Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The HVA report states that there had been no further contacts with Tamara, but that she appeared to be “progressively asserting herself” in Cuba, working with a whole series of government institutions, and was always “importuning” visiting GDR delegations to be their interpreter. It added that she had “apparently given up her resolve to go on to Argentina [and] intends to stay in Cuba and also to assume Cuban citizenship. She also has close ties to Cuban security ... [and] permission to wear a military uniform, and she makes use of it constantly.”
The Stasi files suggest that the East German counterespionage agency had an agreement with Tamara Bunke but that she severed contact after she arrived in Cuba. The files, however, give rise to other questions. When Tamara was accepted for service by Cuban intelligence, did she tell her handlers about her prior links with German intelligence or the fact that her recruiter had defected a month after her arrival? If she did tell them, why did Cuba eventually use her in the same region—Bolivia and Argentina—that the HVA had originally planned to use her in? It surely had to be assumed that both Tamara’s identity and her intended future espionage role were known to the CIA and its allied intelligence agencies after Mannel’s defection.
In response to these questions, Barbarroja Piñeiro said, “I handled Tania directly. And I asked her if she had been recruited by the German [intelligence] services. She said ‘no.’” Piñeiro added that if he had known about Mannel and the letter she had been sent, he would have approved her anyway, both because she displayed “excellent qualities” as an agent, and because he trusted his organization’s ability to build her an undetectable new false identity.
One of the ways Che gathered information and analyzed the situation in Argentina was by engaging Argentine friends and acquaintances—as he had done with Oscar Stemmelin—in long discussions during which he would try out his theories. In February 1963 he sent for Ricardo Rojo. “I want to talk,” Che said when Rojo arrived. They didn’t see eye to eye politically—Rojo was liberal, an “anti-imperialist,” though not a socialist—but the two of them went back a long way, and Che knew him to be both well connected and an acute political analyst. Rojo had first sent Masetti to Cuba and had recently become a close friend of Che’s mother. Che put him up in a top-flight government protocol house in Miramar for two months. Rojo wrote
later that he found Che depressed about Cuba’s growing regional isolation and still upset over the Soviets’ “paternalistic” treatment of Cuba in the missile crisis. Che believed that Cuba could not break out of its regional straitjacket until socialist revolutions had taken place in the other Latin American countries, and he made no secret of the fact that he was actively studying how to bring that process about.
One day Che told Rojo that he wanted to discuss Argentina “systematically.” As they talked, Che took notes. He showed special interest in the Argentine labor and university movements and was anxious to update his knowledge about who was who among the opposition. They also discussed Perón’s enduring popularity with the Argentine working class, and Che showed Rojo a letter he had received from Perón expressing admiration for the Cuban revolution. It seemed to Rojo that Che was weighing the pros and cons of an alliance with the
peronistas
as a means of sparking revolt. There was an unpopular military government in Argentina, and increased labor strife; Che wondered aloud what the “reaction of the masses” would be if Perón came to Cuba to live—something Perón’s leftist disciple John William Cooke had been trying to persuade Che to arrange for some time.
In early April 1963, just before Rojo left Cuba, there was a brief but bloody naval uprising in Buenos Aires. It was rapidly suppressed by the army, but Che thought the incident revealed that “objective conditions for struggle” were beginning to appear in Argentina. It was time to follow up with subjective conditions to show the people that they could overthrow their rulers by violent means. Rojo argued that the revolution had worked in Cuba because the Americans had been caught off guard. That day had passed, and the United States and its regional allies were now on the alert. Che conceded the point but, as always, refused to accept that Cuba’s success was an exception that could not be repeated elsewhere.
Che never told Rojo explicitly that he was preparing a guerrilla insurgency in Argentina, but there were enough hints for Rojo to draw his own conclusions. He had shared his flight to Havana with a left-wing
peronista
guerrilla, a leader of a short-lived uprising in Tucumán province in 1959. The man was coming to see Che. And then there were Che’s last words as Rojo prepared to leave Cuba. “You’ll see,” he said, “Argentina’s ruling class will never learn anything. Only a revolutionary war will change things.”
