Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
In a country where many of the men had second and even third “wives” simultaneously with their first marriage, sired children with several women, and had affairs quite openly, Che was, by all accounts, steadfastly monogamous in Cuba, despite the fact that woman flocked to him like groupies to a pop star. One of his aides was at a social gathering where a pretty young woman blatantly flirted with Che. Instead of being flatttered and responding with gallantry or banter, Che primly scolded the woman, telling her to behave herself. A friend recalled being with him at a dinner in a foreign embassy. They had been seated with the ambassador’s daughter, and it was implied that the young woman was available to Che. The daughter, said Che’s friend, was so beautiful that any man would have forgotten his marriage vows or any commitment to the revolution just to sleep with her. Che was finding it difficult to resist. He finally turned to his companion and whispered, “Find an excuse to get me out of here before I succumb. I can’t bear any more.”
Che was always suspicious of anyone who did him an unsolicited favor, seeing it as pandering or, worse, a symptom of moral corruption. A classic example is the story of the time a new bodyguard brought Che his boots, freshly shined. Che gave him a kick in the rear and called him a
guataca
, a brownnoser. Then, when the humiliated soldier hurled the boots into the street, Che punished him by docking his pay for a week. Yet Che’s devotion to those who earned his trust was reciprocated by fanatical loyalty. Known to everyone as
los hombres del Che
, they included bodyguards, accountants, economists, and revolutionary fighters. Men such as Hermes Peña, Alberto Castellanos, and Jorge Ricardo Masetti had willingly left their jobs, wives, and children to fight in his wars. He personified the revolution for them.
Masetti and his small band hacked their way through the northern Argentine wilderness for two weeks in late June and early July 1963, trying to reach their target area south of the town of Orán. Their path brought them up against great jungle cliffs, and finally they gave up and returned to the farm in Bolivia to recuperate before trying a different route. When they got back, they discovered that much had changed. The Argentine military had allowed elections to be held on July 7, and since the biggest voting bloc—the
peronistas
—were not allowed to participate, most Argentines had expected the candidate of the armed forces, the right-wing General Aramburu, to win. Instead, the centrist Radical Party of the People’s candidate, a respected sixty-three-year-old doctor from Córdoba, Arturo Illia, was elected by a slender majority.
The election results caused a crisis in the fledgling Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP). It was one thing to declare war on a military regime that had illegally seized power, but quite another to wage war against a democratically elected civilian president. “Our project disinte-grated just like that,” Ciro Bustos recalled. “We spent a couple of days doing nothing, with everything on hold.” Masetti decided to call the whole thing off. Colomé Ibarra drove to La Paz to advise Havana through the embassy there, and Federico Méndez was sent into Argentina to catch up with Jorge Vázquez-Viaña, the young Bolivian Communist who was coordinating activities with a Trotskyite splinter group. Masetti wanted him to suspend everything.
While Masetti and his men pondered what to do next, Che was in Algeria to attend the first-anniversary celebration of the Algerian revolution. He returned to Havana in time for the July 26 festivities, bringing with him Algeria’s minister of defense, Houari Boumédienne, for a public display of the alliance of Algeria and Cuba in the Afro–Asian–Latin American anti-imperialist struggle. By then, Masetti had changed his mind again. Only two days after sending Colomé Ibarra and Federico off with orders to suspend operations, he had reanalyzed the Argentine elections and decided to go ahead.
Masetti wrote what he called a “Letter from the Rebels” to President-Elect Illia. After praising him for his reputation as a civic-minded man worthy of respect, Masetti castigated Illia’s decision to “lower himself” and play the military’s game by seeking office “in the most scandalous electoral fraud in the history of the country.” He urged Illia to resign to restore his reputation and to ally himself with the Argentines who wanted to be free of the military, those “blackmailing gunmen and bodyguards for imperialism and the oligarchy.” He announced that the EGP, which was armed and
organized, had gone into the mountains. “We are the only free men in this oppressed republic ... and we won’t come down unless it is to do battle.” He signed the letter “Segundo Comandante, Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo, July 9, 1963, Campamento Augusto César Sandino ...
Revolución o Muerte
.”
