Companero
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The guerrilla campaign in Bolivia was intended and designed for Che Guevara. Since there had to be a foco, it was better to bestow an ideological basis on it than to establish it in a void. Thus the ex post facto rationale of distracting imperialism and breaking the U.S. stranglehold on Cuba. A revolutionary victory elsewhere in Latin America would indeed provide the island with much-needed respite. But if the struggle was identified with Cuba, the price to pay would be as high as the benefits accrued. This is what happened with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua ten years later, though in relative terms the Cuban presence there was more significant than in Bolivia. Cuba derived undeniable benefits from its involvement in Nicaragua; it also paid a very high price.
Bolivia was Castro’s last gamble: he would either win or lose all. If the expedition prospered, or the mother foco ignited a successful revolution in a neighboring country, U.S. pressure on Cuba would recede. If it failed, Castro would resign himself to an indefinite alignment with Moscow, until the United States called a truce or a new opportunity emerged. Roughly coinciding with Che’s time in Bolivia, Castro’s tone and attitude toward the Soviet Union underwent an undeniable change: he renewed his support for revolution in Latin America and, in early 1968, endured the worst crisis yet in his relations with the USSR, when it virtually suspended oil shipments to Cuba. The price to pay appeared only after Che and the focos in other countries had been defeated. In August 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, Fidel had to bow and accept an event which would change forever the course of socialism in Cuba and the world. This was the real consequence of Che’s debacle in Bolivia. The future of Latin America might well have been quite different if the Argentine revolutionary had not been killed at La Higuera. But effects are not causes: Bolivia was a compromise solution for Che, not a strategic goal for Cuba.
Preparations for the expedition intensified. A number of Bolivians arrived for training in Cuba while Pombo, Papi, and Pachungo looked after the final details in Bolivia. Tania, back in La Paz after her trip to Prague, served as liaison. She hid the Cubans, established contact with local groups, and took charge of the mission’s logistics: money, safe houses, documents, and weapons. Very quickly, however, the Cubans understood that their Bolivian expedition was no picnic, and that something was terribly wrong in the Andean crests and valleys.
Their relations with the Bolivian Party became increasingly torturous. After Monje and the PCB leadership realized that the Cubans did not just intend to use their country as a transit lounge en route to Argentina, but hoped to establish themselves in Bolivia itself, they were outraged. When the Cubans requested the twenty men they had been promised, Monje feigned surprise. He was having “problems,” he explained, with his Central Committee, which was “opposed to the armed struggle.” Guevara’s lieutenants sensed “great uncertainty about [the Bolivians’] decision to join the armed struggle.” The situation was at an impasse. Nothing could be done; all plans were put on hold: “there is apathy, and little enthusiasm, over all this.” The Cubans concluded, “we are the ones doing all the organization, and they are not helping us.”27 Their reports to Havana were received with surprise and disappointment: “they are crazy [over there] because nothing is ready here.”28
Things got worse late that southern winter, when an enigmatic figure arrived on the scene: the French writer Régis Debray, who had already traveled in Bolivia during 1964 partly on his own, partly as an emissary sent by pro-China groups in Paris to recruit Bolivian Maoists. Now he had been dispatched by Fidel Castro with a slightly different mission. He was to study the different regions of Bolivia to determine the best location for a foco. His other task was to initiate talks with the pro-Chinese labor unionists of Moisés Guevara, who had broken both with the PCB and the Maoist group led by Oscar Zamora—with whom he also spoke.*10 Debray’s mission was thus twofold: to find the optimum site for a foco, but also to persuade Che that the Bolivian venture was possible. Debray’s links to Castro were well known; during those weeks, his book Revolution in the Revolution? was published with Castro’s endorsement.
