Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
On July 26, as Washington enjoyed its victory, Fidel reiterated his offer of détente. In return for a normalization of relations with its neighbors, Cuba was willing to live within accepted “norms of international law.” If attaining peace meant giving up Cuba’s “material aid to other revolutionaries,” so be it, as long as the gesture was reciprocated. Leaving no doubt that his overture was within the framework of the Soviet Union’s existing foreign policy of peaceful coexistence, he concluded, “Our position is that we are disposed to live in peace with all the countries, all the states, of this continent, irrespective of social systems. We are disposed to live under a system of international norms to be complied with on an equal basis by all countries.”
That was Fidel’s carrot to the Americans, and then came the face-saving stick: “The people of Cuba warn that if the pirate attacks proceeding from North American territory and other countries of the Caribbean basin do not cease, ... as well as the dispatch of agents, arms, and explosives to
Cuban territory, the people of Cuba will consider that they have an equal right to aid with all the resources at their command the revolutionary movements in all those countries that engage in similar intervention in the internal affairs of our Fatherland.” There was no question that Fidel was gingerly offering terms for peace, but, as with Che’s overture at Punta del Este in 1961, his gesture was perceived by U.S. policy makers as a sign of weakness, and once again they spurned it. Fidel’s placating speech and the OAS ruling put the Americans in a triumphalist mood. The pressure on Cuba was showing results, and by keeping it up they could finally finish Castro off.
They were, of course, quite wrong. Fidel returned to the path of confrontation advocated so unstintingly by Che. Outside events greatly aided his turnaround. On August 5, American planes began bombing North Vietnam in retaliation for alleged attacks by Hanoi’s gunboats against American naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later, Congress gave Johnson the green light to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam War, as it would become known to the Americans, had begun in earnest. Cuba issued a ringing denunciation of the American bombing, calling for unity in the global socialist camp to defend Vietnam against “Yankee imperialist aggression.” The crisis in Vietnam afforded a grand opportunity to repair the socialist fraternity that had been damaged by the feud between China and the Soviet Union.
On August 15, at an awards ceremony for outstanding Communist workers who had set records for volunteer labor, Che reassured Cubans that, for all their increased isolation, they were now part of an expanding international community of revolutionary states. In those Latin American nations that had aligned themselves with Washington’s policy of containment, revolutionary armed struggles would triumph and extend the socialist alliance still farther. “It does not matter if these are the times when the bad winds blow,” Che said, “when the threats increase from day to day, when the pirate attacks are unleashed against us and against other countries of the world. It does not matter if we are threatened with Johnson or Goldwater ... it does not matter that every day imperialism is more aggressive. The people have decided to fight for their liberty and to keep the liberty they have won. They will not be intimidated by anything. And together we shall build a new life, together—because we are together—we here in Cuba, in the Soviet Union, or over there in the People’s Republic of China, or in Vietnam fighting in southern Asia.”
Che reminded his audience that in Latin America, there were two revolutionary struggles—in Guatemala and Venezuela—which were making progress, “inflicting defeat after defeat on imperialism.” Throughout Africa, national liberation movements were ascendant. In the former Belgian
Congo, the inheritors of Patrice Lumumba’s revolutionary example were still fighting and would inevitably win. In the Portuguese colony of Guinea, the liberation army led by Amilcar Cabral already controlled half the national territory—soon, it too would be free, as would Angola. Zanzibar had recently won its independence, and Che unrepentantly acknowledged that Cuba had played a part in that happy outcome. “Zanzibar is our friend and we gave them our small bit of assistance, our fraternal assistance, our revolutionary assistance at the moment when it was necessary.”
But Che was now ready to go farther than he ever had before in public. He invoked the specter of an atomic apocalypse. He said it was a real prospect, given the inevitability of confrontation between the “liberation movements” and the “forces of imperialism,” which could unleash a nuclear war through an error of calculation. “Thousands of people will die everywhere, but the responsibility will be theirs [the imperialists], and their people will also suffer. ... But that should not worry us. ... We as a nation know we can depend upon the great strength of all the countries of the world that make up the socialist bloc and of the peoples who fight for their liberation, and on the strength and cohesion of our people, on the decision to fight to the last man, to the last woman, to the last human being capable of holding a gun.”
