Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
I state once more that I free Cuba from any responsibility except that which stems from its example. If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of the people and especially of you. ... I am not sorry that I leave nothing material to my wife and children. I am happy it is that way. I ask nothing for them, as the state will provide them with enough to live on and to have an education. ...
Hasta la victoria siempre! Patria o muerte!
I embrace you with all my revolutionary fervor.
Che.
Che had also left a letter to be forwarded to his parents:
Dear
viejos:
Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante.
*
I return to the trail with my shield on my arm. Nothing essential has changed, except that I am more conscious, my Marxism is deeper and more crystallized. I believe in the armed struggle as the only solution for the peoples who fight to free themselves and I am consistent with my beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer, and I am, but of a different type, of those who put their lives on the line to demonstrate their truths.
It could be that this will be the definitive one. I don’t go looking for it, but it is within the logical calculations of probabilities. If it is to be, then this is my final embrace.
I have loved you very much, only I have not known how to show my love. I am extremely rigid in my actions and I believe that at times you did not understand me. On the other hand, it was not easy to understand me. ... Now, the willpower that I have polished with an artist’s delectation will carry forth my flaccid legs and tired lungs. I will do it.
Remember once in a while this little
condottiere
of the twentieth century. ... A great hug from a prodigal son, recalcitrant for you.
Ernesto.
For Aleida, he left behind a tape recording of his voice, reciting his favorite love poems to her, including several by Pablo Neruda. And to his five children, in a letter to be read to them only after his death, he wrote:
If one day you must read this letter, it will be because I am no longer among you. You will almost not remember me and the littlest ones will remember nothing at all. Your father has been a man who acted according to his beliefs and certainly has been faithful to his convictions.
Grow up as good revolutionaries. Study hard to be able to dominate the techniques that permit the domination of nature. Remember that the Revolution is what is important and that each one of us, on our own, is worthless.
Above all, try always to be able to feel deeply any injustice committed against any person in any part of the world. It is the most beautiful quality of a revolutionary.
Until always, little children. I still hope to see you again. A really big kiss and a hug from Papa.
*
Che’s contact with his first wife, Hilda, had become formal by then, limited mostly to his visits to see their daughter. Hilda last spoke to him in person on the eve of his trip to address the United Nations, in November 1964. When she showed Che a letter she had received from his father, saying he was planning to come to Havana soon, Che seemed surprised. According to Hilda, he blurted out: “Why didn’t he come ... ! What a pity!
Now there’s no more time
.” She didn’t understand what Che was referring to until later, when she realized he must have had his African project already in mind. Eight-year-old Hildita was at the airport to greet him on March 15, when he returned from Algiers, and he took her home before going to meet with Fidel. There had been no time to talk with Hilda, but he told the little girl that he would come back later. He spoke to Hilda on the phone two or three days after that and said that he was going to the countryside to cut cane.
†
Neither she nor their daughter ever saw him again.
For a few of his closest friends, Che had selected books from his office library and written personal dedications inside each of them; he left them on the shelf to be discovered, without saying anything. For his old friend Alberto Granado, he left a book on the history of Cuban sugar,
El Ingenio
. In it, he wrote, “I don’t know what to leave you as a memento. I oblige you, then, to immerse yourself in sugarcane. My house on wheels will have two feet once again and my dreams no frontiers, at least until the bullets have their say. I await you, sedentary gypsy, when the smell of gunpowder dissipates.”
Orlando Borrego had asked if he could go with Che to Africa, but Che had said no. Borrego now had an important job as the minister of sugar, and Che said his services were too valuable. Che left Borrego his three-volume set of
Das Kapital
. “Borrego,” he wrote on the flyleaf: “This is the
wellspring, here we all learned together by trial and error looking for what is still just an intuition. Now that I leave to fulfill my duty and my desire, and you remain behind to fulfill your duty against your desire, I leave you evidence of my friendship, which I rarely expressed in words. Thank you for your constancy and your loyalty. May nothing separate you from the path. A hug, Che.”
