Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  The problem was not only one of development strategies. Cuban farming, directed from the INRA by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez since 1961, was governed by principles strongly opposed by Che Guevara. Material incentives, the financial self-management of companies, high salary differentials, and relatively decentralized investment programs prevailed in the rest of Cuban agriculture, excluding the sugar industry. Those who worked more were paid more*15; each company kept its own resources, transferring only its surplus to the INRA or the banks. In a word, the law of value was playing a central role in Cuba’s socialist agriculture outside sugar. Even after the second land reform of October 1963, 30 percent of all land remained in private hands. Bestowing priority on agriculture thus implied an unqualified preference for its most characteristic features. Converting it into the pillar of the Cuban economy, as was the case, effectively doomed the kind of socialism Che desired for his adopted country. Though he agreed that a centralized system like that which prevailed in industry could exist alongside material incentives, which were current throughout the economy, he believed moral incentives were not compatible with the financial self-management applied in agriculture: “Moral incentives cannot work with financial self-management; they cannot advance two steps together, but trip each other up and fall. It is impossible.”48

  In other words, the full implementation of the law of value would reinforce the status quo, the existing relations between agriculture and industry, cities and countryside, and among the different regions. As Che succinctly put it, “It is now evident to me that wherever we use the law of value we are actually, through indirect methods, letting capitalism in through the back door.”49

  The “great debate,” as it came to be called, was summed up in a recent study as follows:

  Ernesto Guevara and others contended that Cuba could not allow the law of value to determine investments without reneging on the possibility of overcoming underdevelopment. Industry did not enjoy the comparative advantage of agriculture and, therefore, was not as “profitable.” Self-finance planning would tend to reinforce uneven development and specialization. The budgetary system of centralized planning allowed the state to plan for the economy as a whole, correct past inequalities, and promote more balanced development. The fact that Cuba was a small country with limited wealth and an open economy compelled the state to harness its most abundant resource: the will, energy and passion of the Cuban people. Self-finance planning advocated material incentives on the grounds of efficiency and rationality. Yet material incentives privatized conscience, and inefficiency was not restricted to economic resources. Moral incentives would develop conscience as an economic lever and further the creation of new human beings.50

  When on July 3, 1964, Che lost his direct tutelage of the sugar industry, which would now have its own ministry—albeit headed by Orlando Borrego, one of his closest advisers—he could hear one shoe falling.*16 At the same time, President Osvaldo Dorticós replaced Regino Boti at the Ministry of the Economy, and was also named head of the Central Planning Council. This amounted to a second attack on Che, not because he had a poor relationship with Dorticós but because a second power center was being established in Cuban economic policy—as important as his own. Che pursued the debate throughout 1964, publishing three essays on his major areas of disagreement with the Soviets, the old Cuban Communists, and the new Cuban technicians: centralization, the budgetary system, and material incentives. Charles Bettelheim would note thirty years later that there was always a bureaucratic bias in Che’s analysis. He regarded the Cuban economy from the perspective of the large companies within the Ministry of Industries, where there could indeed be appropriate forms of oversight and control. But for the countless small firms that had been nationalized in 1963, no centralized direction was feasible; there was not enough administrative capacity, nor enough cadres or resources. Che saw the forest, but not the trees; he did not acknowledge that the changes wrought in the Cuban economy and society worked against his system.51

  He continued to develop his views during this period, within the Marxist discourse of the time but also with undeniable sincerity:

  The consciousness of men in the vanguard … may perceive the right path to carry a socialist revolution to victory … even if … the contradictions between the development of the forces of production and the relations of production which would make a revolution necessary or possible are lacking.52

  In this reply to Bettelheim, Che concluded that even if Cuba was not “ready” for the precise and comprehensive planning he would have wished, or the moral incentives and extreme industrial centralization he advocated, it made no difference. What counted was the prevalence of an advanced consciousness among the Cuban leadership and the most enlightened sectors of the people, for the process to be forced through. This stance permeated all his views: about sugar and industry, the budget and centralization, moral and material incentives. His positions were not strictly economic; they were essentially political, and stemmed from a central premise: consciousness (which for Che meant willpower) is the driving force behind change. Administration comes later, and is entirely secondary.

