Che Guevara (100 page)

But Che’s protestations of innocence sounded disingenuous to most of the Soviet leadership. He had made no secret of his view that the Chinese displayed a truer socialist “morality” than the Soviets. His preference was well known among his aides. Orlando Borrego pointed out that the only Chinese technicians working in Cuba were attached to Che’s ministry and worked for free, while the Soviets required salaries and housing, paid for out of the credits Moscow provided to Fidel’s government. Che had allied himself time and again with the Chinese. Any attention he received from Beijing could be seen only as having been asked for.

The suspicion had cast a pall over his work in Cuba and his dealings with some of his closest comrades, even Raúl Castro. Since the days in Mexico and the sierra when Raúl had been Che’s chief ally and had shown deference to him, their relationship had steadily deteriorated to the point of becoming adversarial. Some say that the turning point was the negotiations over the Soviet missiles in the summer of 1962, when Che had been called in to do “clean-up duty” after Raúl. As Che’s own relations with Moscow soured, Raúl had become increasingly pro-Soviet and was reportedly given to cracking jokes about Che’s being “China’s man” in Cuba.

Che was also engaged in a fierce, if fraternal, ideological debate over the direction and control of Cuba’s economy. He advocated a “budgetary finance system,” whereby state-owned enterprises shared assets and resources communally instead of competing among themselves in the system of “state capitalism” practiced and advocated by the Soviet Union. His main opponents were Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, whom Fidel had put in charge of agriculture as the INRA chief; and Marcelo Fernández, Che’s old July 26 sparring partner, who was now at the Ministry for Foreign Trade.

At the core of the ideological dispute was Che’s insistence upon the application of “moral incentives” in addition to “material incentives.” The system employed in the Soviet Union had grown out of the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1924 as a way of jump-starting the stagnant Soviet economy after the civil war. It allowed for capitalist forms of competition between factories and individual workers as a means of increasing
production. Che believed that the system prevented workers from achieving a true socialist regard for their labor, a regard that only moral incentives could achieve. This was the impetus behind his volunteer labor scheme, which was meant to demonstrate willingness to sacrifice for the common good.

Also at issue was the direction of Cuba’s economy. Che’s dream of bringing about rapid industrialization in Cuba had soon bogged down. He accepted part of the blame himself for having moved too fast, with an unprepared workforce and insufficient resources, but there were other factors beyond his control: incompetence, lack of technical expertise, and often the poor quality of equipment and materials imported from the Soviet bloc. By mid-1964, with the new Soviet-Cuban sugar deal, and Khrushchev’s offer to help invent a cane-cutting machine to mechanize Cuba’s sugar harvests, it was fairly clear that agriculture, not industry, was what the future held for Cuba—and this undercut Che’s dream of creating the New Socialist Man.

Finally, Che was not a Cuban but an Argentine, and although he never said so publicly, he must have felt that Cuba was “their” country, after all. He had trained loyal cadres who believed in his methods, and they could carry on the battle in his absence; but it was time for him to leave the scene. Perhaps Che was also becoming aware of his age. He was now almost thirty-six; he could still march and fight and lead men. If he waited much longer, it would be too late. The question was, where would he go?

The clandestine guerrilla infrastructure in South America had been shaken but not shattered by the fiasco in Salta. With the exception of Alberto Castellanos, the Bolivians and Cubans who were involved had come out unscathed, as had the urban underground in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, and other Argentine cities. Most of the damage had been limited to the guerrillas themselves and to their immediate support network in Salta. Even as Masetti’s column collapsed, Che had deployed an important new asset: Tania, as Tamara Bunke was now known. She had adopted the nom de guerre when a mission was proposed to her by Barbarroja Piñeiro in the spring of 1963. She selected the name in honor of the Soviet guerrilla fighter Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja, aka Tania, who was captured, tortured, and hanged by the Nazis in 1941.

When Tania had finished her espionage training, in March 1964, Che summoned her to his office at the Ministry of Industries. One of Piñeiro’s top agents, whose pseudonym was Renán Montero, was with him. Renán had participated in several missions, including the ill-fated Nicaraguan
guerrilla expedition with Rodolfo Romero in 1959. Che informed Tania that he wanted her to go to Bolivia, to be his deep-cover agent there. She would establish a false identity and become acquainted with as many of the country’s leaders as she could. She would remain indefinitely, to be activated when the right moment came. According to Piñeiro, Tania had been selected for Bolivia because, among her other talents, she spoke German, which would be useful for penetrating Bolivia’s influential German émigré community. He said she was not informed that Che eventually planned to join her there.

