Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Braddock’s cable ended with an uncannily prescient forecast. “The planning for these various adventures appears to be preliminary and unrealistic at this stage, and the groups disunited. However, in view of the background of many of the principal Cuban revolutionary leaders, and the support their own movement received from abroad, it can be expected that Cuba will be a center of revolutionary scheming and activities for some time, with consequent concern and difficulties for various governments including our own.”
Among Che’s men at La Cabaña, it was no secret that he was meeting with revolutionaries from other countries, and rumors of conspiracies of the kind detected by the U.S. embassy were circulating throughout Cuba. Schoolboys too young to have participated in the fight against Batista wrote to Che, asking to be allowed to go fight against Trujillo. On February 5, Che posted polite refusals to three young volunteers who had offered their services. To Juan Hehong Quintana, in Cárdenas, he wrote: “I appreciate your gesture. It is always good when the youth are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause as noble as giving freedom to Santo Domingo, but I feel that in these moments our combat post is here, in Cuba, where there are enormous difficulties to overcome. For now, dedicate yourself to working
enthusiastically for our revolution, which will be the best help we can offer to the Dominican people, that is to say, the example of our complete triumph.”
In fact, Che was helping to lay the foundations for a secret agency within Ramiro Valdés’s state security apparatus that would organize, train, and assist foreign guerrilla ventures. (The clandestine unit would become known as the Liberation Department within the Dirección General de Inteligencia.) The man who would eventually lead the agency, Manuel Piñeiro Losada, was a former Columbia University student and the son of Galician émigrés who owned a wine-import firm and beer distributor-ship in Matanzas. Piñeiro, who had been one of Raúl’s former Second Front aides, said that the first guerrilla expeditions sponsored by Cuba were very “artisanal” and, in the case of the Nicaraguans and Guatemalans, relied on personal relationships Che had developed in Central America and Mexico. As of early 1959, Piñeiro said, there was still no “structured policy” regarding these missions on the part of the Cuban government.
That would soon change, however. Osvaldo de Cárdenas, a mulatto high school student from Matanzas, was only sixteen years old in January 1959, but within a year Piñeiro had recruited him as an intelligence operative specializing in assisting foreign guerrillas. Cárdenas recalled that he and his young comrades were convinced that the Cuban revolution was the beginning of other changes in Latin America, and that they were imminent. “And so, to work! We were all imbued with this spirit,” Cárdenas said. “Everyone wanted to join a guerrilla army somewhere. There were plans to go to Paraguay. I don’t know how we thought we were going to get there, but there were plans to go to overthrow Stroessner. There were plans to fight against Trujillo. Some went, some with authorization and others without it. There were plans to topple Somoza. Wherever there was a tyrant, a Latin American dictator, he was automatically our enemy.”
Orlando Borrego, Che’s hardworking young protégé, became infected by the liberation fever. In February or March 1959, a rumor spread among La Cabaña’s officers that an expeditionary force of Cuban revolutionaries was being organized to support the fledgling Nicaraguan guerrillas. “Several of us tried to enlist to go to Nicaragua,” Borrego recalled. “There was an officer who seemed to be at the center of the organization, but as it turned out, it was, as they say, ‘freelance.’ It wasn’t authorized by Che or coordinated by him. And I remember that Che summoned this group and he chastised them sternly—because they were gathering weapons and planning this movement without permission—and it was stopped. But from that moment on it was pretty clear that such things were being planned.”
Indeed they were, although the more serious guerrilla conspiracies
were kept under tighter wraps than the plot Borrego had tried to join. In March, following an unimpressive initial meeting with a group of Nicaraguan leftists from the Partido Socialista Nicaragüense (PSN), Che saw the Nicaraguan militant Rodolfo Romero, whom he had invited to Havana. During the Castillo Armas invasion of Guatemala in 1954, when they were both hoping to actively fight in defense of President Arbenz, Romero had shown Che how to use an automatic weapon. Now their roles were reversed. After the debacle in Guatemala, Romero had gone underground. He was eventually arrested and deported to Nicaragua, but he was freed following a short stint in jail and joined forces with Carlos Fonseca’s anti-Somoza student group. Che asked Romero to give him an appraisal of the Nicaraguan situation and suggest what should be done to undermine the regime there. Explaining that the PSN was politically “prostrate,” Romero replied that there was only one road left, “the road of Cuba.” Che then asked him if he wanted to join the Nicaraguan guerrilla column that was being trained on the island under the command of a former Nicaraguan National Guard officer named Rafael Somarriba. Romero said yes.
