Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  The fact is that three survivors were able to escape the Bolivian mouse trap by crossing the Andes into Chile, partly thanks to the remnants of the urban network. The problem, then, lay not in the abstract chances for success, but in the timing, the placement and organization of resources, and the willingness to proceed. By sending several autonomous special forces teams to Bolivia and using the knowledge of Montero (now back in Cuba), Rodolfo Saldaña (still in La Paz), and other Bolivians familiar with the area, it might have been possible to rescue Guevara. One-way communications, such as they were, would have sufficed to tell him that help was on the way; he could have been sent instructions for meeting points. If necessary, the expedition could have been initially disguised as a reinforcement effort, instead of a rescue mission. The worst that could have happened was failure, and there was no lack of Cuban commandos who would gladly have given their lives to save Comandante Guevara.

  In fact, beyond his conflicts with the Soviets, Fidel had several other reasons to discard the rescue operation. The problem was not so much failure, as success: what would he do with Che once he had saved him? It would be the third time in as many years that the question had arisen. First there had been Salta, a fiasco which Che had avoided only because he waited too long and the foco was eliminated too quickly; then the Congo, and now Bolivia. Fidel would be faced anew with a lacerating dilemma. Once again, he would have to find an alternative function for Che, other than death or a bitterly resigned residence in Cuba. The perpetual guerrilla fighter would have to be persuaded that his latest venture had come to an end. And once convinced, what would happen after Che had returned to Cuba?*44

  If Fidel Castro did at some point contemplate a rescue operation, he might well have decided that a Che martyred in Bolivia would better serve the Revolution than a Che living frustrated and discouraged in Havana. The former would become a myth, a bulwark for the hard decisions ahead; he would be the emblematic martyr required by the Revolution in its pantheon of heroes, along with Camilo Cienfuegos and Frank País. Guevara alive and disgruntled in Cuba would be a source of ongoing problems, tension, and dissent—all incapable of solution; and, at the end of the road, a similar, if not identical, destination. To imagine Fidel Castro incapable of such cold-blooded cynicism is to ignore the methods which have kept him in power for almost forty years, and to disregard his conduct in other crises, albeit none as emotionally or mythically charged as that of Che Guevara. Fidel did not send Che to his death in Bolivia; nor did he betray or sacrifice him. He simply allowed history to run its course, fully aware of its inevitable outcome. Fidel did not shape the event; he let it happen.

  Aside from the evidence supporting this hypothesis, two additional events merit mention. The first took place after Che’s death. In 1968, the Cubans attempted a similar rescue mission in Venezuela; they were able to save twenty-four surrounded guerrillas (including Arnaldo Ochoa, whose execution would be ordered by Fidel Castro twenty-one years later). They escaped via Brazil, thanks in part to that country’s Communist Party. The second event is the peculiar experience of François Maspéro. The French publisher had close ties to the Cubans, and traveled to Bolivia to try and visit Debray in the Camiri jail and report back to Havana. He returned from La Paz just in time to attend an important cultural congress and the 26th of July celebrations in the Sierra Maestra. When Fidel Castro, who knew him and was aware of his trip to Bolivia, greeted him and asked how things were in that country, Maspéro replied, “Terrible.”105 But Fidel never requested any details; he never sought out the Frenchman for a conversation. One may conclude that Castro did not need to know more than he already knew. This may also explain why the Cubans forestalled Mario Monje’s visit during this period; they preferred to leave him waiting in Chile, rather than deal with him in Cuba.

  This attitude is corroborated by the impressions obtained by two witnesses who were with Fidel Castro immediately after the news of Che’s death reached Cuba. Pepe Aguilar depicts a man obsessed with convincing Guevara’s family in Argentina that Che had died, and much more involved in politically managing the situation than in mourning his friend. Castro was whipsawed by the dilemma of, on the one hand, possessing direct information from Bolivia, thanks to the presence of several virtual Cuban agents—Antonio Arguedas, Gustavo Sánchez, Carlos Vargas Velarde—who all confirmed Che’s death, and, on the other, the impossibility of using that information to convince Ernesto Guevara Lynch of his son’s execution. Carlos Franqui, called in by Castro to confirm that the handwriting from the photographed pages of Che’s diary was truly his, remembers finding Fidel “frankly euphoric.” Both portraits show a man who, though undoubtedly saddened by the loss of his companion of a thousand battles, had resigned himself a long time earlier to the inevitable outcome of the Bolivian adventure.*45

