Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
When Che decided to withdraw, on November 18, night had already fallen on the camp. Che radioed Kigoma to prepare the boats for an evacuation. He ordered his men to burn the huts and conceal what equipment they could, and to bring the heavy weapons, in case they had to make a last stand. They began slowly walking toward the lakeshore at dawn, straining under their loads, abandoning some pieces of equipment by the side of the trail. Che noted that his men’s faces showed “a centuries-old weariness,” and he tried to hurry them along. Behind them, explosions shot fire and smoke up into the sky: someone had set fire to their ammunition stores. Most of the Congolese had fled, and Che let them go, knowing that when they reached the lake, there would not be enough boats to transport everyone.
They had decided on a rendezvous point on the lakeshore about six miles south of Kibamba, and during their march, Che sent new radio messages to Kigoma, asking for the launches to meet them that night. By afternoon they had reached the evacuation point; Che radioed again, saying he and his men were in place, the war was over, and it was urgent that they be withdrawn. His calls finally got a response: “Copied.” Che wrote, “When they heard the ‘copied’ from the lake, the expression of all the comrades present changed as if a magic wand had touched their faces.”
But the boats did not arrive that night, or the next day. While they waited with increasing anxiety, Che set up ambushes to protect their perimeter, and sent men back to look for the missing. One man appeared the next morning, hobbling on a sprained ankle, but two other Cubans were still unaccounted for. That afternoon, November 20, Che radioed his launch
captain, Changa, in Kigoma, saying he had 200 men to evacuate. Changa radioed back to explain that he had been detained by the Tanzanian authorities but would cross that night.
At this news, wrote Che, “the people were euphoric.” He had already talked with Masengo and his general staff, and they had agreed that one of the Congolese commanders would stay behind with his men; Masengo and the others would be evacuated with the Cubans. But for the plan to work, those escaping had to deceive the Congolese fighters, and Che and Masengo decided to use various “pretexts” to embark the stranded fighters on a boat that would take them to a nearby village. When they were out of sight, the “real” evacuation would take place.
Things did not turn out so smoothly. While they managed to coax a good portion of the Congolese onto the first boat that arrived, those who remained “smelled something,” recalled Che, and announced that they wanted to stay where they were. On the spot, Che ordered his men to carry out a selection of those Congolese who had shown the “best behavior” to be taken with them “as Cubans.”
As he stood on the lakeshore, overseeing the final evacuation of the Cuban mission in the Congo, Che continued to mull over the possibility of staying behind to carry on the struggle. “The situation was critical. Two men who I had sent out on a mission would be abandoned unless they arrived in a few hours. As soon as we left all the weight of calumnies would fall upon us, inside and out of the Congo. I could extract, according to my research, up to twenty men who would follow me, although at this point with knit brows. And afterward, what would I do? The chiefs were all retreating; the peasants were displaying more and more hostility toward us. But the idea of evacuating completely and leaving behind defenseless peasants and practically defenseless armed men in defeat, and with the sensation of having been betrayed, I found deeply painful.”
One of the options Che had been toying with in the last few days was the possibility of crossing the Congo to try to join up with the rebel force led by Pierre Mulele, but Mulele’s territory was hundreds of miles away through the jungle, and it would be a feat just to survive the odyssey, much less organize an effective guerrilla force.
As they waited for the boats, Che continued to weigh his options, none of them good. “In reality,” he acknowledged, “the idea of staying behind continued to circle around in my head long into the night.” He was disturbed by the demeaning manner of his retreat and by thoughts of how he and his comrades would be remembered by the Congolese fighters left behind. “I passed the last hours solitary and perplexed,” he wrote, “until, at two in the morning, the boats arrived.” First the sick and wounded boarded, then
Masengo, his general staff, and about forty Congolese men they had selected to go with them. Finally, Che and the Cubans climbed aboard.
“It was a desolate, sobering, and inglorious spectacle,” Che wrote. “I had to reject men who pleaded to be taken along. There was not a trace of grandeur in this retreat, nor a gesture of rebellion. The machine guns were prepared, and I had the men ready in case the [abandoned fighters] tried to intimidate us with an attack from land, but nothing like this happened. There was just some sobbing as I, the leader of the escapees, told the man with the mooring rope to let go.”
