Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Christmas and New Year’s came and went, and Che remained in seclusion. In early January 1966, at Che’s request, Aleida was brought to Tanzania. She was rushed straight from the car into the embassy building in Dar es Salaam, and, once inside, quickly upstairs. She and Che shared two rooms. One was a tiny photographic darkroom with a bed, where they slept, and the other was a small living room where they spent their days. For the next six weeks, neither she nor Che left those rooms, and the curtains on the windows were permanently drawn. Just once, Aleida dared to peek out. She saw a grove of trees. No other houses were in sight. Their only visitor was Pablo Ribalta, who brought their meals upstairs. In a communications room on the same floor were the cryptographer and Che’s typist, a Cuban named Coleman Ferrer. Nobody else knew who they were or even saw them.
Che didn’t seem bothered by the confinement, Aleida said, because he had plenty to do. He had already finished his Congo memoirs by the time she arrived and had begun two other projects: “Apuntes Filosóficos” (Philosophical Notes),
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and “Notas Económicas” (Economic Notes), which was based on his critical review of the Soviet
Manual of Political Economy
, the standard socialist bible since Stalin’s day. When he wasn’t writing, Che spent his time reading, including poetry and fiction for mere enjoyment. When Aleida arrived, he set her a curriculum of books to read, like homework, which they
discussed at the end of each day. They clearly relished the time together. Che took some fanciful, romantic photographs of the two of them in which he looks younger, slimmer, and more handsome than he had in several years. His dark, wavy hair has grown back and he has a thin mustache. In some of the photographs he is bare-chested. In one of them, Aleida is reading a play by Strindberg while Che looks on with a playful expression. In another he is wearing a dark suit and kneeling by Aleida, holding her hand.
Aleida recalled that their Tanzanian interlude was the closest thing she ever had to a honeymoon. It was the first time they had been alone together. In a giggling allusion to their bed in the darkroom, Aleida hinted that they had made up for lost time. She said that in the past they had often talked about one day visiting Mexico and Argentina together, but “there was no time, and there was not to be any.” When she returned to Cuba at the end of February, Aleida left in the same way she had come: down the stairs, out the front door, into a waiting car, and straight to the airport. She rued the fact that she had been to East Africa and seen nothing, not even the fabled game parks. “Later I saw what I had missed,” she said, “in a movie starring Yves Montand and Candice Bergen.”
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By the time Aleida left, Ariel had persuaded Che to go to Prague, where he would be safer and could wait things out.
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But before he left Tanzania, sometime in March, Fernández Mell came to see him. He had finally rounded up the missing Cubans, rescued the abandoned Congolese fighters across the lake, and helped wind up the Cuban operation in Kigoma. Che showed his friend the passages in his memoirs where he referred to him critically, and said, “See how I dump on you?” Fernández Mell retorted that anything Che criticized him for was a direct reflection on him, since he had only followed Che’s orders.
The Congo experience had distanced them. They were still friends, but they no longer believed in the same things. Fernández Mell had done a lot of thinking about Che’s notions of continental guerrilla war and had begun to doubt the wisdom of the strategy, at least for Africa. He thought Che was stubbornly deluded about it. “In the Congo, Che had said things to us that I am convinced he knew weren’t realistic,” Fernández Mell explained, “although he wasn’t a man who said things he didn’t feel. ... He
had it stuck deeply in his head that he had found the path to liberate the people and that it would be successful, and he expounded it as an absolute truth. So he could not accept that the attempt in the Congo ruined that strategy he had thought out so well.”
Fernández Mell knew that Che was probably going on to South America, and ultimately to Argentina. It had always been understood that Fernández Mell would join him there, but now the subject didn’t come up. He didn’t inquire about Che’s plans or volunteer himself to be a part of them. Their mutual silence said it all. It was a parting of the ways between two friends. A few days later, Fernández Mell returned to Havana, taking Che’s latest “Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria” with him to deliver to Fidel. He would never see Che again.
Che arrived in Prague accompanied by Papi. They were met by Pombo and Tuma at the safe house, a large, stately villa on the outskirts of Prague, discreetly screened by a row of tall juniper trees. The Czechs had turned over a number of safe houses in Prague for Cuba to use as it saw fit. According to Ariel, they were run by the Cubans independently of the Czechs. “Che was brought in as just another Latin American revolutionary under a false identity,” he said. “The Czechs never knew he was there.” Pombo recalled that they lived quietly in the villa, killing time and keeping their skills honed with shooting practice. Aleida rejoined Che for a few weeks. Piñeiro’s agent Ulíses Estrada came and went from Havana bearing messages. (Eventually, Ulíses was replaced by Ariel at Che’s request. Ulíses was black, and he attracted too much attention in Prague.)
