Che Guevara (30 page)

Among this group were a few tactfully undeclared Marxists such as Ñico López, Calixto García, and Fidel’s brother Raúl. Fidel’s own ideology was publicly anticommunist, although he was already showing signs of the wily political opportunism he was to become famous for, gathering useful people from all political stripes to help implement his goals. The reckonings would come later. For now there was an uphill battle to be waged, and he needed all the help he could get. The movement’s actual philosophy could be ironed out over time; what held them all together for now was their attraction to Fidel Castro.

Castro’s organization had acquired a name—the July 26 Movement—but so far, it remained a secret known only to his closest followers. Publicly, Castro denied any intention of forming his own political party and strenuously reavowed his loyalty to the Ortodoxo Party. In truth, Castro’s plan was to build up his base of support in Cuba before going to Mexico and preparing for the next phase of the struggle, the guerrilla war that would oust Batista and bring his own party to power.

Taking advantage of Batista’s amnesty, Ñico López and Calixto García returned to Havana to meet with their leader and help him coordinate strategy. Two days before they left Mexico, on May 27, Ernesto wrote an intriguing letter to his father. Opening with a description of his allergy research, he began to ramble on about his future travel plans, enigmatically letting slip the possibility that he “might go to Cuba.” He was involved in two separate “collaborations,” he wrote: one involving allergy research, and the other—in an allusion that must have mystified his father—with a “good chemist” in Mexico “about a problem of which I have only an intuition, but I believe something very important is going to come out. ... I hope for a
recommendation to the places where the dawn is ripening, as they say. ... Havana in particular attracts me as a place to fill my heart with landscape, well mixed with quotes from Lenin.”

Yet when he heard of a ship sailing for Spain in early July, he was prepared to abandon all his plans and go on it. He was told he could attend the upcoming Communist Youth Congress in China if he could pay for part of his travel costs, but as tempting as it was to see the “land of Mao,” the pull of Europe was stronger, “almost a biological necessity,” as he wrote to his mother a few days later.

Eager for some excitement, Ernesto joined an “improvised” attempt to scale Mount Popocatépetl, one of two majestic volcanos towering over Mexico City. Although he and his companions reached only the lower lip of the summit’s crater, he did get to “peer into the entrails of Mother Earth.”

He was following the news from Argentina with mounting anxiety. On June 16, the Argentine navy launched a bloody attempt to topple Perón. Hundreds of civilians died in a messy aerial bombardment of the presidential palace. The attempt failed, but Perón was shaken, and an atmosphere of tense uncertainty lingered as his regime teetered on the brink of collapse. Ernesto wrote to his mother, asking for news because he didn’t trust the reports being published in Mexico: “I hope the thing isn’t as bad as they paint it, and that there’s none of ours stuck in a dispute where there’s nothing to be gained.” Aware of his family’s strong
antiperonista
sentiments, Ernesto was concerned that some of them, especially his brother Roberto, who worked for the navy, might be at risk. Moving on to his own news, Ernesto told Celia that he was now spending much of his free time imparting the “doctrine of San Carlos,” a euphemism for Karl Marx, to “a bunch of sixth-grade kids”—presumably his less worldly exile friends.

The political climate in Havana had deteriorated rapidly. Since his release, Fidel had been busy recruiting new members to his organization and denouncing Batista to the press. On the night of June 12, in a secret meeting in Old Havana, the July 26 Movement was formally founded with an eleven-member National Directorate, headed by Fidel. Political violence committed by the police, students, and Fidel’s party militants resumed with a vengeance. An exile who had returned to the city was murdered; a wave of bombs ripped through Havana. Fidel accused the government of unleashing the violence, while the authorities accused Raúl of placing one of the bombs and issued an arrest warrant for him. Fidel publicly accused the regime of plotting to kill him and his brother. On June 16, having already
banned him from making radio broadcasts, the police closed down his chief remaining media outlet, the tabloid daily
La Calle
.

Climbing Mt. Popocatépetl, Mexico.

Realizing he had little time left in which to act, Fidel ordered Raúl to flee to Mexico and prepare the way for his own arrival. After seeking asylum in the Mexican embassy in Cuba and spending a week holed up there, Raúl flew to Mexico City on June 24. He went straight to María Antonia’s house. Among those waiting to meet him was Ernesto Guevara.

By all accounts, the two hit it off immediately. First of all, they shared an ideological affinity. Raúl, Fidel’s younger brother by five years, had joined the Cuban Communist Party’s youth wing at Havana University, helped edit its publication
Saeta
, and in May 1953 attended the World Youth Festival in Bucharest, Romania. No doubt Raúl had already heard about Ernesto from Ñico López, who had stayed with him and Fidel after returning to Havana.

Soon after Raúl’s arrival, Ernesto invited him to Hilda and Lucila’s apartment for dinner. Ernesto didn’t mention the event in his diary, but in her memoirs, Hilda said she had liked Raúl immediately. “In spite of his youth,” Hilda recalled, “twenty-three or twenty-four years, and his even younger appearance, blond and beardless and looking like a university
student, his ideas were very clear as to how the revolution was to be made and, more important, for what purpose and for whom.”

Raúl spoke of his faith in his older brother and of his personal belief, echoing Ernesto’s views, that in Cuba and the rest of the region power could be gained not through elections, but only through war. With popular support, one could gain power and then transform society from capitalism to socialism. “He promised to bring Fidel to our house as soon as the latter arrived in Mexico,” Hilda wrote. “From then on he visited at least once a week, and Ernesto saw him almost every day.”

A mystery that has endured over the years is the question of
when
the Soviets became involved with the Cuban revolution. Although “involvement” is probably too strong a term to use, the earliest contacts between Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries and Soviet officials took place in Mexico City during the summer of 1955.

