Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Galeano met with Che in August 1964 and thought he noted symptoms of impatience. “Che was not a desk-man,” he said. “He was a creator of revolutions. He was not, or was in spite of himself, an administrator. Somehow, that tension of a caged lion that his apparent calm betrayed had to explode. He needed the sierra.” Galeano may have written this appraisal with the benefit of hindsight, but it was accurate nonetheless. As they spoke, Che was searching for a way back to the battlefield, even as he worked himself to the point of exhaustion on Cuba’s industrial economy.
Several possibilities existed. Besides the insurgent groups in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, there was now a Cuban-backed guerrilla organization in Colombia, the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional, which had been formed in July. In Peru, Héctor Béjar’s guerrilla force and Luis de la Puente Uceda’s MIR were both preparing for revolutionary action. But Che had his heart set on the Southern Cone and his Argentine homeland. That posed a problem, for Ciro Bustos and his comrades had a lot of work to do before conditions would be ready for a new attempt at insurrection in this region, and Tania was still traveling in Europe, en route to her post in Bolivia.
Probably the most promising of the potential battlegrounds for the immediate future lay in Africa. All over the continent, rebel movements had formed to do battle with the last colonial holdouts: in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, in white-ruled South Africa, and in the former Belgian Congo. In October 1963, an antigovernment coalition calling itself the National Liberation Council had been formed by a potpourri of former Lumumbist government officials and disaffected regional, often tribally based, strongmen. The council had offices across the Congo River from Léopoldville in the city of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, formerly French Equatorial Africa. The rebels had managed to attract Chinese and some Soviet aid, and they had sparked revolts in southern, eastern, central, and northern Congo, seizing provincial towns and huge portions of the ill-defended national territory. One Chinese-backed rebel column had seized the distant northern city of Stanleyville in August 1964 and declared a People’s Republic of the Congo. By September, the stage was set for a renewed escalation of the Congolese crisis as the government struggled to respond to the rebellion. The ambitious trio that ruled the Congo—Moise Tshombe, President Joseph Kasavubu, and Joseph Mobutu,
commander in chief of the armed forces—took action to bolster their thread-bare army’s fighting strength. They called in the South African mercenary commander Mike Hoare and asked him to recruit a thousand white fighters from South Africa and Rhodesia.
The African resistance struggles, and particularly the Congolese conflict, had been featured more and more prominently in the Cuban press and in Che’s speeches. In fact, Che had begun to seriously consider temporarily transplanting his program for continental revolution to the African continent. Barbarroja Piñeiro’s agency was given the task of preparing the way. Although Che had reserved his decision about the best base for a pan-African guerrilla struggle until he could tour the area and meet with the various guerrilla leaders himself, the huge Congo, in the middle of the continent, seemed to offer a perfect setting and conditions for a rurally based guerrilla war that could “radiate” out to its neighbors.
There were other advantages to fighting in Africa. The Soviets were less concerned about direct involvement there than in Washington’s backyard, Latin America; and the nature of the wars, against foreign, white colonial regimes—or in the Congo’s case, against a Western-backed dictator with little political legitimacy—gave them widespread popular support. Finally, the continent was already inflamed with conflict; it was not a situation that had to be “created,” as had been the case with Masetti’s ill-fated mission to Argentina. The Soviets, the Chinese, and the Americans and their Western allies were all involved in Africa, providing money, arms, and advisers. There were also a number of anti-imperialist national leaders friendly to Cuba whose strategically placed territories could provide invaluable rearguard bases, transshipment points, and access to the zones of conflict. In addition to the regimes holding power in Mali and in Brazzaville, they included Ben Bella in Algeria, Sekou Touré in Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. These “radical” states were outraged at the specter of white mercenaries and “neocolonial” Western powers intervening on behalf of the Léopoldville regime, and they openly supported the rebel government at Stanleyville.
Che saw an opportunity to pursue a long-held dream: to build a Cuban-led international anti-imperialist alliance to replace the ineffectual Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, which was based in Cairo. Such an alliance would give a global dimension to his scheme for the upcoming continental revolution in Latin America. In an ideal world, the alliance would come under Fidel’s political direction, and be bankrolled and armed by the two socialist superpowers, China and the U.S.S.R. He envisioned repairing the Sino-Soviet split through the shared burden of waging war.
