Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che talking to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who visited him on their trip to Cuba in 1960. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez is at left.
After Fidel’s two-hour speech in response to the
La Coubre
incident, Sartre and de Beauvoir walked through the streets of Old Havana, where they saw a public fund-raising campaign already under way for a new consignment of arms. De Beauvoir was bewitched by the sensual, fervent mood. “Young women stood selling fruit juice and snacks to raise money for the State,” she wrote later. “Well-known performers danced or sang in the squares to swell the fund; pretty girls in their carnival fancy dresses, led by a band, went through the streets making collections. ‘It’s the honeymoon of
the Revolution,’ Sartre said to me. No machinery, no bureaucracy, but a direct contact between leaders and people, and a mass of seething and slightly confused hopes. It wouldn’t last forever, but it was a comforting sight. For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.”
On March 23, Che gave a televised speech, “Political Sovereignty and Economic Independence.” Through the revolutionary seizure of power, he said, Cuba had attained political independence but had not yet won economic independence, without which it was not a truly politically sovereign nation. Some inroads had been made against the foreign, mostly U.S.-owned, monopolies that had previously held sway over Cuba’s economic freedom. The electricity and telephone rates had been cut, rents had been lowered, and the large landholdings had been turned over to the people, but the island’s oil, mineral, and chemical wealth was still in the Americans’ hands.
It is good to speak clearly. ... In order to conquer something we have to take it away from somebody. ... That something we must conquer—the country’s sovereignty—has to be taken away from that somebody called monopoly. ... It means that our road to liberation will be opened up with a victory over the monopolies, and concretely over the U.S. monopolies.
The revolution had to be “radical,” and had to “destroy the roots of evil that afflicted Cuba” in order to “eliminate injustice.” Those who opposed the revolution’s measures, those who resisted losing their privileges, were counterrevolutionaries. The workers of the reined-in CTC were contributing 4 percent of their wages to the “industrialization” program; it was time the rest of society shouldered its fair share of the revolutionary sacrifice.
Lately Che had been driving home the point that Cuba was no longer just Cuba. It was the revolution, and the revolution was the people; going one step further, the people, Cuba, and the revolution were Fidel. It was time to get on board the new ship of state, or get off. Just as the men of the
Granma
had put aside their individual lives, ready to die if necessary in the war against Batista, so now did all Cubans have to sacrifice for the common aim of total independence. The enemy might well retaliate, he warned. And when the counterrevolutionary soldiers came—paid for perhaps by those same monopolies whose interests were being affected—Cuba would be defended not by a handful of men but by millions. All of Cuba was now a Sierra Maestra, and together, Che said, quoting Fidel, “we will all be saved or we will sink.”
The “individualistic” university students with their “middle-class” mentalities seemed to especially provoke Che; perhaps in the students he saw his self-absorbed former self, and it rankled him. In early March he went to Havana University to remind the students that they had a duty to perform in the economic development of Cuba. An individual’s sense of vocation wasn’t justification for choosing a career; a sense of revolutionary duty should and would take its place.
I don’t think that an individual example, statistically speaking, has any importance, but I began my career studying engineering. I finished as a doctor. Later I became a
comandante
and now you see me here as a speaker. ... That is to say, within one’s individual characteristics, vocation doesn’t play a determining role. ... I think one has to constantly think on behalf of masses and not on behalf of individuals. ... It’s criminal to think of individuals because the needs of the individual become completely weakened in the face of the needs of the human conglomeration.
In practical terms, this meant that certain faculties would be expanded; others would be reduced. Humanities, for instance, was a field that would be kept to the “minimum necessary for the cultural development of the country.”
In April, Che’s guerrilla warfare manual,
Guerra de Guerrillas
, was published by INRA’s Department of Military Training. Che dedicated the book to Camilo Cienfuegos, and a photograph of Camilo astride a horse, holding aloft a rifle, his face beaming under a straw hat, was on the cover. “Camilo is the image of the people,” Che wrote. Excerpts were widely published in the Cuban media, and before long, not only Cubans but U.S. and Latin American counterinsurgency specialists would be studying the manual with acute interest. In the prologue, “Essence of the Guerrilla Struggle,” Che outlined what he believed to be the cardinal lessons for other revolutionary movements seeking to emulate Cuba’s success:
1. Popular forces can win a war against the army.
2. It is not necessary to wait for the conditions to be right to begin the revolution; the insurrectional
foco
[guerrilla group] can create them.