According to both Ariel and Pombo, Fidel continued trying to persuade Che to return to Cuba, but Che wouldn’t budge. “Che didn’t want to return under any circumstances,” said Pombo. Those who were close to Che suggested that, in addition to his pride, a decisive factor was his recognition that he had become a political liability for Fidel with the Soviets, who were now bankrolling the Cuban ship of state. Che was more useful to Fidel abroad, where he could carry forward Cuba’s revolutionary foreign policy, with Fidel discreetly backing him on the grounds that he was aiding an old comrade.
Che’s departure from Cuba had coincided with Fidel’s swing back to an aggressively internationalist stance. It had become explicit in his May Day speech in 1965, when he blasted the concept of peaceful coexistence. In January 1966, at the first Tricontinental Conference, an outgrowth, promoted by Cuba, of the Cairo-based Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization—attended by hundreds of delegates from more than eighty Latin, Asian, and
African states; sundry armed national liberation movements; and the Soviets and Chinese—Fidel had once again played the feuding socialist super-powers off against each another. He had disturbed Moscow by pushing through a resolution lauding the guerrilla movements fighting in Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru, while simultaneously tweaking the Chinese by mentioning the “misunderstandings” between Havana and Beijing over China’s decision to reduce Cuba’s badly needed rice imports. (In February, Fidel would abandon his diplomatic language and come out publicly with a list of grievances against China, accusing the Chinese of trying to meddle in Cuba’s politics and seeking to use rice as a bludgeon to secure political obeisance.)
The Tricontinental Conference provided a platform for dampening the continuing rumors of a rift between Fidel and Che, and for creating an opening for Che to enter a new battlefield. Fidel proclaimed 1966 the Year of Solidarity and pledged common cause with the guerrilla struggles taking place against imperialism around the globe. And he instructed Piñeiro to find a place for Che to go.
In early 1966, the Latin American revolutionary panorama was vibrant and in a violent state of flux. There were now pro-Chinese Communist Party factions in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, and guerrilla groups were popping up all over the place. There were some senior Cuban agents in place with the guerrillas in Venezuela and Colombia, but the situation in those countries was tenuous; along with the guerrilla upsurge had come an increased American military and CIA presence.
In Guatemala, the Cuban-backed rebel coalition was being riven in two by a Trotskyite breakaway movement, but, in spite of their internal splits, the guerrillas had pulled off some spectacular attacks, including the assassination of the head of the U.S. military mission, and, a few months later, that of the Guatemalan deputy defense minister. Then, in March 1966, when Che was in Prague, Guatemalan security forces swooped down on a secret meeting of the Guatemalan Communist Party leadership, murdering the twenty-six top officials it captured. Their deaths temporarily decapitated the Cuban- and Soviet-backed guerrilla leadership.
The Peruvian MIR guerrillas led by Luis de la Puente Uceda and Guillermo Lobatón had finally gone into action in June 1965, after two years of underground organizing. In September, the Cuban-backed ELN in Peru led by Héctor Béjar began fighting as well. Peru’s government had suspended constitutional guarantees, and Peruvian troops, supported by the United States, had begun a fierce counterinsurgency war. By October 1965, they had killed Luis de la Puente Uceda; then they killed Lobatón only three
months later, leaving the MIR leaderless and its combatants on the run. By December, the ELN was in a similar situation; before long, Béjar himself was captured and imprisoned.
In Colombia, the picture was similar. An official state of siege had been imposed in May 1965 following the appearance of the Colombian ELN guerrillas, who were also backed by Cuba, at the beginning of the year. By December, an outspoken revolutionary Catholic priest, Camilo Torres, had joined the Colombian ELN, lending its effort a charismatic blend of social vision and potentially broader appeal. By February 1966, Torres was dead, but the Colombian insurgency would continue, with the appearance of new offshoots and mutations, for many years to come.
Problems were brewing in Venezuela’s FALN guerrilla organzation. The Communist Party, which had initially supported the armed struggle, was now stepping back in the wake of the imprisonment of many of its leaders. In April 1965, in a move openly criticized by Fidel, the Venezuelan Party plenum had voted to alter course in favor of “legal struggle,” and a year later the Party leaders were released from prison. The guerrillas backed by Cuba repudiated the Party and continued the fight.
