By now the genesis of Ché’s last campaign has been forgotten by most people. Bolivia was chosen not because its minuscule Communist Party was champing at the revolutionary bit but because Che had in his sights all five of its bordering countries (the domino effect). With Fidel, he had decided that ‘Bolivia will sacrifice itself so that conditions for revolution can be created in neighbouring countries. We have to make Latin America another Viet Nam.’
The eighteen experienced Cubans in the ‘expeditionary force’ expected the peasantry to support them as the Sierra Maestra villagers had eventually supported Fidel. But uninvited foreign forces, whether Cuban guerrillas or US marines, have trouble ‘winning hearts and minds’. Instead of flocking to Ché’s standard these Bolivian villagers were scared by the incomprehensible arrival in their remote mountains of strange long-bearded men (the indigenous Indians are not hirsute) who set about digging inexplicable tunnels and couldn’t speak their language. Ché’s attempt to learn Quechua was irrelevant; the tribe amongst whom they found themselves spoke Guarini which not even the Bolivian guerrillas knew. These peasants didn’t want to fight anybody but when the shooting started they usually sided with their own army, informing them of the invaders’ movements.
For all his callous talk about ‘another Viet Nam’, and his insistence on the value of guns to social reformers, the mature Che was a hesitant man of violence. Nor did he urge his team, in Bolivia, to be ruthless. Given a tiny revolutionary ‘army’, hoping to outwit a professional (though inept) national army, one might have expected him to kill at every opportunity. Not so, however. His diary records occasions when he couldn’t bring himself to shoot vulnerable young conscripts who presented easy targets. On 3 June – ‘At 1700 an Army truck came by, with two little soldiers wrapped in blankets in the bed of the vehicle. I did not feel up to shooting them, and my brain didn’t work fast enough to take them prisoner, so we let it go by’. On 20 June – ‘The officer is a Second Lieutenant of the police that was sent with a carabinero and a teacher who came as a volunteer … His mission entailed a long trip for which they allowed him only four days … We considered killing them but then I decided to send them back alive’.
The uncensored Bolivian Diaries is a movingly honest record of a tragically ill-planned campaign. It is also a gripping adventure story. For eleven months the guerrillas endured extreme hardship amidst one of the Andes’ most formidable ranges. For days they went without food or water, were lost (together or in two anxiously wandering groups), had to use machetes to clear the way on jungly pathless slopes, had to retrace their weary footsteps when thwarted by sheer precipices, had to make rafts to cross wide rapid rivers in which a few compañeros were drowned and several precious weapons lost. Meanwhile the Bolivian army was tracking them, ineffectually, until reinforcements arrived, troops specially trained and equipped by the US army for the Che-hunt.
The day after their quarry was wounded and captured the CIA conferred with the military junta in La Paz who then ordered Sergeant Mario Teran to kill his prisoner. Expediency demanded Ché’s murder. As a Cuban government representative, he had addressed the Organization of American States, the 1964 UN Conference on Trade and Development, the UN General Assembly, the Organization of Afro-Asian Solidarity meeting in Algiers. Internationally, he had made his mark as a passionate spokesman for the voiceless. Had he been brought to trial millions, already enthralled by his deeds and words, would have listened attentively to his speech from the dock. And many would certainly have been inspired to take up where Che had to leave off – shades of Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia peroration. A helicopter took his body to a small hospital in the hill town of Vallegrande where the open-eyed corpse was photographed and identified by a Cuban-American agent of the CIA, known as ‘Eduardo Gonzalez’, who had directed the Che-hunt. Almost forty years later, in that same hospital, a blind octogenarian, a retired army sergeant named Mario Teran, had his two cataracts removed by a Cuban opthalmic surgeon, one of a team of twenty providing free medical care to the local campesiños.
