Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che’s personal security was a matter of concern to his companions. Before leaving Havana, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the PSP leader, had told Alfredo Menéndez that he was worried because Che was not taking many bodyguards; the only military men going along were José Argudín and Omar Fernández, and they were traveling unarmed. “We don’t have any intelligence that there are plans to shoot him,” Rodríguez said, “but you guys with him should take precautions. Don’t leave him alone for a minute. And pick up some weapons in Europe on your way.”
Menéndez bought two Colt pistols in Madrid. Argudín, who never strayed from Che’s side, carried the pistols throughout the trip—no difficulty in those pre-hijacking days—and as an additional security measure, one of the men, usually Pancho García Vals, always shared Che’s bedroom. The arrangements worked well enough until Che and Dr. Vilaseca were invited to a diplomatic reception in Tokyo that Argudín could not attend. The venerable professor was pressed into duty. Both pistols were stuck into his belt under his formal jacket.
Che’s companions found his austerity at times stifling. In Osaka, Pardo recalled, they were invited by the Cuban consul to make a nocturnal visit to a famous cabaret, the Metropole, which was said to employ 600 women. Che said he was not interested, and he ordered the uniformed men to stay behind. Only the civilians—Pardo and Vilaseca—could go, if they wanted, and risk “having a
Time
photographer take their picture and create a scandal, showing how the members of the Cuban delegation spend the people’s money partying and getting drunk with whores.”
Another evening, Che found that part of his entourage had vanished. When asked where the men were, Menéndez told Che he didn’t know.
“They’re out whoring, aren’t they?” Che said. Menéndez insisted he really didn’t know, and Che seemed to relent. “I know what it’s like to
putear
,” he said. “I whored round in my youth, too.”
Occasionally, Che loosened up in a more public fashion. He drank a lot of sake in a traditional Japanese geisha house and even went so far as to playfully mimic the geishas’ dance steps. In the living room of the Chilean ambassador’s residence in Delhi, he surprised his host by abruptly standing on his head to demonstrate his knowledge of yoga. But the pressure of having to maintain a rigid public posture gradually wore him down. During a flight over India, Che wrote to his mother about his frustration with the official straitjacket.
Dear
vieja:
My old dream to visit these countries takes place now in a way that inhibits all my happiness. Speaking of political and economic problems, giving parties where the only thing missing is for me to put on a tuxedo, and putting aside my purest pleasures, which would be to go and dream in the shade of a pyramid or over Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus. On top of that, I am without Aleida whom I couldn’t bring because of one of those complicated mental complexes I have.
Egypt was a diplomatic success of the first magnitude; the embassies of all the countries of the world came to the farewell reception we gave and I saw firsthand how complicated diplomacy can be when the Papal Nuncio shook hands with the Russian attaché with a smile that was really beatific.
Now India, where new protocolar complications produce in me the same infantile panic [in deciding how to respond to greetings].
Then, as always with his mother, he became introspective.
Something which has really developed in me is the sense of the collective in counterposition to the personal; I am still the same loner that I used to be, looking for my path without personal help, but now I have a sense of my historic duty. I have no home, no woman, no children, nor parents, nor brothers and sisters, my friends are my friends as long as they think politically like I do and yet I am content, I feel something in life, not just a powerful internal strength, which I always felt, but also the
power to influence others, and an absolutely fatalistic sense of my mission, which strips me of all fear.
No one has ever defined the essence of what made Che Guevara unique better than he did himself in this rare, private moment of truth. But then, as usual, he defensively pulled back from his reverie.
I don’t know why I am writing you this, maybe it is merely longing for Aleida. Take it as it is, a letter written one stormy night in the skies of India, far from my fatherland and loved ones.
A hug for everyone, Ernesto.
Che may have longed for Aleida, but he resisted his desire to be with her. His tendency toward self-denial baffled and intrigued Fidel, who kept trying to moderate it. Aleida recalled that while Che was in Japan, Fidel summoned her to his office. He had arranged a long-distance telephone call with Che, and he suggested again that Aleida join him. Che refused again. Fidel tried later, when Che was in Morocco, to no avail.
