In the Cuban version, reconstructed by the Italian-American historian Piero Gleijeses, at Ben Bella’s request Castro sent an advance group of Cuban officers to Algeria, rapidly backed by other units totaling 686 men and a large number of tanks.13 Though the Cubans would have preferred to keep the operation secret, it was reported by the world press shortly after the landing at Oran. A few days later, Ben Bella began talks with King Hassan and on October 19, in Bamako, the capital of Mali, signed a cease-fire. The Cubans remained in Algeria for six months, delivering the military supplies they had brought and training a large number of troops.
Jorge Serguera, Cuba’s first ambassador to Algeria and Che’s aide in all of his African expeditions, believes Cuban assistance played a key role in Ben Bella’s victory over Morocco:
Of course [Hassan] asked for negotiations. He had only three tanks and we took over sixty. Our help was decisive. Algeria could not have negotiated on its own, pressured as it was by the Americans, pressured by the English, and pressured by everybody.14
Thus, the growing complicity between Cuba and Algeria, whether in providing military supplies and training to guerrillas in Latin America, or acting jointly in Africa. This had been Cuba’s first expedition in Africa, and Che had played a central role in it, as he would in the next four years. Cuba’s political relationship with Algeria and Che’s personal bond with Ben Bella became the pillars of Cuba’s African policy, and the starting point of all Guevara’s projects there in the future.
The understanding between the two countries was such that the arms shipment discovered in Venezuela at the end of 1963, which would serve as a pretext for OAS sanctions against Cuba, probably originated in Algeria. As Ben Bella revealed in an October 1987 interview with the French Trotskyist daily Rouge, Che asked him on behalf of Fidel and the Cuban leadership to send arms and trained cadres to South America; Cuba could no longer do so, as it was under close observation. Ben Bella immediately agreed.*6 On November 28, 1963, the Venezuelan government revealed that it had discovered a 3-ton weapons cache in the coastal province of Falcón, including eighteen bazookas, four mortar guns, eight recoilless rifles, twenty-six machine guns, and one hundred assault rifles bearing Cuban insignia. According to available information—ambiguous but revealing—the reunified guerrillas of Venezuela had convinced the Cubans (including Che) to send them the arms they needed to overthrow the Caracas regime. Cuba simply rerouted some of the light arms it sent to Algeria, as they were no longer needed following the cease-fire signed by Hassan and Ben Bella.
Despite Che’s increasing involvement in African politics, this was for now only a sideshow in relation to his other pet international project, the creation of a guerrilla foco in Argentina. There was a link between the two though: Jorge Masetti, the Argentine journalist who interviewed Che in the Sierra Maestra in 1958. As early as January 10, 1962, the Cuban cargo ship Bahia de Nipe had docked in Casablanca to deliver a large weapons supply to the National Liberation Front (FLN) and transfer Algerian casualties to Cuba.15 Masetti was there to receive it.
He had stayed on in Cuba after the Revolution and—with the support of Che and others, including Gabriel García Márquez—founded Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency (which also indulged in other activities). In 1961, Masetti resigned from Prensa Latina, due to strained relations with both the Cubans and the Argentine Communists working at the agency. At the end of that year, he negotiated the first Cuban arms shipment to Algerian guerrillas and their provisional government. He remained in Algeria until its independence several months later, then returned to Cuba. In November 1962, leaving behind a newborn son, he left again for the Maghreb to receive military training.
After a failed attempt by Che and John William Cooke to bring Perón to Havana and transform him into a patron for the armed struggle in Argentina, Che finally resigned himself to waging the revolution in his native country with a handful of supporters: a group of heroic and misguided Argentines, and the Cubans closest to him. When Guevara arrived in Algeria in early July 1963, he first dealt with the forlorn Cuban physicians in Sétif who had not yet received their stipend, and attended the planning seminar mentioned earlier. Then he met with Masetti, by now the designated comandante of the future Argentine foco.