In addition to the speech he made in Algiers, Che had left behind a final manifesto that can be seen as the crystallization of his doctrine. “Socialismo y El Hombre Nuevo en Cuba” (Socialism and the New Man) was written during his three-month journey in Africa and sent off in the form of a letter to the editor of
Marcha
, the Uruguayan weekly. It appeared in Uruguay in March and had begun to cause a stir in left-wing circles around the hemisphere. It was published in Cuba in
Verde Olívo
on April 11, as Che was en route back to Tanzania. In the essay, he reasserts Cuba’s right to a role at the helm of Latin American revolution and issues a stinging disquisition challenging the docile application of Soviet dogmas by fellow socialists. In a further critique of the Soviet model, Che reiterates his argument in favor of “moral” as opposed to material incentives.
Che denied that the building of socialism meant the “abolition of the individual.” Rather, the individual was the essence of the revolution: the Cuban struggle had depended on those individuals who fought and offered their lives for it. A new notion of self, however, had emerged in the vortex of that struggle—“the heroic stage” that had been attained when those same individuals “vied to achieve a place of greater responsibility, of greater danger, and without any other satisfaction than that of fulfilling their duty. ... In the attitude of our fighters, we could glimpse the man of the future.”
It is difficult not to feel that Che was rendering an account of his own revolutionary transformation. He had sublimated his former self, the individual, and he had reached a mental state through which he could consciously sacrifice himself for society and its ideals. If he could do it, then so could others.
Finally, Che wrote:
It must be said with all sincerity that in a true revolution, to which one gives oneself completely, from which one expects no material compensation, the task of the vanguard revolutionary is both magnificent and anguishing.
Let me say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the greatest dramas of a leader; he must combine
an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decisions without flinching one muscle. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people, for the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the places where ordinary men put their love into practice.
The leaders of the Revolution have children who do not learn to call their father with their first faltering words; they have wives who must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives to carry the Revolution to its destiny; their friends are strictly limited to their comrades in revolution. There is no life outside it.
In these conditions, one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth, to avoid falling into extremes, into cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. Every day we must struggle so that this love of living humanity is transformed into concrete facts, into acts that will serve as an example, as a mobilizing factor.
We know that we have sacrifices ahead of us and that we must pay a price for the heroic act of constituting a vanguard as a nation. We, the leaders, know that we must pay a price for having the right to say that we are at the head of the people of America.
Each and every one of us punctually pays his quota of sacrifice, aware of receiving our reward in the satisfaction of fulfilling our duty, conscious of advancing with everyone toward the new man who is glimpsed on the horizon.
On April 20, amid mounting rumors that something had “happened” to Che, Fidel announced mysteriously that Che was fine, that he was where he would be of “most use to the revolution.” It was all he would say.
That same day, Hildita received a belated birthday letter from her father. She had turned nine on February 15. He told her that he was “a little far away,” doing some work for which he had been commended, and it would be “a little while” before he could return. He told her to look after her “other” brothers and sisters, and to make sure they did their homework, and that he was “always thinking” of her.
At around the same time, Che had dispatched a clue to his father that he was fine, hinting strongly which part of the world he was in. It was a
postcard, mailed after he had left Cuba, which said simply, “
Viejo:
from the Saharan sun to your [Argentine] fogs. Ernesto renews himself and goes for the third [round]. A hug from your son.”
Despite Fidel’s reassurances, rumors about Che’s fate continued to fly. Some of the earliest speculation was that he was in the Dominican Republic, where a crisis had erupted within days of his disappearance. President Johnson, who had defeated Goldwater in the election in November, had dispatched U.S. marines to quash an armed leftist uprising there. It was the first American military invasion in the Western Hemisphere in decades, and the streets of Santo Domingo had become a battleground between the rebel loyalists of the deposed leftist civilian president, Juan Bosch, and the Dominican military.