3. In underdeveloped Latin America, the armed struggle should be fought mostly in the countryside.
Guerrilla Warfare
was Che’s own go-to guide for Latin America’s would-be revolutionaries. He gave instructions on how to build tank traps and refuges against mortar fire, explained the usefulness of mules as beasts
of burden, and emphasized the importance of a constant supply of salt. “If the force is near the sea, small dryers should be established immediately.” He wrote that a good working relationship with local peasant farmers was essential for any guerrilla force; the farmers should be encouraged to grow food and livestock to feed the fighters. Cattle “taken from the large landowners” should be killed for their meat, and their hides should be used to make leather for boots.
Sabotage was an important part of guerrilla warfare, but the use of terrorism should be selective. “Terrorism is valuable only when used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or for other qualities that make his elimination useful,” Che wrote. Wounded prisoners should always be treated decently, unless their past record made them targets for revolutionary justice. Guerrillas had to be willing to lay down their lives at a moment’s notice, for the cause. “The essence of guerrilla warfare is that each one of the guerrilla fighters is ready to die, not to defend an ideal but rather to convert it into reality.”
A small band of men and women living in the wildnerness and struggling against all odds, fighting and dying together on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden—this was Che’s idealized
foco
. It was an almost biblical notion. Over the coming years, the
foco
theory was to be tested again and again, not least by Che himself, and the efforts almost always ended catastrophically. The very success of Cuba’s revolutionary experience worked against most future attempts to replicate it. Governments in the region were forewarned and forearmed, and in the coming years, with direct U.S. military and intelligence support, they demonstrated a grimly successful determination to quash Cuban-style insurgencies at the embryonic
foco
stage.
Within Cuba itself, opposition to the revolution was hardening. An underground movement had begun forming under Manuel Ray, who had been teaching at Havana University since his ouster from government. Another openly dissident quarter was the militant Juventud Católica, which was more vociferous than ever since Mikoyan’s visit. In the countryside, small counterrevolutionary groups, inflamed by uncompensated land seizures and the general chaos, were becoming active. Many of the counter-revolutionaries were former Rebel Army men. In Oriente, one of Che’s old comrades, Manuel Beatón, had taken up arms against the state. He had murdered another of Che’s former fighters, evidently for personal reasons, and fled to the Sierra Maestra with twenty armed followers. In Raúl’s old turf in the Sierra Cristal, one of
his
former fighters, Higinio Díaz, had gone back to war as well, allying himself with the disaffected July 26 veteran Jorge Sotús, who had led the first rebel reinforcements from Santiago into the
mountains in March 1957. They had formed the Movimiento de Rescate de la Revolución (MRR), organizing themselves around Manuel Artime, a former naval academy professor living in exile in Miami. With Artime in Miami, Díaz in the sierra, and a network of underground supporters in Havana, the MRR had quickly come under the benevolent eye of the CIA.
It was not long before Fidel’s “listeners” among Cuba’s swollen exile community in Miami picked up rumors of the CIA’s recruitment drive. In late April, Fidel accused the United States of trying to create an “international front” against him, and he warned that Cuba was not another Guatemala. In Guatemala itself, President Ydigoras Fuentes then accused Che of trying to organize a guerrilla invasion force against his country. On April 25, Cuba and Guatemala broke off relations. Undeterred, the CIA program continued to expand. Anti-Castro propaganda was broadcast to Cuba from a radio transmitter installed on tiny Swan Island, near the Cayman Islands. The man running the station was David Atlee Phillips, who six years earlier in Guatemala had first brought the agency’s attention to Ernesto Guevara.
