Che Guevara (109 page)

Che’s indignation turned into a sense of personal betrayal when one of his bodyguards, Sitaini, a man who had been with him since the sierra, asked to leave as well. “What made it even more painful was that he used phony arguments about not having heard what I had warned everyone, that the war would last at best three years and with bad luck five,” Che wrote. “The duration and harshness of the war had been one of my constant litanies and Sitaini knew it better than anyone because he was always with me. I told him that he couldn’t leave because it would be a discredit to both of us; he was obliged to stay.” From that moment on, Che wrote, Sitaini was like a “dead man.” A couple of months later, Che allowed him to leave, but evidently he didn’t speak to him again, and people in Cuba who knew Sitaini say he never recovered from this precipitous and humiliating fall from grace.

More bad news had come from farther afield. On June 19, a coup had toppled Che’s friend, the Algerian president Ben Bella. The coup was led by Ben Bella’s own defense minister, Houari Boumédienne. This boded ill for the Cuban operations in Africa; Algeria was an essential partner in the multilateral effort to support the Congolese rebels against the regime in Léopoldville. Fidel had immediately condemned the coup and its new leadership, so the hard-won “unity” between the two revolutionary states appeared to have come apart in one fell swoop.

Before Che had even had a chance to organize an effective fighting force, everything seemed to break down. With Mitoudidi dead, he was forced to deal with men who had little political schooling, little sense of mission, and even less fighting spirit. And, after three months in the field, Kabila still hadn’t shown up. He had taken to sending barbed notes urging Che to buck up, to “have courage and patience,” reminding him in a patronizing manner that he was “a revolutionary and had to withstand such difficulties,” and of course repeating the message that he would soon be coming.

Che must have been furious, but he was exquisitely diplomatic in his responses, reiterating his respect and loyalty, both to the Congolese cause and to Kabila as his commander, merely stressing that he needed to talk to Kabila and offering an apology about his covert manner of showing up. Che included this mollification because he now strongly suspected that Kabila resented his presence. He thought this might be why Kabila had not come to the front. “There are serious indications that my presence doesn’t give him the least pleasure,” Che observed. “It is yet to be known whether this is due to fear, jealousy, or wounded feelings.”

Meanwhile, the government troops and mercenaries had begun to probe deeper into rebel territory, sending spotter planes over the lake and making strafing runs against boat traffic and the lakeshore base at Kibamba. This caused alarm at the general staff headquarters, and in response to a plea for help, Che grudgingly dispatched some of his Cubans to man the heavy machine guns in order to provide antiaircraft defense. “My state of mind was very pessimistic in those days,” Che acknowledged, “but I climbed down with a certain happiness on July 7 when it was announced that Kabila had arrived. At last the
jefe
was in the field of operations!”

Che instructing his fighters.

Kabila had indeed come, and he brought with him a commander to replace Mitoudidi, Ildefonse Masengo. But, in a further sign that all was not well within the rebel leadership, Kabila was even more critical of Gaston Soumaliot, his political leader, than he had been when Che first met him in Dar es Salaam. He called Soumaliot a demagogue, among other things. Kabila returned to Tanzania after only five days in Kibamba, explaining that it was important for him to meet with Soumaliot to work out their problems. He had galvanized his troops when he was there, and they set to work digging antiaircraft trenches and building a new clinic, but when he left—some jaundiced Cubans had taken bets on how long he would stay—everything fell apart again. The Congolese put down their shovels and refused to work.

An internal power struggle was taking place among the political leaders who made up the National Liberation Council, each of whom drew strength from alleged power on the military battlefield and from a series of shifting alliances with various regional guerrilla commanders. These men were the visible faces of the Congolese rebellion to the outside world—holding summits; meeting with heads of state such as Nasser, Nyerere, and Chou En-lai—and they had become the privileged recipients of huge amounts of foreign aid. The Chinese were still the primary supplier of the rebels’ arms, and in some areas even of military advisers, but the Soviets and Bulgarians were also funneling in aid—such as the Soviet medicines Che had seen dumped on the lakeshore. All three nations were providing military and political training courses in their own countries to Congolese fighters.

Relations between the Rwandan Tutsi and the Congolese had fallen to an all-time low. Mudandi, the Tutsi commander whom Che held responsible for his fighters’ pathetic performance at Bendera, had begun airing his grievances. His men had not fought, he said, because the Congolese didn’t fight, and it was
their
country and
their
war after all. Over the succeeding weeks, Mudandi’s rancor deepened and extended to open hostility against Kabila and the council leadership, whom he accused of willfully neglecting the men at the front.

Things went from bad to worse. Soon, word arrived that Mudandi had shot and killed his own deputy commander, apparently on charges that
he was responsible for the bad
dawa
at Bendera. A Congolese rebel officer went to Mudandi’s camp to investigate and was unceremoniously expelled; now this officer threatened to leave the Congo unless Mudandi was shot. Mudandi remained defiant and from his zone made it clear he was in a state of virtual rebellion against Kabila and the National Liberation Council, declaring that his men would no longer fight unless the Congolese did.

Matters were not helped by the fact that, in addition to their mistreatment of the peasants and one another, both the Tutsi and the Congolese showed an extraordinary degree of cruelty toward their prisoners. At one point, Che heard that a French mercenary had been captured on the lake and brought to a rebel camp where, by local custom, he had been buried up to his neck in the dirt. When Che sent men to seek the prisoner’s release in order to obtain information, they got an evasive reply from the commander, and a day later were told that the prisoner had died.

