Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
A few days later, Masetti told Bustos, “Look, this situation is becoming unbearable. No one can stand it anymore. Nobody wants to carry him, and so a measure has to be taken that sanitizes the group’s psychology, that liberates it from this thing that is corroding it.” Masetti had decided to shoot him.
Masetti decided to kill Pupi the night three new volunteers arrived in camp, and he selected one of them, Pirincho, a student from a wealthy and aristocratic Buenos Aires family, to carry out the task. The way Bustos understood it, Masetti wanted to harden Pirincho, whose gentle, diplomatic personality bothered him. “He wanted hard fighters, guys of steel who responded to him,” Bustos said. Pupi had been unwittingly prepared for his execution—given tranquilizers and tied into his hammock, which was hung a short distance from the camp. The others gathered. Masetti explained what
had to be done and ordered Pirincho to do it. Pirincho’s face told it all—he was terrified—but he complied.
“Pirincho went ... and we heard the shot,” Bustos said. “Then he came back, saying desperately, ‘He won’t die’ ... and so I go there and see he’s got a bullet in the head. He is a dead guy but convulsing, and I decided to end it.”
Bustos pulled out his pistol, fired a bullet into Pupi’s brain, and returned to his comrades. Pirincho’s face showed that he was devastated by his experience, but everyone else was in high spirits. “Suddenly there was euphoria,” Bustos said. “It reminded me of when someone dies and everyone feels the necessity to have a lunch and drink toasts. ... Segundo [Masetti] handed out promotions and began making plans about moving to another zone.”
It was November 5, 1963. The raison d’être of the EGP had been consecrated by bloodshed. But it was already too late. The
gendarmería
had picked up the rumors spreading among locals about a group of armed strangers in the forests around Orán. Inquiries were made to local cattle ranchers and rural storekeepers who had sighted them, and a suspicious profile began to emerge; by the year’s end, there seemed little doubt that the men in the forest were the same rebels who had sent the communiqué to Illia. The security forces began making plans to infiltrate the area.
Papi told Masetti that he thought they were staying too long in one place, that the zone they were in was not appropriate for building a guerrilla
foco
. He proposed opening up a second front in the
chaco
region, east of the Andean precordillera region they were installed in. Federico Méndez had lived there for years and was well connected. For fighters, Papi suggested activating Vasco Bengochea’s Trotskyite group in Tucumán province, which he had trained in Cuba; Papi could be the military chief, and he would take Héctor Jouve with him as the responsible politico.
Masetti angrily rejected the idea and accused Papi and Jouve of trying to undermine his authority. “You’ve always wanted to be
comandante
,” he told Jouve. “But I’m not going to let you—you’re staying here.”
Papi had brought one of Che’s
hombres de confianza
, Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada, to the Bolivian base camp. He had been
auditor revolucionario
, or judge, in the Escambray and the summary tribunal judge in La Cabaña, and he was the Special Operations man at INRA. Duque’s job was to wait at the farm until Che arrived, and then go into the battle zone with him. Meanwhile, Alberto Castellanos had developed a bad throat infection, and by December it became obvious that he needed an operation. Their courier, Dr. Canelo, took him to Córdoba and arranged an operation. For public purposes, Castellanos was Raúl Dávila, a Peruvian. He spent Christmas and New Year’s in Córdoba, had his operation, and stayed on in the
city through the month of January, convalescing. During that time, Papi showed up in Córdoba to inform Castellanos that Che wasn’t coming just yet, and that Duque had been withdrawn from the farm and returned to Havana. Che’s orders were for the group to “keep exploring ... not to recruit peasants until we are ready to fight.”
