Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
There was little overt public opposition to the workings of revolutionary justice. On the contrary. Batista’s thugs had committed some sickening crimes and the Cuban public was in a lynching mood. Newspapers were full of morbid revelations and gruesome photographs of the horrors and
brutalities that had taken place under Batista.
Bohemia
published snide interviews with suspects awaiting trial and provided sanctimonious captions to pictures of the executions. In its February 8, 1959, issue, the culminating moment of the trial of two gunmen responsible for several murders in Manzanillo, the Nicolardes Rojas brothers, was described.
The Prosecutor, Dr. Fernando Aragoneses Cruz: “Do the Nicolardes brothers deserve freedom?”
Noooo! was the thundering shout of the enormous multitude.
“Do they deserve prison with the hope that one day they can be useful to Society?”
Noooo!
“Should they be shot, as exemplary punishment to all future generations?”
Yeeees!
The Prosecutor ... glanced over at the infuriated multitude. And, in the face of their unanimous opinion, he expressed himself calmly, while directing a look that was part anger and part pity to those who had been condemned by the People.
“That is, ladies and gentlemen, the petition of the citizenry, whom I represent in this session.”
The Nicolardes brothers were immediately taken out and shot.
The account in
Bohemia
seems to be a fairly accurate depiction of the atmosphere prevailing in Cuba’s revolutionary courtrooms. Orlando Borrego recalled that he felt under great pressure from his civilian audiences to be severe. “They often thought the sentencing was too benign,” he said. “Sometimes one asked for a sentence of ten years and the people wanted it to be twenty.” The tribunals were attracting mounting criticism abroad, with American congressmen decrying them as a bloodbath. Indignant over the accusations, in late January Fidel had decided to hold some high-profile public trials—of Major Sosa Blanca and several other ranking officers accused of multiple acts of murder and torture—in Havana’s sports stadium. The plan backfired, however. Attending foreign reporters were nauseated by the spectacle of jeering crowds and hysterical cries for blood. The sympathetic Herbert Matthews tried to rationalize the trials from the “Cuban’s perspective” in an editorial that
The New York Times
’s editor in chief refused to print.
Che warned his judges to be scrupulous about weighing the evidence in each case so as not to give the revolution’s enemies additional ammunition, but the trials had to continue if Cuba’s revolution was to be secure. He
never tired of telling his Cuban comrades that Arbenz had fallen in Guatemala because he had not purged his armed forces of disloyal elements. Cuba could not afford to repeat Arbenz’s mistake.
In his memoirs, Ernesto senior avoided the issue of Che’s leading role in the tribunals, but he alluded to his shock at discovering his son’s transformation into a hard man. He recalled asking Che what he planned to do about his medical career. Che smiled and replied that, since they had the same name, his father could substitute for him if he wanted. He could hang up a doctor’s shingle “and begin killing people without any risk.” Che laughed at his own joke, but his father insisted that he give a more serious reply. “As for my medical career, I can tell you that I deserted it a long time ago,” Che said. “Now I am a fighter who is working for the consolidation of a government. What will become of me? I don’t even know in which land I will leave my bones.” Che’s father didn’t understand the significance of the remark until much later. “It was hard for me to recognize the Ernesto of my home, the normal Ernesto,” he wrote. “He had been transformed into a man whose faith in the triumph of his ideals reached mystical proportions.”
His father’s befuddlement was shared by some of Che’s old friends and acquaintances. Tatiana Quiroga and Chichina’s cousin Jimmy Roca, who had been Che’s roommate in Miami, were married and living in Los Angeles in January 1959. “I sent a telegram to La Cabaña and it cost me five dollars,” Tatiana recalled. “I still remember because, as a student, it was a lot of money for me, but I spent the five dollars to congratulate him. Then came the killings of La Cabaña, and I’ll tell you I have never felt so horrible as to have spent five dollars on that telegram. I wanted to die.”