Tania left the meeting with a feeling of pride; Che had recognized her merits and assigned her a vital role in the continental revolution. Shortly afterward, she left Cuba in disguise to travel around Western Europe and acquaint herself with places associated with her false identity, her
leyenda
. For about six months, Tania traveled under various passports and different assumed identities that had been concocted for her by her Cuban handlers. She journeyed to West Germany and Italy, but spent most of her time at various safe houses in Czechoslovakia. Eventually, it was decided that she would “become” Laura Gutiérrez Bauer, an Argentine who had lived for some years in Germany.

Following the meeting with Tania, Che summoned Ciro Bustos to Havana for a debriefing and to issue him new instructions. Since the Masetti debacle, Bustos had been engaged in mopping up while waiting for his marching orders. With the help of the academics in Córdoba, he had put together the legal defense team for the prisoners and had smuggled Abelardo Colomé Ibarra and two other conspirators, “Petíso” Bellomo and Héctor Jouve’s brother Emilio, to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he rented a safe house.

Most significantly, Bustos had orchestrated the transfer of arms to two independent groups from the weapons caches intended for the Salta
foco
. One of the groups was the Argentine Trotskyite splinter faction of Vasco Bengochea, which intended to open a new
foco
in Tucumán province, and the other was a nascent group led by Raúl Sendíc, the leader of the Uruguayan
cañeros
, a leftist movement of sugarcane cutters. Bustos’s meeting with the latter was cloaked in clandestine drama. “Sendíc asked to meet with me through some contacts of Petíso Bellomo,” Bustos recalled. “The meeting took place one Sunday afternoon on a beach of El Cerro, on the industrial outskirts of Montevideo. He was disguised as a poor old fisherman and I as a solitary stroller. Beyond, not far away, some youths—his guys—played soccer on the beach. A little closer, was
el gordo
Emilio, Héctor’s brother, serving as my backup ‘fisherman.’ Sendíc questioned me extensively on the reasons for the Salta failure and asked me for two things: a training course in security and some ‘irons’ [arms].”

Bustos agreed to train one of Sendíc’s men in the basics of security and espionage. (Three decades later, Bustos observed with some irony that his student had become a well-known and respected economist working for the Uruguayan government.) He also authorized Emilio to transfer part of the EGP’s arms cache in Uruguay to Sendíc’s group. Bustos’s decision to aid the Uruguayans was much more significant than he realized at the time. From this humble beginning, Sendíc’s organization soon became renowned as the sophisticated Tupamaro urban guerrilla movement, whose actions would shake Uruguayan society to the core.

For his meeting in Havana with Che, Bustos traveled with Pancho Aricó, editor of
Pasado y Presente
and the ideological mentor of the Córdoba support group. Aricó was the only one of the group who had gone to see Masetti in the mountains. Since then he had become convinced—as had his colleagues, Oscar del Barco and Héctor “Toto” Schmucler—that Che’s
foco
theory wouldn’t work in Argentina. “Pancho went to Cuba to see Che, carrying our critical views, that we thought the rural guerrilla thing wouldn’t work tactically,” Schmucler recalled. “But when he got there, he couldn’t open his mouth. Che talked for two or three hours, and Pancho didn’t say anything.” Afterward, Aricó told his friends that once he was sitting in front of Che, he was overcome by the force of Che’s presence and arguments and was too intimidated to contradict anything. “It was
Che
,” he said.

Bustos, who met with Che several times to go over what had happened in Salta and to decide on a new plan of action, had a similar story. Che said he could not fathom why some of the men had starved to death. Bustos tried to explain the conditions of the jungle around Orán, an area with virtually no peasants and no food; the difficulties of hunting, how at one point the guerrillas had shot a tapir but found it impossible to eat because the meat simply decomposed. “When I told him that, Che said no, they should have boiled it longer, so that the acids converted or something, and then it would have been fine.”

