Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Claure offered a subtly different account of the talks in Havana. He agreed that he and Monje made clear their opposition to a Cuban-sponsored guerrilla war in Bolivia, but he found Fidel noncommittally “diplomatic.” Che was “arrogant,” and dismissive. “That’s what the Communists here told us when we wanted to make the Cuban revolution,” Che said. “If we’d listened to them, there wouldn’t have been one.” Claure recalled that he and Monje returned to La Paz with the suspicion that the Cubans were going to go ahead with whatever they had already planned in spite of the Bolivian Communist Party, and before long, they sensed that their worries were well founded.
On a subsequent visit to Havana, Monje said, he and Che were relaxing outside one day, lying on some grass and talking, when Che turned to him and said, “Hey, Monje, why don’t you get a guerrilla war going in Bolivia?” “And why should I?” Monje retorted. “What will it get us?” Che challenged him: “It’s because you’re afraid, isn’t it?” Monje said he shot back, “No, it’s that you have a machine gun stuck in your brain, and you can’t imagine any other way to develop an anti-imperialist struggle.” Che laughed at his retort, and let the matter rest. Monje said that not long after his exchange with Che, a “top Cuban official” told him that “it would be great” if
his Party began an armed struggle in Bolivia “because it would distract the imperialists and release pressure on us.”
For the time being, Monje kept his relations with the Cubans as fraternal as possible. He even requested permission to send some young Party cadres to Havana “to learn from Cuba’s revolutionary experience.” Meanwhile, his people began helping Béjar’s and Masetti’s groups, providing them with safe houses, food, supplies, and transportation. While Masetti and his men were still in Algeria, the Bolivians had located and purchased the rearguard base of operations on the Río Bermejo. After some delays and changes of itinerary, they had moved Béjar’s column out of La Paz and on a long river journey toward the Peruvian border.
Béjar’s group had reached the border in May, by which time their intentions had evidently become well known to the Peruvian authorities. Béjar sent an advance party across the border, but it was discovered almost immediately by police in the Peruvian town of Puerto Maldonado. One of the fighters, a talented young poet named Javier Herauld, was killed in the resulting shoot-out. Most of the others managed to escape back into Bolivia, whereupon a dozen or so of Béjar’s men were captured by local authorities but then released in an apparent goodwill gesture to Cuba by Paz Estenssoro’s government. By late May, Hugo Blanco had also been captured and imprisoned in Peru. In early June, Peru’s military junta held the elections it had promised after seizing power the year before, and the winner was the center-right candidate Fernando Belaunde Terry, an engineer who had been educated in the United States. The first Peruvian guerrilla venture had failed miserably, but Béjar and his comrades began reorganizing, and before long they would try again.
*
Why was the presence of Béjar’s group detected so quickly? Béjar himself later accused the PCB of secretly acceding to the Peruvian Party’s demands to thwart his effort, pointing out that the Bolivians had delayed their entry by rerouting his force to a point hundreds of miles from where Blanco was operating. Suspicions of internal treachery persisted over the years. As Humberto Vázquez-Viaña, a PCB youth militant at the time, later quipped acidly, the Party had striven to be “good with both God and the Devil.”
Che’s former brother-in-law, Ricardo Gadea, missed the Béjar fiasco. After a factional split, he and other would-be guerrillas had formed the Peruvian MIR. They believed they should build up a social and organizational base in Peru before beginning a war. The Cubans did not approve, and Gadea and his comrades were kept on ice in Cuba. While Béjar and his followers were shipped out to Bolivia, Gadea’s group was dispatched to the Escambray mountains to fight the counterrevolutionary
“bandidos”
operating there. Their requests to return to Peru were rebuffed or not answered at all for several months, and it wasn’t until after Béjar had failed, and after a special trip was made to Havana by the group’s leader, Luis de la Puente Uceda, that they were finally allowed to depart. Before he left, Gadea saw Che one last time.
“It was an important conversation for me,” Gadea recalled, “because it was the first time Che saw me not just as a student or out of a family obligation, but because of the decision I had made regarding the revolution in Peru.” Che made it clear that there was no bad blood and gave Gadea his blessing. “Well, go have your experience,” he said. “Everyone has to test himself, and you must learn and gain knowledge through your own experiences.” All the members of his group made it to Peru without being arrested, began their work of underground organization, and within two years were ready for war.
