Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
While the dissidents were forming separate groups with different agendas to oppose him, Fidel’s revolution had acquired an unstoppable momentum. In June he ordered the seizure of three of Havana’s luxury hotels, justifying the action on the same grounds as Che’s earlier “interventions” of factories. Their owners were intentionally underfinancing them, making them unprofitable, and therefore a takeover by the state was necessary. Fidel also took up the gauntlet Che had thrown to the American oil companies. They would do as Cuba requested and process the Soviet oil, he declared, or face the confiscation of their properties. Days later, Cuba expelled two U.S. diplomats, accusing them of spying; in response, the Americans expelled three Cuban diplomats.
The war of wills quickly escalated. Fidel warned the United States that it ran the risk of losing all its property in Cuba. If it reduced the quota of Cuban sugar available for export, he would seize one sugar mill for every pound of sugar taken away. On June 29, the day that two Soviet oil tankers docked in Cuba, he ordered Texaco’s Cuban installations seized. Twenty-four hours later, Esso’s and Shell’s installations were taken over. In one fell swoop, Cuba had freed itself of a $50 million debt and gained an oil-refining industry.
On July 3, the U.S. Congress authorized President Eisenhower to cut Cuba’s sugar quota. Fidel responded by legalizing the nationalization of all American property in Cuba. On July 6, Eisenhower canceled the Cuban sugar quota for the rest of the year, some 700,000 tons. Calling this an act of “economic aggression,” Fidel now dropped broad hints of his arms deal with the Soviet Union, saying he would soon have the weapons he needed to arm his militias; ominously, he also ordered 600 U.S.-owned companies to register all their assets in Cuba.
Khrushchev now entered the game openly. On July 9, he warned the United States—stressing that he was speaking figuratively—that, “should the need arise, Soviet artillerymen can support the Cuban people by missile fire,” pointing out that the United States was now within range of the Soviets’ new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Eisenhower denounced Khrushchev’s threats and warned that the United States would not permit a regime “dominated by international Communism” in the Western Hemisphere. The very next day, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet
Union would buy the 700,000 tons of sugar cut from the American sugar quota.
In Havana, Che happily shook his fist at Washington, saying that Cuba was protected by “the greatest military power on earth; nuclear weapons now stand in the face of imperialism.” Nikita Khrushchev had insisted that he had been speaking figuratively, but before long, the world would discover that the threat was very real. And Che had been the first to say so.
By July 1960, Che’s wife, Aleida, was nearly five months’ pregnant with their first child. Their married life had attained a comparative peace and normality. It helped that since Che moved to the National Bank, Aleida and Hilda—who now worked at Prensa Latina—no longer had to see each other every day.
Che and Aleida had moved again, with their permanent guest Fernández Mell in tow, to a pretty two-story neocolonial house with gardens in the residential neighborhood of Miramar, on Eighteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. The Harvard-trained economist Regino Boti, one of the few remaining moderates still at his job in the Ministry of the Economy, lived across the street. The headquarters for Cuban State Security was a block and a half away, in a handsome neocolonial mansion on Fifth Avenue.
To Che’s delight, his old friend and traveling companion, Alberto Granado, showed up in time for the July 26 celebrations. It had been eight years since Fuser had said farewell to Mial in Caracas, promising to return after finishing his medical exams. Granado had continued his work at the leprosarium and had married a Venezuelan woman. The birth of their first child coincided with news of the
Granma
’s landing and the false reports of Ernesto Guevara’s death. Granado had been visiting his family in Argentina when word of Batista’s flight came, and he had celebrated Che’s arrival in Havana with the Guevara clan. When he heard that Che would be accompanying Fidel to Caracas in 1959, Granado had eagerly awaited his arrival and was crestfallen when he didn’t arrive. They had corresponded, however, and now, finally, Granado and his family had made it to Cuba.
