Che Guevara (149 page)

†
The Congo became the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1964. It was later renamed Zaire by Joseph Mobutu. The capital, Léopoldville, became Kinshasa, and Stanleyville became Kisangani. When Mobutu was overthrown in 1997, the country became the Democratic Republic of the Congo again.

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While leaving some of the complaints against him unanswered, Piñeiro rebutted Bustos’s version of events, indicating that Masetti’s movements were all coordinated out of Havana. “If Masetti went off to Algeria, it was with prior approval from Che and if not, Ben Bella would have asked us for our approval.”

*
In his book
My Friend Che
, Rojo claimed that Masetti was present at some of the sessions with Che, but Ciro Bustos insists that Masetti never left his group except for the short visit to Algeria from Prague.

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In the face of the persistent and proven inadequacy of the Cuban security apparatus to successfully implement Che’s guerrilla programs, a number of former guerrillas, including Ciro Bustos and several of his comrades, singled out Barbarroja Piñeiro for blame. Piñeiro’s task was a thankless one, however. In addition to Béjar’s and Masetti’s groups, his department was simultaneously assisting the Guatemalan, Colombian, and Venezuelan guerrillas, among others. And there were problems arising on every front, ranging from logistical and communications difficulties to factional splits and military and political setbacks.

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Edelman admitted that the Party at the time was “dogmatic” and “reformist,” out of touch with the revolutionary impulse, and rejected outright armed struggle as a means of gaining power. “It was a period in the life of our party in which all guerrillas, all armed groups, were taboo,” she said. Indeed, for all its official trumpeting of revolutionary solidarity with socialist Cuba, at home the Argentine Communist Party was a monolithic, well-entrenched bureaucracy that sought political respectability above all else. Like its kindred parties in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, it was vehemently opposed to the Cuban-inspired calls for armed struggle that had begun issuing from the ranks of its younger militants. Che was aware of this, and for that very reason not only was his bid to install a guerrilla
foco
being conducted behind the Party’s back, but he was counting upon Party dissidents to join up and become its fighters.

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Guanacahabibes remained controversial, and around the time Che left Cuba, it was closed down.

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Che Guevara remained a suspect for almost any kind of international skullduggery, evidently, for his name popped up in a number of reports filed during the Warren Commission’s investigation into the JFK assassination, including some quite bizarre ones from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI field agents. One, in particular, reported an alleged sighting of Che Guevara and Jack Ruby—Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin—together in Panama.

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Gustavo Roca was a Marxist, the enfant terrible of an eminent conservative Córdoban clan, a cousin of Che’s old love Chichina Ferreyra, and a friend of Che’s since adolescence. Over the coming months and years, Roca did what he could to denounce the “human rights abuses” and anomalies in the sentences of the imprisoned guerrillas, but his most important role was as a personal courier between Che, the prisoners, and the surviving guerrilla underground network in Argentina.

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Both Padilla and Mora suffered unhappy fates. Mora never recovered from his fall from grace, and he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1972. That same year, after his arrest by State Security, Padilla was put through the humiliating ritual of a public “confession” by the Cuban Writers’ Union for alleged crimes as a “counterrevolutionary author.” He endured imprisonment, house arrest, and years of official harassment and ostracism before finally being allowed to leave Cuba. He died in Alabama, where he was teaching at Auburn University, in 2000.

*
See Notes.

†
See Notes.

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Within a few months, in April 1965, the Venezuelan Party plenum voted in favor of giving “priority” to legal forms of political change, leading eventually to a bitter split between the Party and the Cuban-backed guerrillas led by Douglas Bravo.

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According to Pedro Álvarez Tabío, Castro’s official historian, who accompanied Che’s entourage on the UN trip, Che didn’t show up because he wanted to avoid an appearance that the U.S. government could claim was an interference in its internal affairs.

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Two months later, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by assassins from the rival Nation of Islam while giving a speech in New York. He was thirty-nine.