To Mario Monje, it was Debray’s appearance in September, along with the presence of Pombo, Papi, and Tuma in La Paz and Cochabamba since July, that tipped him off to the real nature of unfolding events. Fidel’s original story of smuggling a high-ranking Cuban into Argentina did not square with the arrival of important figures like Debray and Che’s lieutenants. As Jorge Kolle also recalled, “We had known Debray for a long time; we knew about his links to the Venezuelan guerrillas and his ideas which were aligned with those of the Maoist dissidents.”29 When the Bolivians detected his presence at Los Yungas, they realized that the Cubans “were misinforming us, they had not given us the whole script.”30 The day Monje glimpsed Debray in Cochabamba, he became furious and demanded of Papi and Pombo,
“What is Régis Debray doing in Bolivia? You know him, but we have no contact with him. He has come for you to start a guerrilla struggle.” “No,” said the Cubans, “we have nothing to do with him.” Monje replied, “That remains to be seen. You are trying to develop a guerrilla struggle here, and you are not respecting the plan.”*11
A new series of arguments broke out, pitting Monje and most of the PCB leadership against Castro and Piñeiro, with Che as a more or less innocent bystander. The Cubans were playing a double game. They wanted Monje to participate in an armed struggle which he did not support and did not believe possible.†4 Simultaneously, they were attempting to infiltrate and divide Bolivia’s Communist Party, reinforcing partisans of military action like the Peredo brothers, Jorge and Humberto Vázquez Viaña, and the youth movement led by Loyola Guzmán. It was only natural that Che and the Cubans should have identified with that sector of the party: links of solidarity, affection, and shared experience, as well as broad ideological affinities, bound them together. But so that their friends would not be forced to choose between the armed struggle and the party line, it was vital that Che and the Cubans also maintain cordial relations with the PCB leadership.‡2 The radical break would come later, leading to open hostility on the part of the PCB. For the time being, however, comity seemed an indispensable part of the plan—and the only way to achieve it was through duplicity and deceit. Che and his companions were right to believe in the courage and dedication of the Communists, whether the youth movement or pro-Castro dissidents—but they paid a high price for their cultivation of the PCB at the expense of other groups. Their efforts cost them time and energy that could have been better spent elsewhere, and their role was inevitably tainted by mystery and ambiguity.
Monje soon started weaving his own traps and tricks. First he tried to change the location of the Cuban base, shifting it away from the more advantageous setting of the Alto Beni and Los Yungas, in order to achieve his own goal: to get Che and the Cubans out of Bolivia as quickly as possible. The difference between the initial site in the northwest and Ñancahuazú in the southeast was obvious. The former had no outlets; ideal for a struggle within Bolivia, it was unsuited for a mother column meant to branch off into other countries or to cross quickly and secretly into Argentina, which the second location was quite appropriate for. Next Monje convened the Party’s Politburo and solemnly announced: “Gentlemen, the guerrilla struggle is beginning in Bolivia in September or October. Régis Debray is studying the terrain in Bolivia.”31 Then Monje decided to travel to Havana, either to ratify his initial agreement with the Cubans—or else to cancel it entirely.
Concurrently, Fidel and Piñeiro were concealing from Che the full complexity of the issues and positions involved. On the eve of his departure, Che did not know that Monje was insincere in his pledge to join the armed struggle; or that the Bolivian was also, to some extent, being misled; or that the Communists behind the plan represented only a marginal faction within the PCB. Castro’s motives were fairly straightforward: in contrast to Argentina, what made Bolivia attractive as a possible place for a foco was that Cuba possessed serious and significant political assets there. It woul
d have been counterproductive to share with Che the intricacies, dubiousness, and precariousness of those assets or resources; Guevara would merely have concluded that he should go to Argentina after all. But this gave rise to a chain of misunderstandings, euphemisms and simulations which all pointed in one direction: to unleash the armed struggle in Bolivia, at almost any cost. Later, the same web of deceptions would converge on a tragic outcome: complete failure, and the heroic or simply brutal death of the participants.
