Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
By August, a base of operations had been located in Bolivia, a remote 3,700-acre tract of wilderness in the backward southeastern region, with a seasonal river, the Ñancahuazú, running through it. It lay in a hilly, forested area abutting the eastern foothills of the Andean cordillera and at the edge of the vast tropical desert of the
chaco
that spreads eastward to Paraguay, the nearest border. It was about 150 miles south of Santa Cruz along a dirt road, and a similar distance from the Argentine border; the nearest town, an old Spanish colonial outpost called Lagunillas, was about twelve miles away. A few hours’ drive farther south lay the oil-drilling and army garrison town of Camiri.
Since his return from Cuba, Mario Monje had complied with his promise to Fidel, assigning his Cuban-trained Party cadres to help make the arrangements for Che’s arrival, buying equipment and weapons, renting safe houses, and lining up transportation. Papi, who had gone to Bolivia with no clear directives about where he should establish a base, had agreed to the Ñancahuazú purchase based on Monje’s recommendation.
Years later, Monje admitted that it was an almost arbitrary choice and certainly not a strategic one. He sent Coco, Loro, and Saldaña off to look for a good base near the Argentine border—assuming that this was where Che was headed—and two weeks later, Loro returned, having located Ñancahuazú; Monje says he looked at a map, decided that it seemed close enough to Argentina, and gave the go-ahead. On August 26, Loro and Coco, posing as prospective pig breeders, bought the land.
When Pombo and Tuma arrived in late July and told Monje that their plans had changed, that the “continental” guerrilla operations would begin in Bolivia rather than Peru, Monje told them he was in agreement. When the Cubans sounded him out on the possibility that Che might be personally involved, Monje expressed his willingness to go to the field himself and agreed to give them more men to set up a rural guerrilla front, while still stating his preference for a popular uprising.
A few days later, Monje had changed his tune, saying he did not remember promising the Cubans more men, and reminding them that he could withdraw the Party’s help altogether. He had to be in control of what was happening in his country, he said, and he resented the way the Cubans were trying to dictate terms to the Bolivians. In an attempt to pull rank, he alluded to conversations he had had in Moscow detailing his own plans, and said he would request aid from the Soviet Union at the appropriate moment. He had, he said, agreed to lend the Party’s help in getting Che to Argentina and assisting the guerrilla efforts in Brazil and Peru, but Bolivia itself had never been under discussion. The Cuban advance team remonstrated with him and Monje backed off, but from that time forward the air was full of mutual distrust.
One of the reasons for Monje’s demurral was the outcome of Bolivia’s general elections in July. The Communist Party was given permission to field candidates, and Monje and his fellow Politburo apparatchiks had opted to participate while simultaneously telling Cuban-trained Young Turks such as Coco Peredo that they were only delaying, not abandoning, the option of an armed struggle. The Party had picked up some votes, a mere fraction of the total, but still the biggest number it had ever obtained. For Party moderates, it was an argument for continuing to work within the system.
In early September, while Monje continued to vacillate and send mixed signals, Che dispatched Pacho to La Paz to assess the situation. The Cubans began taking soundings among the Bolivian Party cadres to determine their affinities; would they join the Cubans if a guerrilla war was launched independent of the Party? Coco Peredo, for one, told them he would fight with them to the death, but some of the others, loyal to the Party hierarchy, clearly could not be counted on. Meanwhile, Che sent word that he wanted the guerrilla base to be in the Alto Beni, a tropical farming region in the upper Amazonian watershed, northeast of La Paz and at the other end of the country from Ñancahuazú. He told his men to purchase land there, and to transfer the weapons they had stored in Santa Cruz.
Meanwhile, Monje learned from Party informants that Régis Debray had been sighted moving around the Bolivian countryside—in Cochabamba, in the Chaparé, and in the Alto Beni—all regions that had been under discussion by the Cubans as possible guerrilla sites. He also heard that
Debray had met with Moisés Guevara, an action-minded, dissident miners’ leader, who had broken off from Oscar Zamora’s pro-Chinese Communist Party faction. Monje accused the Cubans of operating behind his back and demanded to know if they were having any dealings with the
fraccionalista
Guevara. The Cuban advance team denied any knowledge of Debray’s presence and assured Monje that there had been no contact with Moisés Guevara. Both assertions were, of course, untrue. In fact, Che had sent the Cubans a message explaining Debray’s mission: to recruit Moisés Guevara’s force, and to make an assessment of the Alto Beni area he had chosen as the war’s launching ground.