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According to one Chinese official, the snub was directed not at Che, who was said to have “behaved correctly,” but at Osmany Cienfuegos, who had offended the Chinese by “shouting” and “talking too much” and led them to fear he would provoke an embarrassing incident in Mao’s hallowed presence.

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The manuscript of this book, of which there were reportedly only five copies of the typescript made, was kept under lock and key at the highest levels of Cuba’s revolutionary government for nearly three decades until a few leaked copies began circulating to a number of researchers, including me. In 1999, it was published in Spanish. The English title is
The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo
. The translation here is mine, made from the manuscript.

*
See Notes.

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Fidel also alluded to the irritation he felt over the fact that the Chinese and Soviets had brought their rivalries to his island. Without naming a nation—but he was referring to China—he decried the efforts being made to circulate unauthorized political propaganda on Cuban soil. Only Cuba’s ruling party had the right to issue propaganda, he said, and he warned that he would not tolerate it any longer. Despite his warning, however, this problem had yet to reach its climax.

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Che was evidently referring to his brief loss of faith in Fidel in the aftermath of the Miami Pact during the revolutionary war.

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Rocinante was Don Quixote’s horse.

*
See Notes.

†
Che could not tell Hilda of his secret agenda, for a good reason. According to one of his closest friends, who was privy to his plans, Hilda had become something of a security risk because of her penchant for playing “fairy godmother” to any Latin American guerrilla who showed up in Havana. Some were genuine, others wannabes; and at least one, a Mexican, was later arrested and unmasked by Cuba’s security services as a CIA agent.

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The fighting was soon over, and the U.S. and allied Latin American troops that had intervened were withdrawn after the OAS mediated a cease-fire agreement. New elections were scheduled and took place the following year. Bosch lost to his rightist rival, Joaquín Balaguer, who dominated politics in the Dominican Republic as an on-again, off-again president for the next thirty years.

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Alexiev said that Brezhnev “did not seem very interested” in what he was told. Alexiev gave few additional details of their meeting, but he hinted that Brezhnev would not have let the matter become an issue affecting relations with Cuba. “[Brezhnev] was
with
Fidel,” he said. “He was trying to capitalize on Fidel’s friendship with Khrushchev and have the same kind of relationship.”

*
Che noted that the letter to his parents was released in October 1965, when Fidel finally broke silence and divulged Che’s farewell letter to him.

†
See Notes.

*
Che had censured Bahaza only days before for abandoning a weapon in the exodus from Lambert’s front.

*
A Cuban intelligence official who was directly involved in the Cuban operation in the Congo at the administrative level told me that Soviet rivalry with the Chinese exerted a direct influence in the Congolese denouement. “I think the Soviets wanted to be rid of Che,” he said. He indicated that the Soviets, while cooperating with the Cuban- and African-backed rebel alliance, had done so primarily in order to compete in an area staked out by the Chinese; that when the winds shifted, Moscow had thrown its weight behind the negotiated settlement, thus dooming the Congolese revolutionary cause—and Che’s personal effort. Bolstering this analysis, a senior Cuban official acknowledged seeing something in Che’s notes (presumably his original, handwritten, Congo diary) alluding to his suspicion that the Soviets had “pressured” the Tanzanian president, Nyerere, into calling for a Cuban withdrawal.

*
See Notes.

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See Notes.

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Che eventually bequeathed the outline for a manual on philosophy to Armando Hart, then the Cuban minister of education, who had moved sharply to the left politically since the rebel victory. Che’s letter to Hart and the outline appeared in a Cuban magazine,
Contracorriente
, in 1997.

*
Claude Lelouch’s
Vivre pour vivre
(1967).

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See Notes.

*
Pombo told me that Papi was sent to Bolivia from Prague to talk with Monje about facilitating their entry into Peru and to set things in motion for Che’s arrival; and that Pombo and Tuma were then dispatched to Bolivia to assist Papi. He said that it was only after they were in Bolivia that the Peruvian guerrillas began falling apart and were suspected of being “penetrated,” at which point the idea of beginning a war in Bolivia itself was discussed. One problem with this version—in addition to its being contradicted by Ariel—is that Pombo didn’t arrive in Bolivia until July 1966. The disintegration of the Peruvian guerrillas had begun months earlier with the deaths of the MIR leaders Luis de la Puente Uceda and Guillermo Lobatón, followed by the arrest of Ricardo Gadea. And the ELN leader Héctor Béjar, who was aligned with Havana, had been arrested in March.