Che believed firmly that the creation of a rural guerrilla
foco
was possible if it were done correctly. Bustos had his doubts, but unlike Aricó he had not lost all hope. Any new attempt, he felt, should concentrate on building up infrastructure, spread out over several zones to ensure survival. The guerrillas couldn’t expect to live off the land by hunting; nor could they rely, as Masetti’s group had, on a flow of canned goods from the city, with pickup trucks coming and going suspiciously in a pattern that ultimately alerted the police. They needed to blend into an area and be as self-sufficent as possible. Bustos said that Che agreed with him. “He told me: ‘Tie things up well here, then go back and put your plan in action. Start working with the people. Make use of the [Communist and Peronist] splinter groups, and let’s
see what develops.’” Bustos understood that he was to work with whichever group was willing to embark on the armed struggle, and simultaneously to try to forge a coordinated national guerrilla front. There was to be no politico-military commander named for now, no imminent call-up to the mountains. The preparatory work was of indefinite duration.

One very big obstacle to all this was going to be money. Bustos said that Che didn’t give him a budget as such but did provide him with “some help.” They discussed fund-raising, and Bustos mentioned an “expropriations” strategy advocated by some of his action-minded comrades: robbing banks. It was the same proposal Che had made when he arrived to take command of the revolutionary forces in Las Villas in late 1958, but this was a different situation; Cuba had been in a full-fledged state of civil war, and Che had been in command personally. Conditions weren’t the same in Argentina, and he didn’t want things to get out of hand there before the insurrection had taken root. Che ruled out the bank robbery scheme. “Not at this stage,” he told Bustos. “If you start out by robbing banks you end up as a bank robber.”

Before leaving, Bustos saw Colomé Ibarra, Ariel, and Papi, and they worked out logistics: entry lines and contact points for receiving and sending messages, people, and money to and from Havana. Uruguay, one of the last countries in Latin America to maintain diplomatic relations with Cuba, would remain their relay station for the time being.

On May 20, while he was still in Cuba, Bustos received a cable informing him of an explosion on Calle Posadas in downtown Buenos Aires. Vasco Bengochea and four of his men had been making bombs on the sixth floor of an apartment building and had blown themselves to pieces. That was the end of the Tucumán group. It was another setback, but Bustos recalled that Che seemed fairly unperturbed about the incident.

After Bustos’s departure, Che and Fidel had a temporary falling-out over strategy. In the midst of sharpening language from the Johnson administration, which tightened trade sanctions and renewed measures by the OAS to isolate Cuba, Fidel embarked on an appeasement offensive. In July, he gave a series interviews to a correspondent for
The New York Times
, Richard Eder, in which he obliquely offered to end Cuba’s support for Latin America’s revolutionary movements if the hostilities against Cuba ceased. For Fidel, it was a matter of realpolitik. He had learned his lesson in the art of quid pro quo the hard way by watching Khrushchev during and after the missile crisis. (Khrushchev had pursued talks with Washington and signed a nuclear test–ban treaty in August 1963.) Fidel hinted strongly to Eder that he had received advice from the Soviet Union for his gesture, and he made it clear that he hoped Johnson would defeat the conservative Republican,
Senator Barry Goldwater, in the upcoming presidential election. He looked forward to resuming with Johnson the exploratory talks about détente that had begun with John Kennedy.

The day after Fidel’s remarks were published, the State Department released a statement flatly rejecting his olive branch. There could be no negotiations with Cuba as long as it was tied to the Soviet Union and continued to “promote subversion in Latin America.” Fidel maintained an unusually diplomatic silence despite the rebuff. He even managed to avoid provocation when, on July 19, a Cuban soldier was killed by a gunshot fired by an American from within the Guantánamo base. Raúl spoke at the huge funeral that was held for the dead man and made clear that he was following his brother’s cue. The shot fired, he said, was aimed at Cuba and at President Johnson and against the cause of peace. If Goldwater was elected, there would be war.

Within a few days, however, Che made his own uncompromising views public. On July 24, speaking at a factory in Santa Clara, he reminded his listeners that it was their common duty to fight imperialism “whenever it appears and with all the weapons at our disposal.” It didn’t matter, he said, who the Americans elected as their president; the enemy was the same. This was the closest Che had ever come to a public rebuttal of the doctrine espoused by
el jefe máximo
, and if Fidel took him to task, he did so behind closed doors. Two days later, the OAS voted to impose mandatory sanctions on Cuba and ordered all those member states that had not severed ties with Cuba to do so. One holdout, Brazil, had already broken off relations in May, and now the stragglers followed suit. In August, Bolivia and Chile broke off ties; they were followed in September by Uruguay. Mexico was the only nation that refused to go along with the ruling.