Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  The crisis erupted in July 1964. The tentative peace and territorial integrity forcibly imposed by the United Nations, Washington, and Brussels in the early sixties were coming apart at the seams. Once the danger of secession by the mining region of Upper Katanga was averted, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) lost all interest in maintaining a UN mission in the Congo. The UN withdrew in mid-1964, frustrated by its costly and discredited task. It left a vacuum behind, which was rapidly filled by the social and political forces already present at the beginning of the decade.

  Uprisings inspired by the memory of the martyred independence hero Patrice Lumumba immediately flared up in the western part of the country. One of them, beginning in January 1964, was led by Pierre Mulele. Lumumba’s first minister of education, Mulele had spent time in exile in Beijing, and obtained Mao’s support. His was “the first great peasant uprising in an independent African country.”2 According to an admiring biographer, it was as well “the first great people’s revolution against neocolonialism in postindependence Africa.”3

  The incumbent prime minister of the Congo soon resigned. In his stead, President Kasavubu named the discredited leader of the independence wars, Moise Tshombe, who enjoyed the support of the Société Générale of Brussels (a sort of tutelary body for the Congolese semicolony). Tshombe was despised by the leaders of the OAU, especially its most radical ones— the so-called Group of Six, consisting of Nasser, Ben Bella, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sékou Touré of Guinea, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Modibo Keita of Mali*2—who still blamed Tshombe for Lumumba’s death. The rebellion quickly spread eastward, led by several of Lumumba’s former aides, and by a more recently arrived and dubious revolutionary, Gaston Soumaliot. They had all previously formed a Committee for National Liberation (CNL) supported by the USSR, Cuba, and the OAU itself. Beginning in early 1964, the CNL had established bases in neighboring Rwanda-Burundi (one country at that time), on the western shores of Lake Tanganyika. By July 1964, the important mining town of Albertville had fallen; in August the rebels took Stanleyville, the provincial capital named after the New York Herald journalist of Livingstonian fame, where, according to several Western authors, they unleashed a reign of terror that killed 20,000 Congolese.4 The CNL’s strategy of operating from Rwanda-Burundi proved decisive: its base there was the only one to survive the rebel defeat in late 1964. That is where Che would arrive the following April.

  In sum, there were two rebellions, two leaderships, and two guerrilla campaigns in the Congo: that of the CNL in the north and east, and Pierre Mulele’s in the west. The former had greater African, Soviet, and international support; the latter was better organized, had more ideological depth and consistency, and was probably more deeply rooted in Congolese society. Mulele was a natural leader, and Lumumba’s only plausible heir. But his movement never extended beyond his tribal base (Bapendes and Bambundas) and region (Kwilu and the northeastern part of the country). In contrast, the CNL conquered a larger territorial base, but its leaders soon gained a reputation for corruption, cowardice, and internal squabbling. The radicalism of the two movements was very relative. The CNL leadership maintained relations with both Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak and the CIA station chief in the Congo, Lawrence Devlin.5 Even so, the rebellion came to represent a significant threat to Belgium’s economic interests—embodied by the archetypical Union Miniére du Haut Katanga, longtime owner of the Congo’s immense mineral riches—and to the geopolitical interests of the United States, which could not possibly allow Soviet gains in Africa during its own presidential election campaign. It also posed a problem for the South Africans and ex-Katanganese, who feared reprisals for their atrocities in the early part of the decade: massacres, murders, and assaults.

  The CIA soon decided to help crush the rebellion with the help of anti-Castro pilots. So did South Africa, with several hundred mercenaries led by the notorious and movie-famous “Mad Mike” Hoare, as did Belgium with up to 450 combatants, initially sent in as advisers. By November 1964, after a campaign which succeeded in isolating the rebels in Stanleyville, there was little left to do. The death blow was Opération Dragon Rouge, when Belgian paratroopers were dropped into the east of the country by U.S. planes and reconquered the eastern capital.

