Che Guevara (129 page)

Chapter 26
, page 579, top:
In November 1962, Leonov came face-to-face with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had arrived at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and asked to speak to an official. According to Leonov, he was called out to deal with him. But Oswald was both armed and agitated, and Leonov quickly called other embassy personnel to help remove him from the premises. Leonov said that he was stunned when, soon afterward, he realized that the “psychotic and dangerous” man who had come to the embassy was the man who had been arrested in Dallas and was accused of murdering the American president. In a conversation about the various JFK assassination theories, Leonov dismissed the notion that Oswald might have acted on the KGB’s orders, citing the “psychotic” behavior he had witnessed firsthand. He said that, theoretically, even if the KGB
had
wanted to kill JFK, it would never have used someone so unbalanced and so difficult to control.

In the course of three separate conversations with Leonov in Moscow during 1993, we discussed his intelligence career and his relationship to Che Guevara and other figures. During one session, Leonov spoke passionately of the Guatemalan revolutionary cause in particular and of the murders of Guatemalan Communist Party “friends” by military death squads. He did not go into detail about what kind of relationship he had with the friends, other than to say he had supported their cause. But the well-informed Argentine Isidoro Gilbert, a former TASS correspondent, wrote in his 1995 book
El Oro de Moscú
that Leonov actively assisted the Guatemalan revolutionary cause, and suggested that he did so as part of an officially approved, if covert, KGB program. More elliptically, Manuel Piñeiro told me that
Leonov “always showed solidarity toward Latin America’s revolutionary fighters and the Cuban revolution.”

To judge from a declassified memorandum that the KGB chief, Alexander Shelepin, sent to Khrushchev on July 29, 1961, the Soviets did not have a problem with guerrilla wars in the countries where the local Communist Party was outlawed and sometimes gave their support to such actions. According to extracts published in
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
, by Vladislav Zubok and Konstantin Pleshakov, Shelepin’s memo proposed a series of covert activities around the world to distract the United States from the confrontation in Berlin. “Shelepin advocated measures ‘to activate by the means available to the KGB armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments.’ The subversive activities began in Nicaragua, where the KGB plotted an armed mutiny through an ‘internal front of resistance,’ in coordination with Castro’s Cubans and with the ‘Revolutionary Front Sandino.’ Shelepin proposed making ‘appropriations from KGB funds in addition to the previous assistance of 10,000 American dollars for the purchase of arms.’ The plan also envisaged the instigation of an armed uprising in El Salvador, and a rebellion in Guatemala, where guerrilla forces would be given $15,000 to buy weapons.” (Khrushchev approved this plan, and it was passed by the Soviet Central Committee on August 1, 1961.)

Chapter 26
, page 579, bottom:
Shortly after Che’s visit to Moscow, Rudolf Shlyapnikov traveled to Cuba to take up a post at the Soviet embassy, as the official in charge of the thousands of Soviet Komsomol “volunteers” working in Cuba. In February 1968, accused of colluding with the unrepentant Aníbal Escalante and other disgruntled “old Communists” in a plot to undermine Fidel’s revolutionary authority, Shlyapnikov and several other Soviet agents were expelled from Cuba; Escalante was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. From his embassy post in Havana, Oleg Darushenkov rose rapidly in Party ranks to become head of the Central Committee’s Cuba department. In the 1980s, he became the Soviet ambassador to Mexico. After the fall of Communism in the U.S.S.R., he resigned his post but remained in Mexico, working as an executive for the Mexican television conglomerate Televisa. (Shlyapnikov’s last diplomatic post, as Soviet consul in Veracruz, Mexico, also coincided with Darushenkov’s tenure as ambassador to Mexico.)

These men are considered to have represented the anti-Guevarist Soviet line. Che’s widow, Aleida March, said she believed that Oleg Darushenkov was a “provocateur.” She was rankled by the fact that after Che’s death, when Darushenkov came to her house and offered his condolences, he undiplomatically asked her, “Why did Che go to Bolivia, when he was a foreigner?”
She took offense and cited the precedent of the Dominican general Máximo Gómez, who helped in Cuba’s war of independence against Spain. Finally, she asked Darushenkov how he dared to pose such a question in Che’s house.

