Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Oltuski:
That all idle land should be given to the peasants and that large landowners should be pressured to let them purchase the land with their own money. Then the land would be sold to the peasants at cost, with payment terms and credits to produce.
Guevara:
That is a reactionary thesis! [
Che boiled over with indignation
] How are we going to charge those who work the land? You’re just like all the other Llano people.
Oltuski:
[
I saw red
] Damnit, and what do you think we should do?! Just give it to them? So they can destroy it as in Mexico? A man should feel that what he owns has cost him effort.
Guevara:
Goddamnit, listen to what you’re saying! [
Che shouted and the veins on his neck bulged
]
Oltuski:
In addition, one must disguise things. Don’t think that the Americans are going to sit idly by and watch us do things so openly. It is necessary to be more discreet.
Guevara:
So you’re one of those who believes we can make a revolution behind the backs of the Americans. What a shiteater you are! The revolution must be carried out in a life-and-death struggle against imperialism from the very first moment. A true revolution cannot be disguised.
On October 22, with the issues between Che and his local July 26 colleagues unresolved, a new problem arose with the Second Front. Che was visited by a Commander Peña, “famous in the region for rustling the peasants’ cattle.” In his diary, Che wrote, “He began by being very friendly but later showed his true colors. We parted cordially, but as declared enemies.” Peña had warned Che not to attack Güinía de Miranda, which lay within
his
territory. “Naturally,” Che, wrote, “we paid no attention.” But before Che could go ahead with the attack, his men, whose boots were rotting on their feet after their long trek, needed new footwear. He was enraged to learn that a shipment of forty boots sent to him by the July 26 Movement had been “appropriated” by the Second Front. For Che, it was nearly the last straw. “A storm was brewing.”
Amid this crisis, Víctor “Diego” Paneque, the July 26 action chief for Las Villas, arrived, bringing 5,000 pesos and an old letter from Fidel, both forwarded by Oltuski. Che gave Diego his orders for the upcoming offensive: “to burn the voting centers in two or three important cities on the llano and to give Camilo the order to attack Caibarién, Remedios, Yaguajay, and Zulueta [towns in northern Las Villas].” Che had yet to work out exactly what his own plan of attack would be. Everything depended on the cooperation he got from the other rebel forces.
On October 25, Víctor Bordón, the local July 26 guerrilla chief, finally came to see Che and was immediately humbled. Among other things, Che found Bordón guilty of overstepping his authority and of having lied about a meeting with Fidel that had never taken place. He demoted Bordón to captain and ordered Bordón’s 200 men to bring their weapons and place themselves under Che’s command. Those not in agreement were told to leave the mountains.
That night, the Directorio leaders came to tell Che they were “not in a condition” to join his attack against Güinía de Miranda, which was planned for the next day. Che had suspected as much and told them he would go ahead without them. The following night, he and his men hiked down to Güinía de Miranda and opened fire on the barracks with a bazooka. Its first shot missed the target, however, and the soldiers returned fire. A fierce firefight ensued, punctuated by three more wild shots from the bazooka. Rebels began to drop. In desperation, Che grabbed the weapon himself and hit the barracks on his first shot. The fourteen soldiers inside surrendered immediately.
Che was far from pleased with the results. “We captured very few bullets and [only] eight rifles. Our loss, because of the amount of ammunition wasted and grenades used.” Two rebels had died and seven were injured. By dawn the attackers were safely back in the hills. Che pointedly
left a stolen jeep near the Directorio camp as a “gift” from the battle in which its members had not participated.
Che decided to keep up pressure on the army, with or without help from the other factions. The next night he set off to attack the Jíquima garrison, which was defended by fifty soldiers. He was more cautious this time, and suspended the attack just before daylight when Fonso, his bazooka man, said he couldn’t find a good firing position. Back in the sierra on October 30, Che received visits from the July 26 action chiefs from Sancti Spíritus, Cabaiguán, Fomento, and Placetas; all of them endorsed his plans to attack their towns during the coming days. “They were also in agreement with the bank robberies,” Che noted, “and promised their help.”
