Che Guevara (52 page)

The Directorio, virtually crippled after its disastrous attack on the presidential palace the previous year, was becoming more active as well. A tiny Directorio breakaway group had been operating in the central Escambray mountains near Cienfuegos for several months. It was led by Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, whose brother had died leading the palace assault, and was aided by an American military veteran named William Morgan. In February, their efforts were bolstered with the arrival of a fifteen-man armed Directorio expeditionary force from Miami led by Faure Chomón. Temporarily joining ranks, they carried out a few hit-and-run attacks, then issued a somewhat grandiose proclamation calling for a Cuba with ample employment and educational opportunities, and appealing for the formation of a Bolivarian-style “confederation of American republics.” Fidel played the magnanimous elder statesman, sending a note to welcome the Directorio’s guerrillas to the “common struggle” and offering them his assistance.

Fidel took new steps to extend his own theater of operations. On February 27, he named his three principal lieutenants—his brother Raúl, Juan Almeida, and Camilo Cienfuegos—as
comandantes
of their own columns. In keeping with his custom of exaggerating his force’s size, Fidel called Raúl’s “Frank País” unit Column Six and Almeida’s “Santiago de Cuba” unit Column Three. Raúl was to open up a Second Eastern Front in the Sierra Cristal in northeastern Oriente, adjacent to the American naval base
at Guantánamo Bay, while Almeida was to start up the Third Eastern Front, covering the area from the eastern Sierra Maestra to the city of Santiago. Camilo’s theater of operations would be determined once he recovered from the wounds he suffered at Pino del Agua.

Fidel also set about consolidating his power within the
territorio libre
of the Sierra Maestra. Humberto Sorí-Marín, the lawyer who had assisted in the “bandit trials” in October, drafted legislation that imposed revolutionary authority over the inhabitants of rebel-held territory. Sorí-Marín also prepared an agrarian reform law that gave “legal” backing to the wholesale rustling of cattle from landowners and their distribution among Fidel’s fighters and the peasants of the region.
*
In March, impetus was given to another project, the creation of a training school for recruits and officers at Minas del Frío. It was to be run under Che’s direction, with day-to-day administration handled by a new convert named Evelio Lafferte.

Just a month earlier, Lafferte had been a twenty-six-year-old army lieutenant fighting against the rebels at Pino del Agua. The rebel leader he most feared was Che Guevara. “The propaganda against him was massive,” Lafferte recalled. “They said that he was a murderer for hire, a pathological criminal ... a mercenary who lent his services to international Communism, that he used terrorist methods and that he
socialized
[brainwashed] the women and took away their sons. ... [It was said] that any soldier he took prisoner he tied to a tree and opened up his guts with a bayonet.”

Immediately after the ambush in which Lafferte was captured and many of his fellow soldiers were killed, he was led before the feared Argentine. “He told me: ‘So you are one of the little officers who come to finish off the Rebel Army, huh?’ He repeated that ‘little officer’ and this angered me,” Lafferte said. “It was in an ironic tone and it seemed to be a hint of worse to come.” Lafferte was convinced that the rebels meant to kill him, but he was taken instead to an improvised prison at Che’s La Mesa camp. The rebels realized they had a potentially valuable man on their hands. Lafferte was a bright and distinguished young officer, the best of his class at Cuba’s military academy, and was beset by doubts about the army’s brutal conduct of the war. Fidel personally urged Lafferte to join his side. After a month of preferential treatment, he accepted Fidel’s offer and was immediately made a captain and sent to run Che’s training school in Minas del Frío.

Che was careful in his dealings with Lafferte. He spent time with the young officer, talking about his family and about literature and poetry, a love they shared. Lafferte showed Che some poems he had written, and Che gave him a copy of a book by Pablo Neruda. He listened to Lafferte’s suggestions for running the school at Minas del Frío and accepted those he found convincing. One he did not accept was Lafferte’s idea that recruits should “swear by God” in their oath of allegiance. “When the comrades come to the Sierra,” Che told him, “we don’t take into account whether they believe in God or not, so we can’t oblige them to swear by God. For example, I don’t believe, and I am a fighter of the Rebel Army. ... Do you think it’s right to force me to swear an oath to something I don’t believe in?” Lafferte was convinced by Che’s argument: “I was Catholic,” he said, “but I understood the correctness of what he was proposing, and I took God out of the oath.”

