Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Tamara and Che’s deputy, Orlando Borrego, had renewed the friendship begun in Berlin. She made no secret of her desire to become a fighter in one of Latin America’s guerrilla wars and was constantly asking Borrego to take her to see Che. Borrego stalled. There were always lots of people trying to see Che. Tamara finally got her way by arranging to participate in a day’s volunteer work alongside him at a school being built near his house. “I underestimated her,” Borrego observed wryly.
At the Independence Day
asado
, Che gave his usual speech on the revolutionary struggle in Latin America, putting special emphasis on Argentina. He spoke of the need for Argentina’s anti-imperialist forces to overcome their ideological differences, specifically including the
peronistas
in this appeal. According to a Cuban who was present, at one point during the meal, Che scribbled something on a matchbox and wordlessly handed it to an Argentine sitting near him. It bore the word
unidad
(unity). As the match-box circulated, Che’s message was lear. No more sectarian infighting.
It was a significant moment to the group of
peronista
exiles who were present, and their leader, John William Cooke, stood up to echo Che’s appeal for revolutionary unity and to laud Cuba for leading the Second Emancipation of Latin America. Cooke, a former Peronist Youth leader and personal representative of Perón, had been in Cuba for several years, but he corresponded regularly with Perón, who was living in Madrid. Cooke had been won over by Cuba’s revolution and evoked it for Perón in flattering terms, extending Fidel’s invitation for Perón to visit, promising a reception “with the honors of a head of state.” Perón never took up the invitation but sent flattering responses back, much as he continued to play kingmaker from exile with all the various
peronista
factions that competed for his approval.
Cooke dreamed of bringing about Perón’s triumphal return to Argentina at the head of a revolutionary alliance backed by Cuba. According to Cooke’s former comrades, Che became friends with him and his wife, Alicia Ereguren, in spite of Che’s lingering skepticism about Perón. In the course of their many conversations, Cooke’s arguments gave Che a broader
view of
peronismo
’s potential as a revolutionary force, while he in turn was influential in Cooke’s assimilation of Marxist-Leninist concepts. This helped to galvanize the revolutionary group that Cooke founded, Acción Revolucionaria Peronista. That summer of 1962, with Che’s approval, Cooke’s men began receiving guerrilla training to prepare themselves for a future revolutionary war in Argentina.
Stealthily, Che was setting up the chessboard for his game of continental guerrilla war, the ultimate prize being his homeland. He was actually training several different Argentine action groups, distinct in their ideologies but united by a common desire to take to the field. At the right time each group would be mobilized to take its place in a united army in the Argentine campaign under Che’s command. Masetti’s forward patrol was Che’s first move on that chessboard; the others would follow at the right time.
*
A number of events that were to have a direct bearing on Che’s future had occurred. The previous September, Secretary-General Hammarskjöld had been killed in a suspicious plane crash while visiting the Congo. The new UN secretary, the Burmese diplomat U Thant, had inherited the job of resolving the seemingly insoluble crisis there. The government in the capital of Léopoldville continued to fence for power with the standard-bearers of Patrice Lumumba, who were based in the distant northern city of Stanleyville.
†
And the long-simmering Sino-Soviet dispute had finally become public in October 1961, when Chinese premier Chou En-lai walked out of a Communist Party congress held in Moscow. Both powers now increased their jockeying for global influence, pressuring Cuba and Latin America’s Communist parties to choose a side.
In Cuba, the attempt of the “old Communists” in the PSP to control the Organizaciónes Revolucionarias Integradas (ORI)—the new official party, headed by Fidel, which had subsumed the July 26 Movement along with the PSP and Directorio Revolucionario—was publicly denounced by Fidel in March 1962. Accused of favoring Party comrades for a wide variety of government posts, ORI’s organization secretary, the former PSP eminence Aníbal Escalante, was the most prominent victim of the purge.
Publicly castigated, he was sent into exile in Moscow. Afterward, Fidel announced a new name for the reformed party: Partido Unificado de la Revolución Socialista (PURS), the next stage in the creation of a new Cuban Communist Party.
