Che Guevara (104 page)

After leaving China, Che stopped in Paris, where he took a few hours off to tour the Louvre. Then he returned to Africa. Over the next month, in Algeria, Tanzania, and Egypt, he met again with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ben Bella, and Julius Nyerere, and began to take soundings for his ambitious plan for pan-African revolution. Dar es Salaam, where white colonial rule was a very fresh memory, was the crucial stop on his itinerary. Built on a lagoon bordering the Indian Ocean in the 1860s as the site for the Arab sultan of Zanzibar’s summer palace, Dar es Salaam had been the
capital of the colony of German East Africa until World War I. Then the British had taken over and ruled it as the colony of Tanganyika until granting independence in 1961. Since then, under the leftist president Julius Nyerere, “Dar” had become the headquarters for numerous African guerrilla movements. It was a promising revolutionary outpost. The U.S. embassy had been shut after the two countries had severed relations the previous year, and the Cubans had opened one of their own.

But Che’s first encounters with African revolutionaries were disappointing. In what he titled “the first act” of a book—
Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria (Congo)
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—that he wrote about his Congolese experience, Che recalled his initial meetings with the men he derisively called, in English, “freedom fighters.” These men, he noted, had a common “leitmotif.” Almost all were living comfortably in Dar es Salaam’s hotels and all invariably wanted the same things from him, “military training in Cuba and monetary help.”

The first thing that struck Che about the Congolese rebel leaders was their “extraordinary number of tendencies and diverse opinions.” Gaston Soumaliot, the self-styled “president of northeastern Congo,” whose forces had liberated a swath of territory in eastern Congo to which they had access from Tanzanian territory across Lake Tanganyika, was vague and inscrutable. Che described him as “little developed politically,” and certainly not a “leader of nations.” He noted Soumaliot’s rivalry with some of his comrades on the National Liberation Council, especially Christophe Gbenye, whose fighters had seized Stanleyville.

A rebel leader who did impress Che was Laurent Kabila, a French-schooled Congolese in his mid-twenties who was the overall military commander of Soumaliot’s eastern front. Che found Kabila’s exposition about the struggle “clear, concrete, and firm,” although Kabila too spoke ill of fellow council leaders, such as Gbenye and even Soumaliot himself. Che later noted that Kabila had lied to him in their first meeting. Kabila announced that he had just arrived “from the interior” of the Congo, but, as Che later learned, he had merely been to the seedy bar-and-brothel port of Kigoma on the Tanzanian shore of Lake Tanganyika. Che chose to ignore Kabila’s bluster, however, in light of his avowedly leftist worldview. “Kabila understood perfectly that the principal enemy was North American imperialism,” Che wrote, “and
he said he was consequently ready to fight against it to the end; his declarations and his self-assuredness gave me ... a very good impression.” Finding a receptive ear for the concept upon which his entire African plan hinged, Che told Kabila of his distress at the shortsighted resistance to outside involvement in the Congolese rebellion by many of the African states. “Our viewpoint is that the problem of the Congo is a problem of the world,” he said. When Kabila agreed with him, Che offered Cuba’s support on the spot. “In the name of the [Cuban] Government I offered some thirty instructors and whatever arms we might have and he accepted with pleasure; he recommended speed in the delivery of both things, which Soumaliot had also done in another conversation, the latter recommending that the instructors be blacks.”

Che decided to take the pulse of the other freedom fighters in town. He had planned to meet them in separate groups for informal talks, but “by mistake,” he wrote, the Cuban embassy assembled a “tumultuous gathering ... of fifty or more people, representatives of the movements of ten or more countries, each one divided into two or more tendencies.” Che found himself faced with a roomful of guerrillas who almost unanimously requested Cuba’s financial support and the training of fighters in Cuba. To their exasperation, Che begged off, arguing that to train their men in Cuba would be costly and wasteful, that true guerrilla fighters were developed on the battlefield, not in military “academies.” “Therefore, I proposed that the training should be carried out not in our faraway Cuba, but in the nearby Congo, where the struggle was not merely against a common puppet like Tshombe, but against North American imperialism.”

The Congolese struggle, Che insisted, was extremely important. Its victory would have “continental repercussions,” as would its defeat. What Che envisioned was a Cuban-led “grand
foco
” in the eastern Congo, where the guerrillas of surrounding countries could come and, by helping in the war to “liberate” the Congo, gain fighting and organizational experience to do battle in their own countries. “The reaction,” Che acknowledged, “was more than cold. Although the majority abstained from any kind of commentary, there were those who asked to speak to reproach me violently for my advice. They said their people, mistreated and brutalized by imperialism, would demand an accounting if their men died ... in wars to liberate another State. I tried to make them see that what we were dealing with was not a war waged within national boundaries, but a continental war against the common master, as omnipresent in Mozambique as in Malawi, Rhodesia, or South Africa, the Congo or Angola.”
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Nobody in the room agreed with him, Che wrote. “Coldly and courteously they said good-bye.” He was left with the clear impression
that Africa faced a long road ahead before it would acquire a true revolutionary direction. What he was left with, then, was “the task of selecting a group of black Cubans, voluntarily of course, to reinforce the Congolese struggle.”

In Cairo, according to Nasser’s personal adviser, Muhammad Heikal, Che revealed his plans for the Congo, but when he mentioned that he was thinking of leading the Cuban military expedition himself, Nasser told him that it would be a mistake to become directly involved in the conflict, that if he thought he could be like “Tarzan, a white man among blacks, leading and protecting them,” he was wrong. Nasser felt it was a proposition that could only end badly.

