Che Guevara (78 page)

The high point of Mikoyan’s tour was the obligatory visit to the city of Santiago and Fidel’s old Sierra Maestra
comandancia
at La Plata. The whole entourage traveled to Oriente, but only a select group went up to La Plata: Mikoyan, Sergo, and Leonov; Fidel, Che, and their bodyguards. The press corps was left in town.

Fidel had planned for them to spend the night at La Plata, but nothing had been prepared for their arrival. Some workers were there building huts, but they had not finished the job, and there were only a few tents. Fidel was embarrassed and angry. Mikoyan told him not to worry, that he was not averse to sleeping in a tent. Sergo, however, decided to leave and take advantage of the opportunity to see Santiago. He later heard from his father what happened that night. After he had gone, Fidel and Che spoke openly with Mikoyan about their desire to create a socialist revolution, the problems they faced in doing so, and their need for Soviet aid to carry it off.

“It was a very strange chat,” Sergo Mikoyan said. “They told [my father] that they could survive only with Soviet help, and they would have to hide the fact from the capitalists in Cuba. ... [Then] Fidel said, ‘We will have to withstand these conditions in Cuba for five or ten more years,’ at which Che interrupted and told him: ‘If you don’t do it within two or three years, you’re finished.’ There was this difference [of conception] between them.”

Fidel then launched into a soliloquy about how the rebels’ victory had proved Marx wrong. “Fidel said that according to Marx, the revolution could not have happened except along the paths proposed by his Communist Party and our Communist Party. ... Mass struggle, strikes, and so forth. ‘But we did it,’ Fidel said. ‘We have overtaken Marx, we have proven him wrong.’ My father contradicted him. He said, ‘You think this way because your Communists are dogmatic; they think Marxism is just A, B, C, and D. But Marxism is a
way
, not a dogma. So I don’t think you have proven Marx wrong, I think you have proven
your
Communists wrong.’”

They didn’t talk directly about military aid, Mikoyan said, but they did ask for Soviet economic aid. “They explained that if they didn’t receive it they were damned, due to two considerations. First, American imperialism. Second, the struggle with their own capitalists.”

After this talk, everyone understood that the commercial agreement they had announced a few days later was merely to be the first step in the reestablishment of full relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. For now, it was all Fidel dared risk. Nonetheless, Alexiev, who hadn’t gone to La Plata, was surprised to learn that Che and Fidel hadn’t asked to buy Soviet
arms. “They talked with Mikoyan about everything but arms ... which was a little strange. In Mexico, even Mikoyan said that he thought Fidel might request arms.”

It was a logical assumption. Over the past year, Fidel had sent emissaries all over the world to buy airplanes and weapons, but he had managed to buy only some of what he wanted in Belgium and Italy. His requests to Washington for airplanes had been spurned, predictably, and the unwillingness of Great Britain and several other countries to sign arms deals was probably due to U.S. pressure. Lately, defiant phrases such as “Cuba reserves the right to defend itself” and “Cuba will get the arms it needs wherever it has to buy them” had become familar refrains in his speeches.

Very soon, however, the subject was raised. On March 4, the French freighter
La Coubre
, which had just been towed into a dock in Havana harbor, exploded in a horrendous blast heard all over downtown. When the first explosion occurred, Jorge Enrique Mendoza, INRA’s chief in Camagüey, was in a meeting with Fidel and the agency’s other provincial bosses. They rushed to the port and were starting down the wharf where
La Coubre
was docked when Mendoza saw Che hurry past him toward the burning ship.

Just as Che neared the ship, and with Mendoza, Fidel, and the others about 300 feet back, there was a terrific second explosion. Mendoza and some other men immediately threw themselves on top of Fidel, to protect him. “Fidel began to kick and punch and yell: ‘Damnit, you’re suffocating me!’ Then things began falling from the air,” Mendoza recalled. Mendoza turned to Raúl and urged him to take Fidel away. He said that Raúl had to practically take Fidel prisoner to evacuate him. Mendoza then turned his attention to Che, who was still trying to board the burning ship. “I walked quickly over to where he was. Someone, I don’t remember who, was trying to stop him from getting on the ship, and I could hear Che say: ‘Damnit, don’t fuck with me! There’s been two explosions; everything that was going to explode has exploded. Let me go on the ship!’ And in he went.”

