Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  On the one hand, he was absolutely certain that armed struggle was the only way to bring revolution to Argentina; the only means to defeat the army and oligarchy was to unify all those political forces capable of joining in the struggle. But one of those forces, the Communist Party, was led by a notorious Argentine-Soviet apparatchik, Víctor Codovilla (indirectly involved in, among other nefarious acts, the first attempt on Trotsky’s life in Mexico City in 1940). Codovilla rejected Che’s foco theories, and the other opposition forces squabbled among themselves for a leadership position which they did not, in many cases, deserve. Either they featured talented personalities who nonetheless represented very little—as in the case of Cooke, despite his personal association with Perón‡1—or they were simply peopled by fans of the Socialist or Castroist left, with scant links to Argentine society.

  Cooke, who had already distanced himself from Peronism if not from Perón himself, and who was exiled in Madrid, also addressed the crowd. On that spring day in Havana, he made a fiery speech supporting Guevara’s position, recalling that all the great heroes of Latin American liberation had been “guerrilla fighters.”4 Che, never one to beat around the bush, appealed for unity among traditional enemies, calling for them to rise up in arms—which many did not even have or want to have:

  We believe we are part of an army fighting in every part of the world, and we must ready ourselves to celebrate another 25th of May not in this generous land, but in our own country and with new symbols, with the symbol of victory, the symbol of the construction of socialism, the symbol of the future.5

  The words, gestures, and especially the intentions of Comandante Guevara could only alarm the many Communists in the audience. His calls for convergence with the Peronists and among all revolutionaries, and for guerrilla warfare and revolutionary violence, inevitably antagonized the Communist Party. There was an uproar the next day, and heated arguments among the delegates.6 The Communists were enraged, and even censured Che’s speech in their publications. Guevara suddenly found himself an outcast, caught between his revolutionary goals and a dismal lack of supporters to achieve them with. His only alternative was one which Cuba—and he himself—would be forced to choose for years to come: the promotion of more or less explicit divisions within the Communist parties of Latin America, training militants in Cuba without the knowledge or consent of their leaders, and plotting for the militants’ takeover of their organizations.

  A private letter written by several Argentine Communists living in Cuba to one of the Party’s leaders in Moscow illustrates the bad blood between Che and some of his compatriots:

  Our relations with our famous countryman Ernesto Guevara are going from bad to worse, and all of this because of the incidents involving our beloved Party. We took it up with Cooke and his wife and the whole group that the Cubans were training. Their defender was none other than Guevara; he was financing them. Among the members of the future “commandos” there was a group of Trotskyists who were going around claiming that when they have the chance to apply what they are learning they will make no fine distinction between “gorilas” (the anti-Peronist military) and “Stalinist Communists.”7

  That takeover rarely if ever materialized, but the attempts aroused infinite mistrust and resentment among Party leaders. Che gradually realized that if he hoped to mount a guerrilla war in Argentina or anywhere else, he would have to do so alone—that is with individual recruits, and on the margins of existing groups.

  A case in point was Tamara Bunke, who often accompanied him to parties or volunteer-work celebrations, or to welcome foreign delegations. Some of the Argentines who attended the independence festivities met a couple of days later to discuss the incidents and determine their future course. Several of them—not including Tamara—expressed disagreement with Che. Imbued with her Communist parents’ spirit of sacrifice and the recklessness that would lead her to her death in Bolivia five years later, Tamara stormed out, exclaiming, “I’m leaving, I’m not going to waste my time here.”8

  Che would have to make his revolution in Latin America with the Tamaras of the hemisphere—and without the Codovillas. From an individual viewpoint, this had its advantages; in terms of politics and popular support, it was a disaster. This was especially true in the case of Argentina, where neither the Socialist Party, nor the Communists, nor Perón was prepared to join in a delusional armed struggle. When Cooke returned to his country two years later, Che was left even more isolated in his Argentine aspirations. But he did not give up. In the days following that 25th of May, 1962, he confided his true intentions to more sympathetic compatriots living in Havana, who visited him at the Ministry. They found him with a map of his native land spread out on his desk. Che brought out some maté and they spent four or five hours sipping it like true Argentines, exchanging countless anecdotes. One above all impressed his interlocutors. “Revolution,” said Che, “can be made at any given moment anywhere in the world.” “Anywhere in the world?” they asked. “Even in Argentina or La Paz?” Pointing with his finger at the city of his youth, Che proclaimed: “Even in Cordoba there can be guerrilla warfare.”9

  Several Latin American countries possessed the central traits Che had described in Guerrilla Warfare as impediments to the armed struggle: constitutional government, elections, etc. But those obstacles now loomed larger, as they were buttressed by the Soviet Union’s growing reluctance to countenance Cuban adventures, and especially by the refusal of Communist parties in the region to engage in guerrilla warfare. Preliminary attempts had failed in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Repression—even by democratic governments—was intensifying. The dangers for large mass organizations inspired or led by the Communists were growing. Under these conditions, the parties’ willingness to take up arms—never overwhelming to begin with—faded day by day. The Communists asked Moscow on occasion to intervene and temper the Cubans’ revolutionary fervor. But the Soviets, who already had enough troubles with their tropical partners, preferred discretion over any public rift—for the moment. So the natural candidates for armed struggle in Latin America—the Communist cadres—became increasingly reluctant, and Che Guevara increasingly irritated.