Masetti told Ciro Bustos to go after Federico and rescind the suspension order. He was also to take the open letter to Illia and see that it was published, then travel to cities in Argentina where he knew people and lay the groundwork for an urban support network for the rebel force. For the next several weeks, Bustos was on the move between Córdoba, Buenos Aires, and his home city, Mendoza. He managed to have Masetti’s letter published, but only in
Compañero
, a leftist
peronista
fringe publication, where it made little impression. He was more successful in establishing a support network. In Córdoba he approached a leftist academic he had known since childhood, Oscar del Barco, a cofounder and editor of the intellectual Marxist journal
Pasado y Presente
. Bustos revealed his mission and asked for help. Within a day, del Barco had assembled a group of people, mostly intellectuals and Communist Party dissidents like himself who worked at Córdoba University’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Bustos outlined the EGP’s plan of action to them candidly. He told them that the project had Che’s backing, that the core group had trained in Cuba and Algeria, and that funds were not a problem. What they needed was recruits, safe houses, urban contacts, and suppliers—in short, a clandestine national urban infrastructure.
It was what these intellectuals had been arguing for—“revolutionary action”—a position that had earned them expulsion from the mainstream Argentine Communist Party. Within days, they had begun to organize enthusiastically, and before long a small but well-coordinated network was being set up in half a dozen cities and towns across the country, from Buenos Aires to Salta, with Córdoba as its center.
By now an important new personality had arrived at the guerrilla base—José María “Papi” Martínez Tamayo, a Cuban army captain who was one of the most valuable assets in Piñeiro’s intelligence apparatus. After serving with Raúl during the war, Papi had stayed in the military, and since late 1962 he had been Piñeiro’s envoy to various Latin American guerrilla groups. He had joined Turcios Lima in Guatemala, served as an instructor in Cuba for Tamara Bunke’s clandestine training, and helped train the Argentine Trotskyite group of Vasco Bengochea. Good-looking, strong, and energetic—“an impassioned conspirator,” Bustos remarked, “and a stupendous guy”—Papi had come to see the
foco
through its initial stages and help prepare the way for Che’s arrival. He took some of the load off the hard-pressed Colomé Ibarra, who was acting not only as the group’s permanent base commander but also as its liaison with Cuba’s embassy in La Paz,
handling communications, logistics, and arms supplies. With Papi around to do some of these tasks, Colomé Ibarra could safeguard his cover as a pioneering rural
finquero
. Over the coming months, Papi came and went constantly, between Bolivia, Argentina, and Cuba.
By September, it seemed to be time to get moving. Curious Bolivian policemen had already paid the farm a visit, no doubt having heard rumors from locals about the unusual amount of traffic at the newly purchased
finca
. Fortunately, there was only one road to the farm, and a car engine could be heard long before it arrived; the police came, poked around, and left, having seen nothing suspicious. In case they returned, a camp was built for the fighters in the forest a short distance away.
When Papi brought Alberto Castellanos to the farm in late September or early October, Masetti and his men were still there. Masetti had been in Argentina exploring, and had returned to base. Scouts had to be extremely careful and usually traveled by night, for the Argentine police of the Gendarmería Nacional, who had posts throughout the border area, patrolled constantly, on the lookout for smugglers. The rural north was very sparsely settled, and strangers, especially armed, bearded, and uniformed ones, were soon noticed. Castellanos had orders to wait for Che, but seeing that one of Masetti’s men was sick, and anxious to get into action himself, he asked Masetti to take him on as a fighter. He wrote a note to Che explaining his decision, and sent it back with Papi.
The group was still tiny. Besides the flap-eared, jovial Castellanos, who became known to everyone as El Mono (The Monkey), there were only one or two newcomers. In light of his initial success at organizing the urban network, Masetti asked Bustos to assume the duty of liaison with the outside and to begin enlisting volunteers. Among Bustos’s first recruits were the Jouve brothers from a small town in Córdoba province. Emilio and Héctor were the sons of a French-Basque émigré builder of anarchist leanings. Both in their early twenties and former members of the Communist Youth, they had grown disenchanted with the Party’s inactivity and had formed a small action group of their own in Córdoba. They had collected a few guns and had painted graffiti on walls, but had not done much else. They jumped at the chance to go to the mountains when Bustos showed up asking for volunteers. A doctor friend of Bustos, El Petiso (Shorty) Canelo, drove the recruits north. A “bookstore” was opened in the city of Salta as a cover for the storage and transport of supplies for the guerrillas. Three more volunteers arrived from Buenos Aires.
