Che Guevara (110 page)

Fernández Mell said that in Cuba the general feeling toward Che’s African mission was euphoria. “They said that everything was all right, that everything was marching along and they had had some victorious battles, et cetera. And that our mission was to lend Che a hand and help in everything and to serve as a kind of backup.” He and Aragonés had gone off with enthusiasm, even though Fidel had expressed concern that Che seemed “overly pessimistic” about the prospects. It hadn’t taken them long to realize that things on the ground were not as had been painted for them.

In Dar es Salaam, they met Kabila, who was driving around in a Mercedes Benz. Then, in Kigoma, Kabila’s men refused to let them cross the lake in what they called “Kabila’s launch,” a new fast motorboat that the Cubans and Soviets had provided. They had to cross in a larger, slower boat. When they reached Kibamba, Kumi, the Cuban doctor at the base dispensary, told them, “You’ll see what this is: a piece of shit.” Pombo came down the hill to meet them as they struggled on the climb up, and from him they heard more details of just how bad things really were, and that Che, fed up with being “retained” at the base, had taken off. Knowing Che as he did, Mell was not surprised. “Underneath that calm demeanor he had, always writing, reading, and thinking, Che was a man of enormous activity,” he said. “He was an erupting volcano who wanted to do things, and in the Congo, he wanted it to be like it was in the Sierra Maestra, he wanted to fight, he wanted to go to where the mercenaries were.”

Che headed back to base when he heard that Fernández Mell and Aragonés had arrived. He was worried that they had orders to bring him back to Cuba and was relieved and gratified to learn he was mistaken. They had both volunteered to come, out of a desire to be a part of his mission.

The brief trip had revived Che’s spirits. For the first time, he had entered into friendly contact with the peasants, and had reveled in it. “Like peasants anywhere in the world, they were receptive to any human interest taken in them,” he wrote. He had carried out a little “social action,” handing out vegetable seeds for planting and promising to send doctors on regular medical visits to the area. He briefly even returned to his old profession of doctoring, giving injections of penicillin against the most “traditional” disease he found, gonorrhea, and dispensing antimalaria pills. In one place, the villagers dressed up as bush devils and danced around a stone idol and sacrificed a sheep for him. “The ritual seems complicated, but it boils down to something very simple: a sacrifice is made to the god, the stone idol, and afterward the sacrificed animal is eaten, and everyone eats and drinks profusely.”

Wherever he went, Che had tried hard to get the commanders to agree to send their men to his base for training, but invariably he found that they wanted the Cuban instructors to be sent to
them
. Their presence was seen as a sign of prestige. He had even set up some ambushes in which, for the first time, some of the Rwandans hadn’t run but actively participated. These were slim grounds for optimism, but after so many months of gloom and inaction Che felt that headway had been made.

September brought him back to reality. The Tanzanian government was now throwing obstacles in the way of the Congolese, and it was becoming difficult for them to move men and supplies out of Kigoma. In the Congo itself, a pro-Gbenye faction had begun causing problems in some of the
outlying rebel areas, and there were a few armed standoffs between pro-and anti-council factions. Masengo was shot at in a couple of pro-Gbenye villages and had to beat a retreat. The situation was becoming dangerous for the Cubans, who no longer knew who was friend or foe. Still, Che was anxious to pull together some coordinated actions against the mercenaries before they took the initiative. After sending units out to reinforce rebel defenses, he went to the town of Fizi, the domain of the rebel strongman General Moulana, where he found the general’s antiaircraft defenses to consist of a single machine gun manned by a Greek mercenary prisoner. Che tried to persuade Moulana to bring his men to the lake for training, but the general refused. The trip wasn’t a total waste, however, since Moulana provided Che with one of the more colorful spectacles of his time in the Congo. Taking his distinguished visitor to his home village, Baraka, Moulana put on a special outfit. “It consisted of a motorcycle helmet with a leopard skin on top, which gave him a really ridiculous appearance,” Che observed. His bodyguard, Carlos Coello—now Tumaini, or Tuma—dubbed Moulana “the Cosmonaut.” In Baraka, the Cubans had to endure a “Chaplinesque” parade ceremony. The saddest thing about it, Che noted later, was that the Congolese fighters seemed to enjoy parading around more than learning how to fight properly.

