Companero
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All right, the only alternative left me is to leave here for wherever the hell, and please, if you can help me in any way in what I intend to do, do so immediately; and if not, tell me so I can see who can. Fidel said to him, “No, no, there is no problem there.”41
Che prepared for his departure. On March 22, he convened his last meeting at the Ministry of Industries and delivered a couple of talks—one in general terms, and one within the governing council. At both meetings he recounted his experience, in Africa and highlighted the similarities between Cuban and African culture, emphasizing the African roots of modern Cuba. He did not say that he was leaving for Africa. From the outset, he agreed with Castro that they would explain his absence by saying that he had gone to cut sugar cane in the province of Oriente. The deception was quite plausible: everybody knew that Che had a penchant for volunteer work. The main point was to gain time.†5
Che’s cover could not last forever. Soon, it would be necessary to account for his whereabouts, but by then he and his expeditionary force would be in the hills of Africa. Before leaving, he sent books, gifts, and elliptical letters of farewell to his friends. He also selected the aides who would accompany him: among them, Víctor Dreke, a black combatant from the old Student Directorate; Papi (José María Martínez Tamayo); and Pombo (Harry Villegas, who this time could be included precisely because he was black).
Almost all the 130 Cubans who landed on the shores of the Great Lakes were black, and many of them volunteers, but not all went entirely of their own free will. A large number of “volunteers” were completely unaware of their geographic and political destination. Evidently, security had to be tight. But the ignorance of the “internationalists” about their mission would have dire consequences. So Che would conclude at year’s end, devastated by defeat and dysentery:
In Cuba very few of our principal military or mid-level cadres with good training were black. When we tried to send primarily black Cubans, we sought them out among the best elements of the army, with some combat experience. The result is that our group has … a very good combat morale and precise tactical knowledge in the field, but little academic training. … The fact is that our comrades had a very scant cultural background, and also a relatively low political development.42
As Aragonés would exclaim months later in the Congo, “Shit, Che, nobody knows what the hell we’re doing here”; no wonder the Cuban troops were soon overwhelmed by discontent, rage, and indiscipline. But Che was, as always, in a hurry. The whole process of selection, training, and transport lasted less than a couple of months. At daybreak of April 2, 1965, Che’s head shaved and with a dental prosthesis in place, he, Dreke, and Papi departed from Havana’s José Martí airport for Dar-es-Salaam. As Castro would reveal twenty years later: “I myself suggested to Che that he should gain some time and wait; but he wanted to train cadres, develop through experience.”43
The account of Celia Sánchez quoted by Franqui, whereby Che left Cuba without taking leave of Castro, rings true.44 In mid-April, Franqui was summoned by Castro late one night to his house on Calle Once, where the comandante was deeply distressed, pacing back and forth like a lion in a cage. He had seen him in that state only twice before: at the Miguel Schultz immigration bureau in Mexico City and in the Sierra Maestra in June 1958, when Batista’s counteroffensive came within half a kilometer of his general headquarters. Castro ordered him to seek out Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was about to return to Milan from Cuba, to tell them that rumors of Che’s death in the Dominican Republic were false. Che was alive and well, he said, and had gone to Vietnam. Franqui dissuaded Castro, explaining that the story would create more suspicions than it would dispel. But he understood two things: Che was not in Vietnam, and Fidel was enormously upset at his friend’s departure.
With or without a hug from Castro, Guevara finally departed Havana, leaving Celia Sánchez a good-bye letter for Castro: “Afterwards, Celia told me Fidel was quite upset because he had not been able to see Che before his departure; he had so much work those days.”45 The departure of the other combatants—who would arrive in Tanzania little by little—was also arranged in haste, as were the arms shipment and messages to the families and governments involved. A first unit, commanded by Che, landed at the Tanzanian capital on April 19. Four days later they embarked upon their trek across the savannah to Kigoma, a godforsaken village on the lakeshore facing the Congo.46
Che’s insistence on a secret operation contrasted with Fidel Castro’s political need to keep his principal partners informed. The itinerary followed by most of the combatants was fairly straightforward, passing through Havana, Moscow, Algeria, Cairo, and Dar-es-Salaam.47 Che’s trip, however, was more roundabout and lasted seventeen days, in order to avoid arousing undue curiosity—including in friendly countries. Even in his journal, Che noted that he could not divulge the stops on his slow passage to Tanzania. According to a Cuban intelligence source who worked at the Cuban Embassy in Prague, Che, Dreke, and Papi arrived in Prague directly from Havana, and remained there for several days without the Soviets’ knowledge. It is possible that they then traveled less directly, through Belgium, Paris, and Madrid.*17 Whatever the road, the effort was in vain: during those very days, Fidel Castro shared with the Soviet ambassador in Havana one of the best-kept secrets in the world.