Aleida did not want Che to go to Argentina to fight, but she knew she couldn’t stop him. From the beginning, he had made clear to her that one day he would carry the revolution to his homeland. This had seemed like an abstraction until Masetti’s group was formed and its training was under way.
Che and Aleida’s second child, Camilo, had been born in May 1962. The new baby was fair, like his mother. He would grow up to have her blond hair and his father’s massive forehead and intense stare. Aleida had become pregnant again during the missile crisis, and they had moved to a new, larger house on Calle 47, in a residential neighborhood in Nuevo Vedado, a few blocks from the zoo and close to the government complex around Plaza de la Revolución. On June 14, 1963—Che’s thirty-fifth birthday—Aleida gave birth to a second daughter. They named her Celia, after Che’s mother. This was a particularly poignant homage, for at that moment, Celia
madre
was in prison. She had arrived in Cuba in January 1963, had stayed with them for three months, and on her return to Argentina in April had been arrested on charges of possessing subversive Cuban propaganda and of being an agent for Che.
On June 9, Celia wrote to Che from the women’s prison in Buenos Aires. “My dear,” she began. “I share my present kingdom with 15 people, almost all communists.” They were fine companions, apart from their enforcement
of an “overly iron discipline and an irredentist dogmatism” that she found trying. She didn’t know when she would be freed, “but you know that if there is someone who is well constituted to withstand prison in good humor, that’s me. It will also serve me as an exercise in humility. ... The only thing I find uncomfortable is not having a single minute of privacy in the entire day. We eat, sleep, read, and work in our cell of 14 by 6 [meters] and [exercise] in a gallery where you can see the sky through the bars and from which they throw us out when a common prisoner arrives. It seems we might infect them with a terrible contagious disease.” She played volleyball for an hour a day and had also learned some prison crafts, such as making papier-mâché dolls. “They’re horrible, but a good way to kill time.”
Apart from the lack of privacy, her biggest complaint was about the body searches she was subjected to before and after each visit, and the reading of all her letters, which she found especially humiliating. “The searches include doubtful caresses: almost all the prisoners here are lesbians and I suspect that the guards have elected this wonderful work because they have the same inclinations. ...
“I don’t know, or rather yes I do know why the government has wanted to put me in this place. ... I’ll tell you as a point of curiosity that one of the questions they asked me in the DIPA [Argentine secret police] was ‘what is your role in Fidel Castro’s government?’” She reassured Che that she hadn’t been mistreated. However, prison was “a marvelous deformatory, as much for the common prisoners as for the political ones: if you are lukewarm, you become active; if you’re active, you become aggressive; and if you’re aggressive, you become implacable.” In fact, ever since her son Ernesto had become Che, Celia had undergone a significant political radicalization. She claimed now to believe in “socialism,” although she was not a Communist and, according to people who knew her well, she didn’t really like or trust Fidel. She particularly didn’t like what she saw as his hold over her son, and Che’s subservience to him, but in spite of her private qualms about Cuba’s disorganization and incompetence, she vigorously defended the revolution.
Whatever the Argentine security forces suspected, there was a bitter irony to Celia’s imprisonment along with members of the Argentine Communist Party. Although she downplayed it in her letter, Celia’s life was made extremely difficult by her doctrinaire cellmates. According to María Elena Duarte, who was married to Celia’s youngest son, Juan Martín, “They imposed rules even the jailers didn’t impose. For instance, she liked to read, and as if to persecute her, they turned out the lights. The lights had to be turned out at such and such an hour. If she wanted to play some sport in the
patio, they told her no, that was not the correct hour for that sport. It was so cruel ... and so obviously directed against her.”
The leader of the Communist women, and the person María Elena Duarte held chiefly responsible for Celia’s ill-treatment, was Fanie Edelman, a veteran Party activist and founder of the Communist-front Argentine Women’s Union. Many years later, Edelman acknowledged that she and her comrades had “organized life in the prison” and imposed “very rigorous norms of conduct.” But she reacted with indignation at the notion that Che’s mother had been in any way singled out for persecution. “We were a harmonious group. On the contrary, we respected her a great deal, precisely because she was Che’s mama.”
