Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
After he came to Cuba we almost always lived in the same house, as was fitting for two old friends. But we no longer maintained the early intimacy in this new life, and I suspected El Patojo’s intentions only when I occasionally saw him studying one of the native Indian languages of his country. One day he told me he was leaving, that the time had come for him to do his duty. ... He was going to his country to fight, arms in hand, to reproduce somehow our guerrilla struggle. It was then that we had one of our long talks. I limited myself to recommending strongly three things: constant movement, constant wariness, and constant vigilance. ...
This was the synthesis of our guerrilla experience; it was the only thing—along with a warm handshake—that I could give to my friend. Could I advise him not to do it? With what right? ...
El Patojo left, and with time the news of his death came. ... And not only he, but a group of comrades with him, all of them as brave, as selfless, as intelligent perhaps as he, but not known to me personally. Once more there is the bitter taste of defeat. ...
Once again, youthful blood has fertilized the fields of the Americas to make freedom possible. Another battle has been lost; we must make time to weep for our fallen comrades while we sharpen our machetes. From the valuable and unfortunate experience of the cherished dead, we must firmly resolve not to repeat their errors, to avenge the death of each one of them with many victorious battles, and to achieve definitive liberation.
When El Patojo left Cuba ... he had few clothes or personal belongings to worry about. Mutual friends in Mexico, however, brought me some poems he had written and left there in a notebook. They are the last verses of a revolutionary; they are, in addition, a love song to the revolution, to the homeland, and to a
woman. To that woman whom El Patojo knew and loved in Cuba are addressed these final verses, this injunction:
Take this, it is only my heart
Hold it in your hand
And when the dawn arrives
,
Open your hand
And let the sun warm it
...
El Patojo’s heart has remained among us, in the hands of his beloved and in the grateful hands of an entire people, waiting to be warmed beneath the sun of a new day that will surely dawn for Guatemala and for all America.
Cuba had become a fully operational “guerrilla central” by 1962, fueling the far-flung substations of armed revolution throughout the hemisphere. Che’s dream of a continental revolution now made strategic sense. The spreading guerrilla threat helped divert American pressure away from Cuba and simultaneously made Washington pay a high price for its regional containment policy. Fidel had made support of guerrilla activity government policy. Responding to the expulsion of Cuba from the OAS in January 1962, he issued what he called his Second Declaration of Havana, which proclaimed the “inevitability” of revolution in Latin America. Jittery Latin American governments took this to be a tacit declaration of war against their countries.
Juan Carreterro, aka Ariel, a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer at the time, said that he began working with Che in 1962 to create a transcontinental, anti-imperialist “revolutionary theater in Latin America.” Ariel worked directly under Manuel Piñeiro Losada—Barbarroja—who over-saw the guerrilla programs at State Security as Ramiro Valdés’s deputy.
*
By that spring, Che was directing a campaign to recruit and organize guerrilla trainees from among the Latin American students invited to Cuba on revolutionary scholarships. One of them was Ricardo Gadea, the younger brother of his ex-wife, Hilda. Ricardo had finished high school in Peru and had studied journalism at Argentina’s renowned University of La Plata, a magnet for students from all over Latin America. He had joined the youth movement of the Peruvian nationalist opposition party, APRA, and like many of his student friends, Ricardo quickly became enamored with the Cuban
revolutionary cause, seeing it as a model for political change in Latin America. In his spare time he helped out at the July 26 support committee’s offices in Buenos Aires, working with Che’s father.
In 1960, Ricardo had decided to go to Cuba to finish his studies and to participate in the revolution he sympathized with so strongly. Hilda could help set him up. But when Ricardo arrived, he learned that he wouldn’t be able to pursue his career in journalism. The university reform process was under way, and journalism was not a priority profession in the new Cuba. The journalism school at Havana University was, as he put it, somewhat “disorganized.” So he began studying economics. The dean of his faculty was the venerable Communist Party leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, Ricardo and many of his fellow Latin American students volunteered for the revolutionary militias, hoping to be sent to the front, but they were left behind in Havana to guard public buildings.