After a few more days of skirmishing, Che set about organizing his men for the series of attacks that would be carried out on November 3, Election Day, in concert with the urban action groups. On the eve of battle, however, he was visited by the very anxious action chief for Sancti Spíritus. The city coordinator for Sancti Spíritus had learned of the bank robbery scheme, the action chief explained, and had refused to help. He had even made threats. A short time later, Che received a threatening letter from “Sierra” Oltuski, the July 26 coordinator for Las Villas, ordering him to abort the robbery plan. Che fired back a withering letter:
You say that not even Fidel himself did this when he had nothing to eat. That is true. But when he had nothing to eat he was also not strong enough to carry out an action of this type. ... According to the person who brought me the letter, the local leaderships in the towns are threatening to resign. I agree that they should do so. Even more, I demand it now, since it is impermissible to have a deliberate boycott of a measure that would be so beneficial to the interests of the revolution.
I find myself faced with the sad necessity of reminding you that I have been named commander in chief, precisely to provide the Movement with unity of command and to improve things. ... Whether they resign or don’t resign, I intend to sweep away, with the authority vested in me, all the weaklings from the villages surrounding the mountains. I never imagined things would come to a boycott by my own comrades.
Now I realize that the old antagonism we thought had been overcome is resurrected with the word
Llano
. You have leaders divorced from the masses stating what they think the people believe. I could ask you: Why is it that no peasant disagrees with our thesis that the land belongs to those who work it, while the landlords do?
Is this unrelated to the fact that the mass of combatants are in favor of the assault on the banks when they are all penniless? Have you never considered the economic reasons for this respect toward the most arbitrary of financial institutions? Those who make their money loaning out other people’s money and speculating with it have no right to special consideration. ... Meanwhile, the suffering people are shedding their blood in the mountains and on the plains, and suffering on a daily basis from betrayal by their false leaders.
You warn me that I bear total responsibility for the destruction of the organization. I accept this responsibility, and I am prepared to render an account of my behavior before any revolutionary tribunal, at any moment decided by the National Directorate of the Movement. I will give an accounting of every last cent provided to the combatants of the Sierra, however it was obtained. But I will also ask for an accounting of each of the fifty thousand pesos you mention.
*
You asked me for a signed receipt, something I am not accustomed to doing among comrades. ... My word is worth more than all the signatures in the world. ... I will end by sending you revolutionary greetings, and I await your arrival together with Diego.
†
Once again, Che’s plans had been foiled by the llano. On the very day they were supposed to be waging war together against the regime, his city-based comrades had done nothing, choosing to attack him instead.
Still determined to do something, Che ordered a three-pronged attack on the town of Cabaiguán. It was to begin with a bazooka blast, but at around four in the morning, his captain, Angel Frías, reported that he couldn’t fire “because there were too many guards.” Furious, Che wrote in his diary, “The indecision of this captain has cost us much prestige, because everyone knew we were going to attack Cabaiguán and we had to retreat without firing a shot.” Arriving back in the Escambray the next morning, Che ordered a new
attack on Jíquima that night, but this too was aborted when Angel Frías couldn’t find a “good firing position.”
Che’s disappointment over these poor showings was offset by good news coming in from around the province. The combination of his actions and Camilo’s attacks in the north had brought most traffic in Las Villas to a standstill on Election Day, with voter abstention very high. In the rest of the country, the results were similar, and in Oriente the rebels had compounded the paralysis by launching multiple attacks. Nationwide, the rebel strategy had been a tremendous success, with perhaps less than 30 percent of the eligible voters showing up at the polls. As expected, Rivero Agüero had won, thanks to massive voting fraud carried out with the assistance of the armed forces, and he was to assume the presidency on February 24. The rebels were determined to see that the inauguration never took place.
For a few days, Che stayed in the hills to oversee construction work at Caballete de Casas, which was to be his permanent rearguard base. The work was proceeding well, and several adobe houses were already finished, but to accelerate the work Che organized the nearly 200 men he had assembled into crews. He set up a recruits’ school, modeled on Minas del Frío, which he named the Ñico López in honor of his late comrade, and, once again, the Communist Party official Pablo Ribalta was appointed political commissar. Within a few days, a field-radio system was installed, courtesy of the PSP. The mimeograph machine also arrived, and by mid-November Che had founded a newspaper called
El Miliciano
(The Militiaman). Soon, there would be an electrical plant, a hospital, a tobacco factory, leather and metals workshops, and an armory.