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Che’s name had changed again, from Tatu in Africa to Ramón in Prague—one of several names, including Mongo and Fernando, he would use in Bolivia.

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The identity of “Francisco” has never been disclosed; he is referred to in the published version of Pombo’s diary as “a Cuban liaison” who had decided not to continue in the venture. Piñeiro says Francisco was a brave man, seasoned in urban combat, and that unexplained “psychological reasons” were behind his desire to withdraw.

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I obtained a partial copy of Pombo’s original handwritten diary, the typewritten manuscript that he made later, and a copy of the editing corrections he made. The above excerpt is taken from the typed document. In 1996, after being suppressed for three decades, the
edited
version of Pombo’s diary was published in Cuba and Argentina with the approval of the Cuban government, minus this key passage.

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See Notes.

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Monje was giving himself a little more credit than was due. Alexiev had informed Brezhnev where Che was, and the Soviets had only recently helped evacuate the Cuban fighters from Tanzania.

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Later on, after the guerrillas were discovered, López Muñoz was arrested and charged with aiding them. He claimed he had been duped and was released, but he was in fact a willing partner in the guerrilla plan, recruited by Inti Peredo, whose wife was his wife’s cousin.

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Mercy’s identity was not known for many years, even after he died in 1997. It was revealed in Ulíses Estrada’s book
Tania la Guerrillera
, which was published in 2005.

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When they met up in Bolivia later, Bustos told Che about his uncomfortable encounter. Che laughed and said, “You were lucky. It was the beginning of the Cultural Revolution; it could have cost you your balls.” Che never clarified for Bustos if
he
had engineered the trip, or what his own dealings with the Chinese had been; because of the quick sequence of events that followed their talk, this was to be the only time they discussed it.

†
Ariel told me that he did speak to several left-wing Argentine underground groups, including the leaders of a small “rather terroristic group,” about the idea of a breakout. In the end, it was deemed too difficult to pull off, and Cuba fell back on the “legal option,” supporting the efforts of Gustavo Roca and the other lawyers to get the prisoners’ sentences reduced.

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Although Monje would not say he had done so, it is believed in Cuba that he traveled to Moscow as part of his return trip to Bolivia for the express purpose of complaining to his handlers in the Kremlin about the Cubans’ plans for his country.

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In the increasingly Sovietized Cuba of subsequent years, however, Borrego had difficulty finding the “right time” to push for the publication of Che’s writings. Reportedly, Fidel considered them too sensitive to be made public. Borrego finally received approval to publish excerpts of Che’s economic critique in a memoir he wrote,
Che: El Camino del Fuego
, in 2001. A complete version of Che’s critiques,
Apuntes Criticos a la Economica
, was published in 2006.

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In 1997, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Che’s death, an “abridged” version of Borrego’s special edition of Che’s works was finally approved by Cuba’s government for public consumption.

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Hildita was the only one of his children Che did not see. She was ten, old enough to see through his disguise.

*
See Notes.

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In the end, the breakdown of nationalities in Che’s guerrilla force—excluding the members of his urban network—would be as follows: one Argentine (Che), one German (Tania), three Peruvians, sixteen Cubans, and a total of twenty-nine Bolivians.

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A short while later, Fidel wrote back that the Bolivian union leader Simón Reyes was in Cuba, and that Jorge Kolle Cueto, the number two Bolivian Communist Party official, was on his way there for talks to amend the crisis.

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Loyola Guzmán, Che’s new “national finance secretary” and a member of his urban network in La Paz, explained that Tania’s first return trip, with the Peruvians, was really the fault of her group, which had decided to send Tania as an escort because the others were all too busy to go.