  Che was right, to a certain extent. If the degree of political awareness and mobilization he called for had existed, it would perhaps have been possible to run an economy as simple as Cuba’s like clockwork: centralize everything in a few hands, and structure prices, salaries, and investment in light of moral criteria. Indeed, that level of activism seemed ready to dawn at certain moments of the Revolution: the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, the literacy campaign. It was Che’s misfortune that this higher consciousness always faded, and that his own passion and dedication were not shared by all—nor could they be, as he all too often failed to understand.

  The debate went back and forth from centralization to the budgetary system to the central management of investment, salaries, and banks; then it would shift back to moral versus material incentives, its original starting point. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez stated over twenty years later that he and Che “had small differences in our conception of incentives.”53 From a distance, the discrepancy between Che and the other economic policy-makers was more a matter of degree than substance, though this did not prevent furious arguments. Che once stalked out of an INRA meeting so abruptly that even his bodyguards were left behind, according to a Soviet technician. A man so hotheaded could hardly debate matters of historical importance with any degree of calm.54

  The Cuban government mounted a retroactive whitewashing campaign to minimize its differences with Che, insisting that they were only a matter of emphasis. Thus, Rodríguez notes that Che never sought to eliminate material incentives—which is true. Nor did the old Communists demand that moral incentives simply be eliminated. But the dispute—whether a matter of substance or degree—was very real. For Che, moral incentives were the key; for the others, it was material incentives.*17 The cycle ended with Fidel Castro’s second trip to Moscow in January 1964. Cuba’s alignment with the USSR was now virtually complete, and in a sense beneficial to the island, as its depleted economy was able to accumulate foreign-currency reserves, take advantage of high international sugar prices, and ensure a long-term market for its produce.

  And so Che Guevara began his final year in Cuba relatively marginalized from the daily running of the economy. But he continued laboring in other areas of government and in his private activities. In early 1963, he turned again to volunteer work. During the sugar harvest of that year, he broke records in cane-cutting and consecutive hours of labor, providing a twofold example. First, he strengthened the government’s revolutionary resolve and proved that Cuba’s leaders could still sustain the effort and sacrifice they demanded of the people; secondly, he showed that volunteer work helped solve the daunting problem of scarce manpower. After 1963, the sugar harvest fell precipitously; when the government decided, in 1964, to reemphasize sugar production, it came up against a shortage of labor. The countryside was not entirely deserted, but the rural population h
ad fallen and the machinery promised by the Soviets (and eagerly awaited by Che, who even experimented with several designs) never arrived. By that time Guevara’s conception of volunteer work was gradually changing; he acknowledged that it could not be sustained without adequate planning:

  Last Sunday I went and lost my time at volunteer work, and something happened that had never happened to me during volunteer work, except for cane-cutting, which was that I kept looking at my watch every fifteen minutes to see when my hours would be up so I could leave, because it didn’t make any sense.55

  Volunteer work was a partial solution. Others were mandatory military service, instituted in December 1963 (the first recruits were called up in March 1964), and legislation on labor norms and salary classifications, promulgated in the first half of 1964. The consolidation of the armed forces and reorganization of the militias served the same purpose, and strengthened the leadership as a whole. But they also undermined Che’s influence. Indeed, neither the exiles in Miami nor the Mafia in the United States considered him as important as they once had; the price on his head fell to $20,000, while Fidel Castro’s was worth $100,000.56