*
Back in Algeria, Masetti learned that Piñeiro’s people had finally purchased a farm for their use in Bolivia, but there was still no sign that he and his men were about to be moved. Masetti decided he could not wait any longer, and he asked the Algerians to assist them in getting to Bolivia. “The Algerians gave us everything,” Bustos recalled. “They would have given us arms, but we couldn’t take them, since we were going to have to go through the border controls of several different countries—but they gave us all kinds of military equipment, passports, everything.”
In May 1963, seven months after leaving Havana, Masetti’s group was finally on its way to South America. But it was minus one man. Miguel, one of Alberto Granado’s recruits, had been left behind in rather chilling fashion. (The real name of “Miguel” has apparently been forgotten by his surviving comrades, but they remember him as a well-educated Argentine Jew, a significant detail in light of what happened within the group when it reached Argentina.)
Miguel had become increasingly argumentative and disobedient. One of the strict rules which they had all observed since entering clandestine life—and which Ciro Bustos was supposed to enforce—was that nobody wrote letters home, “not even to their mothers,” and Miguel had violated that rule. Bustos had caught him trying to mail some letters when they were in Paris. In Algeria, Miguel had openly questioned Masetti’s leadership. The two argued constantly and became fiercely competitive. One day, trying to best Miguel in their physical training exercises, Masetti had strained his back quite badly, an injury that was to cause him great pain in the months ahead.
Matters reached a head as they were preparing to leave Algeria. Miguel announced he didn’t want to go if Masetti was the leader, predicting that the two of them would end up shooting each other. “Masetti, who had been in the Argentine navy, and who always tried to be ‘the macho of the movie,’ did not take it lying down,” Bustos recalled. The two men squared off for a fistfight. The other men intervened, but Masetti wanted vengeance. He insisted that a trial be held to decide whether Miguel should stay in the group. Bustos was appointed prosecutor, and Federico acted as Miguel’s defense lawyer.
Bustos believed that Miguel had gotten cold feet and provoked the fight with Masetti so that he could drop out of the group. He argued that Miguel’s negative attitude posed a security risk, and since they were about to undertake a delicate trip across several foreign borders, the reasonable solution was that he be left behind. Even Miguel’s defender, Federico, did not oppose this solution. But Masetti argued that Miguel’s wish to withdraw from the group was tantamount to a defection, a crime punishable by death. He proposed that Miguel be executed by a firing squad. He could arrange this with his Algerian military friends.
The group unanimously voted for Miguel to die. Masetti, Papito Serguera, and Abelardo Colomé Ibarra talked with the Algerians, and a military unit took the condemned man away. Bustos was convinced that the decision had been the right one, but he felt bad about it nonetheless. “One of the things that affected us the most,” he recalled, “because we were sure they took him away to shoot him, was that the guy left ... like a man, correctly, without any lamentations or begging for clemency.” From that moment forward, Bustos and the others referred to Miguel not by his name, but as El Fusilado (He Who Was Shot), their first sacrifice in the cause for the Argentine revolution.
Traveling in separate groups under false identities, with Algerian diplomatic passports, and accompanied by the two Algerian agents who had been their constant companions of late and who carried their gear in sealed diplomatic luggage, Masetti’s men made their way to La Paz, where they got in touch with their Bolivian contacts, all young members of the Bolivian Communist Party. Then they headed to their base of operations. Their cover story was that they were the Argentine and Bolivian partners of a new joint venture, traveling together to set up a farming and cattle ranching operation on a tract of land they had recently bought. They reached their “farm,” in a remote area where the Río Bermejo forms Bolivia’s border with Argentina and makes a sharp dip south. Their land was strategically set in the middle of this mountainous, forested triangle, with Argentina on either side. There was only one dirt road leading in or out, and they were miles from the nearest neighbors.
A member of the Bolivian Communist Party was on the site, an older man who was to act as caretaker but who spent his days doing not much more than making peanut soup. Piñeiro’s people and the Bolivians working with them had bought some gear locally, but it seemed worse than useless. “There were thin uniforms made out of shiny nylon,” Bustos said. “Ordinary nylon shirts, and Tom Mix–style holsters with little stars on them. ... It really seemed like a joke.” Their backpacks and boots were of poor quality, as well, but, fortunately, the Algerians had provided them with some good Yugoslav military uniforms, cartridge belts, and field binoculars. And the arsenal that somehow had been smuggled in from Cuba was plentiful and in good condition: Chinese bazookas, pistols, a Thompson submachine gun, automatic rifles, and lots of ammunition. Ciro Bustos acquired a gun with a silencer.