Within a couple of days of the Congo disaster, Che was safely concealed inside a small apartment in the Cuban embassy residence on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. Ambassador Ribalta cleared out all the employees except for his cryptographer-telegraphist, a male secretary, and a cook, who never knew that there was a stranger living upstairs.
The other Cubans on the ill-fated expedition had been ferried by truck to Dar es Salaam and then were sent to Moscow and on to Havana aboard their own aircraft. Fernández Mell was left behind in Kigoma to organize a search-and-rescue mission for the two missing Cubans, and to evacuate the Congolese who had been left behind. It would be four months before he found the Cubans, in an odyssey that was to take him almost all the way to Rwanda.
Che and his men had had a close encounter with an armed Congolese government cutter on their way across Lake Tanganyika. Che bluffed his way out of the situation by having his men mount their 75mm recoilless rifles on the prows of the boats to give the appearance that they were well armed and prepared for battle. It was an audacious move. If the weapons had been fired, the afterblast alone would have killed many of those on board. In any case, the gunboat did not approach.
A small motorboat piloted by Cubans was waiting for Che when they neared the Kigoma shore. To ensure his safety, he was to be separated from the others and transported secretly to Dar es Salaam.
Taking Papi, Pombo, and Carlos Coello with him, Che boarded the small boat. He bade farewell to the rest of the fighters, telling them that he hoped to see them again. He said that some of them would go on to fight in other lands. It was an awkward and emotional moment. The
Cubans, although overjoyed to be going home, had mixed emotions about their experience.
Pombo said that when they got to shore, Che turned to his three young companions and said, “Well, we carry on. Are you ready to continue?” They understood then that Che was not going back to Cuba. “Where?” Pombo asked. And Che replied, “Wherever.”
Pombo was twenty-five and Tuma was just a year older. Both of them had been close to Che since 1957, when they were teenagers and had joined him in the Sierra Maestra. Papi was twenty-nine and had been Piñeiro’s point man in Che’s guerrilla programs since 1962. They were among the half dozen or so men Che believed he could call upon to follow him “without knit brows,” and he was not disappointed; in reply to his question on the Tanzanian shore, all said yes.
*
“He could not return to Cuba without having achieved success,” Pombo explained. “He thought that the best thing was to continue. Through his own efforts, with whatever possibilities, he had to continue the struggle.”
Che had planned to be fighting for five years, but after only six months it was all over. Fidel had made Che’s farewell letter public a month earlier, at the inaugural ceremony of the Cuban Communist Party. (The new Party replaced the Partido Unificado de la Revolución Socialita (PURS) as the country’s single ruling party, complete with a new, offical Soviet-style central committee and Politburo.) In the farewell letter, Che had committed himself before the world to lend his hand in “new battlefronts,” and for reasons of pride, he felt he could not go back. Getting out of the Congo, however, was a good idea for several reasons. Even if the CIA did not already know where Che was, presumably it had put the Congo on the short list of possibilities after the capture of the Cuban guerrilla’s diary at Bendera in June. Che had to assume they would be looking for him. As of late November 1965, he was probably the world’s best-known Marxist revolutionary, a man for whom the goal of “proletarian internationalism” knew no frontiers. But for now, he had nowhere to go. He was truly a man without a country.
On November 25, four days after Che and his men left the Congo, Joseph Mobutu, the chief of staff of the armed forces, overthrew President Kasavubu. Mobutu’s despotic regime, backed by the West, would endure for the next three decades. The Congolese revolution was over.
After a few days in Dar es Salaam, Tuma and Pombo had flown to Paris and then to Moscow and Prague, where they were installed in a safe house provided by the Czech intelligence service. Holed up in his little apartment in the Tanzanian capital, visited only by Pablo Ribalta and the Cuban telegraphist, who took dictation, Che set to work on his Congolese memoirs. Just as he had measured his final actions in the Congo with an eye to history, Che set about writing this account with the intention of its eventual publication—“at the convenient time”—as his contribution to the annals of global socialist revolution. The title he chose, “Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria (Congo),” echoed the title of his book on the Cuban revolutionary war and made the point that the Congo was just one more stage in a historic struggle that had as its final goal the liberation of the world’s oppressed.
