Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The noose was being drawn tightly around Che, and then it was given another tug—not by Hoare’s mercenaries, but by a political settlement reached between the Congolese government in Léopoldville and the Congolese Liberation Army’s backers in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which included Tanzania.
The OAU had blacklisted the Congo regime of Prime Minister Moise Tshombe because of his unholy alliance with the Belgian and white mercenary forces. On October 13, President Kasavubu ousted Tshombe, and in a meeting of African presidents in Accra ten days later, he announced that the white mercenaries would be sent home. It was to be a quid pro quo, however. If the mercenaries went, those states aiding the rebels would have to end their support as well. All foreign intervention in the Congo was to cease—and that meant the Cubans too.
Mike Hoare was not pleased when he heard the news and, in a meeting with Joseph Mobutu, the Congolese army chief, insisted that his men’s contracts be honored. Mobutu prevailed upon Kasavubu to let the mercenaries stay until the rebellion had been completely crushed.
Che had been forewarned about the mounting external pressure for a negotiated settlement, and he knew from Masengo and others that the Tanzanians had become increasingly uncooperative. But in the field, events now took place in rapid succession, too quickly for Che to react effectively, let alone concentrate on the political machinations taking place. On the morning of October 24, the six-month anniversary of his arrival in the Congo, his base camp was overrun by government troops. Che had time to order
that the huts be torched, but in the confusion of the retreat his men left behind large stocks of weapons and ammunition, communications equipment, food stores, papers, and two pet monkeys Che had kept.
As they withdrew, Che castigated himself for having been caught unaware. He had not posted sentries on the route the enemy had taken to approach, not believing they would come that way. He was even more bitter when he discovered that the initial panicked reports of the approaching enemy vanguard had been mistaken: they had actually been peasants fleeing the advancing government troops. If he had waited and found out the truth, Che could have mounted a good ambush and struck an important blow against the enemy. Now, it was too late.
“Personally, my morale was terribly depressed; I felt responsible for that disaster through weakness and lack of foresight,” he wrote. As Che and his Cubans retreated, the Congolese fled past them, finding their own escape, and when Che reached a hilltop where he had ordered some Cubans who had gone ahead to wait for him, he found they had gone on. Che looked around at the little band of men who were still with him: it included Víctor Dreke, Papi, and his bodyguards Pombo and Tumaini—and Chamaleso, his original Congolese contact. “I made the bitter reflection that we were thirteen in number,” Che wrote. “One more than Fidel had at a certain moment [after the
Granma
’s landing], but I was not the same leader.”
Che and his men marched on through a desolate landscape of abandoned hamlets whose peasant inhabitants had joined the rebels’ flight toward the lake. They hiked on through the night and at dawn reached a village where they found one of the Cubans, Bahaza, gravely wounded with a bullet in the lung.
After doing what he could to alleviate Bahaza’s condition, Che ordered the column forward, leaving the valley to find safer refuge in the hills. Under a heavy rainfall, and up a steep mountain trail slippery with mud, with the men taking turns carrying Bahaza, everyone experienced the next six hours as a grinding ordeal. From the heights, they observed a terrible spectacle: on adjacent hills were fleeing peasants, while in the valley below columns of smoke rose from burning huts as the advancing government troops burned everything in their path. Reaching a small village filled with hungry refugees, Che was berated by angry peasants who said the soldiers had carried off their wives, but they had been helpless to save the women because they had only spears; the rebels had not given them guns to defend themselves.
Bahaza died at dawn the next day. “Bahaza was the sixth man we lost and the first whose body we were able to honor,” Che wrote. “And that body was a mute and virile accusation, as was his conduct from the moment of
his wounding, against my ... stupidity.” Che gathered his men around and gave what he described as a “soliloquy loaded with self-reproach.”
“I recognized the errors I had committed and I said, which was a great truth, that of all the deaths that had occurred in the Congo, Bahaza’s was the most painful for me, because he had been the comrade I had seriously reprimanded
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for his weakness and because he had responded like a true Communist [by acknowledging it] ..., but that I hadn’t been up to my responsibilities, and I was guilty of his death. For my part, I would try to do everything I could to erase that error, through more work and more enthusiasm than ever.”