The dissension in the Cubans’ ranks continued to grow. Four more men, including two doctors, asked Che for permission to leave. “I was much less violent but much more hurtful with the doctors than with the simple soldiers, who reacted to things in a more or less primitive way,” he recorded. But the growing specter of mass desertion by his own comrades drew him to deeper reflection. “The reality is that at the first serious reverse ... several comrades lost heart and decided to retire from a struggle that they had sworn to come to and die for, if necessary (what’s more, voluntarily), surrounded by a halo of bravura, sacrifice, enthusiasm—in a word, invincibility,” he wrote. “What meaning does the phrase ‘If necessary, unto death’ have? In the answer to this lies the solution to the serious problems we face in the creation of our new men of tomorrow.”

As for the military situation, Che had arrived at a crossroads. So far, he had doggedly clung to the hope that he could somehow get the Congolese rebels moving and turn the deteriorating situation around; but after Bendera he knew that unless something dramatic was done soon to improve the rebels’ fighting ability, they were doomed. By the end of July, Che realized that his original time frame for seeing the Congolese revolution to victory was unrealistic, and he mused that “five years [now seemed] a very optimistic goal.”

Che had been trying to keep up the pressure on the enemy by sending out Cuban-led patrols to lay road ambushes and, since he now knew that the rebels’ own information network was worthless, to gather intelligence on the enemy’s positions. These efforts produced some tragicomic results. One group, led by a Cuban called Aly, attacked a police unit, but, Che recorded gloomily, “Of the 20 Congolese who went with him ... 16 ran away.” In another, more successful attack, Papi Martínez Tamayo led a combined
force of Cubans and Congolese to lay siege to the road between the enemy-held forts at Albertville and Bendera and was able to score a respectable blow, destroying two armored cars and a jeep driven in convoy by a crew of white mercenaries, killing seven. But in another joint Cuban-Rwandan ambush against an army truck, the Rwandans had run away, firing their weapons wildly, and one of the Cubans had lost a finger from this friendly fire. To make amends, the Rwandan commander had pulled out a knife and proposed cutting off the fingers of the culprit, but Papi prevailed upon him not to do so. Then the commander and his men proceeded to drink the whiskey and beer they found in the ambushed truck and got hopelessly drunk before shooting dead a peasant who happened by; they claimed he was a spy.

On August 12, Che issued a candid message to his Cuban fighters, acknowledging that their situation was bad and giving a fairly honest appraisal of the weaknesses of the rebel organization they had come to help. Its leaders, he said, did not come to the front; the fighters themselves did not fight and had no sense of discipline or sacrifice. “To win a war with such troops,” he confessed, “is out of the question.” As for his original plan of bringing guerrillas from other countries to be trained in the Congolese “school” of guerrilla warfare, such a notion was now unthinkable. When, a few days later, Pablo Ribalta sent word that he was dispatching a group of Cubans to assume the task of organizing a training base for Mozambican and other African guerrillas, Che wrote back to advise against it, citing the “indiscipline, disorganization, and total demoralization” they would find.

Since the defeat at Fort Bendera, Che had redoubled his efforts to persuade the Congolese to adopt his proposals. He outlined a plan for a new unified central military command, a rigorous training program, and a streamlined and disciplined food-supply system and communications network. He proposed that a rebel posse be formed to go after the deserters who were now marauding all over the region and disarm them, both to restore order and to recapture valuable weapons. He had kept up a barrage of petitions to Kabila, which typically received oblique or evasive responses, and he pursued his objectives in frequent conclaves with Masengo. On the surface, the new Congolese chief of staff seemed receptive, but he lacked authority to make decisions, and the situation dragged on without resolution.

Che again asked to be allowed to go into the field himself, but this request, made to Masengo, was met with alarm, ostensibly out of concern for Che’s “personal security.” Che refused to accept his explanation and demanded to know if the real problem was a lack of trust. Masengo strenuously denied this, and he relented, agreeing to take Che on a visit to some of the regional commands. Writing about this later, Che concluded that both Masengo and Kabila were well aware of the ill feeling their absences had
spawned among their fighters, and feared being shown up if he were to visit the fronts where they had never even appeared.

As promised, Masengo took Che on a short inspection trip to nearby bases, but then a message came from Kabila asking his chief of staff to come to Kigoma. The power struggle within the rebel leadership had finally climaxed. In early August, Gaston Soumaliot ousted Christophe Gbenye as the leader of the Congolese National Revolutionary Council, on the grounds that Gbenye had betrayed his comrades by secretly negotiating with the Congo regime. Masengo promised Che he would be back in a day. When he still hadn’t returned a week later, Che took off for the rebel front line near Fort Bendera, determined to see the conditions firsthand. It was August 18.

With the enthusiasm of a chess master who senses victory, Fidel was dispatching a regular stream of Cuban fighters to Tanzania. In early September 1965, a fifth group arrived. Among them were the corpulent PURS secretary, Emilio Aragonés—immediately dubbed Tembo (elephant)—and Che’s old sierra war sidekick and housemate, now chief of staff of Cuba’s western army, Dr. Oscar Fernández Mell, renamed Siki (Vinegar), allegedly for his sour personality.

Fernández Mell had been on vacation at the Varadero beach resort when he got a surprise call from Havana. Although he had been privy to Che’s disappearance—he had even taken Che’s dental impression so that false teeth could be made for him as part of his disguise for leaving Cuba—he had not known, or asked, Che’s destination, and had assumed it to be South America. “It was something he had talked to me about, and that he had proposed as far back as the Sierra Maestra,” Mell recalled. “He had said that after liberating Cuba he was going to liberate his own country. It was his final objective—that’s the great truth. ... When they called me, I thought it was for
that
, but when I was told it was for Africa, I didn’t even think about it. I said, ‘Well, if he’s there, that’s where we go.’”