  Faced with this growing resistance and the ever-repeated objection that the time was not ripe, Che revised his original views in the September 1963 essay on guerrilla warfare. Before, he had insisted that the creation of a guerrilla foco required a series of conditions, including the absence of a constitutional elected government. Now he claimed that those conditions could be self-created: the foco could breed the prerequisites for its own existence. Did this new idea derive from a new theoretical viewpoint? Or was it the total absence of those conditions in reality, along with Che’s stubborn insistence on making the revolution here and now, which led to a retroactive justification of the foco’s self-generation? Without a doubt, it was the lack of real revolutionaries that led Che to theorize that they were no longer necessary. At the end, he would perish surrounded by the silence of absent Bolivian campesinos and Communist cadres, as his foco in Ñancahuazú created everything but the conditions for victory.

  Within this troubled and contradictory political context, there occurred another crucial event in the history of the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro’s lengthy visit to the USSR in the spring of 1963. He spent over forty days there, reaching agreements with the Soviet leadership which would have countless implications for the island’s economic and political future. Despite an explicit invitation to Che from the Soviet ambassador (discussed later in the chapter), he did not accompany Fidel—though the trip was to include important commercial and industrial negotiations well within his areas of responsibility. Indeed, according to French journalist K. S. Karol, Guevara learned of Fidel’s accords with the Soviets only after the fact.10

  So much the better: the principal result of the trip was to confirm Cuba’s sad fate as a single-minded producer of sugar, along with a few other raw materials and farming products, within the Socialist bloc’s divis
ion of labor. Thus did Fidel explicitly renounce a project which had in fact been abandoned months earlier: the island’s industrialization. Che did not forgive the USSR for its October betrayal as readily as did Castro, nor was he as quick to accept Cuba’s dependence on the Soviets.*3

  Fidel’s visit dissipated the tensions and recriminations of the previous October. He was spontaneously acclaimed, honored, and feted by the people of Russia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Georgia, as well as by the Soviet leadership—though they were perhaps less sincere. In turn, he had nothing but praise and admiration for the fatherland of socialism, especially after his return to Havana on June 3, 1963. If during October and November 1962 there had been some parallels between the Cuban and Chinese views of Khrushchev, they were now banished from Castro’s political discourse. There were still occasional flourishes, remarks, or gestures (for instance, on July 26, 1963) which some observers saw as pro-China and somewhat anti-Soviet.*4 But Cuba’s alignment with the USSR was increasingly evident, despite its attempted neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute. In exchange, the Soviets paid lip service to the cause of armed struggle in Latin America, while entangling any real aid in so many clauses and reservations that Latin American Communist parties could well decide to abstain from military activity without contravening any Soviet dispositions.

  Che’s doubts as to the wisdom and decency of a hasty reconciliation with the USSR were aggravated by a new though recurrent factor: Fidel’s incessant flirtations with Washington, which always allowed contradictory interpretations; indeed, that was their very raison d’être. In the spring of 1963, a U.S. television journalist, Lisa Howard, interviewed Castro and found that he seemed amenable to an understanding with President John F. Kennedy. Washington promptly signaled its refusal. The journalist persisted in her efforts, leading in September 1963 to preliminary talks between Cuba’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, and the U.S. journalist and diplomat William Atwood.

  All of this occurred thanks to the good offices of Howard, who had a close relationship with René Vallejo (Fidel’s personal aide and physician); he had helped set up her meeting with Castro in May. He offered to send a plane to the United States, to bring a Kennedy envoy back to Havana to negotiate. When Washington rejected the offer, Vallejo—with Howard and Atwood listening in on the call—proposed by telephone to travel secretly to the United States himself in order to launch negotiations. Kennedy’s death in November put an end to the initiative. It is impossible to say whether it would have prospered, and if Castro was really willing to make the concessions demanded by Washington to re-establish normal relations.