  Che continued to write essays and grant interviews to the international media; along with Fidel Castro, he remained the most effective spokesman for the Cuban Revolution—and perhaps the most credible. But the revolutionary process was foundering in Latin America, despite efforts in Venezuela, Guatemala, and Peru. He felt alone, caught in a dead end. As he wrote to the director of a primary school in the provinces, “Sometimes we revolutionaries are alone; even our children see us as strangers.”57 With each passing day, there was less for him to do in Cuba. Increasingly, he yearned for movement, for a radically different situation less fraught with ambivalence. Fully aware of his predicament, at the end of March and before leaving on a new trip to Africa and Europe, he spoke with Tamara Bunke in his office for several hours. She had by now completed her training as a Cuban intelligence agent, and Guevara gave her the following instructions: “Go and live in Bolivia, where you will establish relations within the armed forces and the governing bourgeoisie, travel around the country … and wait for a contact who will signal the moment for definitive action.”58 The contact would be Che himself, two and a half years later.

  Aside from his defeat in economic policy and Cuba’s alignment with the U.S.S.R., other, more personal factors were pushing him to leave. On March 19, 1964, a woman named Lilia Rosa Pérez gave birth to a son of his in Havana. He was the only child conceived out of wedlock that Che would ever acknowledge, though there is partial evidence of others. Lilia Rosa was an attractive Havana woman about thirty years old who had met Che in Santa Clara in 1958, and then again at La Cabaña in 1959; in 1996 she still attended the annual commemoration of the occupation of the fortress on January 2. Faithful to his heritage, Omar Pérez (named after Omar Khayyam, author of the Rubaiyat, an edition of which Che gave to Lilia Rosa) is a dissident poet and translator who has, for opposing the regime and refusing military service, done time in one of the labor camps his father founded.*18 He has the eyes, eyebrows, and smile of his father; on the few occasions he has a reason to be glad, his face lights up just as Che’s did. He does not speak of his lineage, though he has Guevara’s long, straight black hair, prominent brow, and sad, mysterious expression. His gestures, look, and reticence also betray his antecedents.

  Toward the end of the eighties, Lilia Rosa appeared one day at the home of the companion of Che’s daughter, Hilda Guevara Gadea, with a pile of books by Guevara and others full of handwritten inscriptions. Lilia thus confessed her past relationship with the comandante, and introduced Omar, who became a close friend of Che’s firstborn. Hildita, as she was known in Cuba, was already beset by cancer, alcoholism, and depression, the latter partly brought on by the ostracism she had always suffered from Che’s official widow and children. Until her death in August 1995, she and Omar would share an especially dear part of their father’s inheritance: his rebelliousness, individualism, and lack of favor with official circles. Hilda Guevara never had any doubt that Omar was her brother; she treated him accordingly, and asked her children to consider him as such. Omar’s story is well known in Cuba, as is that of Che’s other presumed illegitimate offspring†6 Omar’s case is different, however, for a simple reason: Che’s Mexican grandson, Canek Sánchez Guevara, told this author (in both Havana and Mexico, in a private conversation and a taped interview) that his mother, Hilda, introduced Omar to him in those terms, and loved him as a sibling.59 The many reports about Omar, his physical likeness to Che, and the account by Che’s daughter, all confirm his birthright.‡2

  It is not known if Che was aware of his son’s birth in 1964, but in any case, this situation must not have been an easy one for him. He had always opposed his colleagues’ frequent affairs as a matter of principle, and had succeeded in avoiding the erotic temptations of power in the tropics. But something happened in mid-1963, if not before, that can only have exacerbated his growing restlessness in Cuba.