There was a marked difference between the two accounts. The book on the Cuban war contained many blunt reminders of mistakes and sacrifices, but it was primarily a paean to the heroism of the Cuban guerrillas, an exaltation of Fidel’s unerring leadership that had taken them to victory, and a moral tale. The second memoir was a starkly negative reflection of the first, as Che made clear in his opening pages when he wrote, “This is the story of a failure.” The dedication, “To Bahaza and his comrades, looking for a meaning to the sacrifice,” indicated that Che was determined to expunge his sins in classic Marxist self-criticism. At the end of the book, he listed his own faults. “For a long time I maintained an attitude that could be described as excessively complacent,” he said, “and at other times, perhaps due to an innate characteristic of mine, I exploded in ways that were very cutting and very hurtful to others.”
Che wrote that he felt the only group with whom he had maintained good rapport had been “the peasants,” but he chastised himself for his lack of willpower in not learning Swahili well. By relying on his French, he had been able to speak to the officers but not with the rank-and-file soldiers.
In my contact with my men, I believe I showed enough commitment to prevent anyone from impugning me in the personal and physical aspects. ... The discomfort of having a pair of broken boots or only one change of dirty clothes, or to eat the same slop as the troops and live in the same conditions, for me is not a sacrifice. But my habit of retiring to read, escaping daily problems, did tend to distance me from the men, without mentioning that there are aspects of my character that don’t make intimate contact easy.
I was hard, but I don’t believe excessively so, nor unjust; I utilized methods that a regular army doesn’t apply, like making
men go without food; it is the only effective punishment method I know of in times of guerrilla warfare. At the beginning I tried to use moral coercion, and failed. I sought to make my troops have the same point of view as I did regarding the situation and I failed; they were not prepared to look optimistically into a future that had to be viewed through a gloomy present.
Finally, another thing that weighed in my relations with the others ... was the farewell letter to Fidel. This caused my comrades to view me, as they did many years ago, when I began in the Sierra, as a foreigner. ... There were certain things in common that we no longer shared, certain common longings that I had tacitly or explicitly renounced and which are the most sacred things for each man individually: his family, his nation, his habitat. The letter that provoked so many eulogistic comments inside and out of Cuba separated me from the combatants.
Perhaps these psychological musings seem out of place in the analysis of a struggle that has an almost continental scale. I continue to be faithful to my conception of the nucleus; I was the leader of a group of Cubans, no more than a company, and my function was to be their true leader, their guide to a victory that would speed the development of an authentic popular army. But at the same time my peculiar status turned me into a soldier representing a foreign power, an instructor of Cubans and Congolese, a strategist, a high-flying politician on an unknown stage, and a Cato the Censor, repetitive and tiresome. ... With so many strands to deal with, a Gordian knot formed which I didn’t know how to untie. ...
I have learned in the Congo; there are errors I won’t commit again. Maybe there are others I will repeat, and new ones I will commit. I have come out with more faith than ever in the guerrilla struggle, but we have failed. My responsibility is great; I will not forget the defeat, nor its most precious lessons.
From the moment he left the Congo, Che became totally dependent on Cuba’s secret services for his protection and survival. For the first time in his adult life, he was not the master of his own destiny.
The intelligence and guerrilla-support network run by Barbarroja Piñeiro now operated throughout Africa just as it did in Latin America and other parts of the world, often under the cloak of diplomatic cover. The
Cuban chargé d’affaires in Cairo, José Antonio Arbesú, was one of Piñeiro’s operatives, as was Ulíses Estrada, chief of his Africa and Asia section. Ulíses was a tall, thin black man who had been Tania’s lover in Cuba and also Masetti’s controller before he left for Argentina. Throughout Che’s time in the Congo, Ulíses was a primary liaison, constantly traveling between Cuba and Tanzania to coordinate the flow of arms, men, and intelligence. Since the debacle, he had been responsible for getting the Cuban fighters back to Havana and for coordinating Che’s future movements. Fidel wanted Che to come back to Cuba, but he refused to do so, saying he wanted to go directly to South America. Piñeiro’s chief deputy, Juan Carretero—Ariel—who had helped implement the Béjar and Masetti expeditions in Peru and Argentina, was drawn into the dilemma and found that Che was not an easy man to deal with. “He was very hard to argue with,” Ariel said. “He had a very ascetic mentality. He didn’t want to come back to Cuba publicly after the [farewell] letter because of his obligation to the revolutionary cause. It simply was not a possibility.”