  However, the other explanation of Che’s death, based upon an impressive series of errors and misunderstandings in Cuba and Bolivia, is equally plausible. The ineptitude of Havana’s apparatus and Guevara’s support team, Che’s theoretical misconceptions, Fidel’s tactlessness toward the Bolivian Communists, the irresponsibility of recruits and recruiters in Bolivia, all these factors exposed the mission’s essential weakness: the overwhelming disproportion between ends and means. Three examples suffice to illustrate this point.

  First, Che never doubted that the conflict he hoped to trigger would become internationalized very quickly. Once the Bolivian army found itself overwhelmed by events, he surmised, it would seek help from its friends—especially Argentina and the United States. This would confer upon the war a nationalist dimension, creating Che’s famous “two, three, several Vietnams.” The revolutionary group would soon receive support from hitherto undecided or reluctant political factions alienated by Yankee interventionism.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth: foreign involvement was limited in both time and scope. The Bolivian army obtained scant assistance from abroad, aside from small amounts of weapons, food, and supplies, the handful of CIA agents previously mentioned, and about twenty Green Berets led by Pappy Shelton, who trained the Second Rangers Battalion of the Eighth Division. Granted, Gary Prado and the Bolivian military underestimated the importance of U.S. backing at the margins; the latter would surely have been stepped up, had it been necessary. And, as Larry Sternfield has suggested, it is true that the Bolivians’ initial reluctance to confront the guerrillas was reversed largely at U.S. urging; the Americans firmed up Barrientos’s backbone.106 Still, Che was defeated by the Bolivian armed forces, with help from an imperial power that achieved its ends without overcommitting itself. If Guevara thought the U.S. would be drawn into a Vietnam-type quagmire, he was wrong; if he supposed it would stand idly by, he was equally mistaken.

  A second example was the recruitment process, riddled with disasters, desertions, incompetence, and broken promises. Papi (Martínez Tamayo), Tania, Renán Montero, Ariel (Juan Carretero), Marcos (Pinares Antonio Sánchez Díaz), Joaquín (Juan Vitalio Acuña), Arturo Martínez Tamayo (Papi’s brother, in charge of radio equipment which he was never able to operate), and others, carefully picked by Che and the Havana team, proved useless for the mission at hand. Poorly selected, badly trained, and under-motivated, they were not up to a revolutionary project of continental scale. Their undeniable courage and dedication could not possibly make up for their inadequacy. They were completely unsuited for the chore; and if nobody else was available, the mission should have been aborted.

  A third example was the Cubans’ improvised relationship with the Bolivian Communist Party, full of deceptions and misunderstandings. In the final analysis, the only thing Havana could hold against the Party was that it had opposed the creation of a guerrilla foco led by Che Guevara in its own country. This was perfectly understandable, given its history and ideological position. But it was a delusion to believe that Monje supported the armed struggle and would join the foco against his own Party leadership, or that the Party’s pro-Cuba faction would prevail against the rest of the
organization. Such fantasies were typical of Manuel Piñeiro’s team, but were entirely unrealistic. It was foolhardy to expect four semimilitary cadres from the Communist Party, together with a few young men trained in Cuba and youth leaders like Loyola Guzmán, to drag the rest of the Party—particularly its small miners’ base—into a guerrilla war. Unfortunately, this sort of miscalculation has proved recurrent in the history of the Left in Latin America.

  Given the astounding degrees of incompetence and improvisation involved, one can hardly be surprised at the expedition’s failure. As is emphasized by Gustavo Villoldo, the CIA’s chief field officer in Bolivia during those months:

  Everything happened very quickly. In Havana, Fidel had no idea how many assets we had within the country, and he was afraid to start something which our group would pick up on. That kept him from taking steps to help Che. Not because there was a break, or a division, or problems between Che and Havana. Simply, their system failed; and when it failed, they didn’t know what to do. In these cases, either you are very aggressive or you do nothing at all; and he decided to do nothing. The aggressive thing to do, for instance, would have been to parachute people into the area of operations, or have an alternative plan for communications. This proves that the operation was not mounted in a truly professional way.107

  The expedition’s cadres, its apparatus, and the Cuban leadership were all ill prepared for the task imposed on them by Che Guevara. François Maspéro remembers the day it was reported that Joaquín’s group had been annihilated at Vado del Yeso. Piñeiro, Ariel, Lino, and Armando Campos asked him over to view a newsreel that showed the guerrillas’ bodies. Afterward, he was invited to stay in the screening room and watch a film starring Ronald Reagan. Such was the indifference of Che’s support team.