  Hence his more moderate and flexible attitude in the Ministry of Industries, as was evident in the case of an official named Mesa, a director of the Toy Company in the Ministry. A married man with children, Mesa fell in love with his secretary and was spotted with her in dubious circumstances. The case was presented to Che on July 11, 1964, four months after the birth of Omar. His response was revealing:

  No one has yet established in human relations that a man must live with one woman all the time. … I said I didn’t know why all the discussion was necessary, because I consider this a logical case that can happen to anybody, and we should perhaps analyze whether the sanction … is not extreme. … Obviously, if something happens, it is because the woman is willing; otherwise, it would be a serious crime, but this doesn’t happen without the woman’s consent. … We have tried not to be extreme in these matters. There is also a degree of Socialist saintliness in this area, and the real truth is that if one could enter into everybody’s conscience we would have to see who would cast the first stone. … We have always advocated not going to extremes, and especially not making of this a capital matter, or making it public; this could go so far as to destroy homes which could have survived, as these are quite natural, normal things that happen.60

  So Che was restive; his predicament and his eternal wanderlust led him, as always, to travel. On March 17, he left for Geneva as head of the Cuban delegation to the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), whose Secretary-General was his compatriot Raúl Prebisch. Che spent most of his month abroad in Switzerland, with brief stopovers in Prague and Paris, and a couple of days in Algiers to see his friend Ben Bella. His speech at the United Nations was substantive and historic, presenting several of the concerns that would dominate his thinking and public statements in the following year.

  The hall at the Palais des Nations erupted into applause as Guevara made his way to the podium; he was already a legendary figure.61 He began by castigating the conference for excluding several delegations—China, North Vietnam, and North Korea—and for inviting others with dubious credentials, like South Africa. Then he staked out his position, in ideological and political terms:

  We understand clearly—and express frankly—that the only correct solution to the problems of humanity at this time is the complete elimination of the exploitation of dependent countries by developed, capitalist countries, with all the consequences implicit in that fact.62

  Che’s speech was short, ironic, and rhetorical (“the imperialists will insist that underdevelopment is caused by underdeveloped countries”), but lacking in vision and proposals. It was respectful of the Socialist countries, but no more. Guevara repeatedly emphasized the plight of poor nations, the peoples “struggling for their liberation,” “the needy of the world,” with hardly any mention of the Soviet Union. In contrast, he subtly presented the problem that was beginning to obsess him, and which would set him increasingly at odds with the Cuban regime.

 
He noted the worsening terms of trade, whereby the price of raw materials exported by developing countries tended to fall, while that of goods and services exported by industrialized countries tended to rise. This meant that poor nations were forced to export more and more in order to maintain the same volume of imports. He observed that “many underdeveloped countries reach an apparently logical conclusion”: in their trade relations with Socialist countries, the latter “benefit from the current state of affairs.”63 He then explained that this reality must be acknowledged “honestly and bravely,” granting that it was not entirely the fault of the Socialist bloc. And the situation changed when countries reached long-term agreements, as Cuba had with the Soviet Union. Yet his term for Cuba’s sugar pact with the USSR— “relations of a new type”—while reflecting his conviction that it was not the same to do business with Socialists as with capitalists, was hardly enthusiastic. He resented the way he was mistreated by the other Socialist delegations; he simply was no longer part of the family, if he ever had been:

  Guevara complained of the poor impression he brought back of the contacts with Soviet comrades and the other Socialist countries in Geneva, who did not trust him. The Cuban delegation was isolated; the delegations of Eastern Europe would meet and talk things over and only afterwards, for appearances’ sake, notify the Cubans of their decisions. The Cuban delegation was isolated.64

  Guevara’s days in the Calvinist city of Jean Jacques Rousseau had an element of mystery. Very few heads of delegation stayed for the entire month of the UNCTAD meeting. Che had a tense relationship with many of his fellow Latin Americans; according to a member of the Mexican mission, he was not even invited to meetings of the regional group.65 He stayed at a modest hotel near the lake, with a large security detail, and sometimes visited with the Mexican delegates to drink tequila and sing tangos and boleros. He expressed a certain nostalgia for Mexico, asking about people and events there and recalling his time with an affection he acquired only after he left for Cuba. One day, a Mexican delegate saw him walking alone on the banks of Lake Geneva, pausing for a long time on a rock at the water’s edge and contemplating the Saléve in the distance; perhaps he was reflecting upon the hard decisions that awaited him in Cuba.