Che Guevara (103 page)

The Congo also featured prominently in Che’s speech; just a few days earlier the Lumumbist revolutionaries had been ousted from their stronghold at Stanleyville by Belgian paratroopers flown in on American planes. Che characterized the “massacres” committed in Stanleyville as an example of “imperialist bestiality ... a bestiality which knows no frontiers nor belongs to a certain country. Just as the Hitlerian hordes were beasts, so are the Americans and Belgian paratroopers beasts today, as were yesterday the French imperialists beasts in Algeria, because it is the very nature of imperialism which bestializes man, which converts them into bloodthirsty wild animals willing to slit throats, commit murder, and destroy even the last image of a revolutionary or the ally of a regime which has fallen under its boot or struggles for his liberty.”

After his speech, Che took Aleida to see Alberto Granado and his wife, Delia, and they all went out to eat pizza at the Fontana de Trevi restaurant.
It was the last time the two old friends Mial and Fuser would see each other. Granado realized later that the visit had been his “silent good-bye.” Indeed, although few people in Cuba realized it at the time, Che’s absence from the Havana conference was the first sign that something fundamental had shifted. For anyone who cared to notice, Che was already in the process of extracting himself from Cuba’s revolutionary government. He had told Fidel he wanted to leave. The trip to Moscow had convinced him that Soviet pressure on Cuba to accept the Kremlin’s socialist model was overwhelming. At the Party Congress in Havana, Fidel had approved a resolution that tilted heavily in favor of Moscow’s foreign policies, although guerrilla movements were to be backed in nations where neither the parties nor Moscow saw opportuities for open, “legal” political involvement.

A small circle of comrades was privy to Che’s decision to leave, and they begged him to stay on for at least two more years, to give time to “prove” that his economc model was better for Cuba than the one the Soviets were trying to persuade Fidel to adopt. Che refused, replying that two more years were not necessary. His ministry was up and running according to his theories and had already proved itself.

A week after returning to Havana from Oriente, Che was gone again, flying this time to New York, the city he had once told his aunt Beatriz he wished to see for himself in spite of his visceral aversion to the United States. But this time he was going as the official spokesman for revolutionary Cuba. His selection as Cuba’s representative before the United Nations General Assembly was testimony to the fact that Che continued to have Fidel’s support. It was cold when he arrived in New York on December 9, and the photographs of his arrival show him dressed in a winter greatcoat, wearing his beret and the aloof, unsmiling expression of one who knows he has just stepped onto enemy territory. It was to be his second and final incursion into the land of the Yankee.

Che took pains to groom himself for his appearance before the Nineteenth UN General Assembly on December 11, 1964. His boots were polished, his olive green uniform was pressed, and his hair and beard were neatly combed. Nevertheless, he presented a striking contrast to the conservatively attired diplomats who filled the hall, and his defiant speech did not disappoint those who had anticipated a harangue worthy of the famous apostle of revolutionary socialism.

Che had come to sound the death knell for colonialism, to decry American interventionism, and to applaud the “liberation wars” taking place
in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In a bitter reference to the Congolese conflict, he took the United Nations to task for having allowed itself to be drawn in and used there as an instrument of the imperialist West—“a carnivorous animal feeding on the helpless.” As for the latest Belgian-U.S. operation in Stanleyville, which had given the city back to Moishe Tshombe’s troops at a cost of hundreds of dead, Che declared, “All free men throughout the world must make ready to avenge the Congo crime.” He then proceeded to link the “white imperialist” action in the Congo with western indifference to the apartheid regime in South Africa and the racial inequalities in the United States. “How can the country that murders its own children and discriminates between them daily because of the color of their skins, a country that allows the murderers of Negroes to go free, actually protects them and punishes the Negroes for demanding respect for their lawful rights as free human beings, claim to be a guardian of liberty?”

Che addressing the United Nations, December 11, 1964.

Addressing one of the main themes of the assembly—a debate on global nuclear disarmament—Che expressed Cuba’s support for the concept but stressed that it would refuse to ratify any agreement until the United States had dismantled its military bases in Puerto Rico and Panama. Che also reiterated
Cuba’s determination to follow an independent course in global affairs. Although Cuba was “building socialism,” it was a nonaligned country because it identified with those in the new community of states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East that were fighting against imperialism. Under the circumstances, this could be taken as an implicit dig at the Soviet Union’s inaction on behalf of those struggles. In separate references to the feuding socialist superpowers, Che said Cuba strongly supported the Soviet stance in the Congo—and on behalf of China, he argued for its inclusion in the United Nations and the ouster of the U.S.-supported Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Not surprisingly, Che’s words provoked vigorous denunciations by the U.S. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson; and by some of the Latin envoys present. Outside the UN building, Cuban exiles angrily protested against his appearance. Some went considerably farther. Several
gusanos
were arrested after firing bazookas at the UN building from across the East River, and a woman was prevented from trying to stab Che with a knife. Throughout the ruckus, Che maintained his composure and seemed delighted at the anger he had aroused. To the shouted insults of the
gusano
protestors, he raised his hand in a universally understood gesture meaning “Fuck you.”

Not everyone was displeased with Che’s presence. Malcolm X, who had left the Nation of Islam a few months earlier and had been traveling in Africa and the Middle East, was also inflamed over the Congolese conflict, and he also equated white intervention in Africa with racism in the United States. He and Che had found a common cause. During his stop in Ghana, Malcolm X had reportedly discussed with Cuba’s ambassador in Accra the idea of recruiting black Americans to help fight in Africa’s wars.