On February 7, Urrutia’s government had approved the new Cuban constitution. It contained a clause designed especially for Che, conferring Cuban citizenship on any foreigner who had fought in the war against Batista for two or more years and who had held the rank of
comandante
for a year. A few days later, Che was officially made a Cuban citizen “by birth.” The occasion coincided with the new government’s first internal crisis. Fidel had been at loggerheads with Urrutia’s cabinet over the banning of the national lottery and the refusal to reopen the brothels and casinos that had been closed following the seizure of power. Unemployed workers were demonstrating against the closings, and the last thing Fidel wanted was to alienate his constituency. The tawdry “entertainment sector” that was a visible part of Cuban life would cetainly have to be reformed, but gradually, with retraining and new jobs offered to those whose professions were to be purged. Fidel insisted that the cabinet reverse its decisions, and he threatened to find his own solution to the impasse if it didn’t. Realizing Fidel was planning to run things his way whether the cabinet liked it or not, Prime Minister Miró Cardona resigned. His replacement would be none other than Fidel Castro.
To “accept” his post, Fidel insisted that Urrutia give him special powers to direct government policy. A law was issued lowering the minimum age for holding high public office from thirty-five to thirty. Now, both Che and Fidel, who were thirty and thirty-two, respectively, were eligible for
ministerial posts. On February 16, Fidel was sworn in as Cuba’s new prime minister. In his acceptance speech, he promised Cubans “change.” By the end of February, President Urrutia was, to all intents and purposes, a figurehead. Fidel was indisputably the
real
Cuban leader.
Che was more specific about what “change” meant. In an article in
Revolución
titled “What Is a Guerrilla?” and published three days after Fidel’s inauguration, he argued that the Rebel Army had the right to determine Cuba’s political future. Che exalted the guerrilla as “the people’s choice, the people’s vanguard fighter in their struggle for liberation,” someone whose sense of discipline comes not out of blind obedience to a military hierarchy but because of the “deep conviction of the individual.” The guerrilla was “mentally and physically agile.” He was “nocturnal.” In other words, now, as during the war, the guerrillas were waiting in the shadows, vigilant and ready to strike. And their mission was not over. “Why does the guerrilla fight? ... The guerrilla is a social reformer. The guerrilla takes up arms in angry protest against the social system that keeps his unarmed brothers in opprobrium and misery.”
The guerrilla had certain tactical needs, Che wrote. He needed places where he could maneuver, hide, escape, and also count on the people’s support. This meant the countryside, where, coincidentally, the main social problem was land tenure. “The guerrilla is, fundamentally and before anything else, an agrarian revolutionary. He interprets the desires of the great peasant masses to be owners of land, owners of their own means of production, of their livestock, of all that for which they have fought for years, for that which constitutes their life and will also be their cemetery.” For this reason, Che said, the battle standard of the new army born in the Cuban backwoods was agrarian reform. This reform, which “began timidly in the Sierra Maestra,” had been transferred to the Escambray and, after recently being “forgotten in ministerial cabinets,” would now go forward because of the “firm decision of Fidel Castro, who, and it is worthwhile repeating, will be the one who gives the ‘July 26’ its historic definition. This Movement didn’t invent Agrarian Reform but it will carry it out. It will carry it out comprehensively until there is no peasant without land, nor land left untilled. At that moment, perhaps, the Movement itself may cease to have a reason to exist, but it will have accomplished its historic mission. Our task is to get to that point, and the future will tell if there is more work to do.”
Che’s closing comment was an early warning to the July 26 Movement that it might eventually be done away with in favor of “unity” with the Communist Party. “Unity” had become a code word for a merger of the PSP and the Rebel Army. The merger was already being implemented, primarily under the auspices of Che and Raúl in the revolutionary camp and Carlos
Rafael Rodríguez in the PSP, although things were not yet running smoothly. Opinion about Fidel was divided within the PSP. Carlos Rafael had been an early and ardent enthusiast, whereas the Party’s general secretary, Blas Roca, evidently was not. Aníbal Escalante ultimately proved vital in the fence-mending process, but among the “old Communists,” reservations about Fidel’s leadership persisted for years.