Once the school was up and running, Che brought Pablo Ribalta, the Communist Youth leader, to take charge of the ideological orientation of the recruits. Ribalta concealed his identity under the pseudonym Moíses Pérez. So as not to scare off his pupils with Marxist texts, he used the experiences of the sierra war, Cuban history, and the writings and speeches of Fidel and other guerrilla leaders to drive his points home. One of the other guerrilla leaders was Mao Tse-tung. “For Che, the guerrilla war wasn’t just a military proving ground, but also a cultural and educational one,” recalled Harry Villegas Tamayo, who was sixteen when he was at Minas del Frío. “He was concerned with forming the future cadres of the Revolution.”

Some of the reporters who met Che in the Sierra Maestra came away as admirers and disciples.
*
One of these was the Uruguayan Carlos María Gutiérrez, who met Che immediately after the battle of Pino del Agua. Che had pumped Gutiérrez for information about his photographic equipment. What light meters did he use? How long did he expose his film? And—a question Che was to repeat to every visitor from the
mate
-drinking countries of Uruguay and Argentina—had he brought some
yerba mate
with
him? Over the next few days, as he was shown around the base hospital and the shoe factory, Gutiérrez took note of the unusual warmth and camaraderie among Che’s men. “There were no orders given, nor permissions granted, nor military protocol,” he said. “The guerrillas of La Mesa reflected a discipline that was more intimate, derived from the men’s confidence in their leaders. Fidel, Che, and the others lived in the same places, ate the same, and at the hour of combat fired from the same line as they did. Guevara didn’t have to abandon his
porteño
’s brusqueness to show that he loved them, and they paid him back with the same virile reticence, with an adherence that went deeper than mere obedience.”

Among the visitors to the sierra in the spring of 1958 was the young Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti. Like some of his predecessors, Masetti, who had a background in an ultraright Perónist youth group, would find his life irrevocably changed by the experience. By coincidence, Masetti came with a letter of introduction from Ernesto Guevara’s old acquaintance Ricardo Rojo, who had returned to Argentina in 1955 after the right-wing military coup that toppled Perón.
*
In late 1957, Masetti tracked down Rojo at the Café La Paz, a literary and theater hangout in central Buenos Aires, and asked for help in meeting the Sierra Maestra rebels. Rojo jotted off a quick note to Che: “Dear Chancho: The bearer is a newspaperman and friend who wants to do a news program for El Mundo radio station in Buenos Aires. Please take good care of him, he’s a good man.” Rojo signed it “The Sniper,” the nickname he and Che had traded back and forth in their Central American days, little knowing that his friend had once again appropriated it for himself.

Masetti was the first Argentine visitor to the mountains, and some of the young rebels asked excitedly if he was Che’s brother. Masetti seemed determined not to feel impressed at their first meeting: “From his chin sprouted a few hairs that wanted to be a beard. ... The famous Che Guevara seemed to me to be a typical middle-class Argentine boy.” Over a shared breakfast, Masetti prodded Che on why he was fighting in a land that was not his own. Che puffed on a pipe as he spoke, and Masetti thought his accent sounded no longer Argentine but a mixture of Cuban and Mexican. “In the first place,” Che told Masetti, “I consider my fatherland to be not
only Argentina, but all of America. I have predecessors as glorious as Martí and it is precisely in his land where I am adhering to his doctrine. What is more, I cannot conceive that it can be called interference to give myself personally, to give myself completely, to offer my blood for a cause I consider just and popular, to help a people liberate themselves from tyranny. ... No country until now has denounced the American interference in Cuban affairs nor has a single daily newspaper accused the Yankees of helping Batista massacre his people. But many are concerned about me. I am the meddling foreigner who helps the rebels with his flesh and blood. Those who provide the arms for a civil war aren’t meddlers. I am.”