Orlando Borrego agreed with Aleida’s assessment of Darushenkov, whom he knew well, and described him as extremely bright, capable, and highly ambitous, but also “wicked,” given to bad-mouthing people and making provocative comments in a pattern that seemed to indicate an ulterior motive.

Chapter 26
, page 588:
Among those in the room, according to Che’s widow, Aleida, was the young Chinese-trained Angolan resistance leader Jonas Savimbi, who later founded the UNITA guerrilla movement. In the multi-sided battle against the Portuguese, which finally culminated in Angola’s independence in 1975, Savimbi’s forces lost out to the rival Cuban- and Soviet-backed MPLA, which seized power and installed a Marxist regime. Savimbi turned to the West and continued to wage war with military support from the CIA and South Africa. During the the 1980s, Savimbi’s UNITA had lavish offices in Washington, D.C., and he was lauded by President Ronald Reagan as an anticommunist freedom fighter in the best Western tradition. But after participating in and losing national elections following an internationally brokered cease-fire agreement in 1992, Savimbi returned to war; countless thousands of Angolans died in the renewed fighting, which left much of Angola destroyed. In 1996 he was briefly involved in power-sharing negotiations with the regime. In 2002, Savimbi was finally surrounded and killed in battle. With his death, Angola’s long war finally ended.

Chapter 27
, page 600:
Aleida told me that in addition to the tape-recorded poems, Che wrote her a special poem that, at the time we spoke, she had not made public. “The world can read it after I’m dead,” she said. Aleida always guarded the details of her life with Che with an almost obsessive zeal. Her eldest daughter, Aliusha, said it wasn’t until she was in her twenties, prepared to follow in her father’s footsteps by going off to Nicaragua to serve as a doctor, that fear of losing her had made her mother open up. At that point, Aleida read to her a love letter Che had written, kept under lock and key in a special desk at their home. And, while Aliusha was in Nicaragua, Aleida sent her a copy of the tape-recorded love poems he had left. (In her memoir,
Evocación
, which was published in 2008, Aleida printed a poem written to her by Che that may be the one she spoke to me about.)

In addition to the “public” farewell letter to his children, Che also sent them some postcards from Africa, and a tape recording of his voice telling them how he felt to be their father. “Che was a
machista
, like most Latins,”
Aleida said, in an affectionately chiding tone, explaining that in a letter to his two sons, Camilo and Ernesto, excluding the girls, he told them that at the end of the century—if he was still alive and if imperialism still existed—they would have to fight it together, and if not, they would “go together to the Moon on a spaceship.” In a letter to his daughters, he told them to look after their brothers, especially Camilo. They should get him to stop using bad words.

Chapter 27
, page 611:
For many years, Aleida refused to publish the three dark stories Che wrote, arguing that they were too intimate to be shared with the public. She finally relented, however, and two of them, “La Duda” (Doubt), and “La Piedra” (The Stone), appeared. “La Duda” is an undated meditation on the Congolese belief in
dawa
, or witchcraft. “La Piedra” is also undated but was clearly written after Osmany Cienfuegos gave Che the news that Celia was dying. “He told me as one would speak to a strong man, to someone in authority,” the story begins, “and I thanked him. He didn’t feign anguish and I tried not to show it either. It was so easy. The confirmation had yet to arrive that would allow me to be officially sad. I asked myself if I could cry a little. No, I shouldn’t, because the
jefe
is supposed to be impersonal; it is not that he should not be allowed the right to feel, but that he shouldn’t show it, except, maybe, on behalf of his soldiers.”

The rest of the story revolves around the small, indispensable things Che always took with him: his pipe for smoking tobacco, his lighter, his notebook and pens, his asthma inhaler. The title has to do with a little stone attached to a key chain that his mother had given him. The stone had become separated from the chain and Che carried it in his pocket. He also speaks about a linen handkerchief that Aleida had given him before he left home. “She gave it to me in case I was wounded in the arm,” he wrote. “It would be a loving sling.” Then he speculates about what might happen if something more drastic occurred—if his head was split open and he was killed. He imagines the handkerchief tied around his jaw. He muses that “they might exhibit me, and maybe I would appear in
Life
with a look of agony and desperation, frozen at the moment of maximum terror. Because one feels it. Why lie about it?”

Chapter 27
, page 633:
In unpublished notes dated November 21, 1965, from the diary of Harry “Pombo” Villegas Tamayo, sections of which I obtained in Cuba, Villegas wrote about problems that Che omitted in his own account.