Next Che moved on to the house of General Lambert, a rival of Moulana’s and the man who had introduced Che to
dawa
. Lambert promptly got smashed on
pombe
, and was such a funny drunk that Che did not even bother to lecture him. He left after securing Lambert’s promise of 350 men for an operation against the Lulimba garrison. (Predictably, Lambert never produced such a force.)

By early October, Che realized that it was going to be impossible to organize a successful attack unless he altered his approach radically—and when Masengo finally returned, he had come up with a plan. To avoid having to deal with the existing—and to Che’s mind, completely incorrigible—rebels, he wanted to recruit fighters from among the local peasantry, for an independent fighting column, which he would command. “We would create a kind of fighting school,” Che explained later. “Also, we would organize a new and more rational General Staff that would direct operations on all fronts.”

While Che was in the midst of his meeting with Masengo, “trying to raise the Liberation Army from the ruins,” as he described it, one of the Cubans in camp dropped a burning lighter, and in a flash a fire began. One after the other, their straw huts burst into flames. Pombo managed to save Che’s diary and a few other things from their hut, but then everyone fled as grenades left in the huts began exploding. Che punished the
unlucky culprit, an otherwise good cadre, by ordering him to go three days without food.

“In the midst of this party of bullets and exploding grenades,” he wrote, “Machadito, our minister of public health, arrived, with some letters and a message from Fidel.”

José Ramón Machado Ventura—Machadito—the doctor who had extracted the M-1 bullet from Che’s foot in the sierra, had come to assess the health needs in the rebel territory as the result of a remarkable request made by Gaston Soumaliot for fifty Cuban doctors. When, a few weeks earlier, Che had learned that Fidel was planning to host Soumaliot on a visit to Havana, he had sent a message advising him not to receive the rebel leader, and certainly not to give him any material assistance. Che’s missive either arrived too late or was ignored, for Fidel had feted Soumaliot, who had painted an idyllic picture for him of the Congolese revolution; when asked for the fifty Cuban doctors, Fidel had quickly agreed. After hearing Che’s adamant objections and seeing the situation for himself, Machadito promised to relay Che’s assessment to Fidel.

“I had already learned through Tembo that the feeling in Cuba was that my attitude was very pessimistic,” Che wrote. “This was now reinforced by a personal message from Fidel in which he counseled me not to despair, reminded me of the first stage of the [Cuban] struggle, and to remember that these inconveniences always happen.”

Taking advantage of Machadito’s prompt departure, Che wrote a long letter to the
jefe
. “Dear Fidel: I received your letter, which provoked contradictory feelings in me, since in the name of international proletarianism we commit errors which can be very costly. Also, it worries me personally that, whether for my lack of seriousness in writing, or because you don’t comprehend me totally, it could be thought that I suffer from the terrible sickness of undue pessimism. ... I’ll just tell you that here, according to those around me, I have already lost my reputation as an objective observer, as the result of maintaining an entirely unwarranted optimism in the face of the existing situation. I can assure you that if I was not here, this beautiful dream would have dissolved long ago in the general chaos.”

Che went on to give Fidel a brutally realistic picture of the way the foreign aid was being wasted by the Congolese. “Three brand-new Soviet launches arrived little more than a month ago and two are now useless and the third, in which your emissary crossed, leaks all over the place,” he wrote. All he wanted was 100 more Cubans—“they don’t all have to be black”—and some bazookas, fuses for their mines, and R-4 explosive. As for the requested doctors, Che told him, “With 50 doctors, the liberated zone of the Congo would have an enviable proportion of one for every thousand inhabitants,
a level that surpasses the U.S.S.R., the U.S., and the two or three other most advanced nations of the world. ...