Throughout the autumn of 1964, Che honed this idea, and he obtained Fidel’s approval to travel abroad and take soundings. The notion of projecting himself internationally had always appealed to Fidel, and after his rebuff by the Americans, he had become newly receptive to Che’s position. While trying not to appear to take Beijing’s side, he once again questioned the value of toeing the Kremlin’s line on peaceful coexistence; so far, it had brought him precious little.
In September, the OAS had pushed through yet another resolution, further tightening commercial sanctions against Cuba. The attacks by the CIA-backed Cuban exiles had also intensified. Hijackings, sabotage, and armed commando raids against Cuban shipping were now taking place with alarming frequency. On September 24, a seaborne CIA action team based in Nicaragua attacked the Spanish freighter
Sierra de Aránzazu
as it sailed toward Cuba with a cargo of industrial equipment. The Spanish captain and two crew members were killed in the raid, and the ship was set ablaze and disabled. The incident caused an international outcry and recriminations within the CIA, especially when it was learned that the raiders had attacked the freighter by mistake, believing it was the Cuban merchant marine ship
Sierra Maestra
. The agent back at the base who had authorized the attack was Felix Rodríguez.
Since late 1963, Rodríguez had been in charge of communications for a brigade of anti-Castro commandos based in Nicaragua. They were led by Manuel Artime and bankrolled by the CIA. The group had more than 300 active members scattered across Nicaragua, Miami, and Costa Rica. It was a well-supplied operation. The exiles had at their disposal two 250-foot mother ships, two fifty-foot fast boats, and other craft, as well as a C-47 transport plane, several Cessnas, and a Beaver floatplane. They had a refueling and resupply facility in the Dominican Republic, and for weaponry they could take what they needed from their 200-ton arms cache in Costa Rica, which included 20mm antiaircraft cannon, 50mm and 75mm recoilless rifles, and .50-caliber machine guns. In two years, Rodríguez later claimed, the commandos expended about $6 million in CIA funds and carried out fourteen raids against Cuban targets, one of the most successful being a commando strike against the Cabo Cruz sugar refinery—not far from where the
Granma
had landed—that inflicted serious damage.
By late 1964, however, the operation’s budget had been cut back as the Johnson administration’s priorities shifted from Cuba to Vietnam. The death knell came after the embarrassing attack on the
Sierra de Aranzazu
. “We subsequently discovered that the ship was carrying a boiler for a Cuban sugarcane facility as well as some Christmas foodstuffs,” Rodríguez wrote. “We felt terrible. Soon after the incident, our operations were rolled up. Our
fast boats were taken by the agency and sent to Africa, where they saw service in the Congo. Some of the people who served with me in Nicaragua volunteered to fight in Africa too.” Rodríguez returned to Miami, where he resumed his work for the CIA.
When Che flew to Moscow from Havana on November 4, 1964, Raúl Castro, Foreign Minister Raúl Roa, and Emilio Aragonés were at the airport to see him off. The presence of the chief of Cuba’s armed forces, its foreign minister, and the secretary of its official ruling party, the Partido Unificado de la Revolución Socialista, had great symbolic significance. Once again, Che was to be the revolution’s anointed emissary to the
madre patria
of world socialism. He headed the Cuban delegation to the forty-seventh-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik revolution in Moscow and the opening of the new Soviet-Cuban Friendship House. Aleida was also there to say goodbye, along with two of their children. She was visibly swollen, six months into her fourth pregnancy.
Che’s final visit to Moscow came exactly three years after his first. Once again, he stood in Red Square in a wintry November, but things were different this time. He was not the uncritical Che of 1961, full of hope about the rosy future of Soviet-Cuban relations; too much contaminated water had gone under the bridge. A great deal had changed within the Soviet Union as well. Nikita Khrushchev, discredited by his economic failures at home and his perceived reckless adventurism abroad—most notably the Cuban missile crisis—had been ousted from power a few weeks earlier, and Leonid Brezhnev was the new premier.