The final weeks at San Andrés de Taiguanabo were devoted to further training, and to preparing false biographies for the Cubans. Of the twenty-one guerrilla fighters, some, like Che, would pose as Uruguayan; others, as Peruvians or even Bolivians.32 They eventually included five members of the Party’s Central Committee and two deputy ministers of state. Guevara devised the preliminary plan and a long-term schedule, that would never be followed. The strategy was to open two fronts, one near the city of Sucre and the other in the Alto Beni. By December 20, all the Cubans and sixty Bolivians would be in place; this initial nucleus would establish, not a foco, but a school for Latin American guerrillas. Their camp would be secret, isolated, and impenetrable; they would not attempt to infiltrate inhabited areas, recruit peasants, or obtain supplies. In early 1967, a call would be issued to most of the revolutionary leaders of Latin America, asking them to send their best cadres using routes facilitated by Monje and the PCB.*12 Several national columns would then break out toward their respective countries, for training and reconnaissance purposes rather than combat. After various rehearsals, they would slip into the neighboring nations, with Che leading the Argentine column.†5 Before this, however, the guerrillas would make their first public appearance in Bolivia on July 26, 1967, attacking a military base at Chuquisaca, in Sucre; this would furnish them with their first combat experience.33 There is an obvious parallel here to the Sierra Maestra—for instance, the creation of a mother column dividing into several smaller ones.
D-day was set for October 15. The training camp at San Andrés was dismantled and the guerrillas began departing for Bolivia in small groups, all traveling in roundabout and complicated ways. The operation was successful in terms of secrecy; but it required an enormous effort that was shortlived. As Che confessed to Renán Montero, one of his urban cadres in La Paz, the Bolivian government’s security measures were far less strict than he had suspected; all the energy and trouble devoted to penetrating the country in secrecy were partly unnecessary.‡3 Or perhaps, Che’s exertion had another purpose: the Soviets probably did not find out immediately about the mission to Bolivia; this time, Castro did not discuss the matter with Ambassador Alexeiev. Still, a secret CIA report stated a year later that Castro “informed Brezhnev that Ernesto Che Guevara with men and material furnished by Cuba had gone to Bolivia in the fall of 1966.”34
Nonetheless, Che’s effort took its toll. A few days before his departure from Cuba, an incident took place that illustrated his obsession with secrecy, as well as his mood and that of his companions. Aleida often visited Che at the camp, but on the eve of his departure, when the other combatants had been refused permission to take leave of their families, Ramiro Valdés drove her so she could spend some time with her husband. Che was furious; he insulted Valdés and forbade Aleida even to exit the car. In the midst of the altercation, Fidel arrived. When he realized what was happening, he persuaded Che to allow all the guerrillas to see their loved ones before flying off, arguing that it would not pose any great threat to security. Guevara relented, and finally allowed Aleida to stay with him in San Andrés.*13 The outrageous demands Che placed on both himself and others would play a central role in the Bolivian debacle.
The disinformation campaign mounted for the Bolivian expedition was extremely effective. If the same amount of time and effort had gone into other areas, the mission’s outcome might have been different. Ramiro Valdes and the Interior Ministry fabricated a cover for each of the combatants; supposedly, they were off to study in the USSR. They received fake letters, postcards, and documents in order to deceive their families, and were even asked for a list of the presents their wives and children might expect from the Socialist bloc.
It is said that just before the departure, Che and Fidel held their last private conversation while sitting on a log in the ravine of San Andrés.†6 An official from the Interior Ministry who attended the training program but was excluded from the mission at the last minute overheard part of their conversation, and deduced the rest from their body language. Castro did the talking, while Che was sullen and withdrawn; Castro was vehement, Guevara quiet. At last Fidel ran through all the problems, both inherent and circumstantial, in the Bolivian expedition. He emphasized the lack of communications, Monje’s hesitations, the organizational weaknesses of Inti and Coco Peredo. He intended to dissuade Guevara, or at least induce him to postpone his trip. Both finally stood up, gave each other several slaps on the back: less than blows, more than a hug. Fidel’s gestures revealed his desperation at Guevara’s stubbornness. They sat down again for a long while, in silence. After a while, Fidel got up and left.