The revolutionary tribunals did much to polarize the political climate between Havana and Washington. Fidel was incensed by the criticism. How could the country that had bombed Hiroshima brand what he was doing a bloodbath? Why hadn’t his critics spoken out when Batista’s murderers were committing their atrocities? The criticism, he said, was tantamount to intervention, and he warned that if the gringos tried to invade Cuba, the price would be 200,000 dead Americans. There were rumors of an assassination threat against him, but if
he
was killed, he said, the revolution would survive. Behind him stood other comrades who were prepared to lead it, men who were more radical than he was. If anyone had any doubts about to whom he was alluding, Fidel dispelled them in the next breath, announcing that his brother Raúl was his chosen successor. In fact, although Raúl’s official appointment as minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces did not
come until October 1959, he was already the Cuban military’s de facto chief of staff. And where did that leave Che? The U.S. embassy was monitoring his activities and speeches closely, with a growing sense of disquiet.
On January 27, at a forum in Havana sponsored by the PSP, Che gave a speech titled “Social Ideals of the Rebel Army.” He left little doubt as to where he stood, and he hinted that the revolution had radical ambitions far beyond those so far acknowledged by Fidel. To anyone who grasped its significance, it was perhaps the most important speech delivered by any of the revolutionary leaders, including Fidel, since they had come to power. Quite simply, Che was outlining the future.
One of the rebels’ “ideals”—an armed democracy—had already been achieved, he said, but much more needed to be done. The revolutionary agrarian reform decree issued two months earlier in the Sierra Maestra wasn’t enough to right Cuba’s wrongs. The revolution had a debt to repay to the campesinos, on whose backs the war had been fought. The landowning system itself had to be reformed, as Cuba’s constitution of 1940 stated it would be. “It is the job of the organized peasant masses to demand a law that proscribes the
latifundia
,” Che said. What’s more, the constitutional requirement for prior compensation to owners of expropriated land should be waived. It was an impediment to the goal of “a true and ample agrarian reform.” A process of rapid industrialization must also take place to free Cuba from the sugar-export economy. Only then could the country liberate itself from U.S. capitalist domination. “We have to increase the industrialization of the country, without ignoring the many problems that this process brings with it,” Che said. “But a policy of industrial growth demands certain tariff measures that protect the nascent industries and an internal market capable of absorbing the new products. We cannot expand this market unless we give access to the great peasant masses, the
guajiros
, who don’t have acquisitive power today but do have needs to fulfill.”
Che warned that the United States was not going to take kindly to what he was proposing. “We must be prepared for the reaction of those who today dominate 75 percent of our commercial trade and our market. To confront this danger we must apply countermeasures, among which stand out tariffs and the diversification of markets abroad.” To industrialize, Cuba must first rescue its natural resources, which had been given over to “foreign consortiums by the Batista dictatorship.” The nation’s mineral wealth and electricity should be in Cuban hands, and the state telephone company, a subsidiary of ITT, should be nationalized.
“What resources do we have for a program like this?” Che asked. “We have the Rebel Army and this should be our primary instrument for the struggle, the most positive and vigorous weapon. We should destroy all that
remains of Batista’s army. Understand well that this liquidation is not done out of vengeance or even merely a spirit of justice, but because of the need to ensure that all the people’s goals can be achieved in the least amount of time.”
Che said that he expected resistance from many quarters: “National recovery will have to destroy many privileges and because of that we have to be ready to defend the nation from its declared and its disguised enemies.” Alluding to the rumors of invasion plans being hatched in the Dominican Republic, Che invoked the menacing specter of the United States. “We know that if we are attacked by a small island, it would be with the help of a power that is practically a continent; and we would have to withstand an aggression of immense proportions on our soil. For this reason we must be forewarned and prepare our vanguard with a guerrilla spirit and strategy. ... The entire Cuban nation should become a guerrilla army, because the Rebel Army is a growing body whose capacity is limited only by the number of 6 million Cubans. Each Cuban should learn how to use weapons and when to use them in the defense of the nation.”