It was carnage. Up to 100 people had been killed—mostly stevedores, sailors, and soldiers—and several hundred others had been injured.
La Coubre
was loaded with Belgian weapons, and somehow the cargo had ignited. Fidel accused the CIA of sabotage. The next day, he and Che linked arms at the head of a funeral cortege that wound its way along the Malecón. Later, while Fidel gave a speech—in which he invoked a new battle cry,
Patria o muerte!—
Alberto Korda, a Cuban photographer on assignment from
Revolucíon
, took pictures of the people on the speakers’ platform. They included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who had been invited to Cuba by Carlos Franqui. At one point, Che appeared and Korda shot two
frames of him silhouetted against the sky. The photographs of Che weren’t used by
Revolucíon
for its account of the event, but Korda cropped a palm tree and another figure out of one of them and printed it for himself and pinned it to the wall of his studio. He would occasionally give copies to friends and other visitors. (In April 1967, he gave two prints to the left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who turned them into thousands of copies of a poster, the first large-scale use of what would become one of the most famous images of the twentieth century.)
*

Not long after the
La Coubre
incident, Fidel asked Alexandr Alexiev to meet with him at Nuñez Jiménez’s home in La Cabaña. “For the first time,” Alexiev said, “Fidel spoke of arms. He said that after the explosion, the American intervention might be inevitable, imminent. ‘We have to arm the people,’ he said, and he wanted the Soviet Union to sell him some weapons. He spoke of arms such as light machine guns. ‘You could bring these arms in a submarine,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of caves along the coast and we can hide them where nobody can know about them. Send a message to Khrushchev.’”

By then, a Soviet commercial mission had been established in Havana. Among its members was a cryptographer who handled communications with the Kremlin. After his meeting with Fidel, Alexiev went straight to the cryptographer. “I sent the message directly from Fidel to Khrushchev, and I thought that because of our bureaucracy it would take several weeks to get a reply. The very next day the reply came. ‘Fidel, we share your worries about the defense of Cuba and the possibility of an attack,’ Khrushchev said, ‘and we will supply you with the arms you need. But why do we have to hide them and take them in a submarine if Cuba is a sovereign nation and you can buy whatever arms you need without hiding the fact?’ That was his reply. And the arms began to arrive.”

On May 8, Fidel announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Moscow. Faure Chomón, the former Directorio leader, had moved sharply to the left since the rebels’ victory, and he flew to Moscow as Cuba’s new ambassador. A veteran KGB man who worked under diplomatic cover, Sergei Kudriatzov, was the Soviet envoy. Alexiev, his TASS identity no longer necessary, was made Kudriatzov’s first secretary and cultural attaché, his traditional KGB cover.

Following the exchange of messages between Fidel and Khrushchev, a Soviet military delegation arrived quietly in Havana. “We talked right away,” said Alexiev. “Fidel, Raúl, Che—everyone participated. They outlined everything they needed. Above all they needed antiaircraft guns and planes, artillery, T-34 tanks, old ones that weren’t of any use anymore in the Soviet Union. Another delegation came and they talked of prices, although this wasn’t really commerce.” By June or July, Soviet arms and military advisers were surreptitiously entering Cuba. According to Alexiev, Fidel was still nervous about the U.S. reaction—as were the Soviets—so some of the Soviet advisers came in on Czech passports.

The secret military agreement with the Soviets signed, Fidel felt strong enough to take on the Americans. In fact, immediately after the Soviet trade deal had been signed in February, he had begun pushing on the tentative détente initiated by Washington. In response to the State Department’s overture of late January, which had been left in limbo during Mikoyan’s visit, Foreign Minister Roa sent a note to Washington giving Cuba’s “conditions” for talks. As long as Washington threatened to cut Cuba’s sugar quota, there could be no negotiations. The State Department had replied on February 29, refusing to back down and insisting that the United States had the right to take any measures it felt necessary to protect American interests. When
La Coubre
exploded four days later, the exchange turned bitter again. Secretary of State Herter responded angrily to Fidel’s charges of CIA complicity in the incident and questioned Cuba’s “good faith” in continuing negotiations.

