Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Celia had died on May 19, three days before Osmany arrived at Che’s base camp. She had succumbed to cancer at the age of fifty-eight. Toward the end, she had been living alone in her little apartment adjoining her daughter Celia’s, meeting with a small circle of friends during the week and seeing her children and grandchildren on the weekends. Few people around her realized she was ill. According to her daughter-in-law María Elena Duarte, she had intentionally concealed her illness until the very end, when she collapsed and nothing remained but the deathwatch.
On May 10, Celia had been taken to the exclusive Stapler Clinic in Buenos Aires, where she was placed in a private room with a large picture window. María Elena would find her staring out the window with a look of rapturous longing. “All I ask for,” Celia said, “is one more day.” Friends such as Ricardo Rojo and Julia Constenla visited her and took turns at her bedside. Desperate to help despite their long estrangement, her ex-husband rushed around trying to find some way to save her, even going to the Soviet embassy after hearing that the Russians had discovered a cure for cancer. His presence must have comforted Celia during those final days. She confided to María Elena that he had been the first and only man in her life, and despite everything, she still felt love for him. But the specter of Che imposed itself even now. When the clinic’s managers made evident their displeasure over having the mother of a prominent Communist in their facility, the family moved her to another clinic.
Celia begged Ricardo and Julia to call Havana and ask Aleida where Che was. In March, Che’s childhood friend Gustavo Roca had been in Havana and brought back a letter from him to Celia in which he said he was about to resign his jobs, go cut cane for a month, and then work in one of the Ministry of Industries’ factories in order to study things from the ground level. But Celia had not received the letter until April 13, by which time Che had vanished and all kinds of rumors had begun to circulate. She wrote a reply to Che’s letter, and Ricardo Rojo agreed to send it to Havana with a trusted friend, but the friend was refused a visa.
On May 16, with Celia’s death imminent and her anxiety about Che unresolved, Rojo called Aleida, who could say nothing except that Che wasn’t in a place where she could contact him quickly. On May 18, Aleida called back and spoke to Celia. Rojo was present. “Celia was in a near-coma,” he wrote, “but she sat up in bed as if an electric shock had run through her. It was a frustrating conversation, with a great deal of shouting and a sense of hopelessness.” Celia had learned nothing new from the conversation, and so, in a final, futile effort, Rojo sent off a cable addressed to “Major Ernesto Guevara, Ministry of Industries, Havana”: “Your mother very ill wants to see you. Your friend embraces you. Ricardo Rojo.” No reply came, and the next day Celia died.
Celia’s last letter to Che, which was never sent, was published in Rojo’s book. In it, Celia expressed her disquiet over her son’s fate, obviously assuming that there was truth, after all, to the rumors that he and Fidel had had a falling-out.
My dear one:
Do my letters sound strange to you? I don’t know if we have lost the naturalness with which we used to speak to each other, or if we never had it and have always spoken with that slightly ironic tone used by those of us from the shores of the [Río de la] Plata, exaggerated by our own private family code. ...
Since we have adopted this diplomatic tone in our correspondence, I ... have to find hidden meanings between the lines and try to interpret them. I’ve read your last letter the way I read the news ..., solving, or trying to, the real meanings and full implication of every phrase. The result has been a sea of confusion, and even greater anxiety and alarm.
I’m not going to use diplomatic language. I’m going straight to the point. It seems to me true madness that, with so few heads in Cuba with ability to organize, you should all go cut cane for a month ...
when there are so many and such good cane cutters among the people. ... A month is a long time. There must be reasons I don’t know. Speaking now of your own case, if, after that month, you’re going to dedicate yourself to the management of a factory, a job successfully performed by [Alberto] Castellanos and [Harry] Villegas, it seems to me that the madness has turned to absurdity. ...
And this is not a mother speaking. It’s an old woman who hopes to see the whole world converted to socialism. I believe that if you go through with this, you will not be giving your best service to the cause of world socialism.
If all roads in Cuba have been closed to you, for whatever reason, in Algiers there’s a Mr. Ben Bella who would appreciate your organizing his economy, or advising him on it; or a Mr. Nkrumah in Ghana who would welcome the same help. Yes, you’ll always be a foreigner. That seems to be your permanent fate.