*
Not long after she wrote to Che, Celia was released from prison, but she had been cut from her moorings. After the bomb incident the previous year, she and Juan Martín had left the house on Calle Araoz in the care of their Indian maid, Sabina Portugal, and moved into a small, rented apartment. Juan Martín and María Elena were soon married, and while Celia was in prison María Elena had given birth to a baby boy. Celia let them have the apartment and went to live with her daughter Celia in a dark old house on Calle Negro. María Elena and Juan Martín had asked her to stay with them, but she declined. “We have an excellent relationship and I don’t want to ruin it by living together,” she said. They saw each other frequently, meeting up most weekends at Roberto’s house, but Celia had a solitary life. “Celia had her circle of friends, her political activities, but she had compartmentalized her life in a very private, solitary kind of way,” María Elena said. “I think in some way she enjoyed the solitude. She read and thought a great deal, and was undergoing a period of reflection, a reevaluation of her political points of view.” But being Che’s mother had turned Celia’s life upside down, just as it had altered the lives of all of the family members in one way or another. As revolution and war had become features of Che’s life, bombs, imprisonment, and political
persecution had entered hers. The unique mother-son bond that Ernesto had severed during his soul-searching years on the road had been strangely restored.
In her letter from prison, Celia had wished Che a happy birthday. She said that she imagined he would spend it “submerged in the Ministry and its problems.” Then she added: “I almost forget, can you tell me about the progress of Cuba’s economy?” She undoubtedly knew that it wasn’t really a matter of progress. Ricardo Rojo’s latest trip to the island had coincided with her own visit, and he had noted a marked decline since his earlier stay. The neon signs that had once lit up Havana had been switched off; American cigarettes, no longer available, had been replaced by Cuban brands such as Criollos and Dorados; Cuba’s cars and buses looked shabby from lack of spare parts and maintenance, and hundreds of neglected U.S.-built tractors were rusting in the fields for the same reasons.
Cuba’s revolutionaries clearly had not thought through the consequences of breaking completely with the United States. The old system had been brought to a screeching halt, and the new one had not caught up with Cuba’s present needs—much less its ambitious future plans. Soviet petroleum was highly sulfuric and corroded the piping in the U.S.-built refineries, and the Eastern-bloc technicians had proved ill equipped to take over the modern American-built technology left behind in Cuba. Even the simplest logistic detail caused enormous difficulties: for example, the Soviets’ tools were metric and didn’t fit the American-manufactured machinery in Cuba.
There were other disappointments. Much of the industrial equipment bought from the Soviet bloc by Cuba had turned out to be shoddy and outdated. Oscar Fernández Mell recalled Che’s outrage over the crude file-lathing machines he had purchased from Russia. “Che used to say: ‘Look at the shit they’ve sold us!’” He was beset by a multitude of practical problems. Che told Rojo that to get Cuba’s industrialization under way, he needed to produce construction materials, but he had two large kilns standing idle because they didn’t have firebricks. “We even have to improvise screws,” he said. Textile plants had shut down because the thread they were producing was of uneven quality. And so on. “Were I to draw a conclusion about Guevara’s state of mind during those months,” Rojo wrote, “I would say that the struggle was undermining his optimism. His ingenuity seemed blunted, his spirit smothered under the mountains of statistics and production methods.”
Alberto Granado thought that Che’s malaise was also due to his loss of faith in the Soviet model he had embraced with such innocent fervor. Che told Granado that he had been a skeptic about Marxism until his discovery of
Stalin when he was in Guatemala and Mexico. He had been bowled over by what he read. “That was when he began to find a world that was not all slogans and manifestos—an important world—and I think that intoxicated him and made him feel that in the Soviet Union lay the solution to life, believing that what had been applied there was what he had read about. But, in 1963 and 1964, when he realized they had been tricking him—you know Che couldn’t stand being lied to—then came the violent reaction.”