Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Monje completed his training in June. He sent his four handpicked comrades back to Bolivia but told the original group of students to stay and continue their studies in Cuba until the Party decided what was to be done with them. He wrote a letter to Jorge Kolle Cueto, his substitute in La Paz, explaining his promise to Fidel that the Party would assist their “mutual friend” in passing through Bolivia. Before returning to Bolivia himself, Monje decided to take another short trip to Moscow. The Cubans suggested he stop over in Prague en route, so that “someone” there might look him up, but Monje decided to avoid Prague, suspecting that the Cubans were laying a trap for him. “They waited for me in Prague. What for?” Monje surmised that the Cubans were planning to present him with a fait accompli, telling him that by undergoing training he had in effect approved the option of an armed struggle for his country, and that he had no choice but to go forward with it.
Monje revealed neither why he went to Moscow on this trip nor whom he met with there, but, to judge from his earlier admissions, one can reasonably assume he spoke in the Kremlin about Fidel’s request and revealed Che’s next destination. And in view of the Kremlin’s increasing impatience with the “fire-starters” in Cuba, its reaction can also be surmised. Undoubtedly,
Monje was advised to stand up for his rights as the Bolivian Party chief and told not to let Che or Fidel push him around. As things turned out, that is exactly what Monje would try to do.
With Fidel’s help, Che was putting his chess pieces in motion. He wanted eventually to go to Argentina, but Argentina was not ready just yet. Conditions would have to be prepared from Bolivia. Che envisioned guerrillas from neighboring countries coming to join the fighting and then fanning out to form allied guerrilla armies in their own countries. When the Argentine rebellion was up and running, he would leave Bolivia and take command.
It was with this goal in mind, the Cubans say, that Che had placed Tania in La Paz. She could provide them with valuable intelligence about the regime and the political situation in Bolivia, but she was also to be used as a liaison with the evolving insurgencies in the neighboring countries, especially Argentina. So far, her selection as an agent seemed to be paying off handsomely. As Laura Gutiérrez Bauer, an Argentine ethnologist of independent means, Tania was able to make quick headway in penetrating the small and racially stratified social environment of La Paz. She was an attractive, single white woman, and within two months she had established a circle of valuable contacts in the political and diplomatic community, obtained her Bolivian residency and work permit, and even found a volunteer job in the Ministry of Education’s Folklore Research Committee. On the side, she taught German to a small group of students.
One of her best contacts was Gonzalo López Muñoz, President Barrientos’s press secretary, who gave her documents with his office’s letterhead and credentials as a sales representative for a weekly magazine he edited.
*
By late 1965, she had also found a suitable husband, a young Bolivian engineering student. Marriage to him would help her obtain Bolivian citizenship, and he could be gotten rid of by being sent abroad on a study scholarship, an idea she had already implanted in her guileless groom’s mind.
In January 1966 she was visited by one of Piñeiro’s men, Carlos Conrado de Jesús Alvarado Marín, a Guatemalan who had been working with the Cuban intelligence agency since 1960. His code name was Mercy,
and he was posing as a businessman.
*
He brought Tania her mail, carried inside a false shoe heel, and the news that she had been honored with membership in the new Cuban Communist Party. Explaining to her acquaintances that she had been offered some interpreting work, she slipped out of La Paz to meet up with Mercy in Brazil, where he gave her a counterintelligence refresher course. In April, she traveled to Mexico. Another Cuban agent gave her a new Argentine passport, and she debriefed him on the politico-military situation in Bolivia. She returned to La Paz in early May with instructions to lie low until she was contacted again.
Meanwhile, Mercy wrote an extensive and detailed report of the time he had spent with Tania. He found her deeply committed to the cause and the work she was doing, but under extreme nervous tension and emotional strain, throwing fits on several occasions. He decided that her behavior was caused by the stress of being so long alone in a capitalist country, but concluded on a bright, sloganeering note: “I believe she is aware of the honor of being a link in a chain that in the not-too-distant future will strangle imperialism, and she is proud of having been chosen for special work to aid the Latin American Revolution.”
But, as a poem she wrote in April showed, Tania was in a melancholy frame of mind. The poem, titled “To Leave a Memory,” seems to question the cost of her clandestine existence and the effacement of her real identity.