One of the Cuban exiles who joined the CIA’s recruitment drive that summer was Felix Rodríguez. He was now nineteen years old. In the aftermath of the failed invasion of Trinidad the year before, he had returned to his military academy in Pennsylvania. After graduating in June 1960, he went to his parents’ home in Miami, then ran away to join the CIA program. By September, he would be among several hundred Cuban exiles in Guatemala who were receiving guerrilla training from a Filipino West Point graduate who had fought both the Japanese and the Communists in his country. Their force would eventually be called Brigade 2506.
On May Day, Fidel spoke at the Plaza de la Revolución, which was packed with armed Cubans marching past his podium. He praised the new militias and invoked the threat of an impending invasion; Cubans, like the Spartans, would stand, fight, and die without fear. He also took the opportunity to make two important points clear: If
he
died, Raúl would take his place as prime minister. What’s more, there were not going to be any elections; since “the people” ruled Cuba already, there was no need to cast votes. The crowd cheered, repeating the phrase
“Revolución Sí, Elecciones No!”
and a new slogan,
“Cuba Sí, Yanqui No!”
By then, the United States government estimated that Cuba’s armed forces had doubled to 50,000 since January 1959, with another 50,000 civilians already incorporated into the new people’s militias—and there was no end in sight. If the training and arming continued unchecked, Cuba would soon have the largest army in Latin America. Washington’s private fears that Fidel might already have obtained Soviet military support gained credence
on May 3, when the U.S. Senate heard testimony from two officers of the Batista era, former Chief of Staff Tabernilla and Colonel Ugalde Carrillo. Carillo accused Fidel of building Soviet missile bases in the Ciénaga de Zapata. Foreign Minister Roa quickly rebutted the charge, and few gave it credit at the time, but within a year the fantastic notion would become a reality.
Fidel’s militaristic May Day rally, and his decision to renew diplomatic relations with the Soviets a week later, sparked the final round between his government and Cuba’s last surviving independent media.
Diario de la Marina
’s editorials compared Castro to the Antichrist; within days, its offices were attacked and occupied by “workers,” and its presses closed down permanently. The editor sought asylum and fled the country. By the end of the month, the two main remaining independent dailies,
Prensa Libre
and
El Crisol
, were also put out of circulation, soon to be followed by the English-language
Havana Post
and
La Calle
.
The first Soviet tankers were already crossing the Atlantic with oil for Cuba, fulfilling part of the barter agreement signed with Mikoyan. The U.S.-owned Esso and Texaco, and British-owned Shell, each of which had refineries in Cuba, had until now been supplying the island with oil from Venezuela. But Cuba had not paid for some time, and the outstanding bill amounted to about $50 million. Che Guevara, as president of the National Bank, was the man to see about getting bills paid. Esso’s American manager got a cold reception and no clear answers when he asked Che about the debt.
Che now felt confident enough to take on the U.S. petroleum companies, and he told Alexiev that his plan was to offer them a deal he knew they would have to refuse, which would give him the pretext he needed to seize their installations. Alexiev counseled caution, but Che went ahead anyway. On May 17, he informed the American oil firms that in order for him to pay off the debt owed to them, they each had to buy 300,000 barrels of the Soviet oil that was arriving and process it in their refineries. The companies did not reply right away but sought counsel in Washington, where the government advised them to reject Che’s offer.
Opposition activities continued to grow, and so did the government’s crackdown. The members of a rebel group in the Escambray, which was made up mostly of students from the University of Las Villas, were captured and shot. The former CTC leader David Salvador went underground and soon joined forces with Manuel Ray’s creation, the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (MRP). The archbishop of Santiago, Enrique Pérez Serantes, a former Fidel supporter, issued a pastoral letter that denounced Fidel’s new Communist ties and seemed to bless the spreading
antigovernment violence. “Shedding blood is preferable to losing liberty,” he wrote. Still wishing to avoid a showdown with the Church, Fidel remained mute. In Miami, the CIA merged the MRR with an anti-Castro group led by Prío’s former prime minister, Tony Varona. The result was the Frente Democrático Revolucionario (FDR), which was intended to provide a political front to the military force being trained in Guatemala.