But it was not to be. As Che dug in at his new site, the recriminations began. Word came that Congolese commanders such as Lambert were saying the defeat was Che’s fault, that the Cubans were cowardly and had betrayed them. Fernández Mell and Aragonés kept up a flow of messages to Che from the lakeside base at Kibamba, urging him to abandon his position; an enemy attack could be expected at any moment, and he could easily be cut off from escape to the lake.
The Congolese government was now trying to press its advantage by forming alliances with some of the rebel leaders. Masengo had informed Aragonés and Fernández Mell that President Kasavubu had sent him a secret message, offering him a government ministry if he abandoned the struggle. “If they’ve approached Masengo,” Aragonés and Mell warned Che, “they must also be working on Soumaliot and Kabila.”
On October 30, they sent Che a new urgent note, begging him to join them on the lake. Planes had begun firebombing positions around Kibamba, and they feared that this was just the prelude to a final assault. The base was becoming chaotic, a refuge for all kinds of “deserters, criminals, and traitors,” and there was no control. “The thing is really alarming,” they stressed. “We think we’ve been writing you quite enough and have kept you abreast of the international situation as well as the one here. We almost seem like two gossipy old ladies. We beg you to do the same as us since we are always anxious for news (then we can be three gossips).”
Che finally decided to heed their advice. Leaving Papi with a group of Congolese at his new village base with orders to continue the military training sessions, he headed down to Kibamba. Although virtually everyone around him believed the so-called Congolese revolution to be in its death throes, Che refused to give up hope, and even now was trying to shore up
the outlying fronts that had not yet been overrun. In his habitual end-of-month summary, he concluded that October had been a “month of disaster without qualifiers. ... In summary, we enter a month [November] which may be definitive.”
But even as Che was writing, the rug was being pulled out from under him. On November 1, Ambassador Ribalta was called in by the Tanzanian government and informed that, because of the agreements reached at Accra, Tanzania had decided to end “the nature of its assistance” to the Congolese National Liberation Movement. An urgent message was sent to Che, telling him the news.
“It was the coup de grâce for a moribund revolution,” Che wrote. Given the delicate nature of the information, he decided not to tell Masengo, and to base any decision he made on how matters developed over the next few days. Then on November 4, Che received a telegram from the embassy giving him an advance summary of a letter from Fidel, the full text of which was being brought to him by courier. It was Fidel’s response to the letter Che had sent with Machadito a month earlier. The summary of Fidel’s points was as follows:
1. We must do all we can short of the point of absurdity.
2. If in Tatu’s [Che’s] judgment, our presence is becoming unjustifiable and useless, we should think about retiring. You should act according to the objective situation and the spirit of our men.
3. If you think you should stay, we will try to send as many human and material resources as you deem necessary.
4. We are worried that you erroneously fear that your attitude has been considered defeatist or pessimistic.
5. If you decide to stay, Tatu can maintain status quo returning here or remaining in another place.
6. We support any decision you take.
7. Avoid annihilation.
Using the field radio, Che dictated a message to Dar es Salaam to be relayed to Fidel, briefing him on the current situation. A few days earlier, he told Fidel, when rumors were spreading of a mass escape by the Congolese rebel leaders to Tanzania, he had resolved to stay behind with twenty handpicked men. They would have continued to try to assemble a guerrilla force; if they failed, he would go overland to another front or seek political asylum in Tanzania. That option had ended, however, with Tanzania’s decision to suspend its support.
Che proposed that a high-level Cuban delegation be sent to Tanzania to speak with Nyerere and outline the Cuban position, which was that “Cuba [had] offered its aid subject to Tanzania’s approval. It was accepted and the aid became effective. We comprehend Tanzania’s present difficulties but we are not in agreement with its proposals. Cuba does not retreat from its promises, nor will it accept a shameful escape leaving its [Congolese] brothers in disgrace at the mercy of the mercenaries. We will only abandon the struggle if, for well-founded reasons or force majeure, the Congolese themselves ask us to, but we will continue fighting so that this does not come to pass.”