One night in Tokyo, Che and the others gathered in a hotel room to talk, tell stories, and philosophize. According to Alfredo Menéndez, Che veered the conversation onto an odd topic, the significance of which Menéndez realized only much later. “Che started talking about his projects, but I never associated it with a real plan. He said: ‘There’s an
altiplano
in South America—in Bolivia, in Paraguay, an area bordering Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Argentina—where, if we inserted a guerrilla force, we could spread the revolution all over South America.”
A great many changes had occurred in Cuba in Che’s absence. Fidel now had more political power, but the atmosphere was tenser and more polarized than ever. The agrarian reform law had begun to have heavy repercussions. The first seizures of land had been made, and the government was hedging on compensation, offering low-interest “bonds” to affected landowners instead of ready cash. The United States had issued a note of warning—so far left unanswered by Fidel—that it expected all American landowners to be compensated promptly. The wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey who were affected mounted a campaign against the land interventions, and the province’s popular military commander, Huber Matos, joined them. He denounced the Communist encroachment in the armed
forces and INRA. Matos was emerging as the chief spokesman for the July 26 Movement’s anticommunist wing as the dispute with the ascendant PSP became increasingly acrimonious.
Following the resignation of the agriculture minister, Sorí-Marín, Fidel had continued to clean house. Political moderates in the cabinet had been getting the shove, and loyal Fidelistas were taking their places. Even Fidel’s old friend Luis Orlando Rodríguez, who had helped found Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra, was dropped as interior minister. Foreign Minister Roberto Agramonte was fired and replaced by Raúl Roa, the OAS ambassador and former dean of Havana University’s Social Sciences Faculty. The sphinxlike Roa had broken with the Party in his youth, but now he became both an unswerving Fidelista and a brilliant diplomat.
In mid-June, a Cuban-Dominican guerrilla expedition of some 200 fighters led by Delio Gómez Ochoa, a former July 26 commander, had landed in the Dominican Republic. The group was wiped out by Trujillo’s forces. Many of the rebels were killed or imprisoned, and the survivors became fugitives. They were pursued by an anti-Castro army calling itself the Anticommunist Legion of the Caribbean. This army, which was composed of 350-odd fighters—150 Spaniards, 100 Cubans, and an array of right-wing foreign mercenaries, including Croatians, Germans, and Greeks—had been trained at a Dominican air force base. Among the Cubans in the legion were Che’s old antagonist Ángel Sánchez Mosquera, former police officials from Havana, and Batista’s personal pilot. Trujillo had offered to pay farmers a bounty of $1,000 per head for each rebel caught, and soon peasants, taking the generalissimo quite literally, began appearing at Dominican army posts with burlap bags containing decapitated bearded heads and claiming the reward. The anticommunist legionnaires complained jokingly that the peasants, who eventually turned in more heads than there had been invaders, were not leaving them any Cubans to fight against.
Two weeks after the fiasco of the rebel incursion in the Dominican Republic, Fidel’s air force chief, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, defected. On July 14, he appeared before a Senate committee in Washington and denounced Communist infiltration of the Cuban armed forces. President Urrutia appeared on television to rebut Díaz Lanz’s charges and, in an obvious bid to get Fidel to declare himself, stated his own firm opposition to Communism.
Fidel dealt an unexpected counterblow, denouncing Urrutia for attempting to break “revolutionary unity” and insinuating that Urrutia was in league with the traitor Díaz Lanz. Then, as thousands of Fidelistas were trucked into Havana to celebrate July 26, Fidel resigned as prime minister and let the crowds do their work. The popular clamor for his reinstatement grew. Belatedly realizing that he had created a trap for himself, Urrutia
resigned and sought asylum in the Venezuelan embassy. On July 26, Fidel reappeared in front of the crowds and assented to “the people’s demand” that he resume his duties as prime minister. In place of the recalcitrant Urrutia, Fidel named Osvaldo Dorticós, his docile revolutionary laws minister, as the new Cuban president.
“Counterrevolution” became a catchphrase for the activities of those who, like Urrutia, had sought to “sabotage” revolutionary “unity.” In fact, the first threats of counterrevolutionary activity
had
begun to appear. In addition to the force being trained in the Dominican Republic, exile groups were openly organizing paramilitary forces in Miami. After several bombs exploded and an assassination plot was uncovered in Havana, Fidel pushed through a constitutional amendment making counterrevolution a crime subject to the death penalty.