Che was immensely gratified by Fidel’s purge. He loathed the holier-than-thou Party apparatchiks who sought to impose their ideological guidelines, and he had defended a number of people whose careers had been damaged, giving them posts—and protection—at his ministry. In May, he forbade “ideological investigations” at the ministry.
“The Sectarianism,” as the period of dogmatic Communist Party ideology was called, had affected even non-Cubans such as Ciro Bustos. Taking its cue from the chauvinistic PSP, the Argentine Communist Party had tried to wield control over the Argentines living and working in Cuba. While he was in Holguín, Bustos had been summoned by the Party’s representative in Cuba and questioned about his political background and Party affiliations. When he explained that he didn’t have an official Communist Party membership, he was warned that if he didn’t “regularize” his situation, he would have to leave the country. The “antisectarian” purge had come just in time for him, and he was once again breathing freely when, in the summer of 1962, Granado arranged for him to meet with Che.
Their midnight encounter, which took place at Che’s office in Havana late in July, was peremptory. Che explained to Bustos that a group was being prepared to go to Argentina and asked him if he wanted to participate. Bustos said yes. That was all. He was told not to leave his hotel; some people would be coming by to pick him up. In the next stage of his revolutionary metamorphosis, Bustos was first taken to a house in Havana’s Miramar neighborhood, where he was greeted by a man he recognized from news photographs to be Jorge Ricardo Masetti, whose book about the Cuban revolutionary war,
Los Que Luchan y los Que Lloran
(Those Who Fight and Those Who Cry), had helped spark his interest in Cuba.
Masetti explained to Bustos that this was Che’s project, but since the
comandante
couldn’t leave Cuba just yet, Masetti was to lead the guerrilla force in its start-up phase. Then Che would come, and the war would begin. Masetti asked if Bustos was prepared to leave everything to join the project, and once again Bustos said yes. He would return to Holguín until a Ministry of Industries “scholarship” for him to study in Czechoslovakia was arranged to explain his disappearance. His wife would have to stay behind and keep the secret. Later, once the guerrillas had secured a liberated territory, she could undergo training and join him.
By September, Bustos was ensconced in a safe house with three other Argentines: a Jewish doctor from Buenos Aires, Leonardo Julio Werthein;
and two of Granado’s recruits—the mechanic Federico Méndez and an athletic man named Miguel, both of whom were from the rural part of northern Argentina known as the
chaco
. Their new home was an elegant villa on Havana’s eastern edges. Deserted by the exodus of Cuba’s wealthy, the leafy, tree-lined neighborhood of walled compounds was now guarded by Cuban security forces, offering maximum discretion. The Argentines camped in one room of the mansion they occupied, getting to know one another and preparing for the life ahead of them. Their training consisted of hikes and practice at a firing range. For something to do at night, they went out on patrol, trying—with little luck—to catch the gangs of thieves who were breaking into the empty villas and carrying off whatever they could find. “But they were always smarter than we were,” Bustos recalled. “We made too much noise.”
Masetti, Che, and intelligence officials such as Ariel and Piñeiro came and went. Orlando “Olo” Tamayo Pantoja, who had been one of Che’s officers during the sierra war, and Hermes Peña, one of Che’s bodyguards, took an active part in their training sessions, and they soon found out that Peña would be going with them as Masetti’s deputy commander.
Another person who showed up regularly at the safe house was Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, aka Furry, Havana’s police chief. He too would be joining the Argentines as their rearguard base commander and liaison for communications with Cuba. Their chief trainer was neither Cuban nor Argentine, but a Hispano-Soviet general, a man they knew only as Angelito. Ciro Bustos and the others understood that they were not to ask too many questions of him; at this point the presence of Russian military men in Cuba remained a highly sensitive subject. Actually a Spanish-born Catalán, Angelito, also known as Ángel Martínez, was nonetheless an active general in the Red Army, a Spanish Civil War hero whose real name was Francisco Ciutat, one of half a dozen Spanish Republican exiles dispatched to Cuba by the Moscow-based Spanish Communist Party to help train Cuba’s militias in the “Struggle against Bandits.” “He was a real personality,” Bustos recalled. “Tiny, with quite a few years on him, but he could do flips in the air like a gymnast.”