Che with the Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti in the spring of 1958. Masetti’s taped interviews with Che were broadcast internationally.

As Che talked, it struck Masetti that he spoke in a completely impersonal fashion, although a smile seemed constantly to play on his lips. Masetti asked about Fidel Castro’s Communism. At this, Che smiled broadly but answered with the same detachment as before. “Fidel isn’t a Communist. If he was, we would at least have more arms. But this revolution is exclusively Cuban. Or better said, Latin American. Politically, Fidel and his movement can be said to be ‘revolutionary nationalist.’ Of course it is anti-Yankee, in the way that the Yankees are antirevolutionaries. But in reality we don’t put preach anti-Yankism. We are against the United States because the United
States is against our people. The person most attacked with the label of Communism is myself.”

As for his reasons for joining the Cuban force in Mexico, Che saw a strong connection to his years of travel. “The truth is that after the experiences of my wanderings across all of Latin America and, to top it off, in Guatemala, it didn’t take much to incite me to join any revolution against a tyrant, but Fidel impressed me as an extraordinary man. He faced and overcame the most impossible things. He had an exceptional faith that once he left for Cuba, he would arrive. And that once he arrived, he would fight. And that fighting, he would win. I shared his optimism. ... It was time to stop crying and fight.”

Masetti returned to Argentina with his scoop. He had interviewed Fidel and Che—who had spoken for the first time to an international broadcast audience. He also returned with a recorded greeting from Che to the Guevara family. During the past year, letters from Ernesto had been rare. More often than not, the family learned about him through magazines and newspapers. They were delighted by the photograph accompanying Herbert Matthews’s famous interview with Fidel in
The New York Times
, in which Ernesto appeared holding a gun and sporting a scraggly beard. Matthews’s articles had also calmed the Guevaras’ anxieties about their son’s adopted cause. “Now we knew,” his father wrote, “that Ernesto was fighting for a cause recognized as just.” In the spring of 1958, Che’s father saw an article about Che written by Bob Taber: “Will Che Be Able to Change the Destiny of America?” To the elder Guevara, it proved his son was
someone
. “I confess that what Taber wrote impressed the whole family,” he recalled. “Ernesto was not just another guerrilla, but was mentioned as a future leader of countries.”

Other news came from Dolores Moyano, Ernesto’s childhood friend, who now lived in New York and who sent the Guevaras clippings from the Miami-based
Diario de las Americas
. The July 26 committee in New York sent them copies of rebel army communiqués. And soon Ernesto senior was getting regular briefings from the
Chicago Tribune
’s Latin American correspondent, Jules Dubois, who looked him up on a visit to Buenos Aires. They would meet for a chat over whiskey whenever Dubois was in town. In exchange for details of Che’s latest exploits, Dubois pumped the elder Guevara about the young Che. Ernesto senior became suspicious when Dubois asked him to write down a summary of what he knew about Fidel Castro. He claimed that his suspicions that Dubois was actually a CIA official were confirmed by a “very good source.” (True or not, this charge became official dogma in Cuba, where the elder Guevara was living when he wrote his memoir.)

When Carlos María Gutiérrez returned from Cuba, brimming with admiration for the revolution and for Che, he too looked up Che’s family in Buenos Aires. “When he talked to us about Ernesto,” Che’s father recalled, “his words didn’t entirely convince us, because he spoke of a romantic and bohemian hero.” Also a very busy one. According to Gutiérrez, Che “had laid the bases for agrarian reform in the Sierra; built an arms factory; invented a bazooka rifle; inaugurated the first bread factory in the mountains; built and equipped a hospital ... created the first school and ... installed a radio transmitter called Radio Rebelde ... and he still had time left to found a small newspaper for the rebel troops.”