Despite such warnings, the poor reception his strategies had received in Dar es Salaam, his own doubts about the Congolese rebel leaders he had met, and his lack of hard information about the real situation inside the Congo, Che resolved to push ahead. His last speech on the African continent was also his swan song as a public figure or, as it is sometimes discreetly referred to in Cuba,
su último cartucho
(his last bullet). On February 25, in Algiers, speaking before the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity, Che discarded all ambiguity and called upon the socialist superpowers to support Third World liberation movements and to underwrite the costs of transforming underdeveloped nations into socialist societies.

During his trip abroad in 1964, Che met with the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a leading “anti-imperialist.” Anwar al-Sadat is next to Che.

Che addressed the forty-odd African and Asian delegations—representing a colorful array of Third World states, newly independent nations, and active guerrilla movements—as “brothers.” Then “on behalf of the peoples of America,” Che defined the cause that united his part of the world with theirs as the “common aspiration to defeat imperialism.” Many of those present were from nations either struggling against or recently freed from old-style colonialism, he noted, whereas Cuba had triumphed over the other form of imperialism that dominated the Americas—neocolonialism—the co-option and exploitation of underdeveloped countries through “monopolistic capital.” To prevent this from happening in the new societies being forged, he declared, it was “imperative to obtain political power and liquidate the oppressing classes.

“There are no frontiers in this struggle to the death,” he said. “We cannot remain indifferent in the face of what occurs in any part of the world. A victory for any country against imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for us all. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only a duty for the peoples who struggle for a better future; it is also an inescapable necessity. ... If there were no other basis for unity, the common enemy should constitute one.”

It was not only in their vital interest but a “duty” of the developed socialist countries to help make the separation between the new underdeveloped nations and the capitalist world effective. “From all this,” Che said, “a conclusion must be drawn: the development of the countries that now begin the road to liberation must be underwritten by the socialist countries. We say it in this manner without the least desire to blackmail anyone or to be spectacular. ... It is a profound conviction. There can be socialism only if there is change in man’s consciousness that will provoke a new fraternal attitude toward humanity on the individual level in the society that builds or has built socialism and also on a world level in relation to all the peoples who suffer imperialist oppression.”

Che then rebuked the developed socialist states for their talk of “mutually beneficial” trade agreements with the poorer ones. “How can ‘mutual benefit’ mean selling at world market prices raw materials that cost unlimited sweat and suffering to the backward countries and buying at world market prices the machines produced in the large automated factories of today? If we establish that type of relationship between the two groups of nations, we must agree that the socialist countries are, to a certain extent, accomplices to imperialist exploitation. It can be argued that the amount of trade with the underdeveloped countries constitutes an
insignificant part of the foreign trade of the socialist countries. It is a great truth, but it does not do away with the immoral nature of the exchange. The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the West.”

Che was aiming his attack directly at Moscow, which, along with China, had sent observers to the forum. Although he took care to credit both nations for giving Cuba advantageous trade agreements for its sugar exports, he stressed that this was only a first step. Prices had to be fixed to permit real development in the poor nations, and this new fraternal concept of foreign trade should be extended by the socialist powers to all underdeveloped nations on the road toward socialism.

This was not the first time Che had criticized what he saw to be the Soviet Union’s capitalist-style “profiteering” in its trade with Cuba or its relationships with other developing nations—his views were widely known among the revolutionary elite in Havana—but it was the first time he had been critical in an international forum. By doing so, he was consciously and willfully pushing the limits, evidently hoping to “shame” Moscow into action—and he wasn’t done yet. He called for a “large compact bloc” of nations to help others liberate themselves from imperialism and from the economic structures it had imposed on them. This meant that weapons from the arms-producing socialist countries should be given “without any cost whatsoever and in quantities determined by their need and availability to those people who ask for them.”

Again, Che paused to credit the Soviet Union and China for having followed this principle in giving military aid to Cuba, but then he chastized them once more. “We are socialists, and this constitutes the guarantee of the proper utilization of those arms; but we are not the only one, and all must receive the same treatment.” He singled out the beleaguered North Viet-namese—whose country had come under systematic American bombardment just two weeks earlier—and the Congolese as worthy recipients of the “unconditional solidarity” he was demanding.

Not surprisingly, the Soviets were outraged by Che’s speech. Calling the Kremlin “an accomplice with imperialism” was an astounding breach of protocol within the socialist bloc, and, considering the degree to which Moscow was already bankrolling Cuba, Che’s speech was nothing less than an ungrateful slap in the face.

As Che wound up his long peregrination—from Algiers back to Egypt again before flying on to Prague on March 12—new developments in the Congo seemed to bear out requests by Soumaliot and Kabila for speed in delivering the promised Cuban instructors and arms. The white mercenaries assembled by Mike Hoare had gone into action against the rebels, leading government troops in ground assaults and carrying out aerial bombing raids. They
seized several key outposts and quickly threatened the “liberated territory” along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. If Cuba was going to throw itself into the Congolese conflict, the time to act would be very soon.

Just as Kremlinologists looking for signs of power shifts once carefully observed the placement of the Politburo members during celebrations on Red Square, Che’s reception in Havana following his provocative speech in Algiers was long scrutinized for evidence of either cameraderie or conflict between him and Fidel.