By early 1962, hundreds of new Latin American students—Bolivians, Venezuelans, Argentines, Uruguayans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Colombians—had arrived in Cuba. There were about eighty students from Peru. Before long, however, a schism opened between those students who were primarily interested in academic pursuits and those who, as Ricardo described it, “wanted to learn from Cuba’s revolutionary experience and to return to our own country to carry out our own revolution.” Ricardo opted for the latter group. His decision coincided with the March 1962 military coup in Peru that annulled the recent election results, suspended congress, and placed the whole Peruvian political system in doubt. For Peruvians seeking to apply the Cuban model to their nation, it was the time to strike.
Ricardo Gadea and his Peruvian comrades left the university for guerrilla training in the Sierra Maestra. Their instructors were veterans of the Cuban struggle. Fidel himself spoke to them and gave them advice; but it was Che, Gadea said, who was their undisputed revolutionary mentor. “Of all the leaders,” Ricardo said, “Che was the most charismatic, sensitive, and involved, as a Latin American. He understood us, knew our difficulties, and helped us overcome many of our problems.”
Another country whose revolutionary progress was close to Che’s heart was Nicaragua. Since the debacle on the Honduran border in the summer of 1959, the Nicaraguan rebels battling the Somoza dynasty had been going in and out of Cuba. Carlos Fonseca, the group’s ideologue, had recovered there from the wounds he suffered during the border ambush. He had returned to Central America to seek a political alliance between his group, which was based in the university, other exiles, and
antisomocistas
within Nicaragua itself. One of his closest disciples, a short, squat, full-lipped former law student named Tomas Borge, traveled to Havana seeking help for the
Juventud Revolucionaria Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan RevolutionaryYouth) group. He and another comrade, Noel Guerrero, joined Che’s friend Rodolfo Romero on a visit to Che at the National Bank.
As Borge remembered it, he launched into a flowery greeting “on behalf of Nicaragua’s youth,” but Che cut him short. “Let’s forget the greetings and get down to business,” he said. Borge insisted that his speech was not demagogic, and Che let him go on. When he finished, Che embraced him. He also gave Borge and his comrades $20,000 to organize themselves. Rodolfo Romero was designated the military chief of the group, and eventually they had about thirty Nicaraguans in Cuba who were inducted into revolutionary militias and sent off for combat experience in the counter-insurgency war in the Escambray. In 1961, Romero attended the Cuban counterintelligence school. He was the only Nicaraguan there, he proudly recalled. Then he joined Borge, Fonseca, and others at an artillery training course given by Czech advisers at a remote Cuban military base.
By the summer of 1962, Carlos Fonseca was back in Nicaragua, over-seeing the anti-Somoza urban underground effort, pulling off bank robberies, and carrying out propaganda and sabotage. Tomas Borge and about sixty other guerrillas under Noel Guerrero’s leadership slipped into Nicaragua’s northern jungle from Honduras. The group that would eventually call itself the Frente Sandinista de Liberacíon Nacional (FSLN) was ready for action.
*
That spring, guerrilla forces had begun operating in Venezuela. In May, troops at a naval base near Caracas had revolted. The Communist Party openly backed the uprising, and President Betancourt banned both the Party and the MIR. In June, a second naval uprising was put down after two days of bloody fighting with loyalist army troops. Dissident officers and troops fled into the hills, where many of them joined the fledgling guerrilla forces. In December, the Party officially endorsed the armed struggle, and two months later a new guerrilla coalition group, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) announced that it intended to wage war against Betancourt’s regime. The FALN called itself a democratic and nationalist movement, but it had a Communist-dominated political front, the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN). In communiqués reminiscent of those Fidel sent out while he was fighting Batista, the FLN denied government accusations that it was Communist or anti-American and called for
Venezuelans of all creeds to join its united front to make Venezuela “master of her own destiny and her own riches.”
Che assisted the new Venezuelan revolutionary organization, just as he was helping the guerrilla movements of Nicaragua, Peru, and Guatemala. With each new rifle raised aloft, his vision of a continental guerrilla struggle against American imperialism was coming one step closer to reality.
By now, Che was planning to launch an insurgency in Argentina. He had been cultivating the idea for some time, but it had taken on new vigor after the Argentine military toppled President Frondízi. He had chosen the northern jungle of Argentina, near Salta, not far from the rugged Bolivian border, as an exploratory theater of war. It was the same area he had journeyed through in 1950 on his motorbike trip, during which he had paused to reflect about the meaning of life, death, and his own destiny.