Several people who were to become closely linked to Che now joined him in the Escambray. The movement in Santa Clara sent a smart, serious young accountancy student named Orlando Borrego. In time they would become best friends, but at their first meeting Che greeted him imperiously. “He was very rough, very cold, and was contemptuous of students,” Borrego recalled. Borrego was one of seven children raised on a hardscrabble farm in Holguín, Oriente. His father was a farm foreman turned taxi driver, and his mother was a rural schoolteacher. Money had always been a struggle, and Borrego had gone to work at fourteen to help his family. Since then, he had learned what he knew from night classes, and now he had run away to join the rebels.
One of Che’s bodyguards, Orlando “Olo” Pantoja, intervened with Che on Borrega’s behalf, suggesting that Che take him on to help manage his funds. Che agreed to let Borrego stay on as his treasurer, but ordered him to first undergo a military training course at Caballete de Casas. It was there that Borrego made friends with a lively young July 26 guerrilla named
Jesús “El Rubio” Suárez Gayol. A former student leader from Camagüey, he had abandoned his architectural studies to join a July 26 expedition that had landed in Pinar del Río in April. When Borrego met him, he was recovering from wounds suffered during an attack on a radio station in Pinar del Río. He had rushed into the office of the station in broad daylight, carrying a stick of dynamite in one hand and a pistol in the other. After removing the fuse, he somehow caught on fire. Stripped to his underpants, with severe burns on his legs, he rushed out into the street—just as the building blew—to come face-to-face with a policeman. Luckily for him, the shocked policeman ran away. Then, still waving his pistol, Suárez Gayol ran down the street and leaped into an old woman’s house. Fortunately the woman was a rebel sympathizer, and she hid him and treated his wounds until he could be smuggled out of the province and into the Escambray. When the war was over, Suárez Gayol and Borrego remained close friends and became two of Che’s most trusted disciples.
A young lawyer from a patrician Havana family also arrived at the Escambray camp in early November. Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada was not a Marxist, but he admired Che and had closely followed the reports of the march across Cuba. He asked to be sent to Che’s Escambray unit. Che needed someone qualified to enforce the guerrilla legal code in rebel territory, and the young lawyer filled the bill; he made Duque de Estrada his
auditor revolucionario
, or judge. “He had a clear political strategy worked out in his mind,” Duque de Estrada recalled. “He told me prisoners were to be kept alive. There were to be no firing squads. This would change later, but for now he didn’t want executions to put off men who might surrender to his forces.” Like Borrego and Suárez Gayol, Duque de Estrada would become one of Che’s select cadres after the war.
Che was assembling a brain trust of aides and advisers to help in the postwar battle: the political and economic revolution that would be necessary to build socialism in Cuba and free the country from U.S. domination. He wasn’t concerned with their political ideology. If they had a progressive outlook, he could eventually make them believe in socialism. And, indeed, most of his guerrilla protégés were not Marxists at first but ended up adopting Che’s ideology as their own.
By the time he reached the Escambray, Che was actively planning a central role for himself in the postwar transformation of Cuba’s economy. Whether this was the result of an understanding worked out between Fidel and the PSP is a point that has been left intentionally unclarified in Cuba, but there is strong evidence to suggest that it was. Che had been studying political economy ever since his days in Mexico. At Fidel’s behest, he had helped set the agrarian reform process in motion in the Sierra Maestra, had
been a key participant in the delicate talks with the PSP, and was now empowered to carry out land reform in Las Villas. But it was not a one-man show. For both his present and his future projects, Che was relying on the PSP. Besides the Communists already working with him in the Escambray, there was a small, well-placed group of Party militants at his service in Havana. One of them was thirty-seven-year-old Alfredo Menéndez, a sugar expert employed at the Instituto Cubano de Estabilización del Azúcar (Cuban Institute for the Stabilization of Sugar), the sugar-industry syndicate headquarters in Havana. A veteran Communist, Menéndez had for years used his strategic position to feed economic intelligence to the PSP Politburo, and—with the aid of a colleague, Juan Borroto, and two July 26 men at the institute—he now did the same for Che.