If anyone had missed his point, which he had reiterated and refined over time, Che had said it again, in starker terms. The global battle against imperialism was a struggle between two diametrically opposed historical forces, and there was no sense in protracting the people’s agony through doomed attempts to forge tactical short-term alliances with the enemy. The root causes of the problems would remain and inevitably lead to conflict. Moderation ran the risk of giving the enemy an opening where he could seize an advantage. History, science, and justice were on the side of socialism; therefore, it must wage the necessary war to win, whatever the consequences—including nuclear war. Che did not shrink from that outcome, and he was telling others they should not, either. Many would die in the revolutionary process, but the survivors would emerge from the ashes of destruction to create a new, just world order.
For all this to take place, the emergence of the “new socialist man” was essential. A true revolutionary consciousness was the crucial ingredient to bring about a new society. He had begun his speech by quoting from a poem by the Spaniard León Felipe, describing the tragedy of human toil. “No one has been able to dig the rhythm of the sun, ... no one has yet cut an ear of corn with love and grace”:
I quote these words because today we could tell that great desperate poet to come to Cuba to see how man, after passing through all the
stages of capitalist alienation, and after being considered a beast of burden harnessed to the yoke of the exploiter, has rediscovered his way and has found his way back to play. Today in our Cuba, everyday work takes on new meaning. It is done with new happiness.
And we could invite him to our cane fields so that he might see our women cut the cane with love and grace, so that he might see the virile strength of our workers, cutting the cane with love, so that he might see a new attitude toward work, so that he might see that what enslaves man is not work but rather his failure to possess the means of production.
When society arrives at a certain stage of development and is capable of initiating the harsh struggle, of destroying the oppressive power, of destroying its strong arm—the army—and of taking power, then man once again regains the old sense of happiness in work, the happiness of fulfilling a duty, of feeling himself important within the social mechanism.
He becomes happy to feel himself a cog in the wheel, a cog that has its own characteristics and is necessary, though not indispensable, to the production process, a conscious cog, a cog that has its own motor, and that consciously tries to push itself harder and harder to carry to a happy conclusion one of the premises of the construction of socialism—creating a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population.
Che’s habit of referring to the people, the workers, as bits of machinery affords a glimpse of his emotional distance from individual reality. He had the coldly analytical mind of a medical researcher and a chess player. The terms he employed for individuals were reductive, while the value of their labor in the social context was idealized, rendered lyrically. It was a conceptual mode that had parallels in his life. Che had found meaning in his identity as a revolutionary within the large family of socialism. Fraternal guerrilla life was the crucible of his own transformation. The Communist consciousness he had attained was an elusive, abstract, and even unwanted state of being for many people, however—even those who believed themselves to be socialists and who happily echoed his shout, “Freedom or Death.” Willingness to sacrifice material comforts and life itself for the cause was a state of mind most men and women had not achieved, and they probably had little interest in trying. Also, of course, the happy global socialist fraternity of which he spoke was in fact a house bitterly divided.
In Cuba itself, the ill feeling caused by the purging of “sectarianism” had officially been put to rest after Fidel’s rapprochement with the Soviet
Union, but it had not gone away. Aníbal Escalante was moldering in exile in Moscow, but some of his comrades retained influence with Fidel. The previous March, while Che was in Geneva, a former PSP man named Marcos Rodríguez went on trial after being accused of having betrayed some of his comrades to Batista’s police in 1957. Because of Rodríguez’s links to senior “old Communists,” the event at first took on the appearance of a purge trial. Fidel intervened, and a new trial was held. The honor of the Communists was restored, and Marcos Rodríguez—now portrayed as a twisted, resentful loner—was executed by firing squad.