With his training in Cuba and Algeria, and some combat experience in the latter country,16 Masetti set about recruiting Communist dissidents and university students from Argentina, who were all on the margins of traditional leftist organizations. He was soon forced to include several Cubans in the expedition due to the sparsity of local recruits. Three of them participated in it directly; another two were involved only in its preparation. Hermés Peña, one of his bodyguards, died in the Argentine jungle of Salta. Alberto Castellanos, Guevara’s driver (at whose home Che and Aleida had been married), was captured and spent four years in jail in Argentina. José María Martínez Tamayo (“Papi”), the first advance man for the Argentine affair and Che’s highest-ranking personal aide, accompanied him to the Congo and helped prepare the expedition to Bolivia, where he died a few months before Che. He landed in La Paz in July 1963 to lay the groundwork for the others. And Cuba’s current Minister of the Interior, General Abelardo (“Furri”) Colomé Ibarra, was sent by Raúl Castro (under whom he still serves, as his closest collaborator) to “coordinate the entire operation.”17
Furri first went to Buenos Aires with one of the Argentines, the painter Ciro Bustos. From Buenos Aires he traveled to Tarija, Bolivia, the jump-off point for the guerrilla expedition into northern Argentina. There they all regrouped: Masetti, Martínez Tamayo (who carried the money), Furri (in charge of weapons), Hermés Peña, and Alberto Castellanos, entrusted with logistics and security for Che Guevara, who in all likelihood had already decided to join them.
Masetti had probably made a first secret trip to Argentina in 1962, along with Hermés Peña.*7 One year later, during the summer of 1963, the aspiring guerrillas arrived in Bolivia disguised as members of an Algerian trade mission. Between September and December they journeyed several times in and out of Argentina, seeking volunteers for the Salta foco.†4 Castellanos joined them in September. In late 1963 (September, according to some sources), they made their final entrance into Argentina; neither Masetti nor Peña would leave the country alive (by early 1964 the entire affair was over). They were never able to recruit more than a handful of inexperienced youths, devoted but completely unfit for guerrilla warfare. Their tale would impact Argentine public opinion just enough to draw the armed forces’ attention—but not enough to awaken the slightest glimmer of sympathy.
There are three indications that Ernesto Guevara intended to leave Cuba and direct the armed struggle in his own land. First, the leaders of the Argentine expedition all belonged to his inner circle: two of his bodyguards, his best journalist friend, and his closest Cuban aide. Castellanos asserts that the head of Che’s escort, Harry (“Pombo”) Villegas, was not included because he was of African origin and, as Che declared, “there are no blacks where we are going.”18 Guevara’s fourth bodyguard, José Argudín, was excluded because (according to Castellanos) he had seduced the wife of Peña during the latter’s absence.19 Che’s two subsequent expeditions would also include his bodyguards or the old guard dating back to the Sierra and the “invasion”: Pombo, Papi, and Tuma (Carlos Coello). And it was inconceivable, given Che’s nature, that he should ever have contemplated sending his closest aides on a dangerous mission without eventually joining it himself.
In the second place, when Che summoned Castellanos to the Guantánamo officer-training school and announced that he had decided to entrust him with a task which could well last twenty years, he said: “I will go soon. You go and wait over there, you go and set up the group and have them wait for me.”20 By January 1964, Papi and Castellanos had arrived in Tucuman to contact possible Argentine recruits (mainly Trotskyists, Castellanos recalls). Among other things, they carried twenty thousand dollars for one Dr. Canelo in Tucumán. As Castellanos describes it,
Thirty years later in Havana, Castellanos ruefully remembers that he never harbored any doubt that his boss fully intended to join the guerrilla group in Salta. As for the presence of Colomé, one of the men closest to Raúl Castro, and the reasoning behind the mission, there was no margin for confusion. Furri was always linked to Raúl, from the time of the Sierra Maestra and the Second Front. Raúl was involved in the operation because it was Che’s mission; Che was already planning to leave the island.*8
Finally, there was the enigma of Masetti’s nom de guerre in Salta: “Comandante Segundo” or “Segundo Sombra” (Second Shadow). Both names have been interpreted as a wink to Guevara: either because the first comandante was going to be Che, or because Segundo Sombra is a central figure in nineteenth-century Argentine literature, along with Martín Fierro—an occasional nickname of Che’s. In any case, the double meaning is sufficiently explicit to suggest that Ernesto Guevara was determined to join the guerrillas in Argentina between late 1963 and early 1964. His instructions to Castellanos—“do not recruit any peasants for the moment, just devote yourselves to exploring the area”—reinforce this interpretation. Combat was to begin only after Che’s arrival.