Most dramatically of all, Che bared his evolving vision of a continental revolution, not only challenging the conventional Communist theory of Party-led mass struggle, but throwing down the gauntlet of violent confrontation throughout the hemisphere. “The example of our revolution and the lessons it implies for Latin America have destroyed all the coffeehouse theories: we have demonstrated that a small group of men supported by the people and without fear of dying were it necessary can overcome a disciplined regular army and defeat it. This is the fundamental lesson. There is another for our brothers in the Americas who are in the same agrarian category we are, and that is to make agrarian revolutions, to fight in the fields, in the mountains, and from there to the cities. ... Our future is intimately linked to all the underdeveloped countries of Latin America. The revolution is not limited to the Cuban nation, because it has touched the conscience of Latin America and alerted the enemies of our peoples. ... The Revolution has put the Latin American tyrants on guard. They, like the foreign monopolies, are the enemies of popular regimes.”
The revolution had enemies, but it also had friends. Che ended with a call for a “spiritual union between all the people of the Americas, a union that goes beyond demagoguery and bureaucracy to effective assistance, lending our brothers the benefits of our experience. Today, all the people of Cuba are on a war footing and should remain so. Their victory against dictatorship is not transitory but rather the first step in Latin America’s victory.”
Che’s speech was nothing less than a siren call to the hemisphere’s would-be revolutionaries and an implicit declaration of war against the interests of the United States.
On February 2, Daniel Braddock, the American deputy chief of mission in Havana, sent a classified dispatch to the State Department, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the U.S. embassies in Ciudad Trujillo and in Managua. It carried the heading “Cuba as a Base for Revolutionary Operations against Other Latin American Governments,” and it spelled out a specific warning: “A number of leaders of the successful revolutionary movement in Cuba consider that efforts should now be undertaken to ‘free’ the people of some other Latin American nations from their ‘dictatorial’ governments,” Braddock wrote. “While Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara Serna is generally regarded as the principal force behind such thinking, and is indeed active in the planning, he is far from alone. Fidel Castro has reportedly made remarks along such lines, particularly during his recent visit to Venezuela.”
*
For once, the U.S. intelligence appraisal was on target. With Fidel’s backing, Che had summoned prospective revolutionaries from around the hemisphere seeking Cuban sponsorship for their own
Granma
-style armed expeditions. During the war against Batista, a number of anti-Somoza Nicaraguans, including a group of students led by Carlos Fonseca, a Marxist intellectual, had supported the Cuban revolutionary cause in acts of homage and rhetoric. Now Che offered the Nicaraguans help in organizing a guerrilla army, and a revolutionary party to lead it. But the Nicaraguans were not the only revolutionaries being encouraged, as Braddock’s cable noted:
The countries most frequently mentioned [as candidates for Cuban-sponsored guerrilla invasions] are the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Haiti. Paraguay appears to be too far away for direct Cuban interference, but there is a great deal of preliminary talk and planning taking place about the other three countries. A number of Dominican exiles are in Cuba, including “General” Miguel Ángel
RAMÍREZ
. The revolutionary leaders, as
distinct from the officers of the provisional Government, seem to feel that they have a piece of unfinished business to take care of in connection with the Dominican Republic, in the form of the abortive Cayo Confítes expedition of 1947, in which a number of the revolutionary leaders, including Fidel Castro, were involved.
Louis
DEJOIE
is now in Habana, hoping to be able to organize and obtain support for a movement to overthrow the “fraudulent” [Haitian] government of
DUVALIER
. He is being assisted by Pierre
ARMAND
, self-styled “President of the Haitian Revolutionary Front in Habana.” It appears that the Cuban revolutionaries are mainly interested in the Haitian plans as a means of getting a base from which to attack
TRUJILLO
. They would support Dejoie, in return for his permitting an expedition against Trujillo to be based in Haiti.
A number of Nicaraguan exiles are in town, including Manuel
GÓMEZ
Flores. The Embassy has today received a report from a fairly reliable source that the Nicaraguan group feels that they will be the first to attack. ... This report mentions Guevara specifically as actively participating in the plotting, and as training some of the participants. It was indicated that they hoped to be able to launch an invasion within two months.