Granado spent as much time as possible with Che and went with him to greet the captain of one of the first Soviet tankers delivering Russian oil to Cuba. With Granado at his side, Che told the captain that he was grateful “for having friends who lend a hand at the necessary time.” If Che’s words were an oblique hint to Granado, they had an effect; within a few months, he had quit his faculty job in Venezuela, packed up his family, and moved
to Cuba, where he too could lend a hand. He would get a job teaching biochemistry at the University of Havana.
Doctor David Mitrani, Che’s friend and colleague from the General Hospital in Mexico City, also flew in for the July 26 celebrations. Mitrani, who had been born to European Jewish émigrés and was a Zionist, had gone to Israel to work on a kibbutz the month before Che boarded the
Granma
. Although they had argued over politics—Che called Zionism “reactionary”—they had both considered themselves to be committed to socialism. After meeting Fidel in Mexico, Che had urged Mitrani to join the Cuban revolutionary venture and had ridiculed his plan to “go and pick potatoes” in Israel. Mitrani had told Ernesto that he thought Fidel was “full of shit” and that the plan to invade Cuba was crazy. Although their friendship remained intact, they lost contact after going on their separate adventures. When Mitrani returned to Mexico from Israel on the eve of the rebels’ victory in Cuba, he had sent Che a telegram congratulating him and his comrades.
Since then, Mitrani had established a private medical practice in Mexico City. He had kept up with news from Cuba and had been shocked to learn of his friend’s role in the revolutionary executions, but when he received Che’s invitation to come to Cuba in 1960, he accepted. Before going, he met with the Mexican president, Adolfo López Mateos, who asked Mitrani to bring him back a signed copy of Che’s
Guerra de Guerrillas
. The Israeli ambassador in Mexico asked him to use his contact with Che to see if relations with Cuba could be improved. The Israeli ambassador in Cuba was, coincidentally, related to Mitrani.
In Havana, Mitrani was lodged in the elegant Hotel Nacional and summoned by Che for lunch in his private dining room at the National Bank. Che was in a sardonic mood. “I know you’re a bourgeois,” he said, “so I’ve had a special meal prepared for you, with wine and everything.” Mitrani found Che far more acerbic than he remembered, with a cutting sense of humor. They met several times, always at the bank, and in their first meetings there were always others present. It wasn’t until his third or fourth visit that Mitrani felt he could talk openly.
Che asked Mitrani if he wanted to go to Oriente, where Fidel was going to give his July 26 speech, and Mitrani told him no; he’d come to Cuba to see Che, not Fidel. He didn’t attempt to hide his old antipathy for Fidel. He told Che of Israel’s desire for better relations, and Che seemed supportive. (The days when Cuba would take the Soviet position in favor of the PLO were still years in the future.) Eventually, Che spoke candidly with Mitrani about the revolution. “By the first days of August, we’re going to transform this country into a socialist state,” he said. At least that was what he hoped and expected, and he explained that Fidel himself was
not yet totally convinced, because he wasn’t a socialist; Che was still trying to persuade him.
Mitrani brought up the issue that had been troubling him the most: Che’s role in the executions. Mitrani told him that he couldn’t understand his involvement, since Che wasn’t even Cuban and hadn’t suffered at the hands of the
batistíanos
. Where had this hatred, this desire for vengeance, come from? “Look,” Che said, “in this thing you have to kill before they kill you.” Mitrani let the matter drop but remained troubled by his friend’s logic; it was something he would never learn to reconcile with the Ernesto Guevara he had known.
Before Mitrani left, Che gave him one of the new Cuban banknotes with his signature and three inscribed copies of
Guerra de Guerrillas:
for himself; for Che’s old mentor in Mexico, Dr. Salazar Mallén; and for President López Mateos. His dedication to Mitrani read: “To David, in the hope that you return again to the right path.”
In his triumphant July 26 speech in Oriente, Fidel took up what had until then been Che’s personal vision, warning his Latin American neighbors that unless they improved living conditions for their people, “Cuba’s example would convert the Andean Cordillera into the hemisphere’s Sierra Maestra.” Fidel could claim that he was speaking only metaphorically, but of course he wasn’t.