Back in Havana, the ground beneath Che was shifting. He had new enemies, at home and abroad. The Sino-Soviet split was now fiercer than ever, and both Beijing and Moscow were vying for the loyalty of the world’s Communist parties. In Latin America, the race for influence had caused open ruptures as
pro-chino
factions broke away to form their own parties. Most of the Latin American Communist parties depended on subsidies from Moscow for their survival and had quickly aligned themselves with the Soviet Union. Put to the squeeze, the Cuban government had finally abandoned its officially neutralist posture, with Fidel himself implicitly supporting the Soviet position during his trip to the U.S.S.R. in the spring of 1963. Khrushchev had treated him like a conquering hero and Fidel had reveled in the acclaim. A joint Soviet-Cuban declaration lauded Cuba as a fully recognized member of the socialist community. Moscow formally pledged to defend Cuba’s “independence and liberty,” while Fidel reaffirmed Cuba’s support for “socialist unity” and for Moscow’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West. It was a rhetorical vote of support, more tepid than Khrushchev would have liked but just enough to make the Chinese nervous without alienating them completely. Fidel probably thought it was a fair trade, and he came home laden with new Soviet economic commitments for Cuba. Just in time, for Cuba’s economy was in dire straits. The 1963 sugar harvest, at less than 4 million tons, was the lowest in years, and the rest of the economy was crumbling.
Che may have been the original architect of the Soviet-Cuban relationship, but his call to armed struggle, his emphasis on rural guerrilla warfare, and his stubborn determination to train, arm, and fund Communist Party dissidents—even Trotskyites—over the protests of their national organizations had led to a growing suspicion in Moscow that he was playing Mao’s game. A KGB agent, Oleg Darushenkov, had been assigned to stay close to Che since late 1962. His official cover duty in Havana was as the Soviet embassy’s cultural attaché, but he also served as Che’s Russian-language interpreter. His sunstroke-prone predecessor, Yuri Pevtsov, had been withdrawn for health reasons after only a year in Cuba, just before the missile crisis. Che’s own feelings about Darushenkov aren’t recorded, but several people who were part of his inner circle at the time expressed their belief—in
off-the-record interviews—that Darushenkov was a “provocateur” whose real mission was to spy on Che.
Many in the Kremlin, especially after the missile crisis, feared that Cuba’s escalating support for guerrilla “adventures,” which everyone knew was being spearheaded by Che, might drag the Soviet Union into a new confrontation with the United States. “After the crisis, there was concern over what the Cubans might do,” Giorgi Kornienko, Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin’s deputy at the Washington embassy during the crisis, said. “We didn’t want our relations with the U.S. complicated further because of those activities.”
Feder Burlatsky, a former adviser to Khrushchev, said that in senior circles of the Soviet Central Committee, opinion was divided between officials who supported Che and a more predominant group who distrusted him. Burlatsky counted himself among the latter group. “We disliked Che’s position. He became an example for adventurers, which could have provoked a confrontation between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.” Burlatsky said the view that Che was a dangerous character took on added weight because of his remarks after the missile crisis, when he told the Soviets that they should have used their missiles. It was a sentiment that Fidel had also expressed privately, but Che had said so publicly—and whereas Fidel soon modified his rhetoric, few doubted that Che meant what he said. Che echoed the sentiments of many Cubans, but his words were embarrassing since they came from such a high-level revolutionary figure. More pointedly, they echoed Beijing’s accusation that the Soviets had capitulated to Washington.
“That’s why Che was seen as dangerous, as against our own strategy,” Burlatsky said. “But there was still some sympathy for him,” he acknowledged. “There was a romantic aura around him; he reminded people of the Russian Revolution. ... Opinion was divided. ... Some compared him to Trotsky, or to some of the Bolshevik terrorists. Advisers of Khrushchev like [Mikhail] Suslov, who described themselves as revolutionaries, had sympathy for Che.”
The opposition to Che took on real vigor with regard to his guerrilla expeditions in Peru and Argentina. It was spearheaded by Victorio Codovilla’s powerful Argentine Communist Party. Kiva Maidanek, an eminent Soviet Communist Party analyst of Latin American affairs, was well aware of the Argentine lobby in Moscow against Che, and its repercussions. She said that the Argentine Party accused Che of being an adventurer, pro-Chinese, and a Trotskyite. “This offended Che a great deal,” Maidanek said. “But the view took on weight here, especially in the Latin America section of the Central Committee. Anything to the left of the Soviet line was considered pro-Chinese and pro-Trotskyite. The U.S.S.R. began to incline
toward the [Latin American] Communist parties. Beginning in 1964, the Latin American area was seen less as a battleground between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and more as a war of influence between China and the U.S.S.R.”