Aleksandr Alexeiev had visited Che at the Ministry of Industries in late March, asking whether he would be accompanying Fidel and the diplomatic corps to the sugar harvest in Camagüey. Che replied that he wouldn’t, as he was off to Oriente “to cut cane for real, not make-believe.” Alexeiev cautioned him gently but a bit late, “There’s no sense in fighting, Che.” To which Che answered, “All the same, I’m not going.” When the Soviet ambassador met with Fidel in Camagüey on April 18 or 19, he was still disturbed by Che’s tense attitude. Fidel took him by the arm, leading him away from the others, and whispered:
Che did not go to cut cane; he’s left for Africa. Che believes Africa is a noman’s-land, where neither Europe, the USSR, or the United States has hegemony; it’s the right place for Cuba. You know he is a revolutionary and this is how he can help the world. Don’t transmit this to Moscow by radio or in code, but I want you to know it and inform your leaders in person whenever you can.48
According to Alexeiev, the USSR never discussed or protested Che’s presence in the Congo, at least not through its diplomatic mission. Moscow evidently considered that if Fidel had decided Che should go to the Congo, it was all right with them. Oleg Daroussenkov, Nikolai Leonov, and other Soviet diplomats in Cuba at that time corroborate that the USSR knew what was going on, but never raised any objections or interfered with Cuba’s African venture. Fidel’s deference to the Soviets undoubtedly placated them, as did Raúl’s when he attended the Conference of Communist Parties in April. In contrast, Che did not even tell his mother about his plans, which would lead to a series of misunderstandings.
While in Havana in March, Che had met with Gustavo Roca, who would soon return to Buenos Aires. He asked him to remit a letter to his mother, who was dying from cancer. Celia received the letter, dated March 16, at the hospital in mid-April. Part of its content is known thanks to her reply, sent to Cuba with Ricardo Rojo, a copy of which he saved and published in 1968. Che wrote to his mother that he intended to leave the revolutionary government and go off to cut cane for a month; then he would manage a factory for the next five years. He warned his mother not to travel to Cuba for the moment, and told her about his family and the birth of his son Ernesto, in a perfunctory tone for which Celia would bitterly reproach him. Her reply never reached Guevara; the mail service in the Congolese guerrilla camps left much to be desired.
Celia questioned him sharply: wasn’t there a better use for her eldest son’s talents than cutting cane or managing factories? Celia’s condition worsened in mid-May. She asked Rojo to call Che in Havana; Aleida, who answered, reported that Che was in Cuba, but not accessible by phone. A couple of days later Aleida retu
rned the call, only to say that her husband had not been in touch. Che’s family in Argentina was heartbroken; his mother died two days later. His siblings would not know until much later where their eldest brother was, or why he could not contact his mother on her deathbed. Che’s younger brother Roberto did not learn of his trip to the Congo until the end of 1967, when he met with Fidel after Guevara’s execution in Bolivia.49 Even when his mother was dying, Che followed the law of the revolution; Soviet diplomats knew more about his movements than his own family in Buenos Aires.
Between Che’s disappearance on March 22 and October 5, 1965, when Fidel read publicly his letter of farewell from Cuba, countless rumors proliferated concerning his whereabouts and his relationship with Castro.*18 Cuba’s intelligence services added to the confusion through a disinformation campaign. So the word spread that Che had gone to fight the U.S. marines in the Dominican Republic; or that he had been seen by a priest in the state of Acre, in Brazil; or that he lay ill in a Cuban sanatorium; or that Castro had had him shot. U.S. intelligence also floated stories, in the hope that someone would slip up and tell the truth—but to no avail, except in the Congo itself. The Cubans’ expertise in this area, and Che’s obsession with secrecy, functioned more than adequately until July, and even then the CIA refused to believe its field officers’ reports.
In contrast, the substantive rift between Castro and Che became increasingly public. Embassies and intelligence services alike reported and analyzed it in depth, though somewhat late in the game. The best summary is to be found in a CIA intelligence memorandum drafted on October 18, 1965, a few days after Fidel revealed Che’s decision to lead a revolution elsewhere.50 Aside from listing previous disagreements among Che, the Soviets, and the Communists, the U.S. report examined Che’s growing distance from Castro. It began on January 21, 1965, when the Cuban leader announced that the best five thousand cane-cutters would receive prizes, such as motorbikes, trips abroad, and first-class holidays in Cuban hotels, effectively putting an end to moral incentives. Already in December 1964, the government had announced a pilot program of contractual salaries, profit sharing, and prizes for workers. Later, during his 26th of July speech in Santa Clara, Fidel Castro (with a huge portrait of Guevara as a backdrop) denounced moral incentives and administrative centralization. His presentation was polished and well-reasoned, and its central message was clear:
Nor [can we have] idealist methods which conceive of all men obediently following the concept of duty, because in real life we cannot think like that … nor choose those paths which seek, above all else, to awaken selfishness in men. … It would be absurd to try [to convince] the great mass of men who cut cane to make their best effort out of duty, regardless of whether they make more or less.51
Fidel resumed his attack on September 28, asserting in a speech that he favored “local development and administration.”52 Finally, among the list of divergences between Che and Fidel there was the structure of the Central Committee in Cuba’s newly founded Communist Party; the announcement of its creation was the occasion Fidel chose to make public Che’s letter of renunciation. This was largely unavoidable, as Guevara was not among the members of the Central Committee; indeed, in his farewell letter he had discarded his Cuban citizenship. But his closest aides at the Ministry of Industries were not included in the Party’s governing body either. Furthermore, the only cabinet ministers left out were those most identified with Che: Luis Alvarez Rom, the minister of finance allied with Che in his dispute with the National Bank; the minister of sugar, Orlando Borrego; and Arturo Guzman, who replaced Che at the Ministry of Industries. Salvador Vilaseca, the mathematics professor who was a close friend of Che’s, was also excluded. Che’s economic-policy team had been politically annihilated.