Perhaps Guevara’s decision to participate in the Salta team was triggered by Castro’s extended visit to the Soviet Union in May 1963, or perhaps by Che’s own trip to Algeria. Either way, his state of mind was limpid and manifest. After his departure from Algiers in July, he stopped in Paris for a couple of days. There he reflected upon his future in Cuba, in view of Fidel’s reconciliation with the USSR and the growing controversy surrounding his management of the economy. He also delivered a talk at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. There he met Carlos Franqui, who had been living in intermittent exile in Algeria and Europe for some time. Relations between them were strained; they had clashed several times in Cuba over a number of issues, but had just celebrated a virtual reconciliation in Algiers, where Franqui had interviewed Ben Bella and mounted an exhibit of Cuban art he had brought from Paris. According to Franqui’s memoirs, the two now discovered many affinities: “We were both friends of Ben Bella. [Che] was seeking another path. He considered the Cuban situation very difficult, despite an apparent lull in sectarianism and the missile crisis. It was one of our best meetings.”22
Che put his arm around Franqui’s shoulders and the two went walking along a deserted boulevard in the Paris summer, cooled by the chestnut trees and the last cobblestones paving the avenues of the French capital. Guevara tried to persuade the journalist to return to Cuba, without denying the problems there and his own frictions with Castro. It was then, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, that Che gave vent to a feeling which would soon lead him away from his closest friend and dearest companion-in-arms: “With Fidel, I want neither marriage nor divorce.”23 The phrase aptly expressed Che’s quandary; it enclosed an unsustainable ambivalence, an intolerable mingling of contradictory feelings. Flight to the Argentine guerrilla operation had to wait; the Revolution’s internal difficulties loomed too large at the end of 1963. But in the following year a new path opened up for Guevara—much sooner than he could have guessed.
Jorge Masetti’s guerrilla campaign ended in tragedy. Wracked by internal dissensions that led to executions of its own members, and isolated from the cities, his group was easy prey for the government. In addition, representative democracy had returned to Argentina in October, with the election of Arturo Illía as president. This was no tinhorn dictatorship Masetti was fighting. The correspondent’s dreams, dating back to the Sierra Maestra, were no match for the ruthless competence of the Argentine gendarmerie. His column was destroyed after being undermined by its own divisions and excesses, infiltrations, army persecution, and the hardships of the terrain. Castellanos was captured on March 4, 1964; he was defended at his trial by Gustavo Roca, a Córdoba friend of Che’s, who had asked his compatriot to help his friends. No one knew of the link between Castellanos and Guevara until the latter’s death in Bolivia, when a photograph of Che’s wedding with Aleida was published and Castellanos appeared in it as their host. As for Masetti, he was simply swallowed up by the Salta wilderness. Castellanos has his own explanation, straight from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for the fact that Masetti’s body was never found, though Che sent several envoys to search for it. He was carrying over $20,000, plus a large sum of Argentine money and two Rolex watches. The police probably found him; if he was not already dead from exposure, they killed him, took the money, split it up, and reported he had disappeared. If the body showed up, the money had to show up as well.24
In many ways, the Salta operation was a dress rehearsal for the Bolivia escapade three years later. In Cochabamba, Papi may have met the group of Bolivian Communists charged by Mario Monje, the Party’s Secretary-General, with promoting the armed struggle in the region: the Peredo brothers, Rodolfo Saldaña, and Luis Tellería. Along with Papi, they would be entrusted with preparations for Che’s expedition in 1966. It is possible that Tamara Bunke (or Tania), who arrived in Bolivia in October 1964, was initially sent to investigate Masetti’s whereabouts and fate, as well as that of any survivors, rather than to organize a new guerrilla campaign in Bolivia.*9 Ciro Bustos, who was arrested along with Régis Debray in Bolivia in April 1967 upon leaving Che’s camp, and who was responsible for linking the Bolivian struggle and a future Argentine one, was already present at the Salta saga. He traveled from Havana to Buenos Aires with Furri, and even visited Castellanos in jail on several occasions.25
Che may have decided not to participate in the early stages of the Salta expedition, but there is no doubt that he intended to join it sometime soon. The deaths of Masetti and Peña, and the capture of Castellanos, must have dealt him a terrible blow. This was not the first but the second time that close friends had perished in combat, under circumstances which might well have included him. He had taken leave of Julio Roberto (“el Patojo”) Cáceres in Havana in December 1961, his travel companion and fellow-photographer on the streets of Mexico City. A portrait of el Patojo would later hang in Che’s Ministry offices; Cáceres died fighting in Guatemala, only weeks after joining a guerrilla group. Why did they have to expire putting into practice his ideas and methods? He would either share their fate, or prove that death was not the only possible outcome.