At Celia’s funeral service, Che’s framed photograph sat prominently on the coffin. María Elena said that she felt sorry for Celia’s other children: “It was as if they weren’t there. It was as if she had only one child—Che.” And in a way, as painful as it must have been for the others, that was true. The special bond that had always linked Celia and her firstborn son had to some degree excluded the others. And it had endured, as was obvious to everyone, right to the end.
In the Congo, Che sat down with Leonard Mitoudidi to discuss their military plans. He managed to convince Mitoudidi that an attack on Albertville was premature. He didn’t know the true situation, and neither did the general staff, since they depended on the reports of far-flung field commanders who were often unreliable. Mitoudidi finally agreed with Che’s proposal to send out four groups of guerrillas to the various front lines, and within days they began getting the first reports back. At a couple of the fronts, the men seemed well armed and disposed to fight, but everywhere there was passivity and general chaos. The
jefes
often drank to the point of stupefaction, passing out in full view of their troops. The rebels raced back and forth in jeeps, but did little to further the war effort. They occupied fixed positions and didn’t train, go out on patrol, or gather intelligence. They forced the intimidated and mistreated local peasants to supply them with food. “The basic characteristic of the Popular Liberation Army,” Che concluded, “was that of a parasitic army.”
Che found the Congolese lazy. During marches, they carried nothing except their personal weapons, cartridges, and blankets, and if asked to help carry an extra load, whether food or some other item, they would refuse, saying,
“Mimi hapana Motocar”
(“I am not a truck”). As time wore on, they began saying,
“Mimi hapana Cuban”
(“I am not a Cuban”). Víctor Dreke found that the rebels on the Lulimba front were holding a hilltop position about four miles from the enemy post and had not descended from it in months. Instead of launching raids, they spent their days firing off a huge 75mm recoilless rifle in the general direction of the enemy, far out of range. The chief of this front, the self-proclaimed General Mayo, had manifested open hostility to both Kabila and Mitoudidi, seeing them as “foreigners.” Mitoudidi had ordered Mayo to come and see him, but the man had refused. Mitoudidi did his best to whip his men at Luluabourg into shape, punishing the
pombe
drinkers by burying them in the earth up to their necks, suspending the distribution of arms, and giving stern lectures.
Che told Mitoudidi that he felt isolated from the Congolese rank and file because of the language barrier, and Mitoudidi lent one of his aides, a teenager named Ernesto Ilanga, to give Che daily Swahili lessons. Nevertheless, by early June Che was getting increasingly claustrophobic. He sent out more exploration groups; but without the approval of Mitoudidi’s superior officer, Laurent Kabila, they could undertake no action on their own. There was an erratic flow of notes from Kabila, saying that he was about to come, that he was delayed, that he would arrive tomorrow without fail, or the day after. “And boats kept arriving with good quantities of arms of great quality,” Che wrote. “It was really pathetic to observe how they wasted the resources of the friendly countries, fundamentally China and the Soviet Union, the efforts of Tanzania, the lives of some fighters and civilians, to do so little with it.”
On June 7, as Mitoudidi made ready to inspect a spot a short distance down the lakeshore where the general staff camp was to be moved, he and Che talked. Che asked him what the truth was behind Kabila’s nonappearance, and Mitoudidi confessed that the commander probably wouldn’t be visiting just yet. Chou En-lai, the Chinese premier, was coming to Dar, and Kabila had to meet him to discuss requests for aid. Che headed back up the mountain, but before he had reached the top, a messenger caught up with him to report that Mitoudidi had drowned. It was a severe blow, for Che had come to see Mitoudidi as his best hope of achieving anything at all in the Congo. In
Pasajes
, Che titled the chapter in which he wrote of this death “A Hope Dies,” and indeed, the murky circumstances of Leonard Mitoudidi’s demise seemed to sum up everything that was wrong with this “revolution” Che had come to assist.
According to a couple of Cubans who were in the boat with Mitoudidi, the lake was choppy, with a strong wind blowing, and Mitoudidi had apparently fallen into the water by accident. But Che was suspicious. “From that moment on, a series of strange events occurred, which I don’t know whether to attribute to imbecility, to the extraordinary degree of superstition—since the lake is populated by all kinds of spirits—or something more serious.” Mitoudidi had remained afloat, calling for help, for ten or fifteen minutes, but two men who dived in to save him also drowned. Meanwhile, the men in the boat had cut the engine, and when they restarted it, “it seemed that some magical force did not permit them to go to where Mitoudidi was; in the end, as he was still crying for help, the boat was steered to the shore and the comrades watched him disappear a little while later.”