Washington had made one final attempt to reach out to Fidel. In early March, Cuba’s finance minister, Rufo López Fresquet, was approached by Mario Lazo, a legal adviser to the U.S. embassy. Lazo told López Fresquet that the United States was willing to offer Cuba military planes and technical assistance. Fidel asked for two days to consider the offer. On March 17, President Dorticós told López Fresquet on behalf of Fidel that he had decided not to accept. Realizing what this rebuff signified, López Fresquet, the last of the old-style ministers, immediately resigned and left for the United States. If Fidel had any qualms about the course on which he was embarked, Nikita Khrushchev’s rapid response had dissolved them.

Upon being notified of Fidel’s rebuff, Eisenhower approved the CIA’s plan to covertly recruit and train an armed force of several hundred Cuban exiles to lead a guerrilla war against Castro. CIA Director Dulles planned to model the operation after the aptly named Operation Success, the undermining of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954. He put his deputy director for planning, Richard Bissell, architect of the U-2 spy plane project, in command of the Cuba task force. Other members of the team included
Tracy Barnes, a covert operations veteran who had been instrumental in Operation Success, and Howard Hunt, the CIA’s gung ho station chief in Montevideo. A skeptical member of the team was the agency’s Western Hemisphere division chief, J. C. King, who warned that Cuba was not Guatemala; King preferred a “dirty war” to destabilize the Cuban regime and advocated the assassination of top figures such as Che, Raúl, and Fidel. But Dulles overruled this option in favor of building up the anti-Castro forces and helping them get a foothold in Cuba.

Gerry Droller, aka Frank Bender, the CIA agent who had met with Fidel in New York a year earlier, was sent to Miami to recruit Cuban fighters among the exile community. Droller soon arranged for them to be trained at a secret site in Guatemala, with the collusion of Guatemala’s president, General Ydigoras Fuentes.

A few days later, Che denounced the quota on sugar exports to the United States as economic slavery for the Cuban people. By paying a price higher than the market rate for sugar, he argued, the United States obliged Cuba to maintain a single-crop economy instead of diversifying, a vicious cycle that made Cuba dependent on U.S. imports. This attack on the sugar quota system directly undercut one of Fidel’s chief battle standards of the moment. He was decrying the Americans’ threat to reduce the quota as an example of American “economic agression”—but, significantly, he did not counter Che’s remark.

Meanwhile, Fidel kept moving against the media. The owners of the television station CMQ fled the country, and their station became government property. At the same time, the Ministry of Labor had begun to usurp most of the CTC’s functions; the ministry, not the unions, now dictated working terms and conditions.

The face of Havana was changing dramatically. The days of privilege for Cuba’s upper and middle classes were coming to an end, and increasing numbers of them were leaving on the ferries and shuttle flights to Miami. As many as 60,000 had already fled by the late spring of 1960. The city that had been an American playground of exclusive yacht clubs, private beaches, casinos, and brothels—and whites-only neighborhoods—was disappearing. The roulette wheels were still spinning in the big hotels, but most of the prostitutes were off the streets. Armed, uniformed blacks and
guajiros
chanting revolutionary slogans roamed the city.

In place of tourists, trade and cultural delegations were arriving from socialist-bloc nations, along with a growing stream of current and future Third World leaders. Left-wing European and Latin American intellectuals flocked to Havana to attend cultural congresses arranged by the revolution. When Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre visited Cuba in February, the famous French couple went to see Che, and they talked for hours. It must have been a very gratifying experience for him, playing host to the philosopher whose works he had grown up reading. For his part, Sartre came away extremely impressed. When Che died, Sartre wrote that he was “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”