorce
There was more to Che’s life than sugar quotas and missiles, though. This period saw his family grow, along with his fame and love of continual movement. His first son was born in 1962 and named after Camilo, Che’s comrade from the Sierra Maestra; a third daughter, Celia, was born in 1963. Aleida, who had accompanied Che on most of his travels within Cuba, now tended to stay at home. The comfortable—though far from luxurious—family residence at 772 47th Street, between Conill and Tulipán streets in the Nuevo Vedado quarter, was filled with children, papers, books, and (according to neighbors) a ferocious German shepherd. Yet Guevara spent little time there, what with his trips abroad and in the interior. In the words of his eldest grandson (who recalls his mother’s account), “he was never home.”1 Che had not formed the kind of bourgeois family he so dreaded in Buenos Aires, but his household was much what it would have been anywhere. He continued to cultivate his love of reading, and spent long hours writing letters, articles, and essays (which he published at a frantic pace), as well as his diaries.
Che remained as ascetic as always, strictly imposing upon himself the ethical norms of the Revolution and trying to avoid any abuse of power or privilege. But Aleida, confronted daily, like many Cuban housewives, with the ordeal of long lines and shortages, sometimes used Che’s official car, escort, and influence to fulfill the minimal requirements of subsistence. Che would send her to the market by bus, explaining irritably, “No, Aleida, no, you know that the car belongs to the government, it is not mine, and you cannot take advantage of it. Take the bus, like everybody else.” Ricardo Rojo, who stayed with the family for a couple of months in early 1963, recalled how according to both Aleida and Che’s mother, Celia, Che was bent on obtaining from his government position only the indispensable. The house he lived in, a mansion confiscated from a rich emigrant, was empty, despite the countless gifts he received during his international travels. Che simply remitted the presents, ranging from art objects to craftswork and electrical appliances, to youth training centers throughout the island, still wrapped.2
His main preoccupation during this period (over and beyond his administrative and diplomatic activities) was the revolution in Latin America and, increasingly, Africa. If his chief concern after the missile crisis was the adverse effects of the Soviet surrender on the rest of Latin America, that was because of his growing obsession—theoretical, political, and personal—with one goal: to replicate the Cuban model in other latitudes, with all available means and at all costs. Che had presented the conceptual foundation for this in a 1961 essay in which he briefly first described those features of the Cuban Revolution which he believed made it unique in Latin America: the figure and “earth-moving force” of Fidel Castro, and the way “imperialism was taken by surprise.” He then presented a series of conditions which he considered common and/or constant in Latin America: the submissive attitude of the bourgeoisie, the existence of latifundia, and a poverty-stricken peasantry—“a phenomenon to be found in all the countries of Latin America without exception, and which has been the basis for all the injustices committed here”—and the hunger of the people. Finally, Che summed up the significance of Cuba’s victory as “the possibility of triumph and the inevitability of triumph.” In a succinct conclusion, he claimed:
The possibility of triumph of the popular masses in Latin America is clearly expressed in the path of guerrilla warfare, based upon a peasant army, an alliance between workers and peasants, the defeat of the army in a direct confrontation, the taking of cities from the countryside. …3
Che recast these ideas in a more far-reaching essay which appeared in Cuba Socialista in September 1963 under the title “La guerra de guerrillas: un método.” In it, he restated his’ previous arguments and insisted that the armed struggle in Latin America was both feasible and necessary. But the text was different from earlier versions, such as Guerrilla Warfare, because by 1963 the Cuban regime was far more intent on “exporting the revolution.” Certainly, there had been many occasions in the past when Che or other Cuban leaders engaged in undercover practices like sending arms and funds, training guerrillas, obtaining documentation, advising on logistics, and so on. But this had been more a matter of ideological
inclination than state policy. After Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1962 and found its diplomatic relations with most Latin American countries severed, things changed. There was no longer any reason for the Cubans to desist from their revolutionary endeavors in the region—seen as seditious or subversive by the governments involved. Indeed, the caveats imposed on the creation of a foco in the original manual Guerrilla Warfare vanished in this one; for example, there is no further mention of the obstacle constitutional governance can represent for a guerrilla movement.*1 Furthermore, by 1963 Che had greatly consolidated his position within the Cuban government. Thus, his essays were perceived in many Latin American capitals as far more than the personal views of a Cuban intellectual or guerrilla fighter, albeit an important one. They were seen as an expression of Cuban state policy. Above all, the great difference between 1960–61 and 1963–64 was Che’s personal involvement. He was now directly committed to Cuba’s revolutionary adventures.†1
His first guerrilla love, quite naturally, was his native Argentina. The roundabout road Che would follow there began in a meeting with his compatriots in Cuba, many of whom gathered in Havana for Argentina’s independence-day festivities on May 25, 1962. Though the traditional roast was lacking, they sacrificed a rather scrawny calf which, together with their customary maté, sufficed for the occasion. Che had been invited to speak by the Institute for Cuban-Argentine Friendship. Having agreed with some reluctance—for he knew what a hornet’s nest awaited him—he addressed the entire Argentine community of Havana, including Perón’s representative John William Cooke, Tamara Bunke (the young teacher and translator who had joined the Cuban Revolution the previous year), two hundred technicians sent by the Argentine Communist Party, as well as a number of artists, scientists, and writers living in Havana.*2 Che’s speech reflected both his strengths and his weaknesses, his successes and his failures. As an Argentine militant at the scene recalled: “The Communist Party, which had sent a special plane to Havana after the victory of the Revolution packed with activists and experts, had bad relations with Cuba; Cuba believed in revolutionary violence, and the Party did not. Many of the Argentines began to receive training for the militias, deepening the conflict, because the Party elders thought Cuba was training militias within the Party, thus undermining the leadership. This led to a tense situation, verging on a break, particularly when the delegate from the Party was recalled from Cuba. So Che was venturing into very troubled waters, and rapidly found himself in a delicate position: ‘I will speak at the celebration on May 25, but only if they don’t pose any conditions.’”†2
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