There was another reason for Che’s visit. Reportedly at the behest of the Argentine Communist Party chief, Victorio Codovilla, who was still incensed over Masetti’s incursion, the Kremlin had pushed for a first Latin American Communist Party conference, to be held later that month in Havana. The Soviet Union’s decision to support the conference had a double significance. On the one hand, it deferred to Fidel, indicating the Kremlin’s recognition of his regional stature; on the other hand, the gesture came with an implicit expectation that Fidel would put together a pro-Soviet alliance of regional parties and further isolate Beijing. The Chinese had taken their dispute with Moscow to new levels lately, aggressively pursuing adherence to the Maoist line. In January 1964, Peru’s Communist Party had been severely weakened after pro-Beijing members broke away to form a rival party; in Bolivia and Colombia similar factional splits were looming; and in
Guatemala, a Trotskyite faction was emerging that would soon split the guerrilla coalition backed by Cuba.
It was a good time for Che to test the intentions of the new Soviet leadership. He and Fidel were both in a challenging mood. In Cairo in October, at a conference of the new nonaligned countries’ association, Fidel’s spokesman, President Dorticos, had said that although Cuba supported the Soviet Union’s policy of peaceful coexistence as a means of reducing the risk of a nuclear “world conflagration,” the policy was worthless while “imperialist aggression against small countries” was taking place. A show of greater solidarity with its Third World partners was needed from the Kremlin, given the escalating intervention by the United States and its Western allies in Southeast Asia, in the Congo, and in the counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin America.
In Moscow, Che made a pro forma appearance in Red Square and cohosted the inauguration of the new Friendship House with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. He also conducted a series of secret meetings with Kremlin officials. He did not have Nikolai Leonov as his interpreter this time. The KGB had reassigned Leonov to Mexico, where he was involved in aiding the Guatemalan guerrillas, among other duties.
*
Oleg Darushenkov, Che’s translator in Cuba, and another Soviet intelligence official, Rudolf Petrovich Shlyapnikov, alternated as his interpreters during this stay. Shlyapnikov worked under Yuri Andropov in the Cuba section of the Central Committee’s International Department and was a specialist in Latin American Communist Youth groups; he had been to Cuba on several missions and had met Che previously. During Che’s visit to Moscow, Shlyapnikov said, the two of them would sit on the stairs of the protocol house where Che had been installed, playing chess and talking late into the night. Che drank milk and Shlyapnikov drank cognac.
†
According to Shlyapnikov, Che met with Andropov and Vitali Korionov, the deputy chief of the Soviet Central Committee’s Americas Department. Korionov’s brief was to handle relations with the Communist parties in capitalist countries, which included all the Latin American parties except Cuba’s.
Korionov had received bitter complaints—specifically from Mario Monje in Bolivia and Jesús Faria in Venezuela—about the pressure the Cuban regime was putting on their Parties to enlist in the Cuban “continental revolution” scheme of guerrilla warfare. The Bolivians had formally
voted against such an idea, and the Venezuelan Communist Party was reconsidering its involvement in the Cuban-backed FALN guerrilla coalition.
*
Korionov understood Che and Fidel to be proposing nothing less than a modern-day version of the epic liberation wars waged by José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar more than a century earlier. Marxist armies of the northern countries of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador were to sweep south like Bolívar’s troops, while those of the south—Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and Argentina—marched north the way San Martín’s armies had. Bolivia would be the meeting ground.
According to Korionov, Che wanted to know Moscow’s view of the policies of the Latin American parties and was told bluntly that since the Kremlin’s official position was to “respect” the regional Communist parties, it was against the Cuban initiative regarding armed struggle. Korionov concluded that Che was determined to push ahead with his plans nevertheless, that he distrusted the Kremlin’s policy of peaceful coexistence, and that he was on the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet schism.
In Havana later in the month, Che’s response to the Communist Party Congress convened there could hardly have been heartening, either to the Latin American parties or to the Soviet leadership. He was conspiciously absent from the weeklong forum, traveling instead to Oriente. But he did not remain silent. On November 30, he gave a speech in Santiago castigating Latin America’s Communist parties for their reluctance to pursue the path to power.