Che also asked Fidel to solicit a minimum of continued support from Tanzania: to allow them to keep open their communication with Dar es Salaam, and permission to continue using the lake for food and arms supply runs. Finally, he advised Fidel to pass a copy of his letter along to the Chinese and the Soviets “to forestall any discrediting maneuver.”
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By November 10, the situation was continuing to unravel on the perimeter of the reduced rebel territory. One of the Rwandan Tutsi positions was overrun and the enemy was advancing steadily toward the lake. With food and medical supplies running low at Kibamba, Che sent a telegram to the Cuban stations in Kigoma and Dar es Salaam. “Enemy pressure increases and the [Tanzanian] lake blockade still in place. Substantial quantities of Congolese currency are urgently needed in event of isolation. You have to move quickly. We are preparing to defend the base.”
On November 14, Che’s Cuban launch captain, Changa, crossed the lake from Kigoma carrying food and a Cuban intelligence official from Dar with a new message from Fidel. He advised Che that the Tanzanian government was showing no sign of moderating its position. The emissary from Dar asked if he should begin preparing a “clandestine base” for Che in Tanzania, given the current official posture, and Che told him he should.
In a ludicrous sideshow, the boat captain had also brought over forty new Congolese rebel “graduates,” fresh from a training course in the Soviet Union. Like their Bulgarian- and Chinese-trained predecessors, they immediately requested two weeks of vacation, while also complaining that they had nowhere to put their luggage. “It would be a little comic if it weren’t so sad,” Che wrote, “to see the disposition of these boys in whom the revolution had deposited its faith.”
Despite the efforts of Cuban commanders in the field, the rebel defenses continued to crumble. On November 16, Che sent an SOS to the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam requesting arms supplies from the cache in Kigoma. He accused the Tanzanian authorities of intentionally blockading his logistics pipeline, and asked the embassy to demand a clear response as to what their intentions were. Enemy gunboats were patrolling the lake, and he needed action now.
That same day, Papi, still in the mountains, sent word that he needed reinforcements urgently. The Rwandans with him had deserted en masse that morning, taking their weapons with them, and now the Congolese were leaving, as well. It was devastating news: without sufficient men at the front there was no way to hold back the enemy advance.
Che held a conclave to discuss strategy with the Congolese leaders at hand: Masengo, Chamaleso, and a couple of others (despite repeated entreaties, Kabila had still not crossed the lake). As they saw it, there were only two alternatives: a fight to the end in their present position or a breakout attempt, cutting through enemy lines and escaping either north or south. The first option was discarded because of the unreliability of their fighters, and they tentatively decided to make a break for the south, through an area called Bondo. Che ordered Dreke and another of his officers, Aly, to make a quick reconnaissance trip there to see what the possibilities were.
As Che recorded it, Aly exploded, saying it was time to stop “running over hills without having these people’s cooperation.” “I answered him cuttingly that we would organize the evacuation from Bondo and he could leave with the group that left the struggle; he replied immediately that he would stay with it to the end.”
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Deciding that it was unfair to keep the secret any longer, Che now told Masengo of Tanzania’s decision to end its support, telling him to draw his own conclusions. Evidently, the news was definitive for Masengo and his comrades; that night, Chamaleso came to tell Che that all the rebel officers in camp had decided to end the campaign. Che took the news badly, telling
Chamaleso that if that was the case, he wanted their decision in writing. “I told him that there was something called history, which is made up of much fragmentary data and which can be twisted.” Che wanted documentation in case the Congolese later said that it had been a Cuban decision to withdraw. Chamaleso said he didn’t think Masengo would agree to sign such a letter, but went off to confer.
Just then, a field telephone call informed Che that his upper base had fallen. His men had retreated without a fight, and the enemy was advancing in large numbers. Che reacted swiftly, proposing an immediate retreat, which Masengo accepted. Chamaleso took the occasion to inform Che that he had talked again with the officers and they were still unanimous in their desire to withdraw “definitively” from the battlefield. That was an academic point now, as Che noted: “Within five minutes, the telephone operators had disappeared, all the military police had run away, and chaos took over the base.”