As Angelito’s deputy, Hermes Peña was their hands-on instructor, reconstructing sierra-war battles for them to study and emulate in their training exercises. Before long, each of the men in the safe house was assigned a specific duty. Leonardo Werthein was to be the expedition medic, Miguel would handle logistics, and Federico Méndez, whom Bustos described as a no-nonsense tough guy of few words, was put in charge of armaments. Bustos was given training in security and intelligence. Hermes Peña assumed responsibility for their military discipline.
Che himself always arrived at the safe house extremely late, at two or three in the morning. “Practically the first thing he told us,” Bustos recalled, “was ‘Well, here you are: you’ve all agreed to join, and now we must prepare things, but from this moment on, consider yourselves dead. Death is the only certainty in this; some of you may survive, but all of you should consider what remains of your lives as borrowed time.’” Che was throwing down the gauntlet for his future guerrillas, just as he had done during the Cuban struggle. It was important that each man prepare himself psychologically for what was to come, and Bustos understood the message. “We were going to go and get our balls shot off, without knowing if any of us were going to see it through, or how long it would take.” Che let them know he was not sending them off alone to an uncertain fate, however, telling them he planned to join them as soon as he could.
The October missile crisis forced Che to accelerate plans for his Argentine guerrilla force. During the crisis, he commanded Cuba’s western army based in Pinar del Río. His post was situated in some mountain caves near one of the Soviet missile installations. He took his Argentine guerrilla trainees with him and placed them in a battalion under the command of Cuban officers. If there was fighting, they were to join in.
At the moment of maximum tension—after a Russian SAM missile brought down an American U-2 spy plane, killing its pilot—Fidel cabled Khrushchev, saying that he expected Moscow to launch its missiles first in the event of an American ground invasion; he and the Cuban people, he assured Khrushchev, were ready to die fighting. Only a day later, Fidel learned that Khrushchev had made a deal with JFK behind his back—offering to pull out the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba and a withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Fidel was incredulous and furious, and reportedly smashed a mirror with his fist when he was told. Che tersely ordered his troops to sever his command post’s communications line with the adjacent Soviet missile base, and he rushed off to Havana to see Fidel.
Over the coming days, Fidel was consumed with bitter recriminations against Khrushchev, and the hapless Mikoyan was dispatched to Havana to patch things up. Mikoyan did what he could, but Fidel and Che were convinced that Khrushchev had sold them out for his own strategic interests. Their talks went on for several weeks and at times were exceedingly tense. One day, a mistranslation by the Russian interpreter sparked a shouting match. When the misunderstanding was cleared up, Che calmly removed his Makarov pistol
from its holster, handed it to the interpreter, and said: “If I were in your place, the only thing left to do ...” According to Alexandr Alexiev, everyone laughed, including Mikoyan. Che’s dark humor had cleared the air.
In public, relations between Moscow and Havana remained “fraternal,” but under the surface the situation was extremely tense, and it stayed that way for some time. In the streets of Havana, indignant Cubans chanted:
“Nikita, mariquita, lo que se da no se quita!”
(Nikita, you little queer, what you give, you don’t take away!)
“The fate of Cuba and the maintenance of Soviet prestige in that part of the world preoccupied me,” Khrushchev acknowledged in his memoirs. “One thought kept hammering away in my brain: what will happen if we lose Cuba? I knew it would be a terrible blow to Marxism-Leninism. It would gravely diminish our stature throughout the world, but especially in Latin America. If Cuba fell, other countries would reject us, claiming that for all our might the Soviet Union hadn’t been able to do anything for Cuba except to make empty protests to the United Nations.”
In an interview with Che a few weeks after the crisis, Sam Russell, a British correspondent for the socialist
Daily Worker
, found him still fuming over the Soviet betrayal. Alternately puffing a cigar and taking blasts on his asthma inhaler, he told Russell that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have been fired. Russell came away with mixed feelings about Che, describing him as “a warm character whom I took to immediately ... clearly a man of great intelligence, though I thought he was crackers from the way he went on about the missiles.” They also discussed another subject close to Che’s heart—global Communist strategy. Che was extremely critical of the Western Communist parties for adopting a “peaceful parliamentary strategy for power.” Russell wrote that Che felt this would “deliver the working class bound hand and foot over to the ruling class.”