  The results were to be expected: a bloodbath, including the massacre of thousands of Congolese by South African mercenaries and the coldblooded murder of about eighty Western hostages. The international outcry was deafening, but the mission had succeeded. Though the rebels, called “simbas,” would survive in the area for years, by November 1964 they were largely dispersed; and when, in March 1965, “the white mercenaries captured the town of Watsa on the far eastern frontier … the rebellion was declared defeated. … After the Dragon Rouge parachute operation in November 1964, the rebellion was not a serious threat.”6 The Stanleyville operation and its bloody aftermath were eloquently and passionately denounced by Che at the United Nations. Many saw the Stanleyville defeat as just one more phase in the struggle; in fact, it proved to be the last mass rebellion in the eastern Congo for decades, until 1996.

  The uprising in Kwilu dragged on until late 1968, when Pierre Mulele finally surrendered, theoretically in the context of a negotiated peace, to Mobutu Sese Seko. He was promptly dismembered, and his remains readily fed to the crocodiles of the Congo River. In reality, however, his movement had been condemned by internal tribal divisions since March 14, 1965. On that day,

  a grave defeat shattered Mulele’s prestige and any faith in the future of the movement. The unity of Mulelism was broken; many youth abandoned the guerrilla movement. It was Mulele’s only decision based on tribal considerations, but it had disastrous repercussions for him.7

  Thus Ben Bella’s lament that progressive forces had arrived too late in the Congo. Che, too, was late. For this reason, and many others, his expedition was doomed from the outset. Guevara threw his support behind a struggle that had already been soundly and definitively crushed. When he left New York’s Kennedy Airport for Algiers, the first stop in a multi-city African tour, on December 18, 1964, the uprising in the eastern Congo was already over. His entire African saga went against the current; that was its fatal weakness. At the same time, it was rooted in undeniably historical events: the first armed, massive, revolutionary uprisings against the postcolonial regime, in a country at the heart of the African continent so important to the rest of the world that everybody, from Washington to Beijing, strove to control it. The country would prove so ungovernable and unfortunate that thirty years later it came to symbolize the epitome of a failed decolonization. Ravaged by AIDS, corruption, violence, and desperate poverty, it would gradually lose any semblance of nationhood; on its eastern borders, in the Great Lakes region, it would register one of the cruelest tragedies of hunger, genocide, and migration in modern times.

  Che’s African tour was planned from New York, by the Cuban Ambassador to Algiers, Jorge Serguera. None of the missions in Cuba of the countries Che visited were notified of his movements.8 The Soviets were not consulted either. Comandante Guevara started off with a full week in Algiers, where he mapped out the remainder of what would be a three-month trip. He reviewed the situation in Africa with Ben Bella, and met with Congolese and liberation-movement leaders from the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. It soon became apparent to him that the struggle in the Congo faced two serious challenges. First, it required a united and centralized leadership; military operations had to be coordinated jointly. In the next three months, as he traveled through eight African countries, Guevara would return to this idea time and again, always in vain.

  The second challenge was equally complex. Essentially, it involved ensuring and harmonizing Soviet and Chinese assistance to both factions: that of Mulele, helped by the Chinese, and that of the National Liberation Committee, supported by the Soviets. The Sino-Soviet conflict complicated the situation in Africa enormously; it also interfered with aid, which was not very timely or smooth t
o begin with. Thus Che’s emphasis on a third task during those months: persuading Ben Bella and other African leaders to fill in for tardy or inadequate Soviet and Chinese assistance as much as possible.

  On December 26, Che left Algiers for Bamako, the capital of Mali. The idea probably originated with Ben Bella, who considered Modibo Keita the senior and most respected member of the Group of Six.9 Che’s visit did not receive much attention: the joint communiqué was not signed by any member of the Politburo or senior minister. President Keita usually took holidays at Christmas, and there was no public welcome for Che in the streets of Bamako. Even press coverage was scant. The visit was in all likelihood scheduled at the last moment.

  In Mali, Che stressed that Cuba had been wrong to align itself so closely with the Soviet Union and China; this was one of his observations to the minister who received him.10 On January 1, Che traveled to the People’s Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), where he announced that twenty young men would receive military training in Cuba. There he also forged one of the closest alliances Cuba would ever enjoy in Africa. A few months later, a detachment of Cuban troops commanded by Jorge Risquet would arrive in Brazzaville to serve as presidential guards for President Jean-François Massemba Debat. Some of the soldiers who accompanied Che to the Congo in April 1965 later joined this unit, which would stay on long after the Argentine’s departure. Guevara’s meeting with Agostinho Neto, head and founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, would also have long-lasting effects: Cuban troops left the former Portuguese colony only in 1992.