On December 13, at a rally at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, Malcolm X introduced a special guest: Abdul Rahman Muhammad Babu, whose Cuban-trained political movement had helped seize power on the East African island of Zanzibar. The former sultanate was then fused with the mainland state of Tanganyika to form the new nation of Tanzania. Just before Babu appeared onstage, Malcolm X read a message from Che. “I love a revolutionary,” he said. “And one of the most revolutionary men in this country right now was going to come out here with our friend Sheikh Babu, but he thought better of it. But he did send this message. It says: ‘Dear brothers and sisters of Harlem. I would have liked to have been with you and Brother Babu, but the actual conditions are not good for this meeting.
*
Receive the warm salutations of the Cuban people and especially
those of Fidel, who remembers enthusiastically his visit to Harlem a few years ago. United we will win.’ This is from Che Guevara. I’m happy to hear your warm round of applause in return because it lets the [white] man know that he’s just not in a position to tell us who we should applaud for and who we shouldn’t applaud for. And you don’t see any anti-Castro Cubans around here—we eat them up.”
*

Che did not return to Cuba from New York. On December 17, after giving some colorfully defiant interviews to the American media, he flew to Algiers. It was the start of a three-month odyssey through Africa, to China, and back to Africa again, with stops in Paris, Ireland, and Prague. Officially, Che was acting as Fidel’s roving goodwill ambassador to the emerging nations of Africa, but he was also acquainting himself with the continent that was to be the scene of his next adventure. Africa, Che had decided, would be the proving ground for his dream of a “tricontinental” alliance against the West. Between Christmas 1964 and early February 1965, Che traveled from Algeria to Mali; to Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea, and Ghana; to Dahomey; then back to Ghana and Algeria. He met with Algeria’s Ben Bella, with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, with the Congolese-Brazzaville leader Alphonse Massamba-Débat, and with the leader of the anti-Portuguese Angolan independence movement, Agostinho Neto—to whom he promised Cuban military instructors for the MPLA guerrillas operating out of the adjacent Angolan enclave of Cabinda. (Those instructors soon arrived, marking the beginning of more than two decades of Cuban military involvement in Angola.)

Everywhere he went, Che’s message was the same: Cuba identified with Africa’s liberation struggles; there should be unity among all of the world’s anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements, and there should be common cause between them and the socialist community. The fighting in the Congo featured heavily in his press pronouncements, as did far-off Vietnam, that other former colonial dominion whose people were now fighting American troops.

Che gave an interview to Josie Fanon, the widow of the late Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon, author of the fiery anticolonialist manifesto
The Wretched of the Earth
. The interview appeared in the magazine
Révolution Africaine
. Che said that Africa represented one of “the more important fields of struggle against all forms of exploitation existing in the world—against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.” There were, he felt, “great
possibilities for success due to the existing unrest” but also many dangers, including the divisions among the Africans that colonialism had left.

Che with President Ben Bella in Algiers, 1964.

When Fanon asked him about the prospects for revolution in Latin America, Che acknowledged that she had touched on a subject “very close” to his heart, in fact, his “major interest.” He thought the struggle there would be long and hard because of the counterinsurgency activities of the United States. “That is why,” Che said, “we foresee the establishment of a continental front of struggle against imperialism and its internal allies. This front will take some time to organize, but when it is formed it will be a very hard blow against imperialism. I don’t know if it will be a definitive blow, but it will be a severe blow.”

In early February, Che flew to China. He was accompanied by Cuba’s construction minister, Osmany Cienfuegos—Camilo’s older brother—and Emilio Aragonés, who had gone with him to the Soviet Union during the secret negotiations regarding nuclear missiles in 1962 and had seen him off at the airport when he went to Moscow the previous November. Both
Cienfuegos and Aragonés would be heavily involved in the secret Cuban operation in Africa, and their presence with Che at this juncture suggests that they were also involved in its planning stages.

Fidel had already approved a secret Cuban military mission in the Congo; it remained for Che to determine only where Cuba’s services could be best directed, and with which of the rebel factions the mission should be carried out. The month before, in January 1965, a group of handpicked black Cubans had been offered the honor of volunteering for an unspecified “internationalist mission,” and they were now training at three separate camps in Cuba. Another sign of the impending operation was the recent appointment of Pablo Ribalta—Che’s old PSP friend from the Sierra Maestra—as Cuba’s envoy to Tanzania, which bordered the Congo.

What happened behind closed doors during Che’s trip to China has never been made public by Cuba’s government, but according to Humberto Vázquez-Viaña, a well-informed former member of the Bolivian Communist Party, Che’s party met with Chou En-lai and other top officials of the People’s Republic, but not with Mao himself.
*
Che must have seen the potential of the Congo plans for turning around the disfavor into which Cuba had fallen with China. Richard Gott, the British historian of Latin American revolutionary movements—who as a journalist covered Che’s subsequent guerrilla campaign in Bolivia, and who worked in Tanzania in the early 1970s—believes that Che’s mission in China was to talk to the principal backers of the Congolese revolutionaries. “The Chinese were certainly interested in Africa,” Gott reasons. “Chou En-lai was to make two visits that year—and they were also at that stage supporting the strategic notions of Lin Pao, the Chinese defense minister. He had made a famous speech advocating the encirclement of degenerate cities by radical revolutionary peasants. This was of course music to the ears of Guevara.”