In August, Trujillo’s Anticommunist Legion was finally mobilized for an invasion of Cuba, but Fidel had prepared a surprise for them. He orchestrated a ruse with the complicity of the former Second Front commanders Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and the American William Morgan, who tricked Trujillo into believing they were ready to lead an anti-Castro uprising (before too long, they would be doing precisely that, but for now they were cooperating with Fidel). Gutiérrez Menoyo and Morgan radioed the Dominican Republic to say their forces had seized the Cuban city of Trinidad, which was the signal for the Anticommunist Legion to invade. When their transport plane, flown by Batista’s pilot, touched down in the countryside near Trinidad, Fidel and his soldiers were ready and waiting.
Quite a few of the anti-Castro legion’s fighters had been left behind in the Dominican Republic, including one who would later have a profound effect on events in Latin America: an eighteen-year-old military cadet named Felix Rodríguez. Rodríguez’s uncle had been Batista’s minister of public works, and when Castro seized power his whole family fled into exile. Embittered by their misfortune, Rodríguez had left his military school in Perkiomen, Pennsylvania, and joined Trujillo’s legion. He felt intense frustration about the defeat of his comrades, and when he returned to Perkiomen to finish his studies, he resolved to dedicate himself to destroying the Cuban revolution. Most of his attempts were to prove unsuccessful, but in the course of his career he would deal some heavy blows.
By the end of September 1959, Fidel faced a showdown with Huber Matos, the military commander in Camagüey, who was making no secret of his disaffection with the radically leftward turn of the revolution. Matos had
urged Fidel to call a meeting of the July 26 National Directorate to discuss “Communist infiltration” in the army and INRA. Situated as he was in the wealthy, conservative Cuban heartland, Matos posed a real threat.
When Alexandr Alexiev arrived in Havana on October 1, he was met by reporters from the Communist daily,
Hoy
, and taken to the inexpensive, low-profile Hotel Sevilla in Old Havana. The next day, he met with two PSP officials—Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and Raúl Valdés Vivo, who briefed him on the volatile political situation. They offered to introduce him to Blas Roca and other Politburo members, but he declined; instead, Alexiev called Violeta Casals.
Casals was a well-known actress, a Communist, and a loyal Fidelista, having worked as one of Radio Rebelde’s announcers in the Sierra Maestra. Alexiev had met her in Moscow during the summer, and he asked for her help in contacting Che. Casals agreed to arrange the meeting. While he waited, Alexiev lay low, sending off a few TASS dispatches for appearances’ sake.
Che was now working in an unfinished fourteen-story building that had been erected by Batista to house Havana’s future municipal headquarters. It overlooked the large civic square dominated by a huge white obelisk and statue of José Martí that had been renamed the Plaza de la Revolución. He was there to start up the Industrialization Department of INRA. Fidel was the president of INRA. Nuñez Jiménez was executive director. From these offices the
true
Cuban revolution was being launched. The official announcement of Che’s new post would not come until October 8, but rumors had already begun to spread and were duly picked up by the American embassy. In a September 16 dispatch to Washington, the embassy had reported: “Rumors are circulating that he [Che] is slated for an important position in the government. Most frequently mentioned are the director-ship of an industrial development institute or the Minister of Commerce.”
In late September, Che had traveled to Santa Clara to see his old La Cabaña regiment. He gathered his officers at Víctor Bordón’s home and told them of his new responsibilities; it was not what they had expected or hoped to hear. Orlando Borrego sat in the front row. “Che told us that Fidel and the revolutionary leadership had decided to create an Industrialization Department to develop the country. He explained to us the importance of this for the economy, and that he had been named to lead the development. This surprised us because we thought Che would once again take charge of the regiment. ... That he was going to the civil sector was a real blow.”
It sounded to Borrego as if all the rumors he had been hearing for months about Che’s demotion were true. “It seemed to us that Che, who had been commander of La Cabaña, the chief of a regiment, was more important than
this job he was telling us about. ... But he explained it to us with enthusiasm; he said it was a really wonderful job that he wanted to do.”