Che had continued to test the limits of Soviet tolerance. In September 1963, emboldened by Fidel’s Second Havana Declaration (decreeing the inevitability of revolution in Latin America), which he had begun to cite as the guiding philosophy of the Cuban revolution, Che had outlined his call for continental guerrilla war in an ideologically refined sequel to his
Guerrilla Warfare
how-to manual. The sequel was called “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method.” In a rebuke to the Latin American Communist parties’ claims to leadership in the struggle of their countries, Che wrote, “To be the vanguard of the Party means to be at the forefront of the working class through the struggle for achieving power. It means to know how to guide this fight through shortcuts to victory.” He bolstered his argument with a quote from Fidel: “The subjective conditions in each country, the factors of revolutionary consciousness, of organization, of leadership, can accelerate or delay revolution, depending on the state of their development. Sooner or later, in each historic epoch, as objective conditions ripen, consciousness is acquired, organization is achieved, leadership arises, and revolution is produced.”
Something palpably new had emerged in Che’s call to arms. There was less reliance on the old Communist euphemism “armed struggle,” in favor of the far more candid “violence.” “Violence is not the monopoly of the exploiters and as such the exploited can use it, too, and, what is more, ought to use it when the moment arrives. ... We should not fear violence, the midwife of new societies; but violence should be unleashed at that precise moment in which the leaders have found the most favorable circumstances. ... Guerrilla warfare is not passive self-defense; it is defense with attack. ... It has as its final goal the conquest of political power. ... The equilibrium between oligarchic dictatorship and popular pressure must be changed. The dictatorship tries to function without resorting to force. Thus we must try to oblige the dictatorship to resort to violence, thereby unmasking its true nature as the dictatorship of the reactionary social classes.”
In order to outwit the Yankees, who would do all they could to divide, conquer, and repress the rebelling peoples, the revolution in Latin America must be of a continental nature. “The unity of the repressive forces must be met with the unity of the popular forces. In all countries where oppression reaches intolerable proportions, the banner of rebellion must be raised; and this banner of historical necessity will have a continental character. As Fidel stated, the cordilleras of the Andes will be the Sierra Maestra of Latin America; and the immense territories which this continent encompasses
will become the scene of a life or death struggle against imperialism. ... This means that it will be a protracted war; it will have many fronts; and it will cost much blood and countless lives for a long period of time. ... This is a prediction. We make it with the conviction that history will prove us right.”
The rich nation of Argentina had long been coveted by the Kremlin, and leaders of theArgentine Communist Party received preferential treatment in Moscow and wielded an unusual degree of influence over Soviet policy in Latin America. With few exceptions, the other regional parties lent their voices to the Argentine position, and by late 1963 their message was the same: Che was intervening in their countries and had to be reined in.
“There was a whole group of comrades who were of the opinion that we had to help the Cuban comrades become Marxists, true Marxists, because they weren’t sufficiently prepared theoretically,” Nikolai Metutsov, Party Secretary Yuri Andropov’s deputy in charge of relations with the non-European socialist states, said. “Among some leaders in the Central Committee department where I worked there was an opinion that we had to embrace our Cuban friends as strongly as possible, to squeeze them so they would not be able to breathe.” Metutsov, whose last foreign post had been Beijing, was dispatched to Havana. “For me, for Andropov, for Khrushchev, of course, and other members of the Politburo, the first thing was to clarify the theoretical and ideological positions of the Cuban leaders,” Metutsov said. It was imperative in particular, he said, to determine their positions on what he called “the theoretical problems of the global revolutionary process,” a euphemism for the rivalry between Beijing and Moscow.
Metutsov traveled to Cuba at the end of 1963 in a Soviet delegation led by Nikolai Podgorny, president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. When he spoke about his mission many years later, he made it clear that neither Fidel nor Raúl was really the issue. “We knew about the process by which they had come to Marxism, how sincere their comprehension of Marxism was. ... We knew that in essence Fidel was a liberal bourgeois democrat, and we knew that his brother Raúl was closer to the Communists and was in the Party. Now, about Che Guevara: he seemed to me to be the most prepared theoretically of all the political leadership.”