  Just as he had at the Ministry of Industries, Guevara asked too much—of the Revolution, the Cuban population, the island’s economy, the U.S.S.R. In Bolivia, his demands became increasingly exorbitant. His companions sought to humor him, attend to his needs, and fulfill his aspirations, out of altruism, devotion, recklessness, and irresponsibility. They were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the mission, especially when they were tacitly asked to share in the Christlike destiny which Che had pursued since his early youth. As in any tragedy, the last act of Che Guevara’s history is to be found in both its origins and its gradual unfolding; it was both heart-wrenching and unavoidable. Che’s fatal destiny was already written; only death could save him, offering him the respite and the place in history which he had always pursued. His fate caught up with him at La Higuera, in the wilds of the Bolivian southeast, on a morning in October. Thus ended the calvary of Che Guevara; and there, with his peaceful face photographed on the cement slab in Vallegrande, began the resurrection and the myth.

  *1 According to his secretary in Tanzania, “he was skinny, pallid, underfed.” Colman Ferrer, interview with the author, Havana, August 25, 1995.

  *2 Angel Braguer, “Lino,” interview With the author, Havana, January 24, 1996. Benigno presents the same account in his memoirs, published in Paris in 1995, which provoked various heated reactions on the part of Cuban officials. Benigno, Vie et mort de la Révolution Cubaine (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 108.

  *3 Several sources place the date at the end of February: Fernández Mell, who stayed on in Dar-es-Salaam, Ulises Estrada, who accompanied Che to Prague via Cairo, Colman Ferrer, who spent that time working with Che on the “Pasajes … (el Congo)” manuscript, and Pablo Ribalta.

  †1 “But everybody returned to Cuba and he stayed on alone in Tanzania, and then I decided to get him out of Tanzania and take him to a safe place until he decided what he was going to do.” Ulises Estrada, interview with the author, Havana, February 9, 1995.

  *4 Estrada, interview. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, in his biography of Che, quotes similar passages from these same interviews. Taibo and the author shared part of the information obtained by either one. In this case, the interview was granted to the author, who then gave it to Taibo.

  *5 In an interview with Gianni Miná in 1987, Fidel Castro confirmed that Guevara refused to return to Cuba: “[Che] did not want to go back because it was very painful for him to return after the publication of the letter. … But I finally convinced him to comeback, it was the best way to achieve the practical goals he had set for himself.” Fidel Castro, quoted in Gianni Miná, “A Meeting with Fidel,” Office of Publications of the State Council, Havana, 1988, p. 327.

  †2 Estrada, interview. Based upon documents recovered from Bolivia by the CIA and perhaps other intelligence material, Che biographer Daniel James was able to reconstruct Tania’s itinerary. She left Bolivia in mid-February 1966 via Brazil, arriving in Mexico on April 14 and then “disappearing” after April 30. Though James surmises that she went to Cuba to receive instructions from Che, it is now known that Guevara was still in Prague and that she actually traveled to Czechoslovakia, though she might have made a stopover in Havana. Daniel James, Che Guevara: Una biografia (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1971), pp. 268-269.

  ‡1 Estrada, interview. Tania refers to Estrada in a letter to her parents dated April 11, 1964, saying that she hoped “they won’t steal my little Negrito before I return, then I am going to marry him. … I don’t know if this will produce little mulattos. … [He is] skinny, tall, quite black, typically Cuban, very affectionate. …” Marta Rojas and Mirta Rodríguez, Tania: La guerrillera inolvidable (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1974), p. 195.