So I must leave, like flowers that wilt?
Will my name one day be forgotten
And nothing of me remain on the earth?
At least, flowers and song
.
How then, must my heart behave?
Is it in vain that we live, that we appear on the earth?
To protect Tania’s false identity, Che had passed along orders for Papi to minimize his contacts with her; he didn’t want Papi to blow her cover by spending too much time around her. He also sent orders that Tania not be used in the setup phase of the guerrilla war. She was too valuable as a deep-cover asset to risk losing; Che needed her as a courier who could come and go without detection to Argentina, Peru, and the other countries where he planned to recruit fighters. By the time Pombo and Tuma arrived carrying Che’s orders in late July, however, Papi had been in regular contact with Tania since May. He had not only briefed her on the plans for the guerrillas
but introduced her to the man dispatched to be the mission’s permanent liaison with Havana, Renán Montero, also known as Iván. Tania recognized Renán from the meeting in Havana two years before, when Che had told her of her mission.
As always, Argentina loomed large in Che’s mind, and with his arrival in Bolivia only a matter of months away, he tried to get things moving on that front. In May 1966, while Che was still in Prague, his Argentine lieutenant, Ciro Bustos, was summoned to Havana by Piñeiro. The last time Bustos had seen Che was in the summer of 1964, six months before Che went off on his world tour and then vanished from sight. Che had ordered Bustos to return to Argentina and keep up his organizing work, to “lean on the schisms,” as he put it—that is, to avoid the Argentine Communist Party and recruit cadres from disaffected factions. Bustos had spent the intervening two years doing just that. With no firm timetable for action in hand from Che with which to draw potential recruits, however, it was not an easy job, although Bustos had had some success. When Che disappeared in April 1965, Bustos was unperturbed, knowing that he was involved in revolutionary work somewhere, and that he would reappear one day to assume control of the guerrilla network Bustos was building for him.
When Bustos arrived in Cuba, he assumed he would be meeting with Che, but instead he was placed alone in a safe house, a mansion in the Marianao district of Havana. A special provisions truck came by regularly and left him food and cases of beer. He spent several weeks there waiting, with no explanation offered about how long he was to wait or exactly why he was there. Finally, boiling with impatience and hearing that his friend Abelardo Colomé Ibarra was now the army commander in Oriente, Bustos flew to Santiago. He found Colomé Ibarra at a military base in Mayarí.
Bustos gave vent to his litany of complaints, and Colomé Ibarra immediately got on a radio-telephone in his office and had a long, cursing conversation with someone—Bustos believed it was Piñeiro—demanding that he attend to Bustos “properly” and fix up his meeting with “the man,” presumably Che. It was a strange scene that Bustos recalled vividly. As Colomé Ibarra made his call, “Soviet officers passed back and forth nervously outside in the fog at five in the morning.”
Once he was back at the safe house in Havana, Bustos said, “everything changed.” Bustos was told that Che wanted a report from him and needed it quickly; a secretary was brought in to take shorthand. “I dictated a report about our work and the national [Argentine] political situation, predicting a military coup, which did in fact take place before I returned to the country.” Finally, Bustos was informed that he would not be seeing Che
on this visit; he should await a “contact” in Córdoba, but he wasn’t told when it would take place or who it would be.
Before returning to Argentina, Bustos was involved in a very strange odyssey. On an invitation from Mao’s government, he flew to China, where he spent three weeks being grandly feted as Che’s chief Argentine guerrilla lieutenant. Over the course of a series of meetings, Chinese government officials offered to give military training to “Che’s men” and to provide them with unspecified material and financial support. The tantalizing offer came with a catch, however, as Bustos discovered during a meeting with the vice president of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, when he was asked to publicly denounce Fidel Castro for having “allied with imperialism.” A stunned Bustos quickly refused, and his “goodwill tour” ended shortly afterward.
*
Back in Córdoba, Bustos put on a wig to disguise himself and went into the Salta prison, where he and his incarcerated comrades held a whispered “general staff council.” Their cases were all on appeal, but it would be some time yet before they had a resolution, and under the new military regime that had seized power while Bustos was away, their prospects looked bleak. In Cuba, Bustos had explored the possibility of organizing a breakout to free them, and Ariel, Piñeiro’s deputy, had promised to look into it.