In 1960 Che had spent months in the Soviet Union being feted and to some extent brainwashed. But only to a limited extent; thereafter he presented himself as an internationalist Marxist rather than as a Kremlin-controlled Communist. He openly criticised Soviet imperialism, finding it too similar, where foreign aid was concerned, to the capitalist version. Genuine Communists, argued Che, would provide stringless aid to undeveloped countries – how else could the poor be freed from their trap? Doubtless this straight talk partly explains the Soviet reaction to his death. All around the world pro-Soviet journalists and broadcasters used his ignominious (as they interpreted it) end to prove the Kremlin’s point that in Latin America armed insurgency was not the way forward.
Observing the World Bank, the IMF, GATT et al., as they deftly manipulated the Majority World, Che accurately foretold the consequences. Our current proliferation of books dissecting the stratagems employed by Capitalism Rampant would not have surprised him. Long before the Washington Consensus was declared, he clearly saw that pattern emerging.
In our day, Che would of course rank as a terrorist. So how come this idol of the rebellious ’68-ers, this Marxist gunman, this purveyor of violence and sedition, was eulogised in a variety of unexpected quarters? I quote from US reviews of Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, published in the mid-’60s:
A tremendously interesting and illuminating document … tells much about the character and personality of the protagonist: Washington Evening Star.
The absolute truth, putting to shame the pretenders and privileged of the contemporary world. I think it is bound to have powerful meaning to the youth of America: Collegiate Press Service.
Impossible to read and not know one is in the presence of a rare being, a man of principle: Commonweal.
A fascinating picture of a man caught up in what he considered an idealistic process, the saving of a Latin American country from tyranny: Atlanta Journal.
If Guevara had spent his time at the typewriter instead of leading revolutionaries, then the world would be hailing a new giant in literature: Cleveland Press.
Thus was Ché’s fervent adherence to Marxism indulged in the midst of the Cold War. His extraordinary qualities were recognised, even by those whose way of life would have been demolished had his thinking prevailed, and despite his active promotion of armed insurrection against Washington’s satellite regimes. Now he would be relentlessly demonised, his integrity impugned and his ideals scorned – a disturbing measure of how intolerance has gained momentum under the aegis of ‘the new imperialists’.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 prompts a similar comparison. In those days world leaders exchanged real, personal letters and, reading the correspondence between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel, one is struck both by the courteous wording (even when the writer is angry and/or frightened) and by the efforts being made to see the other point of view. Granted, that fraught atmosphere – with nuclear weapons pointing in every direction – made diplomatic tip-toeing and whispering seem advisable. Yet one senses that the civilised tone of those exchanges also had to do with the personalities involved. An equivalent crisis, given the aggression-glorification and coarse phraseology of the present US administration, would be unlikely to have a non-violent ending.
Had President Kennedy survived, he and Khrushchev might have radically changed the Cold War chemistry, to the arms industry’s detriment. And Fidel believes that the Cuban-US relationship would almost certainly have benefited. As he said in an interview with Ignacio Ramonet:
Kennedy was a man courageous enough to introduce some changes into US policy … The day he was killed I was talking to a French journalist, Jean Daniel, whom Kennedy had sent to me with a message … so communications were being established … His death touched me and grieved me. He was an adversary, of course, but it was as though I’d lost a very capable, worthy opponent … His assassination worried me too because when he was taken from the
stage he had enough authority in his country to impose an improvement in relations with Cuba. That was palpably demonstrated in the conversation I had with Jean Daniel who was with me the very instant we heard of Kennedy’s death. As the ‘ifs’ of history go, that’s quite a biggie …
Some January nights can be blessedly chilly and I approached the Che Memorial at dawn through a silver-grey fog, dense enough to obscure Che until I was standing directly below José Delarra’s bronze statue – water-bottle on hip, one arm in a sling, the right hand rather casually carrying a rifle. Then the rising sun created an eerie optical illusion: as the mist thinned and shifted, it seemed that Che himself was moving.