The combination of Fidel’s adoption of his “continental guerrilla” scheme and Khrushchev’s veiled threat to Washington greatly excited Che. Two days later, speaking before the delegates of the First Latin American Youth Congress, he was uncharacteristically emotional.
This people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face of the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names ... they would feel completely happy and fulfilled if each one of you, upon reaching your lands, can say:
“Here we are. Our words come moist from the Cuban jungles. We have climbed the Sierra Maestra and we have known the dawn, and our minds and our hands are full with the seed of the dawn, and we are prepared to sow it in this land and to defend it so that it flourishes.”
And from all the other brother nations of America, and from our land, if it still survived as an example, the voice of the peoples will answer you, from that moment on and forever: “It shall be so: may liberty be conquered in each corner of America!”
Once again, Che invoked the specter of death, now envisioned on a truly massive scale, to extol the beauty of collective sacrifice for liberation. He spoke with the heartfelt conviction of someone with no doubts about the purity of his cause. Che Guevara, age thirty-two, had become the high priest of international revolution. He had plenty of eager listeners, left-wing youths from Chile to Puerto Rico, and he backhandedly thanked Jacobo Arbenz, who was present, for his “brave example” in Guatemala. Cubans had learned from the “weaknesses” of the Arbenz government and had been able to “go to the roots of the question and decapitate in one stroke those in power and the thugs of those in power.” In Cuba, he said, they had done what
had
to be done. They had used the
paredón
—the firing squad—and chased out the monopolies, in spite of those who preached moderation, most of whom, he said, had turned out to be traitors anyway. “‘Moderation’ is another one of the terms the colonial agents like to use,” Che said. “All those who are afraid, or who are considering some form of treason, are moderates. ... But the people are by no means moderate.”
In his next breath, Che took on Venezuela’s anticommunist president, Rómulo Betancourt, whom he had despised on meeting him in 1953, and with whom Cuba’s relations had openly soured. Che said that Betancourt’s government was “prisoner to its own thugs.” He warned that “the [Venezuelan] people won’t remain the prisoners of some bayonets or a few bullets for long, because the bullets and the bayonets can change hands, and the murderers can end up dead.” He was alluding to Betancourt’s heavy-handed use of security forces to put down the mounting tide of demonstrations against his policies, and the recent upsurge of Marxist political opposition to his government. In May, the leftist youth wing of Betancourt’s own party had split off to form the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), inspired by Cuba’s revolutionary example, and it would not be long before the
miristas
launched an insurrection against Betancourt with the collaboration of the Venezuelan Communist Party.
Talking to a group of medical students, health workers, and militiamen on the topic of “revolutionary medicine” in late August, Che prepared them for the possibility that Cuba would soon be fighting a massive “people’s” guerrilla war. Cuba’s new generation of doctors should join the revolutionary militias—“the greatest expression of the people’s solidarity”—and practice “social medicine,” to give healthy bodies to the Cubans whom the revolution had liberated. Drawing on his own life as an example, Che told the crowd that when he began to study medicine, he had dreamed of becoming a famous researcher. “I dreamed of working tirelessly to aid humanity, but this was conceived as personal achievement,” he recalled. It was only when he graduated and traveled through a Latin America riven by misery, hunger, and disease
that his political conscience had begun to stir. In Guatemala, he began studying the means through which he could become a revolutionary doctor, but Guatemala’s socialist experiment was overthrown. “I became aware, then, of a fundamental fact: To be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. The isolated effort of one man, regardless of its purity of ideals, is worthless. To be useful it is essential to make a revolution as we have done in Cuba, where the whole population mobilizes and learns how to use arms and fight together. Cubans have learned how much value there is in a weapon and the unity of the people.”
At the heart of the revolution, then, was the elimination of individualism. “Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole individual to the absolute benefit of the community.” The revolution was not a “standardizer of the collective will”; rather, it was a “liberator of man’s individal capacity,” for it oriented that capacity to the service of the revolution.
In his talk to the medical students, Che tried out a phrase that crystallized a concept which he had been developing for some time, and which would soon become synonymous with him: the “new man.”