Che asked Alberto Granado for help in recruiting Argentines for the guerrilla venture. In October 1961, Granado had moved with his family from Havana to Santiago to start up a biomedical research school at the university there, and during 1962 he used his job and nationality to assess the potential of his fellow expatriates for Che’s Argentine revolution scheme. He became friendly with the Argentine painter Ciro Roberto Bustos, who had arrived in Cuba as a revolutionary volunteer at about the same time as Granado. Bustos had set up a small ceramics factory in the Oriente countryside and was also giving twice-weekly painting classes at Santiago University. When he was in town, Bustos was invited to stay at Granado’s house, and their conversations soon broached the topic of armed struggle. When Granado learned that Bustos supported the idea of a Cuban-style revolution in their homeland, he passed along his positive appraisal of the painter to Che. Before long, Granado arranged for them to meet.
Granado also made a trip to Argentina. He journeyed around the country, working through the Argentine Communist Party to recruit technicians and other skilled people to work in Cuba—a plausible cover story for his recruitment of guerrilla cadres. However, as Granado acknowledged years later, the Argentine security services were already suspicious and had evidently monitored his movements. Several of the people he met with were temporarily detained after his visit. Even so, he was able to recruit a couple of men who soon arrived in Cuba for guerrilla training.
Che’s plan was for Jorge Ricardo Masetti—the Argentine journalist who had visited him in the Sierra Maestra and then, after the revolution, had become the editor of Cuba’s international wire agency, Prensa Latina—to
lead his advance patrol. Masetti had dropped from view after he conducted a televised interrogation of the men taken prisoner during the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was well known that Masetti was no Communist, and, after a long standoff with the doctrinaire Communist Party faction at Prensa Latina, he had been removed. He was said to then be employed by the propaganda department of Cuba’s armed forces, but in reality he was working for Che.
After leaving Prensa Latina, Masetti went through an officers’ training course to gain military experience. He graduated with the rank of captain and traveled on secret missions for Che to Prague—a new way station for Cuba’s overseas espionage—and to Algeria, where he smuggled a huge quantity of American weapons seized at Playa Girón to the FLN insurgents, via Tunisia. One of Granado’s recruits, Federico Méndez, an Argentine mechanic in his early twenties who had military experience, accompanied Masetti. For several months, they stayed at the FLN’s general staff headquarters, where Méndez gave the Algerians training courses in the use of the American arms. By the time they returned to Cuba, they had established close links with the grateful Algerian revolutionary leadership and its top military officers.
Masetti’s mission in Argentina was to become acquainted with the terrain and quietly establish a guerrilla base of operations. Before engaging the enemy, he was to build up support among peasants and a civilian-support infrastructure in the cities. Later on, when the conditions were right, Che would come and lead the force himself.
Che was casting his net wide to take soundings of Argentina’s political situation. When Cuba’s diplomats were expelled from Argentina in March 1962 and flew home on a plane from Uruguay, he sent a telegram to his friend from Dean Funes high school, the
radicalista
Oscar Stemmelin, inviting him to take advantage of the evacuation flight to come and visit.
*
Stemmelin and another classmate of Che’s took up the invitation and stayed in Havana for about a month. During Stemmelin’s stay, he and Che met eight or ten times to talk about old times, Cuba’s revolution, and Argentine politics.
On May 25, the Argentine Day of Independence, the 380 members of Cuba’s Argentine community in Havana gathered to celebrate with a
traditional outdoor
asado
, complete with folk music, traditional dances, and typical Argentine costumes. Che was the guest of honor, and he suggested that the organizers invite the young German-Argentine woman Haydée Tamara Bunke. Since her arrival from Berlin, Tamara, as everyone knew her, had been working as a translator at the Ministry of Education, and she was enthusiastic about everything going on. She joined in volunteer labor sessions, worked as a literacy instructor, and signed up for the militias and her local CDR watch committee. She had become a fixture at the social gatherings of Latin American guerrillas in Havana and expressed great sympathy with their causes.