There is then no mystery enshrouding the increasing strain in Che’s relations with the Communist parties of Latin America and the Soviet Union during 1963. Since Cuba was entering a period of creeping alignment with the Soviet Union, inevitably, Che’s situation became more and more untenable. In April 1963, the Soviet ideologue Mikhail Suslov declared that the Communist parties of Latin America “would be wrong to pin all their hopes on the armed struggle … revolution cannot be accelerated or made to measure, nor can it be promoted from abroad.”26 There was no explicit break, for the moment. But as Che’s economic and international views drew further and further away from those of the Soviet, Cuban, and Latin American Communists, the veiled discrepancies and discreet recriminations drifted toward a harsh and bitter contest of wills. So before analyzing the broad economic policy battles between Che and his “orthodox” colleagues, it is necessary to examine some of his chief differences with the Soviet Union.
Before Castro’s departure for Moscow in April 1963, Che met with the Soviet ambassador to review the trip’s technical aspects. He commented that, in general, Khrushchev’s letters to the Cuban leaders generally showed wisdom and sensitivity; in contrast, a recent memorandum on trade was “disturbing” and amounted to a provocation. When Aleksandr Alexeiev aske
d Guevara if he would like to accompany Fidel, Che jokingly wondered aloud how useful that would be, as he was perceived by Moscow as an “ugly duckling” and a “troublemaker.”27 Alexeiev replied:
I know the opposite is true, because in my country you are appreciated precisely for your honesty and sincerity, your firmness in defending your ideas, even though they are sometimes wrong, and for your courage in recognizing your mistakes; and a certain taste for troublemaking is not a defect in our eyes.28
A further moment of tension surfaced that April. According to a U.S. military intelligence report, important segments of the Cuban militias began to be dismantled during those weeks. At the same time, military facilities at San Antonio de los Baños outside the capital and at San Julián in Pinar del Río were placed under Soviet control. The Cuban air force commander of the former base was arrested for refusing to transfer it to the Soviets. He was freed thanks only to Che’s personal intervention.29
Toward the end of 1963, when the Sino-Soviet conflict escalated and the USSR stepped up its pressure on Cuba to distance itself from Beijing, Che found himself complaining bitterly to his Russian friends about the Soviet “bureaucrats.” He proposed to his Russian teacher and friend Oleg Daroussenkov that the Soviet Embassy organize a chess tournament and invite him, so as to ease relations with various officials who considered him “fervently pro-China.” As Che explained,
Several Soviet comrades tend to think that my views on topics like guerrilla warfare as the principal means for the liberation of Latin American peoples, or the issue of financial self-management as opposed to the system for budgetary financing, are Chinese positions and conclude that Guevara is pro-China. Can’t I have my own opinion on these issues, independently of what the Chinese think?*10
Che was increasingly irritated by the Chinese issue. He reluctantly adopted Cuba’s position of neutrality: “We cannot even publish [an article by Paul Sweezy about Yugoslavia] because of our position of absolute neutrality, as we cannot intervene in any area involving the Chinese-Soviet conflict.”30 Che was troubled by the harassment of China’s supporters in Cuba and elsewhere, and felt that the global onslaught against Beijing was excessive.*11 In an earlier conversation with Daroussenkov, he had gone to great pains to deny the existence of what the Soviet official called an “anti-Soviet propaganda campaign by the local Chinese Embassy.”
Companero Page 38