  Significantly, however, the following argument emerged in several conversations between U.S. and Cuban representatives:

  Castro is unhappy about his present dependence on the Soviet bloc, the trade embargo is hurting him, and he would like to establish some official contact with the U.S.; even though this would not be welcomed by most of his hard-core Communist entourage, such as Che Guevara … there was a rift between Castro and the Guevara-Hart-Almeida group on the question of Cuba’s future course. … Guevara and the other communists were opposed to any deal, and regarded Castro as dangerously unreliable.”*5

  The analysis was not necessarily valid, nor was there a rift between Fidel and Che during those months. To the contrary, they may even (albeit for different reasons) have agreed on the necessity of reinforcing Cuban support for revolutionary groups in Latin America—Che as a matter of principle and due to his disillusion with the USSR, and Castro because he had not found the understanding he sought, either with Moscow or with Washington. Intensifying internal difficulties may also have contributed to Fidel’s enhanced activism in the jungles and swamps of the region. But it was one thing to equip revolutionaries and quite another to confront the USSR. Che, who increasingly believed the two went together, simply could not tolerate the ambivalence implicit in Fidel’s juggling with both. Castro thrived on the game; Che abhorred it.

  In early 1964, Che granted a television interview of his own to Lisa Howard, reiterating Castro’s views. Top White House officials congratulated Howard for the program, even while recognizing Guevara’s poise and skill.†3 Watching the rushes of the interview thirty years later, one can only admire Che’s charm, assurance, and inner strength; even in crossing the set to light a cigarette for the journalist, he moved with incomparable elegance and grace. Despite being tired and overweight, he was still a man of exceptional beauty. The Christlike expression of his death was already there: the ineffable, veiled sadness in his eyes portended an accepted tragedy; he is already, as Dolores Moyano Martín, a friend from his youth, wrote with Dostoyevsky’s portrait of Nechaev in mind, “a doomed man,” even if he has not yet “severed every tie with the civil order.”11 There were still battles ahead, but at some unconscious level Che may have known that he had lost his war in Cuba.

  A few days after Castro’s return from the Soviet Union, Guevara packed his bags again and left for Algeria in early July to attend the first anniversary celebrations of its independence. He spent three weeks there, touring the country extensively. On his way to Algiers, he had time to reflect upon the changes and events of the previous months: Cuba’s reconciliation with Moscow, Castro’s critical advances to Washington, the island’s dire economic crisis, his own disagreements with the rest of the governing team, and his gradual removal from economic policy-making.

  At a planning seminar in Algiers, Che acknowledged Cuba’s failure to achieve industrialization and trade diversification, as well as the island’s economic debacle. His views were not that different from those of Fidel, the Russians, or the Cuban Communists. But his doubts were one thing; quite another was the course the Revolution was starting to adopt in economic and foreign policy terms. Algiers marked the beginning of three important projects for Che Guevara: one economic, and two in international policy. He was already preparing the escape route he would follow less than two years later.

  The first of Che’s foreign initiatives targeted Argentina and would founder. But the second involved Africa and Algeria, and would endure. The young Algerian republic was faced with an ominous and debilitating crisis on its western borders. King Hassan of Morocco, both on his own initiative and pushed by French and American intelligence services, had declared war on his neighbor over the territories of the eastern Sahara. Ahmed Ben Bella, the hero of the clandestine struggle against France and first president of Algeria, had no means of defense, but he and his government enjoyed considerable international support. They had a longstanding friendship with Cuba, whose saga had closely paralleled their own. A high-level Cuban delegation had attended their declaration of independence in July 1962, and Ben Bella had visited Havana on the eve of the missile crisis. During his visit, Castro and Guevara had offered technical, medical, and, if needed, military support to defend the newborn Maghreb State. The first Cuban medical mission of fifty-five members arrived in Algiers on May 24, 1963, just five weeks before Che. It was natural, then, that the Cubans should rise to the defense of their friends when Moroccan troops took several Algerian border posts in September 1963, unleashing the so-called War of the Desert. Moroccan superiority in weapons and training boded ill for the Algerians.

  According to Cuba’s ambassador in Algiers, he himself transmitted Ben Bella’s urgent appeal for help to Cuba. Castro agreed within the spirit of adventure and internationalism which had characterized the Cuban leadership since the Revolution. Ben Bella has a slightly different version. In his view, it was the Cubans who offered to help:

  When I went to Havana in September 1962, Castro strongly insisted that Cuba had a debt with Algeria, contracted before independence, which he wanted to pay. When Che came to Algeria, he also insisted on paying it—but in kind, with sugar. And a boat loaded with sugar was about to sail from Cuba in October, to pay the debt. When Hassan attacked us, I did not ask for anything; but Foreign Minister Abdel Aziz Bouteflika saw Ambassador Serguera and spoke with him. And t
he Cubans put a battalion of 800 men with 70 tanks into the sugar boat. I found out about this several days later, when Serguera came to see me and showed me a sheet of paper, torn from a school notebook, advising him that the sugar boat was also carrying 800 men and 70 tanks. But they never saw combat, for in those very days Hassan called for negotiations. That was because we sent 300,000 civilians to the border to occupy it, and the Americans pressured Hassan into desisting.12