For all his overt sympathies, the freethinking Che Guevara also provoked some disquiet for the orthodox, Moscow-line Party men. Che’s argument for a vanguard role for the Rebel Army—which seemed to ignore urban workers and the traditional Communist Party organization—was theoretical blasphemy, while his forceful advocacy of rural guerrilla warfare and agrarian revolution betrayed deviant Maoist influences. Yet, despite these heretical symptoms, Che was obviously a friend and ally, and the PSP was indebted to him for providing a political opening to Fidel that the Party might otherwise not have had. His ideological kinks would, no doubt, be ironed out.
Early symptoms of a power struggle between the Communists and the July 26 Movement were visible in an incident that went almost unnoticed in Cuba at large. In its February 8 issue,
Bohemia
ran a small article reporting the “first internal crisis” since “the Day of Liberty”: the abrupt resignation of Calixto Morales, who had been appointed military governor of Las Villas. Morales “had been displaying a close link with the Communist factors.” The root of the problem was a resurgence of the feud between Las Villas’s conservative July 26 organization and the local Communist Party organization. But racism reportedly played a part as well. Morales was a radical who was offended by Santa Clara’s racial caste system, and, feeling his power, he had gone too far too fast. One of his first actions was to climb aboard a bulldozer and personally tear down the fencing around the city’s whites-only central plaza. Before long he was openly feuding with the local and regional July 26 authorities. Félix Torres, the PSP chief in Las Villas, came to his aid, and—according to Aleida March’s friend Lolita Rossell—Calixto soon fell under Torres’s influence. Before the situation got any worse, Fidel removed Calixto from his post.
Torres’s aggressive politicking on behalf of the Communist Party ultimately paid off when the PSP gained the upper hand in Las Villas, but he had alienated a great many
villaclareños
and fueled widespread antigovernment sentiment. Aleida March herself, who still despised the Communists in Las Villas, privately blamed Che for having created the mess in the first place, beginning with Morales’s appointment. Before long, disgruntled July 26 men would take up arms in the Escambray in a counterrevolutionary insurgency that would receive assistance from the CIA and spread to other regions. The Castro government’s campaign to quell it would become
officially known as the “Lucha Contra Bandidos” (Struggle against Bandits). It would persist until 1966, when Fidel’s troops finally eradicated the last rebels and, following Stalin’s successful counterinsurgency tactics, forcibly evacuated the Escambray’s suspected civilian collaborators to several specially built “strategic hamlets” in distant Pinar del Río.
Che’s personal life during this period was both complex and crowded. Despite the fact that he had little time alone with Aleida, he made room for an old Guatemalan friend, Julio “Patojo” (The Kid) Cáceres, when Cáceres showed up in Havana. Patojo had worked with Che during his itinerant-photographer period in Mexico City and had lived with him and Hilda off and on. He shared Che’s dreams of revolution and had wanted to come along on the
Granma
, but Fidel had turned him down as one foreigner too many. Now that Patojo was in Cuba, Che moved him into his house without a second thought.
Che also had to face Hilda, who arrived in late January from Peru with three-year-old Hildita in tow. The fearless Che of combat was somewhat less bold in matters of matrimony; rather than go to the airport himself, he sent his friend Dr. Oscar Fernández Mell to greet his wife and child. Hoping for a reconciliation, Hilda was to be sadly disappointed. She recorded the breakup scene:
With the candor that always characterized him, Ernesto forthrightly told me that he had another woman, whom he had met in the campaign of Santa Clara. The pain was deep in me, but, following our convictions, we agreed on a divorce.
I am still affected by the memory of the moment when, realizing my hurt, he said: “Better I had died in combat.”
For an instant I looked at him without saying anything. Though I was losing so much at that time, I thought of the fact that there were so many more important tasks to be done, for which he was so vital: he
had
to have remained alive. He had to build a new society. He had to work hard to help Cuba avoid the errors of Guatemala; he had to give his whole effort to the struggle for the liberation of America. No, I was happy that he had not died in combat, sincerely happy, and I tried to explain it to him this way, ending with: “Because of all this, I want you always.”