This statue was erected on the twentieth anniversary of Ché’s death. Ten years later his bones, and the remains of seventeen other guerrillas, were flown from Bolivia and interred in a simple mausoleum behind the monument, a building that could easily be overlooked. Tania had shown me photographs of countless thousands watching Ché’s coffin being lowered from an aeroplane while an army band played Suite de las Americas. ‘Emotions were mixed,’ she recalled. ‘My generation, we wept … For younger Cubans, Che had been as remote as Martí, then suddenly he became real because of his coffin! Real because he was dead! Soon many of them wept too. Other youths became jubilant in a belligerent way – all very interesting. A sociologist colleague of mine wrote an essay about the different reactions. Everyone noticed how sad Fidel looked. Through the worst times, Che was his best friend.’
I had thought I was alone but now a patrolling policeman appeared in the distance, at the end of his eight-hour shift. As he saluted me amiably I wondered if he really spent the night pacing to and fro on that long, high, concrete platform supporting both Ché’s statue and its attendant bas-relief depicting the Battle of Santa Clara. The expansive Plaza de la Revolucion looked neglected, most of the benches broken, the star-shaped flower-beds weed-dominated, the conspicuous ornamental fountains defunct, their basins half-full of litter. Far away around the periphery, house-sized hoardings showed Che in various moods and poses; some had been not only weather-beaten but vandalised, which perhaps explained the twenty-four hour guard. One can imagine the iconoclastic fury with which some of today’s frustrated young non-consumers might attack Ché’s memorial.
Back on the platform, approached by steep flights of steps at each end, I waved at the new cigar-smoking policeman, then sat at Ché’s feet to scribble in my diary:
Ever more urgently our planet needs Ché’s vision of the New Man to be realised. It’s easy to mock that vision, to assert that human nature can’t be renovated. But the average human being is led, this way or that. Comparatively recently we in the Minority World have been led (most of us) to reject people being tortured or burnt at the stake, children being forced down mines or up chimneys, overt slavery, segregated blacks, jailed homosexuals. Those changes required the evolution of New Men and Women, new ways of thinking. Ché’s ideal of people working not only for themselves but for the general good may seem a more fundamental challenge to human nature – but is it? By definition ‘the general good’ benefits most people. Working towards it would thwart only the minority who thrive within the Growth Society, feeling free to disregard the majority.
I’m not often drawn by big occasions, when crowds gather to celebrate something momentous. Yet here and now I’m deciding to return to Santa Clara in October 2007 for the fortieth commemoration of Ché’s death.
No. 374 was a polyglot household – Tania speaking English, her son Ed fluent in French, his wife Carmel able to get by in German, their son and daughter, aged ten and twelve, attempting Mandarin Chinese at school – despite having heard a rumour that Chinese children must spend fourteen years learning how to write. Ed and Carmel lectured at Santa Clara university, Cuba’s third largest, described by Tania as ‘our city’s main industry’. Conviviality happened in a minimally furnished kitchen behind the living-room. A crowded organoponico, visible from the kitchen window, produced more than enough vegetables to feed the family. Proudly the children informed me that in 2005 urban Cubans had grown over four million tons of vegetables. On their way home from school they collected supplementary feeding (weeds) for the four hens who scratched, clucked and laid at one wire-fenced end of the small garden.
In the 1980s, Tania remembered, eggs were plentiful enough to be unrationed and factory chickens were part of the weekly meat ration and also available on the open market through a cafeteria chain (‘Pio Pio’) modelled on Kentucky Fried Chicken. But many of those birds, including ‘starter chicks’, and almost all their feed, were imported. Come the Special Period, the government distributed chicks to be raised free-range and bred from – hence the numbers of happy poultry now foraging all over rural Cuba.
Cuba’s Revolution was the opposite of green, whatever shade that may be. (‘Orange!’ I hear some of my Irish friends shouting.) If Fidel read The Silent Spring in 1963 – quite likely, given the breadth of his reading – he didn’t heed Rachel Carson’s warnings. He and Che and their advisors truly believed in agriscience and the land and people of Cuba have suffered accordingly. From the Soviet Union came thousands of massive, soil-compacting machines and countless tons of hazardous chemical inputs accompanied by platoons of agronomists – whose domestic record Fidel should have scrutinised before bowing down before them.