Che had managed to avoid any association with the unsavory proceedings. His distaste for the Communist Party’s sectarianism was well known, and he had consistently made a home at the Ministry of Industries for purged or disgraced revolutionaries, whether they were victims of the old Communists’ chauvinism or casualties of Fidel’s own sometimes fickle purges. He had helped Enrique Oltuski, his old July 26 rival, after Oltuski was ousted as communications minister under Communist pressure in 1961. And he had removed Jorge Masetti from harm’s way after Masetti alienated the PSP faction at Prensa Latina. Alberto Mora, the son of one of the martyrs of the Directorio’s assault on the palace, became an adviser at the ministry when he was ousted by Fidel as the minister of foreign commerce in mid-1964, even though Mora was one of the most outspoken critics of Che’s economic policies.
Another recipient of Che’s assistance was the poet and writer Heberto Padilla, who was an old friend of Alberto Mora’s. Padilla had worked in the New York and London offices of Prensa Latina and in Havana for
Revolución
under Carlos Franqui and for its now defunct literary supplement,
Lunes de Revolución
, which was edited by the novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Perceived as troublesome nonconformists in Cuba’s increasingly repressive intellectual climate, Franqui and Cabrera Infante had been sent into diplomatic exile in Europe. Padilla had just finished a stint at the Spanish-language edition of the Soviet magazine
Moscow News
and was well aware of the intrigues and authoritarianism that had begun to stifle cultural freedom in Cuba. In spite of his own doubts and Franqui’s warnings, Padilla decided to go home. Mora arranged for him to meet with Che, who was an admirer of his poetry. Mora was still minister of foreign commerce then and was engaged in a collegial dispute with Che over the economy. Since Padilla had returned with a jaundiced view of what he had seen in the Soviet Union, Mora wanted him to speak to Che.
Padilla and Mora found Che in the midst of a bout of asthma; he was shirtless and prostrate on the floor of his office, trying to regulate his breathing, and he remained there as his visitors began talking. He cut off Padilla’s
critical appraisal of the Soviet Union right away, saying, “I must tell you I don’t need to listen to what you have to say because I already know all of that is a pigsty. I saw it myself.” Che said that China, not Russia, was the model to be studied. The Chinese were making a genuine effort toward the realization of Communism. “Many people criticize me because they say I put too much emphasis on sacrifice, but sacrifice is fundamental to a Communist education,” he said. “The Chinese understand that very well, much better than the Russians do.”
At the end of their talk, Che urged Mora to give Padilla a job in the ministry of foreign commerce. “These are not good times for journalism,” he remarked laconically. Padilla became the director general of a department that dealt with cultural matters. When Mora was fired and arranged to leave Cuba on a grant to study political economy with the French Marxist economist Charles Bettelheim (with whom Che had also been debating economic theory), Padilla also arranged to leave, obtaining a post as a roving emissary for the ministry, based in Prague.
Before they left, Padilla and Mora went to see Che again. Mora was unhappy and couldn’t conceal it. He explained that he felt depressed when he woke up in the morning. “Che walked up to Alberto slowly,” Padilla recalled, “put his hands on his shoulders, and shook him, looking straight into his eyes. ‘I live like someone torn in two, twenty-four hours a day, completely torn in two, and I haven’t got anybody to tell it to. Even if I did, they would never believe me.’”
*
It was a poignant moment of personal revelation for Che, a rare expression of the incredible stress he endured to maintain the persona of an exemplary Communist revolutionary. His father, usually so myopic about Che, had nonetheless perceived this when he wrote that “Ernesto had brutalized his own sensitivities” to become a revolutionary. His mother once told the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano that from the time of his asthmatic childhood, her son “had always lived trying to prove to himself that he could do everything he couldn’t do, and in that way he had polished his amazing willpower.” Celia told Galeano that she teased Che for being “intolerant and fanatical,” and explained that his actions were “motivated
by a tremendous necessity for totality and purity.” “Thus,” Galeano wrote, “he had become the most puritanical of the Western revolutionary leaders. In Cuba, he was the Jacobin of the revolution: ‘Watch out, here comes Che,’ warned the Cubans, joking but serious at the same time. All or nothing: this refined intellectual must have waged exhausting battles against his own doubt-nagged conscience.”