†
For now, all Bustos could do was go home to his family, resume the routine of “normal life,” and await the promised contact that would lead him to Che.
By the end of summer, the troops for Che’s Bolivian mission had been selected and were assembled at a secret training camp in the eastern Cuban province of Pinar del Río. It was in an area called Viñales, distinguished by a peculiar geological formation, called
mogotes
, a series of large bulbous jungle-covered hills that rise steeply like great green puffballs from the
red-earth tobacco fields and river valleys. Their base camp was an ironic choice. Nestled on top of one of the
mogotes
was a luxurious country villa with a stream-fed swimming pool, which had formerly belonged to an American accused of being a CIA agent. It had been expropiated, and now it was serving as the launching pad for Che’s next anti-Yankee expedition.
Che had chosen an eclectic group. It included a few men who had been with him in the Congo, others who had been with him in the sierra war, and members of his bodyguard corps. From different parts of Cuba, they had been put on planes to Havana, where they were taken to Raúl Castro’s office. There they recognized old friends they hadn’t seen for some time. None of them knew why they were there. Finally, Raúl told them they had the honor of being selected for an “internationalist mission.” For most of them, it was a dream come true—to be an internationalist revolutionary had become one of the highest aspirations for Cubans serving in the armed forces.
Dariel Alarcón Ramírez (Benigno), a tough, lean
guajiro
in his late twenties, had shown his mettle as a hardy fighter in the sierra and as a member of Camilo’s invasion column; most recently he had been in the Congo with Che. Eliseo Reyes (Rolando), twenty-six, was another veteran of the sierra who had been on Che’s long march to the Escambray. Smart and loyal, he had served for a time as the head of police intelligence, then fought against counterrevolutionaries in Pinar del Río. Thirty-three-year-old Antonio “Olo” Pantoja had been one of Che’s rebel officers in the sierra and an instructor for Masetti’s group. Papi Martínez Tamayo’s younger brother, René, or Arturo, was a veteran of clandestine work for State Security and the military. Twenty-nine-year-old Gustavo Machín de Hoed (Alejandro) had come out of the Directorio Revolucionario and joined Che in the Escambray; later he had been one of Che’s vice ministers of industry. “Manuel” or Miguel Hernández Osorio, was thirty-five and had led Che’s vanguard squad during the march to the Escambray.
Pacho, or Pachungo, thirty-one-year-old Alberto Fernández Montes de Oca, had been Che’s traveling companion from Prague and his personal courier with La Paz. Pacho had been a teacher before joining the July 26 urban underground during the war. There were three black men besides Pombo. Octavio de la Concepción de la Pedraja—who was known as Morogoro in the Congo—was a thirty-one-year-old doctor, an anti-Batista veteran, and a career officer in Cuba’s armed forces. One of Raúl’s veterans, thirty-three-year-old Israel Reyes Zayas (Braulio), another military careerist, had been with Che in the Congo as Azi. And Leonardo “Tamayito” Tamayo, or Urbano, as he was now called, had been with Che since 1957 as a member of his bodyguard corps.
The heavy-set, forty-one-year old Juan “Joaquín” Vitalio Acuña was the oldest of the men. He had been in Che’s column in the war and had become a
comandante
himself during the final push to power. Another Central Committee man and career officer, Antonio Sánchez Díaz, also called Marcos or Pinares, had been one of Camilo Cienfuegos’s officers and had been promoted to
comandante
after the rebels’ victory. And finally, there was the thirty-year-old, extroverted Jesús Suárez Gayol, or Rubio, Orlando Borrego’s friend since the Escambray and currently his deputy in the Ministry of Sugar.
Nobody knew where they were going to fight or who their commander would be until the day a stranger in civilian clothes, balding and middle-aged, showed up at their camp. “Ramón” began walking up and down before the assembled men, caustically insulting them. It was only when he had taken the joke quite far with Eliseo Reyes, who grew offended, that Ramón revealed his true identity: Che. From then on, Che lived with his men, overseeing their physical training and target practice, and, as always, giving daily classes, this time in “cultural education,” French, and a new language—Quechua.