  **1 Tania’s visit to Prague is also confirmed by the secret archives of the East German Communist Party (SED). They include a letter to Tania’s parents from an Argentine writer at the magazine Problemas de la paz y del socialismo. Dated April 27, 1969, it says in part: “We had met your daughter, as you recall. … During her stay in Prague she visited us several times.” Institut fur Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentral Komitee der SED, Zentrales Parteiarchiv, SED Internationale Verbindungen, Argentinien 1962–72, DY 30/IV A2/20/694, Berlin.

  *6 Germán Lairet, telephone conversation with the author, October 1996. Régis Debray wrote exactly the opposite in 1974: it was the Venezuelans, particularly Teodoro Petkoff’s brother Luben, who invited Che to their country. In this account, Che refused because he did not want to “get onto a train that, was already moving.” See Régis Debray, La critique des armes, vol. 2, Les Epreuves du Feu (Paris: Seuil, 1974), pp. 21–22. The two accounts are not necessarily incompatible: it is possible that Fidel approached the Venezuelans in 1966 precisely because they had already expressed their interest in 1964.

  *7 Harry Villegas (“Pombo”), “El verdadero diario de Pombo,” La Razón (La Paz), October 9, 1996, p. 17. Until 1996, the only available text of Pombo’s diary was an English version retranslated into Spanish, delivered apparently by the CIA to the New York publishing house Stein and Day in 1968. In late 1996, the Central Bank of Bolivia, which holds the documents pertaining to Che’s Bolivian campaign, allowed two journalists access to the vault in order to review and publish some of the texts. The original version of Pombo’s diary was one of them.

  †3 According to Mario Monje, Secretary-General of Bolivia’s Communist Party, Che explicitly said to him: “The only place where we have a serious structure is Bolivia, and the only ones who are really up to the struggle are the Bolivians, and I did not have that in Argentina, which is in a period of latency, or in Peru, where things are only beginning.” The Bolivian replied, “But that structure is not for you; you are taking advantage of a structure which you have not built.” Mario Monje, interview with the author, Moscow, October 25, 1995. This account coincides with what the Argentine Ciro Bustos told his Bolivian interrogators concerning a conversation with Che during the Bolivia campaign. See “Account by Ciro Roberto Bustos of his Stay with Guevara’s Guerrillas in Bolivia,” quoted in Jay Mallin, ed., Che Guevara on Revolution (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1969), p. 200.

  *8 Beginning in August 1966, Kolle suspected that the Cubans had something afoot. At a Congress of Uruguay’s
Communist Party held that month in Montevideo, he confided to the host leader Rodney Arismendi that there was “a guerrilla project aimed at the Southern Cone, in which the Cubans are playing a central role.” See Régis Debray, La guerrilla del Che (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1975), p. 79.

  *9 “Cuando el Che se llamó Ramón,” interview with William Gálvez in Cuba Internacional, no. 296, 1995, p. 31. General Galvez supposedly wrote an account of Che’s stay in the Congo, which was even granted a Casa de las Américas award in 1995. Though it has still to appear in print, it is without a doubt the first book ever awarded a prize before being written. This is probably due to the same obstacles which, ever since 1967, have prevented any Cuban from writing a Che biography—and which have even blocked the publication of documents such as the “Actas del Ministerio de Industrias” or “Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (el Congo).” Benigno for his part notes that Che returned to Cuba in April 1966, but this is probably too early. This chapter of Che’s life is still enshrouded in mystery within Cuba. The Cuban “chronologists” provide no information whatsoever about these months, though they state that Che returned on July 20. See Benigno, Vie et mort, p. 113, and Adys Cupull and Froilán González, Un hombre bravo (Havana: Ediciones Capitan San Luis, 1995), p. 309.

  *10 “I spoke with Zamora; I went to discuss the guerrilla movement with him. He said yes.” Régis Debray, interview with the author, Paris, November 3, 1995.

  *11 Monje, interview. Debray confirms that he did not know Papi or Pombo. Debray, interview with the author, Paris, November 3, 1995.

  †4 Despite the huge resentment between them, Monje and Kolle have similar perceptions of that time. Kolle asks, “How were we going to get involved in a project we had opposed? During our entire lives, we always supported the Cuban Revolution, and we were ready to do anything, even be called traitors, cowards, whatever, in order to protect the Revolution. But one thing is the historical fact of the Cuban Revolution; quite another is the vicissitudes of individuals in history.” Jorge Kolle, interview with the author, Cochabamba, October 29, 1994.