Thirty years on, when the Special Period ousted agriscience, not much knowledge of traditional farming remained to be resuscitated. Most labourers were descended from slaves who had cultivated efficiently within their homelands’ subsistence economies but, within a generation or two, had lost skills no longer relevant. Although Cuba has always been capable of amply feeding itself from its own soil the imposed monoculture prevented that.
Even before the Special Period, some outspoken young agronomists had been blaming their leaders’ ex-colonial mind-set for a too respectful acceptance of Soviet advice, given by ‘experts’ totally ignorant of local conditions. By the early 1980s Fidel & Co. had begun to fear that Cuba was en route to catastrophe, being so dependent on food imports, and from then on ‘the Alternative Model’ of agriculture was encouraged. When the necessary research was funded, factions formed. The keen young researchers advocated and devised microbial formulations, biofertilisers and biopesticides non-toxic to humans, the Soviet-revering Agriculture Ministry bureaucrats scorned their discoveries. A prolonged controversy ensued, incidentally contradicting the widespread notion that Fidel ruled as an all-powerful tyrant. A Castroist government is in fact a complex institution; Fidel’s backing for the young researchers secured their funding but did not enable them at once to defeat the bureaucrats. Victory rewarded them only when COMECON cut all trading links with Cuba.
When the going got tough Fidel didn’t hesitate to admit his past mistakes. Addressing the fifth Congress of the National System of Agriculture and Forestry Technicians, in 1991, he avoided fudging the issue as our politicians invariably do when their great schemes come unstuck:
The food question has the number one propriety. We must produce more food without feedstocks and without fertilisers. Keep one idea clear: the country is without feedstocks and fertilisers. All plans based on fuel availability must be cut practically in half; half of what the country consumed in normal circumstances. We have bred one hundred thousand new oxen, we are breeding a hundred thousand more. Even if we have to subsist on vegetable protein, we cannot eat the oxen because we need them to cultivate land. The ox does not just save fuel: the ox can perform tasks that would be impossible for a tractor, raising the productivity of human labour. Even when the Special Period ends, the role of the ox in Cuban agriculture will not be totally over. We must convert farming into one of the most honoured, promoted and appreciated professions. Our scientists will create resources that will one day be more valuable than sugar cane. Now more than ever, the phrase ‘economic independence’ has meaning. We will achieve it through miracles of intelligence, sweat, heart and the consciousness of humankind.
At that stage, what are emphasised as some of the worst horrors of ‘Communist Cuba’ were used to good effect: state control of the food supply and the media, plus a population amenable to being organised from the centre for the common good.
When we moved to the living-room, in time to hear the end of Fidel’s evening communication, I remarked, ‘He looks and sounds much stronger that in November.’
Tania smiled. ‘He knows how much we need him, with McCarry touring Europe!’
Caleb McCarry contributed significantly to Haiti’s 2004 ‘regime change’. Recently on Radio Four I had heard him explaining his European mission – ‘It’s my job to persuade our allies to support opposition to the Castro dictatorship within Cuba.’
We watched preparations for the morrow’s protest march against Radio Marti. Men using street plans and pointers explained where and when groups should assemble, which streets (including San Rafael) would be closed to traffic from 6.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., where to find first-aid posts, how to summon ambulances, which routes to follow when dispersing. Civilian monitors would be responsible for crowd control – a revealing reversal of the procedure in our democracies where demos require the deployment of extra police units. Radio Marti’s transmissions began during the Reagan era and have become ever more seditionary, prompting many with serious reservations about Castroism to close ranks around their leader.
When Carmel asked why I hadn’t remained in Havana for this event I explained – ‘Friends warned me tourists may not march, will be confined to certain supervised vantage points’.
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