Pombo, Papi, and Tuma were caught in the middle. They already had a guerrilla base, but it was in the southeast. They had a semblance of support from the Bolivian Communist Party and a whole network established. All of it had come about through their dealings with Monje, they told Che, and as difficult as the Party leader was to read, he was all they had at the moment. As for Moisés Guevara, he had promised to join the armed struggle, but so far had produced no men and was demanding money. They urged Che to reconsider his choices.
To complicate things further, they were also dealing with the Peruvian guerrillas who had expected to be the primary focus of Cuba’s guerrilla assistance efforts in the area. The Peruvians were led by a Peruvian-Chinese Mao look-alike, Juan Pablo Chang, an old friend of Hilda Gadea’s, who was now trying to rebuild the clandestine infrastucture shattered after the deaths of Lobatón and Uceda and the imprisonment of Ricardo Gadea and Héctor Béjar. Chang had a man with the Cubans in La Paz, Julio Danigno Pacheco—alias Sánchez—but he and his comrades were upset about the Cubans’ change of focus to Bolivia. The Cubans held a meeting with Sánchez to placate him and explain the new strategy.
Che’s lieutenants were finding it difficult to oblige him about the place in the Alto Beni. They sent him a long report lobbying in favor of the Ñancahuazú property already purchased, and pointed out that the Beni was heavily populated; the large amount of land they would need was not available, and if they set up camp on a smaller farm, they ran the risk of early detection. At last, Che relented, sending word that the present farm would do for the moment.
It was now October, but many issues still hung inconclusively in the air. In a new twist, Monje announced that his Central Committee had voted in favor of the armed struggle but, as usual, emphasized that it would have to be led by Bolivians. He intended to go to Havana to make this policy understood. Despite the obvious need for urgency, however, Monje first made a visit to Bulgaria; he would not arrive in Havana until late November.
There he would discover that the man who was becoming his nemesis was nowhere to be found. In fact, Che had already left for Bolivia, having decided to arrive unannounced except to his closest circle of Cuban comrades.
Monje recalled that Fidel would not confirm or deny that there had been a change of plans. He let Monje make his point that in Bolivia the revolution had to be directed by Bolivians, but deferred the issue, suggesting that he and Che “get together and talk.” Where was Monje going to be around Christmas? Fidel asked. In Bolivia, Monje replied. Fidel said that a meeting would be arranged around that time, somewhere “outside” Bolivia, but near the border. By now, Monje said, he knew where that place was—not outside Bolivia at all, but in Ñancahuazú. He returned to Bolivia in mid-December, more certain than ever that the Cubans had deceived him.
*
Che had lain low until the final days of his stay in Cuba. Aside from Fidel, the men in his training camp, and some high-ranking revolutionary leaders, Orlando Borrego was one of the few people who knew of his presence. Still only in his late twenties, Borrego was keen to accompany Che to the battlefront—as he had wanted to go to Africa—even though he had responsibilities as the Cuban minister of sugar. When Che sent word that he had selected Jesús Suárez Gayol, Borrego’s deputy, to go to Bolivia with him, Borrego asked to go, too. Che refused, but promised that he could join them at a future stage, when the revolution was more secured.
There was another reason why Che wanted his protégé to stay. After one of Aleida’s clandestine reunions with Che abroad, she had returned with a special present for Borrego. It was Che’s own heavily marked-up copy of the Soviet
Manual of Political Economy
that he had begun working on in Dar es Salaam. The manual had for years provided the “correct” interpretation and application of the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in the construction of a socialist economy. Accompanying Che’s copy was a ream of notations and comments, many of them highly critical, in which he questioned some of the basic tenets of scientific socialism as codified by the Soviet Union. He also sent an outline of his theory for the “budgetary finance system” that he favored over the established Moscow line. What Che had in mind was a new manual on political economy, better suited to modern times, for use by the developing nations and revolutionary societies of the Third World. As
for his economic theory, he wanted it expanded into book form. He knew he was not going to have time to finish either project and was now entrusting Borrego with completing the tasks for him. In a letter attached to the material, addressed to Borrego by his pet name, “Vinagreta” (Sourpuss), Che joked that he was sending it via Tormenta (Storm), meaning Aleida. He urged Borrego to do his best with it and told him to be patient about Bolivia, but to be ready for the “second phase.”