Che was overtaken by impatience, for the last time in his life. He realized—though perhaps incompletely—that the plans for Bolivia were unraveling. Mario Monje’s sabotage became increasingly explicit as he discovered the mission’s true scope. His meetings with Pombo along with Debray’s movements confirmed his suspicions, as had his colleagues’ trips to the island: the Cubans were planning to mount a foco in the Alto Beni. As previously noted, Monje decided to render the location unusable by revealing it in the right quarters. In doing so, he forced Che’s lieutenants to shift from the Alto Beni and Los Yungas to another area entirely: the canyon of Ñancahuazú in southeastern Bolivia. The new location was completely unsuited to guerrilla warfare, though perhaps adequate to conceal an isolated school for cadres or to launch an expedition to Argentina.*14 Monje now acknowledges that he was behind the shift to Ñancahuazú, though he knew it might become a trap; he wanted to push Che as close to Argentina as possible, effectively forestalling the armed struggle in Bolivia.†7
Debray adds a further complication. In his view, the best political text he has ever written was precisely the report Fidel requested of him and which he delivered to Piñeiro, where he explained why the Alto Beni was an ideal location for guerrilla warfare, due to its climate, geography, urban and rural political history, and so on.‡4 However, Debray believes that Che never received the report; nor did he ever assimilate the enormous differences between the Beni region and the southeast.**2 In April 1968—several months after Che’s death—a meeting was held in Havana reuniting the three recently arrived Cuban survivors plus the youngest Peredo brother, Antonio, the brother of Jorge Vázquez Viaña, Humberto, Juan Carretero or Ariel, and Angel Braguer or Lino. Pombo explained, “We thought the plan was to develop the struggle in the north. … We were not going to conduct operations in Ñancahuazú.”35 Addressing Ariel, he added: “Che was tricked. We had been told this was an area for settlement, and it wasn’t. We should review the reports, they must be somewhere.”36 This suggests, as Humberto Vázquez Viaña concluded, that the location was chosen without any previous research; in short, Pombo and Papi knew next to nothing about the terrain.*15 Furthermore, Che made no secret of his dissatisfaction with his envoys’ performance. Papi Martínez Tamayo relates in the unex-purgated edition of Pombo’s journal how Che once complained that “his big mistake had been to send him [to Bolivia], as he was useless.” Papi recalled that Che’s criticism had hurt him enormously; for he was there “not because he was particularly interested in Bolivian affairs, but out of personal loyalty to Che.”37
This was doubtless another consequence of the Congo debacle: Che mistrusted Cuban intelligence, choosing instead to rely upon his own team. None of Piñeiro’s men were sent to Bolivia in advance†8 none of the officials previously stationed at the Cuban Embassy in La Paz were asked to help; Debray’s opinion was not taken into account; not even Furri, the co
nfidante of Raúl Castro who helped prepare the Salta expedition, was heeded by Che. After the intelligence fiasco of the Congo, he was wary of everyone save his closest aides; but, as he acknowledged to Monje later in the year, they were military men, not political operators. Even so, while Che was in Cuba all the information from Bolivia was filtered through Piñeiro’s team; Piñeiro himself (Barbaroja, or Redbeard), Armando Campos, and Juan Carretero visited him almost every weekend. As Benigno put it, “Everything Che received went through Piñeiro. … They sent [Che] information about everything that was being done in Bolivia, supplies, logistics, and he received nothing but wonderful news.”38 Guevara was right to mistrust Cuban intelligence, for they committed the same mistakes they had made in the Congo.
In August, Che instructed Pombo, Tuma, and Papi to purchase a place in the Alto Beni; the PCB cadres went along. However, pressured by Monje and the need to maintain cordial relations with the PCB, they, too, had opted for the southeast. When they informed their leader that they had bought a property in Ñancahuazú and were already squirreling away weapons there, they presented him with a fait accompli. Che acquiesced. He had not seen Debray’s text, and his own intentions were still somewhat vague—was his intention to create a foco in Bolivia, or just to pass through on his way to Argentina? There was no time to review the plan.*16 If Che had overruled his envoys in Bolivia, he would have had to start over from scratch. This would have entailed delaying his departure to Bolivia, as he could not remain in urban areas indefinitely; he would have to travel to a camp very quickly, to avoid leaks and betrayals. But there would be no camp if there were no farm, and there would be no property if he did not take advantage of the one already acquired by the PCB. Rather than wait, Che decided to leave Cuba as soon as possible. Quite justifiably, he feared that any further delay might jeopardize the entire project: either Monje and the PCB would compromise him by revealing the entire plan, or Castro would abort the mission when he realized that preparations were not going smoothly. As Angel Braguer, “Lino,” recalls, “there was no time to mount anything else.”†9