*
As members of Cuba’s secret services have hinted, the rumor about “Che in Santo Domingo” may have been generated in Havana. As long as he was en route to the Congo and vulnerable to detection or capture, it was of paramount importance to keep his whereabouts a secret. As time dragged on, new reports would emerge to suggest that he was in Vietnam or other exotic locations. Some of the reports were disinformation planted by Cuban intelligence; others were probably disseminated by the CIA to cast doubt on the Castro regime. One of the more lurid stories that soon began making the rounds had a Soviet aroma. It was a supposedly secret memorandum reporting that Che had suffered a psychotic breakdown and been interned in a mental clinic, where he spent his time reading Trotsky and writing letters to Fidel promoting his ideas for creating a permanent revolution. (The “R Memorandum,” as it was known, pointed with alarming proximity toward Che’s true location, claiming that among the places Che mentioned in his letters was Zanzibar, where it was possible to “work with the Chinese.”)
As Sergo Mikoyan recalled, the initial reports trickling through Moscow were that there had been a confrontation between Fidel and Che and that Che had been exiled or punished. “The general opinion among the apparatchiks was that there had been a fight between Fidel and Che,” he said. “Or maybe not a fight, but that Fidel didn’t want Che in Cuba—that he wanted to be the only leader, and that Che was in competition with him.”
Mikoyan stressed that he had never given credence to this scenario. “I knew them both and I knew that Che was absolutely unambitious. ... He would not even imagine competing with Fidel. That version seemed ridiculous and I didn’t believe it. But our people thought of Stalin and Trotsky, then Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who were always fighting—and they thought it was the same in Cuba.”
Alexandr Alexiev, who was still the Soviet ambassador in Havana, also heard the rumors, but by now he knew better. In March, Fidel had invited him to a special event. He was going to lead a volunteer labor brigade composed of revolutionaries to cut sugarcane in Camagüey. When Alexiev learned that Che would not be part of the event, he began wondering if the rumors of a split were true. But when the time came, Fidel took Alexiev for a walk at Camagüey and told him the truth. “You have probably noted Che’s absence,” Fidel said. “He is in Africa. He went there to organize a movement. But I am telling you just for yourself. By no means should you communicate this by cable.”
Alexiev interpreted Fidel’s warning to mean that he should put nothing in
writing
that might be witnessed by third parties and somehow leak out, but he felt duty-bound to inform his government, and he did. Thirty years after the fact, he found it difficult to recall exactly how he had passed the information along. He believed it was with “someone of great trust” who had come to Havana in a Soviet delegation. He stressed that he had put nothing in writing, although he had followed up when he was next in Moscow by informing Leonid Brezhnev in person.
*
Fidel’s whispered confidence to Alexiev about Che’s mission was no doubt a discreet hint to Moscow that Fidel remained loyal despite his public bearbaiting. Che might be off assisting a predominantly Chinese-backed revolutionary faction in the Congo, but that should not affect relations between the Kremlin and Havana. Indeed, Fidel may have been hoping that the new Kremlin Politburo, which was already giving some aid to the Congolese rebels, might respond with direct support for Cuba’s guerrilla program in Africa.
At about the same time that Fidel revealed the secret to Alexiev, the advance column of the Cuban force, led by Che, was preparing to go into action.
At dawn on the morning of April 24, 1965, Che and thirteen Cubans set foot on the Congolese shore of Lake Tanganyika. An expanse of thirty miles of water separated them from the safety of Tanzania and the vast savanna that extended to the Indian Ocean. They had traveled for two days and nights by car from Dar es Salaam and then by boat to the lakeside village of Kibamba. Above them loomed the western edge of the Great Rift Valley, a green jungle escarpment that rose steeply from the lakeshore. Beyond lay the “liberated” territory held by the rebels. Its northern front line began nearly 100 miles away, at the town of Uvira on Lake Tanganyika’s northern shore. Uvira had become the rebels’ fallback position after they lost the town of Bukavu, farther up the Rift Valley, where the frontiers of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi meet. Inland, the territory extended west through the forest for 170 miles, as far as Kasongo on the Lualaba River, just beyond the northern edge of Katanga province. All together, it was a domain that the mercenary leader Mike Hoare described as twice the size of Wales. It included open plains and jungle mountains bisected by untamed rivers. Herds of elephants still roamed there, and a complex mosaic of tribal peoples lived off the land as subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers. The territory contained few roads or towns, and the few inhabited dots on the map represented native villages, isolated former Belgian colonial garrisons, missions, and trading posts.