In Che’s critique of the Stalinist manual, he pointed out that since Lenin’s writings, little had been added to update the evaluations of Marxism except for a few things written by Stalin and Mao. He indicted Lenin—who had introduced some capitalist forms of competition into the Soviet Union as a means of kick-starting its economy in the 1920s—as the “culprit” in many of the Soviet Union’s mistakes, and, while reiterating his admiration for and respect toward the culprit, he warned, in block letters, that the U.S.S.R. and Soviet bloc were doomed to “return to capitalism.” When Borrego read this, he was stunned. “Che is really audacious,” he thought to himself. “This writing is heretical!” He thought Che had gone too far. With the passage of time, of course, Che would be proved right.
In his notes, Che softened the criticism of Lenin by pointing out that his errors did not make him an “enemy,” and that Che’s own criticisms were “intended within the spirit of Marxist revolutionary criticism,” in order to “modernize Marxism” and to correct its “mistaken paths” to help underdeveloped countries that were struggling for freedom. Che anticipated attacks against him from fellow socialists. “Some will take this writing as counterrevolutionary or reformist,” he said, and he stressed that for this reason the arguments needed to be well elaborated and based on airtight scholarship. Some of the remarks he scribbled in the margins of the Soviet manual, however, were very irreverent. Regarding a passage that read, “Socialism need not come about through violence, as proven by the socialist states of Eastern Europe, where change came through peaceful means,” he quipped, “What was the Soviet army doing, scratching its balls?” Borrego assumed that Che meant to have his work come to light in one fashion or another. “Even if he realized that the new path he was proposing could not be implanted here, for a variety of reasons,” Borrego said. “He probably hoped he could get something going and try it out for himself if he were able to take Bolivia or one of those countries.”
*
While Che had been in the Congo and Prague, Borrego and Enrique Oltuski had worked around the clock for months on his “collected works”; in the end, they had produced a seven-volume set,
El Che en la Revolución Cubana
, compiling everything from
Guerra de Guerrillas
and
Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria
to Che’s speeches and a sampling of letters and articles, including some that were previously unpublished. Che was both surprised and pleased when Borrego showed him the final result, but with characteristic dryness, he looked through the books and cracked, “You’ve made a real potpourri.”
Borrego had an edition of 200 sets printed, and he gave the first set off the press to Fidel, but the Cuban public never saw them. The books went to the revolutionary
dirigentes
and to individuals on a special list that Che composed, one of the last things he did before leaving Cuba. In the end, only some 100 sets were sent out; the remainder were stored in a warehouse where they presumably remain, if they haven’t succumbed to water damage and silverfish.
*
Che’s impending departure was very hard for Borrego, and he tried to spend as much time as possible with Che in the last days. He made frequent trips to the house in Pinar del Río, as did Aleida, who stayed for the weekends and cooked meals for everyone. Borrego even accompanied Che to a session with the “physiognomy specialist” from Cuban intelligence who plucked out the hairs on top of Che’s head one by one in order to give him the severely receding hairline of a man in his mid-fifties. When Che was in his full disguise, Fidel introduced him to a few of the highest-ranking ministers of Cuba as a visiting foreign friend and nobody, according to Fidel, recognized him. “It was really perfect,” Fidel recalled later.
One day in October, not long before Che was due to leave, Borrego took four gallons of his favorite strawberry ice cream to the men in training. A special feast had been prepared, and everyone sat at a long picnic table. When Borrego got up, intending to get a second helping of the ice cream, Che called after him in a loud voice, “Hey, Borrego! You’re not going to Bolivia, so why should you have seconds? Why don’t you let the men who
are
going eat it?”