  Che also visited Guinea, from January 7 to 14, renewing his friendship with Sékou Touré, who was, along with Ben Bella, the African leader most sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution. He was received more effusively than in Mali, except when he traveled with the president’s entourage to meet with Leopold Senghor, the President of Senegal. The poet of négritude and his aides were “indignant” at Guevara’s inclusion in talks among African leaders. Che renewed his call for support to liberation movements in Africa, emphasizing the need for unity in the “struggle against imperialism.” The Congolese and other movements had to be united within and among themselves, and should draw closer to the Socialist countries, especially the two great powers. But not too close; in a secret cable, the CIA reported that Che’s motivation in Africa

  was to warn “their friends” not to get in too deep with the Soviet or Chinese communists. According to Guevara, while Cuba was as dedicated as ever to socialism, Cuban officials were very unhappy about the depth of interference in their internal affairs of the USSR and communist China. Guevara said that it was too late for Cuba to do anything about it but that the Cubans felt it was not too late for the Africans to redress the situation. Guevara added that the Cubans were especially concerned about their friends the Algerians, and that he was proceeding directly to Algiers to deliver the same message to Ben Bella.*3

  From there, it was on to Ghana, where Che talked at length with Kwame Nkrumah, the classic archetype of Africa’s charismatic and corrupt independence leaders. He also met Laurent Kabila, the Congolese leader from the region bordering on Lake Tanganyika where Che would establish his guerrilla base three months later.†2 Thirty years later, Kabila, Che’s chief interlocutor in the Congo, would lead the Tutsi rebellion in eastern Zaire, in the midst of one of the late twentieth century’s worst humanitarian crises; in May 1997 he finally achieved power in the country he had sought Che’s help to liberate in the mid-sixties.

  In late January, Guevara returned to Algiers to compare notes with Ben Bella and decide what to do next. He was increasingly inclined to participate directly in the Congolese struggle. In an interview with the official FLN daily Algers Ce Soir, he declared that while the Congo was an African problem, Cuba was morally committed to its struggle. By now, Che’s views on Africa, the Congo, and his own destiny were fairly well defined. As Ben Bella recalls, Guevara had reached the conclusion that “Africa was the continent in the world most favorable for great changes; Africa set the course for the renewal of the anti-imperialist struggle.”11 In the words of Jorge Serguera, Africa was for Che a sort of no-man’s-land which the great powers had not yet carved up into spheres of influence, and where victory was still possible.12

  For several reasons, Congo-Leopoldville seemed to Che the country, or rather the territory, with the best chances for success thanks to the formidable guerrilla movement in the west and the unified forces of the Committee of National Liberation in the east. Furthermore, as the United States became increasingly involved in Vietnam, it was unlikely that it would intervene in the struggle in any direct or significant way. Finally, though the Congo was a landlocked nation with no outlet to the sea other than Cabinda, it had many neighbors: Congo Brazzaville, the Republic of Central Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, Rwanda-Burundi. It was a sort of African Bolivia. This was only one of many analogies between the two countries, and Guevara’s two expeditions.

  Another decisive element in Che’s approach to Africa, in Serguera’s view, was its geostrategic situation. According to the Cuban ambassador to Algiers, who would later be accused of having “dragged” Che into Africa by painting a rosy picture for him,13 Guevara gambled that the Soviet Union would tolerate Cuban support for the struggle in Africa, even if this was not quite the case in Latin America. Moreover, a success in Africa might induce Moscow to view more favorably Cuba’s support for the revolution in Latin America.14