Guevara did not take his succession of economic policy defeats quietly. He responded in two steps: first, in an interview with the Egyptian publication Al-Tali-’ah, in April 1965, which has never been published in Cuba; and, second, in his most famous essay, “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba” (Socialism and Man in Cuba), originally published in Uruguay in March 1965, and written during his official African tour. In the Egyptian interview, Guevara launched his offensive on two fronts—one directly related to Cuba, and the other to the Sino-Soviet conflict. He was categorical about material incentives, saying that Yugoslavia “has given preference to material incentives,” and that they should be “liquidated.” He rejected the idea that workers should participate in setting salaries, and all profit-sharing and prize schemes. In his words,
An “automatized” industry which distributes high revenues only among privileged workers is denying those resources to the community as a whole. The efforts of those workers in high-revenue companies are like the effort invested by farmers in their own plots of land. Such conditions create a privileged group and strengthen capitalist elements.53
This was a direct response to the decisions taken in Cuba over the previous months. Che also expressed his contradictory feelings about Yugoslavia’s international position, and his exasperation with the Communist movement worldwide: “We differ in two ways from the Yugoslav experiment: in our reaction to Stalinism, and our opposition to having the Soviet Union dictate to us its economic and leadership ideals.”54 Though some of the meaning may have been lost in translation—from Spanish to Arabic to English—it was clear that Che’s criticism of Yugoslavia was similar to China’s. Che did not share in Tito’s emphatic anti-Stalinism; on the contrary, his view was closer to that of the Chinese, who saw in Tito’s and Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism a fatal sign of revisionism.
In “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba,” Guevara returned to the issue of moral incentives and responded to some of the criticism he had received:
The temptation to follow the beaten path of material interest, as the motor for accelerated development, is very great. The danger is that the trees can prevent us from seeing the forest. By pursuing the illusion of achieving socialism with the blunted arms bequeathed us by capitalism (merchandise as economic unit, profitability, individual material interest as driving force, et cetera), one could well arrive at a dead end. So to build communism, one must make a new man together with the material base. It is very important that we choose the right instrument to mobilize the masses. That instrument should be of a moral nature, fundamentally, without neglecting the appropriate use of material incentives, especially of a social nature. As I have said, at times of extreme danger it is easy to magnify moral incentives; but to keep them effective, we must develop a consciousness where values acquire new categories.55
Guevara went on to describe the past errors of the Cuban government, and the special features of the Revolution—though the two were not necessarily related, in his view. He avoided making any link between the caudillostyle leadership of Fidel Castro—which he praised—and the “revisionism” he condemned. This is perhaps why he found it difficult to criticize the revolutionary process as a whole, in any effective or constructive way. If one compares his statements about Fidel with his analysis of the mistakes committed in Cuba, the Guevaran predicament becomes apparent. He is in effect denouncing the errors while celebrating their causes:
In large public gatherings one may observe something like a dialogue between two tones, whose vibrations provoke new ones in the listener. Fidel and the masses begin to vibrate in a dialogue of increasing intensity until reaching a climax in a sudden finale, crowned by our cry of struggle and history. It is difficult, for somebody who has not lived the experience of the Revolution, to understand that close dialectical bond between the individual and the masses. … In our country, we have not made the mistake of a mechanistic realism, but have gone to the other extreme. And this is because we have not understood the need to create a new man. … The reaction against nineteenth-century man has made us fall anew into the decadence of the twentieth century. This is not too serious a mistake, but we must overcome it, so as not to open a channel for revisionism.56
Finally, Che c
ommented briefly but insightfully on his own journey as a revolutionary, and the ties between the new man and himself. The new man is, in a sense, the Cuban Communist: the veteran of the Sierra Maestra and volunteer work, of the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, of international missions and solidarity. In a word, he is very much like Che Guevara. Che never lacked a capacity for self-analysis, or a clear idea of his own destiny; indeed, the fantasy of a chosen fate had obsessed him since his youthful nights in Chuquicamata and the Peruvian Amazon. For him, the new man and the revolutionary leader are fused into one exemplary individual; he comfortably identifies himself with a new man who has yet to see the light of day in Cuba, and never will:
In our ambition as revolutionaries, we try to advance as quickly as possible, clearing paths … by our example. … The leaders of the Revolution have children who, in their early babbling, never learn the word for father; women who are ready to sacrifice their lives in order to take the Revolution to its ultimate goal; friends who are strictly comrades in the Revolution. There is no life outside it [the Revolution]. In these conditions, we must have a large measure of humanity, a large sense of justice and truth. … Every day we must struggle to transform that love of a living humanity … into actions which will serve as an example.57