In late June, after two months of doing “absolutely nothing,” the Cubans’ war in the Congo finally began. Mudandi, a Chinese-trained Rwandan Tutsi rebel commander, arrived from Dar with orders from Kabila. The plan to attack Albertville had been scrapped, and Che was now to assault the military garrison and hydroelectric plant at Fort Bendera instead. Kabila wanted the Rwandans and Cubans to lead the raiding party, which should take place in a week’s time. Che was not enthusiastic about the plan. He had heard from Mudandi’s Tutsi that the Bendera garrison was well entrenched, with as many as 300 soldiers and 100 white mercenaries. It seemed too large a target for his ill-prepared force, much less the Congolese. He proposed a smaller target, but in the end decided to go ahead with Kabila’s plan, reasoning that any action at all was better than none. But after sending repeated requests to Kabila to be allowed to accompany the attack force himself and receiving no reply, Che was forced to stay behind; in late June a column of forty Cubans and 160 Congolese and Rwandan Tutsi set out for Bendera.
The attack, which begun on July 29, was a catastrophe. The assault leader, Víctor Dreke, reported that at the first outbreak of combat, many of the Tutsi fled, abandoning their weapons, while many of the Congolese simply refused to fight at all. Over a third of the men had deserted before the fighting even began. Four Cubans were killed, and one of their diaries fell into enemy hands, which meant that the mercenaries and the CIA—which had sent anti-Castro Cuban exiles to fly bombing and reconnaissance missions for the government forces—now knew that Cubans were directly assisting the rebels. Indeed, as the mercenary commander Mike Hoare wrote later, the unusually audacious rebel attack had led him to suspect that the rebels were getting outside help; the captured diary, which among other things mentioned Havana, Prague, and Peking as a travel itinerary, was his first conclusive proof of a Cuban guerrilla presence in the region.
The Africans attributed their defeat to bad
dawa
, and said that the witch doctor who had applied it to the fighters had been inadequate. “[The witch doctor] tried to defend himself, blaming it on women and on fear, but there were no women there ... and not all the men were prepared to confess their weaknesses,” Che wrote. “It didn’t look good for the witch doctor and he was demoted.” The Congolese and Rwandans who had participated in the debacle were humiliated and demoralized, and the Cubans were furious. If the Congolese wouldn’t fight for themselves, why should they? The spirit of “proletarian internationalism” was something Che had taken to heart with profound personal conviction, but under these circumstances, it was evident that not all his Cuban comrades had the same level of commitment. A number of them were overheard saying they wanted to return home.
“The symptoms of decomposition among our troops were palpable,” Che admitted. “Maintaining morale was one of my main concerns.” Hoping for some action, he sent a letter to the general staff officers in Kibamba, expressing his irritation over the performance at Bendera and demanding to know what he was supposed to do with the new Cubans who were arriving. He also wrote to Kabila, arguing that he needed to be allowed to join personally in future military operations.
While wounded men arrived in a steady stream and were carried back from the battle zone, a fourth group of Cubans arrived at the lakeside Kibamba base. Among them was Harry Villegas, Che’s former bodyguard, who had been left out of Masetti’s mission because he was black. Fidel had handpicked Villegas to provide personal security for Che, and to make sure he came to no harm in the Congo. Villegas had recently married one of Che’s secretaries, a pretty Chinese-mulatta girl named Cristina Campuzano, but he had left her and their newborn son to be with his
jefe
and teacher. Villegas was now renamed Pombo, a pseudonym that in time would be famous.
Che took advantage of the newcomers’ arrival to give a pep talk and a warning at the same time, appealing to the Cubans’ spirit of
combatividad
to try to quash the growing dissension. “I emphasized the need to maintain a rigid discipline,” he wrote. He went on to publicly criticize one of the Cubans for making “defeatist remarks.” “I was very explicit about what we faced; not just hunger, bullets, suffering of all kinds, but also the possibility of death from our [African] comrades, who didn’t have a clue how to shoot properly. The struggle would be long and difficult; I made this warning because at that moment I was prepared to accept that any of the newcomers air their doubts and return [to Cuba] if they so desired; afterward it would not be possible.” None of the newcomers showed “signs of weakness,” but to his dismay, three of the men who had been in the attack on Bendera did.
“I recriminated them for their attitude and warned them that I would request the strongest sanctions against them.”