  As his African odyssey progressed, Guevara became more aware of certain factors, while neglecting or rejecting others. His initial motivations were gradually buttressed or replaced by others. As Serguera describes it, Guevara was profoundly moved by the poverty, backwardness, and racial and colonial oppression which had characterized Africa since conquest and colonization. He also observed at first hand the divisions among progressive forces and the mediocrity of their leaders, believing unavoidably perhaps that he could help to shape events, albeit with limited resources. He underestimated two vital points, nonetheless: the capacity of the United States to intervene in a similar way (that is, to wield enormous influence at scant cost), and the fact that the internal divisions among political leaders were a reflection—indirect but faithful—of profound tribal and ethnic fractures. The weakest link in the chain, however, was Che’s conception of “the people”: there was no such thing in most of Africa. This would become evident in the course of Cuba’s subsequent interventions in Brazzaville, Angola, and Ethiopia. Che was wrong to assume that opposition to the colonial powers (or, after decolonization, “imperialism”) would suffice to coalesce groups that had always been enemies, with nothing in common save the borders imposed upon them by the great powers.

  During those months, Che visited Cairo twice: once very briefly on February 11, on his way back from China; and a second time in March, when he spent a couple of weeks on his way back to Cuba. There is a record of his conversations with Nasser, thanks to notes taken by Mohammed Heikal and published one year after the Egyptian president’s death.*4 First of all, Nasser detected in Che a “deep personal anguish” and great sadness. Che did not discuss his inner concerns; he told Nasser only that he was going to Tanzania to study the prospects of the liberation movements in the Congo. But Nasser sensed in him little enthusiasm for the project. When he returned from Tanzania along with Pablo Ribalta, Cuba’s ambassador in Dar-es-Salaam, Guevara recounted to Nasser his visit to the guerrilla camps in the vortex of the Congo-Tanzania-Burundi. He had made up his mind to personally direct Cuban assistance to the Congolese rebels: “I think I will go to the Congo because it is the hottest place in the world today. With the help of the Africans through the Committee in Tanzania, and with two battalions of Cubans, I believe we can strike at the heart of the imperialists’ interests in Katanga.”

  Nasser expressed his astonishment and attempted to dissuade him, explaining that a white, foreign leader commanding blacks in Africa could only come across as an imitation of Tarzan. Nonetheless, Che tried
to convince the President of the United Arab Republic to help the Congo rebels. Nasser agreed, but refused to send troops: “If you go to the Congo with two Cuban battalions and I send an Egyptian battalion, it will be seen as a foreign intervention and do more harm than good.”

  After several lengthy conversations, Nasser wondered how sure Che was of his plans. As Guevara confessed to him, “I have thought of going to the Congo, but in view of events there I am inclined to accept your opinion that it would be harmful. I have also thought of going to Vietnam. …” Anyway, as Che declared during their final conversation, he would not stay in Cuba. Nasser was struck by Guevara’s preoccupation with death; he had remarked to the Egyptian that “The decisive moment in a man’s life is when he decides to confront death. If he confronts it, he will be a hero whether he succeeds or not. He can be a good or a bad politician, but if he does not confront death he will never be more than a politician.”

  Some of this jibes with Ben Bella’s memories. Che shared with him, too, his intention to join the struggle in the Congo. The Algerian, for his part, was bent on persuading Che to renounce his delusional project—or at least not to don a prophet’s robes and play messiah with the African people. The racial issue was far too delicate, he explained: “The situation in black Africa was not comparable to that prevailing in our countries; Nasser and I, we warned Che of what might happen.”15

  In Cairo, Guevara conversed at length with the Congolese leaders who had been exiled after their defeat at Stanleyville. Gaston Sumaliot lived on the island of Zamalek, where he received Che several times. Guevara met again with Laurent Kabila, one of the National Liberation Committee’s two vice-presidents; the other was Pierre Mulele. Kabila was supposedly leading a guerrilla campaign in an area of Congo-Leopoldville bordering on Lake Tanganyika. Here a new and unfortunate contradiction arose. Mulele’s absence and the collapse of the front at Stanleyville undermined the exiled rebels’ efforts to secure funds and assistance. Their solution was, temporarily at least, to exaggerate the significance of Kabila’s army in the Great Lakes region, which was in fact sorely lacking in combatants, arms, and revolutionary morale. Indeed, its only true military asset lay in its potential to establish a rebel sanctuary in Kigoma, across the lake in Tanzania.