A military junta in Bolivia had overthrown Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the civilian president, in November 1964, and the charismatic president of the powerful Bolivian workers’ union, Juan Lechín, had led a vociferous campaign against the junta. In May 1965, Lechín was exiled, a general strike was called in protest, and a state of siege was declared. Still, the pro-Moscow Bolivian Communist Party, led by Mario Monje, was hesitant about undertaking an armed struggle. A pro-Chinese breakaway faction of the Party, formed in April 1965 in a movement spearheaded by the student leader Oscar Zamora, had previously sought Che’s backing to launch a guerrilla war and been given the go-ahead, but during Che’s time away in the Congo, Cuban-Chinese relations had soured, and little had been done to push this option by either Piñeiro’s agency or Zamora.
According to Pombo, the first possibility proposed by Che as his next destination was Peru, but to go there he would need the help of the Bolivians. Che sent Papi to Bolivia in April, and he planned to follow if Papi gave the all-clear. “The first thing,” Pombo explained, “was to establish contact with the Peruvians, see what state their movement was really in, and [get] the support of the Bolivian Communist Party. The Bolivian Party had helped us with the Masetti thing and the Puerto Maldonado thing [with Héctor Béjar’s ELN group]. There were people who were loyal to the ideas of the revolution, who had worked with us before, and, what’s more, had been trained in Cuba.”
The loyal Bolivian cadres Pombo was speaking about were a group of young Bolivian Communist Party members. Among them were the Peredo brothers, Roberto, who was known as Coco, and Guido, who was called Inti. They came from a large and prominent family in Bolivia’s northeastern Beni province. A younger brother, Osvaldo, or Chato, was studying in Moscow. There were also the Vázquez-Viaña brothers, Humberto and Jorge, the European-educated sons of a well-known Bolivian historian. Jorge, or Loro (the Parrot), had worked closely with Abelardo Colomé Ibarra and Masetti in the Salta campaign of 1963–1964. Rodolfo Saldaña, a former miner and unionist, had helped hide Ciro Bustos and his companions at his home in La Paz after their arrival from Algeria. Loyola Guzmán, a young woman of predominantly Quechua Indian blood, was the daughter of a Communist teacher in Bolivia’s mining communities and a graduate of the elite Communist Party political cadres’ training school in Moscow. She too had helped the Argentine and Peruvian guerrillas. These, and a few other Bolivians, some of whom were already training in Cuba, were the hard core of activists that the Cubans could count upon to support a war in Peru or to get a war going in Bolivia itself.
There has long been a degree of murkiness about the true target of Che’s next—and last—war-making effort. Pombo said that it wasn’t until after he and Tuma arrived in Bolivia that plans changed and Bolivia itelf came under consideration. Ariel had a different story. He said that he, Piñeiro, and Fidel had Bolivia in mind when they managed to lure Che out of his confinement in Tanzania.
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“One of the ways we convinced him to come to Prague was by getting him enthusiastic about the possibilities in Bolivia, where some agreements had been made and conditions were being prepared,” Ariel said. “Venezuela and Guatemala were previously under consideration, but Bolivia offered many advantages. First, because of its proximity to Argentina, which was very important to Che. Next, because of the agreements, the prior experience there, the human assets, and the
Party’s militant traditions. And finally, because of its geographic location, which offered good possibilities for the later ‘irradiation’ of guerrillas trained in the Bolivian guerrilla front to the neighboring countries of Argentina, Peru, Brazil, and Chile. He became enthusiastic over this possibility and agreed to go to Prague.”
This is perhaps the most crucial single question about the life of Ernesto Che Guevara that still remains unsatisfactorily answered:
who
decided he should go to Bolivia; and when and why was that decision made? Fidel always said that Che selected Bolivia himself, and that he had tried to stall him, urging him to wait until conditions were more “advanced.” Manuel Piñeiro concurred. He said that Fidel persuaded Che to come back to Cuba after they learned from Papi that Che was ready to head straight to Bolivia without anything prepared for his arrival there. Fidel offered him Cuba’s help in selecting and training his men, as well as laying the groundwork for a Bolivian guerrilla
foco
. Fidel’s and Piñeiro’s explanations do not exactly mesh with the accounts given by Ariel and Pombo, but then,
their
versions don’t match up, either. How to explain the contradictions between the versions of Ariel and Pombo—one a senior Cuban intelligence official and diplomat, the other a high-ranking military general and an officially recognized “Hero of the Revolution”—let alone between them and the version offered by Piñeiro and the
jefe máximo
? The true answer might lie in the unpublished preamble to Pombo’s diary, which was begun in Prague and written up later on the basis of his notes.