By October, Masetti and his men had moved across the border and installed themselves in a camp in the forest above the Río Pescado, some ten miles from the Argentine border town of Aguas Blancas. The camp lay in
the mountains just off the road from Salta, south of Orán. The little force began to grow, and they hiked deeper into the hills looking for peasants to engage in “armed propaganda.” This consisted of impromptu consciousness-raising talks in which they explained that they had come to liberate the peasants from poverty and injustice. But their first efforts were discouraging.
“It was shocking,” Bustos recalled. “You couldn’t even call these people
campesinos
. These lived in little bush clearings full of fleas and dogs and snot-nosed kids, with no links to the real world, nothing. They didn’t even live in the conditions of the Indians, who at least have their food, their tribes and things. These people were really lost, marginalized. They could hardly be called a social base for what we were trying to do. They were experiencing problems that were real, but their misery was such that they were completely ruined.”
The zone they had selected was sparsely populated, and to reach the isolated settlers they had to hike for hours up and down steep jungle hills, fording rivers in between. It was the rainy season and the rivers were swollen, so they spent much of the time soaked to the skin. Their muscles ached, their feet were blistered, and they were flea-bitten. Swarms of mosquitoes plagued them. With so few farmers around, food was a problem, and they depended entirely on provisions brought to them by truck from the city. This was a task that had to be done carefully, so as not to raise suspicion.
So far, the EGP could hardly be called an indigenous force. Without the help of a peasant strongman such as Crescencio Pérez, who had provided Fidel’s tiny rebel force with its first local guides, couriers, and fighters, Masetti and his men were alien transplants on foreign soil. Most of his volunteers were city boys, young middle-class university students impelled by visions of becoming heroic guerrillas and creating a new utopian society. A few had been through obligatory military service, were physically fit, and could handle weapons, and some others adapted; but most were ill-equipped to deal with the rugged terrain, the exhausting marches, the lack of food, and the rigid military discipline demanded by Masetti.
The darker side of Masetti’s personality began to appear more and more frequently. His frustration over the slow beginning, exacerbated by the political transformation in Argentina, turned to a kind of simmering rage as he led his greenhorn guerrillas fitfully around the sodden jungle. He channeled his anger mostly against the newcomers who found it tough going, contemptuously calling them
pan blanco
(white bread), and meting out strict punishments for petty errors—extra guard duty, mule work carrying supplies, and in some cases hunger diets for two or three days. Hermes Peña, the tough
guajiro
from Cuba’s Oriente and a veteran of war and Che’s strict discipline, backed him up.
Masetti had his favorites, such as Héctor “El Cordobés” Jouve, whom he made his political commissar at the same time that he assigned Bustos to continue his role as the coordinator between the
foco
and the city. Jouve was tall, physically fit, and had been in the military; he took to the guerrilla life with ease. Those who didn’t, however, soon found themselves under Masetti’s brutal scrutiny. Just as he had focused on the unlucky Miguel as the object of his hostility in Algeria, Masetti now cast his gaze among the youths who had joined him, watching for a new potential deserter. He soon found him.
Adolfo Rotblat was a Jewish boy of twenty from Buenos Aires whom they called Pupi. He suffered from asthma and began lagging behind on the marches, complaining about the harshness of guerrilla life. It was obvious he wasn’t cut out for it, but instead of letting him leave, Masetti dragged him along. With every day that passed, Pupi’s physical and mental state deteriorated. Soon he was completely broken.
When he rejoined the guerrillas in October for a few weeks, Bustos found Pupi in a pathetic condition. He lived in a state of terror, wept, fell behind in the marches, and slowed everyone down. Men had to be sent back to drag him forward. The others were disgusted by him. “A process of degradation began,” Bustos recalled. One day he went out with Pupi on a reconnaissance hike and they became lost. Finally Bustos found his bearings at a river, but Pupi refused to cross it. “He wanted me to kill him right there,” Bustos said. “Finally I pulled out a pistol and put it against his head and I made him walk like that, more or less by force ... kicking him in the ass. I made him walk until night fell.” Unable to see well enough to continue, they slept in the forest. Bustos tried to console Pupi, who was deeply depressed. The next morning they set out again. Halfway to the camp they found Hermes Peña, who had been sent to look for them. Once again, because of Pupi, the group had been held up.