Coincidentally, a twenty-seven-year-old official in the Soviet foreign ministry whom Raúl knew was also in Mexico City in 1955. His name was Nikolai Leonov. They had met two years earlier, on the monthlong voyage that brought Raúl back from the European youth festival, and had become friends. The last they had seen of each other was when Raúl disembarked in Havana. Within a few weeks, Raúl had joined in the Moncada assault and gone to prison, while Leonov had traveled on to Mexico to take up his junior post at the Soviet embassy and attend a Spanish-language course at the Autonomous University. Now chance had brought Nikolai Leonov and Raúl Castro together again.

According to Leonov (who retired from the KGB in 1992 as deputy chief of its First Chief Directorate, covering the United States and Latin America), he happened to bump into Raúl in the street one day while shopping. Delighted to see him again, Raúl gave Leonov the address of María Antonia’s house and invited him to drop by. Prohibited from initiating any social contacts without the prior knowledge of the embassy, Leonov nonetheless violated this rule and made his way to 49 Calle Emparán. There, he met Ernesto Guevara.

“He was acting as a doctor, treating Raúl, who was suffering from flu,” Leonov recalled. “My first impression was of a happy man, a joker; practically all he did to treat Raúl was to cheer him up, telling him anecdotes, jokes.” After the introductions were made, Ernesto and Leonov began to talk. Leonov says that Ernesto was full of questions about Soviet life and pumped him about everything from Soviet literature to “the concept of Soviet man—‘How do they think? How do they live?’” Leonov offered to give him some books to read; if he still had questions, they could talk some more. Ernesto requested
A Man Complete
, about a Soviet aviation
hero in World War II, and two novels set during the Russian civil war of 1918–1922—
Chapaev
, by Dmitri Furmanov; and
How the Steel Was Tempered
, by Nikolai Ostrovsky. A few days later, Ernesto showed up at the embassy to get the books and they talked again, “but this time, as friends,” as Leonov put it. They agreed to keep in touch, and Leonov gave Ernesto his embassy card. That, said Leonov, was the last they saw of each other in Mexico.

In the summer of 1955, Ernesto noted an event in his diary: “A political occurrence is having met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, a young man, intelligent, very sure of himself and of extraordinary audacity; I think there is a mutual sympathy between us.”

Their encounter took place a few days after Castro’s arrival in Mexico on July 7. Ernesto met him at María Antonia’s apartment at 49 Calle Emparán. After talking for a while, Ernesto, Fidel, and Raúl went to dinner together at a restaurant down the block. Several hours later, Fidel invited Ernesto to join his guerrilla movement. Ernesto accepted on the spot.

Che, as the Cubans had begun calling him, was to be their doctor. It was the early days—Fidel was a long way from putting together his ambitious scheme—but it was the cause Ernesto had been searching for.

Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro were natural opposites.

At twenty-eight, Castro was a consummate political animal, overflowing with self-confidence. He was one of nine children from a landowning family in eastern Cuba’s Mayarí province. His father, Ángel Castro, was an illiterate Galician immigrant who arrived in Cuba penniless and made a modest fortune in land, sugar, lumber, and cattle. Presiding over a large
finca
, Manacas, with its own store, slaughterhouse, and bakery, Castro was a rural patriarch who ruled the destiny of 300 workers and their families.

Ángel Castro gave his bright, rebellious third son (the offspring of his second marriage, to Lina Ruz, the family’s cook) the best education money could buy. He went to the Marist-run Dolores primary school in Santiago,
was a boarder at Havana’s exclusive Jesuit Colegio Belén high school, and attended law school at Havana University. Intensely competitive and hot-tempered, Fidel acquired a reputation as a gun-toting rabble-rouser on the volatile university campus. Even before the attack on the Moncada barracks he had been linked to two shootings—one of a policeman—but had successfully avoided arrest in both cases.

On Sunday, May 15, 1955, Fidel Castro, in the dark suit, was freed from prison on Cuba’s Isle of Pines. He had spent nearly two years there after being convicted of leading an attack on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago. Castro had received a sentence of fifteen years but had been amnestied. With him are, from left front, his brother Raúl, Juan Almeida, and Ciro Redondo.

Castro came of age during the presidencies of Grau San Martín and Prío Socarrás, which were marked by corruption, gangsterism, and police brutality. He immersed himself in student politics, invoking the purist rhetoric of Cuba’s national hero, José Martí, in his calls for clean government, students’ rights, and social equality. When the vociferous Senator Eduardo Chibás formed the Ortodoxo Party to run for president against Grau San Martín in 1947, Castro joined the new party’s youth wing. Before long, he was seen by many as Chibás’s successor. The fact
that he had friends in the Communist Party and sided with them on certain issues did not prevent him from campaigning with Catholic factions against them in student elections.

Fidel was also strongly anti-imperialist and joined several student associations propounding such views, including one promoting independence for Puerto Rico. He was all too aware of Cuba’s status as a neocolony of the United States after the Spanish-American War and the subsequent U.S. military occupation. Cuba’s putative independence had been won at the cost of the ignominious 1901 Platt Amendment, which granted Washington the right to intervene in Cuba’s “defense” at will and ceded Guantánamo Bay to the United States as a naval base on open-ended terms. By the time Fidel was in high school, the Platt Amendment had been abrogated, but the Americans retained Guantánamo Bay, had large stakes in Cuba’s sugar-based economy, and took a proconsular role in its political life. In 1949, after American sailors urinated on the statue of José Martí in Old Havana’s Parque Central, Fidel helped organize a protest in front of the U.S. embassy and was beaten by Cuban police. In 1951, both he and his brother Raúl had vocally opposed the Prío government’s intention of sending Cuban troops to fight in the “American war” in Korea.