“After making the decision to retreat from that place and return to the neighboring country of Tanzania, open discrepancies began to appear between Tatu [Che] and the other high-ranking leaders of the Party who had been designated to collaborate with him in the exercise of such a difficult duty (Tembo, Siki, Uta, Karim).

“The fundamental root of the aforementioned divergences lies in the attitude of the
compañeros
toward the reality in which we found ourselves, their poor comprehension of the attitude taken by Tatu in the face of the situation on the ground, due to the fact that [they] ... didn’t trust him as a national leader of our revolution and as a leader of our detachment designated to fight in those distant lands.

“They felt that Tatu was being willful in his determination to stay there, and that he hadn’t been able to appreciate the fact that the subjective conditions didn’t exist to carry out the revolution; that even if the insurrection were to win, the [Congolese] revolution did not have leaders to take it forward because they were all pseudo-revolutionaries, without principles, and it could even be said that they had few morals.

“But the reality is that Tatu was aware of this, aware about the impossibility of carrying out a social revolution; it was something he had told all of us, except for Siki [Fernández Mell] and Tembo [Aragonés], who weren’t present because they were at the base, where it wasn’t sent.” (Pombo was referring to Che’s August 12 “Message to the Combatants.”)

“I personally said that his position of sacrifice was due to his conviction that the withdrawal of the Cubans should be a decision that should come from the Cuban government ... [and] that we should never [beg or] shout asking to be authorized to withdraw. ...”

Chapter 28
, page 638:
When Pombo joined Che in the Congo, he left behind a bride of less than three years; they had an infant son, Harry Jr. His wife, Cristina Campuzano, had been Che’s secretary early on at the Industrialization Department of INRA. She was a friend of both Hilda Gadea and Aleida. The families of Che’s men were extremely close in those days. Tuma had been the best man at the wedding of Pombo and Cristina.

It was “terribly hard” for the wives, Cristina said, because they rarely saw their husbands. “When they were in Cuba they were up at all hours with Che, then they went to the Congo, then Bolivia.” The families were “withdrawn” from circulation for security reasons when the men were on a mission with Che. A group of them lived in a semi-communal apartment building in Miramar. At one point, Cristina was to have joined Pombo and was given a
leyenda
—a false identity—to study so she could join him. At the time, she says, Pombo was living in seclusion in the Cuban embassy in Paris.

After Pombo’s departure to Bolivia, Cristina was told that she could go there when “the conditions were right.” Pombo had argued that their son, Harry, was too young to be left, and that she should not come until the “ground was secured.”

Papi also left behind a wife and young son. Only Tuma was childless, but after returning to Cuba from Prague, he impregnated his wife; their son, whom he would never know, was born after he left for Bolivia.

Chapter 28
, page 642:
Since there has been no extensively documented Cuban clarification of Che’s exact movements, meetings, and whereabouts between the time he left the Congo and reappeared in Cuba, I based my account on the most credible sources available to me: Aleida March; General Harry Villegas (Pombo); Manuel “Barbarroja” Piñeiro; Juan Carreterro, the senior Cuban intelligence official and diplomat, alias Ariel; and Oscar de Cárdenas, who was Ulíses Estrada’s deputy in charge of the African department of Cuban intelligence at the time Che left the Congo. All of them said that Che went from Tanzania to Prague, and from there back to Havana.

But there are other versions. Mario Monje, the former Bolivian Communist Party secretary, told me that he had learned, without naming his sources of information, that Che, after leaving Tanzania, went to the German Democratic Republic, where he lived “under the protection of the German intelligence services.” A knowledgeable Cuban source indicated the possibility that Che did spend “some time” in the GDR during his underground period, but that this followed his secret return trip to Cuba, while he was en route to Bolivia in the fall of 1966. This source also added that Aleida “may” have visited him there. Bolstering the possibility of Che’s presence in the GDR is the circumstantial evidence that Che himself provided upon his capture. The first of his two Bolivian diaries, which he began writing in during November 1966, was manufactured in East Germany. Aleida March told me that she had joined Che abroad, clandestinely, on three separate occasions. The first, in January–February 1966, in Tanzania; the second time, in Prague, before his return to Cuba in mid-1966; and a third time that she did not specify. In her memoir,
Evocación
, she mentions two times: the Tanzanian and Prague visits.