Masetti decided that they were ready to go. Colomé Ibarra, who was to stay behind on the Bolivian side for the time being, drove them to the border, and on June 21, the five-man vanguard of the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo crossed into Argentina.
Another Cuban-trained guerrilla force had attempted to cross a Bolivian border a few weeks earlier. In May, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), forty guerrillas led by Héctor Béjar, had had been detected and turned back while trying to enter Peru. Béjar’s destination was the Valle de la Convención in Peru’s southern Andes, where the military was after the Trotskyist peasant leader Hugo Blanco. The small rebel band that Blanco led had attacked a Guardia Civil post the previous November and Blanco had been on the run ever since. The Cubans saw the fracas as a good opportunity for the ELN to go into action.
Bolivia, with its porous and ill-protected borders shared with Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, was a logical point of entry for both Béjar and Masetti. The government was led by President Víctor Paz Estenssoro of the center-left Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), and Bolivia was one of the few remaining Latin American countries that still had diplomatic ties with Havana. The Cuban envoy to Bolivia, Ramón Aja Castro, was close to Che. He had accompanied him to the Punta del Este conference, and Piñeiro’s man Ariel was on his staff. Since the Bolivian Communist Party (PCB) operated legally, it could assist the Cubans with contacts, safe houses, and transportation for guerrillas. Party cadres helped get Béjar’s column as far as the Peruvian border and Masetti’s to the Argentine frontier.
The decision by the PCB to assist the Cuban-trained guerrillas was tactical and taken reluctantly. Bolivia’s former Communist Party chief, Mario Monje, recalled that he was approached by Cuban diplomats in La Paz. “They told me that they needed help for some young Peruvian Communists who had been trained and wanted to return to their country,” Monje said. He told the Cubans that the Cuban experience was unique and couldn’t be repeated elsewhere. Like most of the Communist parties in neighboring countries, the PCB eschewed the kind of armed struggle espoused by Cuba—and by Che in particular—in favor of gaining ground through electoral politics. The PCB had established amicable relations with Paz Estenssoro’s government and hoped to maintain them.
When Monje told Peruvian Party officials about the Cuban proposal, he found them adamantly opposed. “They did not want to have anything to do with guerrillas,” he said. Monje tried to persuade the Peruvians not to precipitate an open break with Havana. He urged them to be flexible and to control the situation. Otherwise, he warned, “this thing [Cuba’s export of armed struggle] will hit the fan everywhere and do damage to the Peruvians and everyone else.” By then, Monje and his comrades had begun hearing rumors that Havana wanted to get a guerrilla war going in Bolivia as well. The Bolivian Politburo held a meeting and voted unanimously against
the notion of an armed struggle in their country, and Monje traveled to Havana with a fellow Politburo member, Hilario Claure. Their mission, according to Monje, was to express the official PCB policy opposing Cuban interventionism in the region generally, while also trying to mediate between Havana and the indignant Peruvians. He met Manuel Piñeiro and reminded him that in the 1930s, under Stalin, the Soviets had backed guerrillas in Latin America and it hadn’t worked. “They pushed armed struggle over here, guerrillas over there,” he told Piñeiro. “They tried it in different countries and failed, and now you are trying to repeat what they did.”
Piñeiro suggested they speak directly with Fidel, and he arranged a meeting in which, Monje said, he once again outlined his and the Peruvian Party’s opposition to the scheme. Fidel replied that he could not and would not deny young guerrillas the chance to emulate Cuba’s struggle. “We are going to help them,” Fidel told Monje. “I’m not asking for the help of the Peruvian Party, but I’m asking for your help.” Monje said that he and Claure acceded to Fidel’s request because they believed that if they bought Fidel’s gratitude he would not authorize guerrilla activity in Bolivia behind the Party’s back. They would assist in getting Béjar’s group into Peru without informing the Peruvian Communist Party. Monje and Claure also met with Che, who was less friendly than Fidel had been. The atmosphere of the meeting was tense, Monje recalled, and Che expounded his defense of the guerrilla project “aggressively and firmly.”