Che; José Ramón Machado Ventura, the Cuban minister of health; Emilio Aragonés (“Tembo”), the organization secretary of the Partido Unificado de la Revolución Socialista; and Che’s friend Oscar Fernández Mell.

“Have a little faith in my criteria and don’t judge by appearances,” Che finished, adding that Fidel should “shake up” the people supplying him with information, who, he said, “present utopic images which don’t have anything to do with the truth. I’ve tried to be explicit and objective, concise and truthful. Do you believe me?”

Indeed, the efforts of Cuba and the other nations helping the Congolese rebels were being squandered. A group of Congolese fighters had recently arrived at the lake, fresh from six months of training in Bulgaria and China, but Che noted with sarcasm that their first concern was to ask for fifteen days of vacation to visit their families. “Later they would stretch it because it had been too short. In any case, they were trained revolutionary cadres, they couldn’t risk themselves in the fighting, it would have been
irresponsible; they had come to inundate their comrades with the mountain of theoretical knowledge they had accumulated in six months, but the revolution should not commit the crime of making them fight.”

Che turned to the task at hand: creating his envisioned “fighting academy,” which in its latest genesis would be made up of 210 men, including peasants and rebels from the three main fronts. After what he had seen there, he was also doubtful about General Moulana’s ability or willingness to defend the strategic Fizi plain, a certain attack route in the event of a government offensive. He sent Mell with some men to try to “talk sense” to the Cosmonaut-General, with orders to do what he could to organize Fizi’s defenses.

Once again Che had to lecture his grumbling Cuban troops. “I told them that the situation was difficult,” he wrote. “The Liberation Army was falling apart and we had to fight to save it from ruin. Our work would be very hard and unpleasant and I could not ask them to have faith in the triumph; personally I believed that things could be fixed although with a lot of work and a multitude of partial failures. Nor could I ask them to have confidence in my leadership ability, but, as a revolutionary, I could demand that they show respect for my honesty. Fidel was aware of the fundamentals, and the incidents that had occurred had not been concealed from him; I had not come to the Congo to win personal glory, nor would I sacrifice anyone for my personal honor.” The important thing now was for the men to obey him, but Che realized that his words were not convincing. “Gone were the romantic days when I threatened to send the undisciplined ones back to Cuba; if I had done that now, I would have been lucky to keep half the troops.”

On top of everything else, malaria as well as gastroenteritis continued to plague the Cubans. Che was also afflicted, as he wrote with black humor: “In my field diary I had recorded the statistics, in my case, of more than 30 depositions [defecations] in 24 hours, until the rigors of my runs vanquished my scientific spirit. How many more there were, only the bush knows.”

Meanwhile, it did not appear he was making any headway in getting through to the Congolese fighters. One day, when they refused to do some work he had ordered, Che blew up. “Infuriated, I talked to them in French, I told them the most terrible things I could find in my poor vocabulary, and in the heights of my fury, I told them that I would put dresses on them and make them carry yucca in a basket (a female occupation) because they were worthless, and worse than women; I preferred to form an army with women rather than have individuals of their category. As the interpreter translated my outburst to Swahili, all the men looked at me and cackled with laughter with a disconcerting ingenuousness.”

There were some other cultural barriers that simply never came down. One of them was the
dawa
, and Che finally opted for a pragmatic approach, hiring a witch doctor for his Congolese troops. “He occupied his place in the camp and took charge of the situation immediately,” Che noted.

By mid-October, the onset of the rainy season, the long-awaited government offensive began. Che and his men were still unprepared. Backed up by a fleet of gunboats and fast launches, and a small air force of bombers, helicopters, and spotter aircraft, Mike Hoare’s mercenaries began moving in on the rebel domain in a three-pronged encirclement manuever. They took General Moulana’s front at Baraka and Fizi with ease, then Lubonja. General Lambert’s defenses collapsed, and his men and the Cubans with them escaped in headlong flight toward the lake. Che sent Mell and Aragonés with Masengo to the lake to take charge there, while he dug in at a new camp at the edge of the foothills.