Che Guevara (74 page)

Suddenly, Che addressed him directly: “Borrego, do you want to come and work with me on this project?” Borrego replied that he was a soldier, and would do whatever Che asked of him. Looking pleased, Che told him, “Good, be at my house in Havana first thing in the morning.”

The next morning, he and Che toured the INRA building’s eighth floor. Nuñez Jiménez had already installed his offices on the fourth floor, and Fidel, as INRA’s president, was at the top, on the fourteenth floor. So far, the vaunted Industrialization Department was only Che, his twenty-one-year-old accountant, Orlando Borrego, and the bare concrete walls. “Well,” said Che, looking around, “the first thing we have to do is finish the construction. ... Then, I want you to take over the administration of the department.”

Fidel’s choice of Che for the industry job was actually not so surprising. In the Sierra Maestra, Che had been the leading proponent of self-sufficient industries, beginning with his modest bread ovens, shoe repair shops, and rustic bomb factories in El Hombrito and La Mesa. Now he wanted to extrapolate the lessons of the guerrilla experience to Cuba as a whole and, if possible, throughout Latin America. Since the rebels’ victory, he had been steadily advocating the industrialization of the country and, with it, the mass militarization of its society. He expected the Americans to invade, and if that happened, the entire Cuban population would have to leave the cities and fight as a guerrilla army. Even if it didn’t happen, industrialization would end Cuba’s dependency on agricultural exports that were controlled by the capitalist markets, and in particular by the meddlesome United States.

When Fidel made Che’s INRA appointment official, he also announced that Che would be retaining his military rank and responsibilities. Orlando Borrego said that Che was excited about his new post, but there are reports that Che had hoped Fidel would appoint him to the job that went to his brother Raúl: minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. If Che was disappointed, he concealed his feelings.

Che’s hopes that Cuba’s support for armed revolution elsewhere in the hemisphere would bring early results were taking a beating. Not only had the expedition to the Dominican Republic been crushed, but the Nicaraguan force he had sponsored had also failed the test miserably. This group of fifty-four Cubans and Nicaraguans, led by Rafael Somarriba, the former Nicaraguan National Guard officer handpicked by Che, included Rodolfo Romero. Beginning in early June, the group’s members had begun leaving Cuba, traveling separately to Honduras, where they linked up on a farm near the Nicaraguan border. The night of June 12–13—while Che was traveling to Spain, on the first leg of his diplomatic trip abroad, Che’s personal
pilot, Eliseo de la Campa, had flown in a planeload of weapons for them. Three weeks later they struck out for the border, but there must have been a
chivatazo
, for they were ambushed by a joint Honduran-Nicaraguan military force. Nine of the expeditionaries, including a Cuban, had been killed. Carlos Fonseca, the anti-Somoza intellectual leader, who had joined the group in Honduras, was badly wounded. The survivors were rounded up and put into a Honduran prison. Within a few weeks, however, they were released. According to Romero, this was because the Honduran president, Ramón Villeda Morales, was an admirer of Che, and his security chief, whose wife was Nicaraguan, was himself a fervent
antisomocista
. Romero went back to Havana.

Shortly after he returned from his long foreign mission, Che summoned Romero for a private meeting. “He was really angry,” Romero recalled. “Especially when I told him how they had fucked us.” Romero blamed the fiasco on the “stupidity” of Somarriba, who had led them into a ravine where they were easily attacked. “The truth is all these career military guys are shit,” Che commented. He asked Romero to draw diagrams of the ambush site to show him exactly what had happened. “You’re only alive by a miracle,” he said.

Romero’s subsequent contacts with Che were sporadic. It was decided that the Nicaraguans needed more training and field experience before they attempted another guerrilla expedition, and Romero and his comrades were subsumed into the new military counterintelligence apparatus run by Ramiro Valdés and his deputy, “Barbarroja,” the red-bearded Manuel Piñeiro Losada. Given the early setbacks, it was clear that Cuba’s guerrilla-support program would have to be operated in a more structured fashion.

For now, Che got on with the INRA job. First, his office was built, with spaces for Aleida and for his private secretary, José Manresa. Then an office was built for Borrego, who still didn’t have a clue what he was to be doing. Their ranks were bolstered by César Rodríguez, an engineeer, and the PSP official Pancho García Vals. The Industrialization Department became a formal reality, but not even Che had a grasp of exactly how to proceed.

Che hadn’t been in his new office many days when Violeta Casals called him. A TASS correspondent was in town, she explained, and wished to meet him. Che agreed to receive the Soviet “journalist,” and Alexandr Alexiev was told to be at Che’s office at two o’clock in the morning on October 13. Arriving at the appointed hour, he found the office dark except for two lamps, one on Che’s desk and one on a nearby desk where a pretty blond woman worked in silence.

“We started to talk,” Alexiev recalled. “He was very happy when he heard I had been in Argentina just a few months before. Since I knew he
was Red, I talked openly, because I could see
he
was very open. ... I had a carton of cigarettes that I had brought from Argentina, and I gave him three or four packets. They were called Tejas [for “Texas”]. I said: ‘Che, I’d like to give you something that will bring back memories.’ Error! He was furious. ‘What are you giving me?’ he said. ‘Tejas, do you know what that is? It’s the half of Mexico that the Yankee bandits robbed!’” Che was so angry, Alexiev said, that he didn’t know what to do. “I said, ‘Che, I’m sorry for giving you such a strange gift, but I’m pleased that now I know how you feel about the common enemy.’ And we laughed together.”

After that initial “delicate” moment had passed, Alexiev said, their conversation continued amiably, and quite soon they began using the informal
tú
to address each other. Che called him Alejandro, and he no longer addressed his host as
comandante
, but called him Che.

Noticing the late hour and that the woman he assumed was Che’s secretary was still working, Alexiev joked: “‘Che, you are such a fighter against exploitation, but I see that you exploit your secretary.’ He said: ‘Ah yes! It’s true, but she’s not just my secretary, she’s my wife as well.’” It was Aleida.

Their talk went until almost dawn, and toward the end Che told Alexiev, “Our revolution is truly progressive, anti-imperialistic and anti-American, made by the people. ... But we cannot conquer and maintain it without the aid of the global revolutionary movement, and above all, from the socialist bloc and the Soviet Union.” Che emphasized to Alexiev that this was
his own
personal viewpoint.

Alexiev said that he was eager to learn what the other revolutionary leaders thought; could Che arrange a meeting with Fidel? “The problem is that Fidel doesn’t like to talk to journalists,” Che said. Alexiev assured him that a talk with Fidel would not be for the press, and three days later, on the afternoon of October 16, he received a telephone call at his room in the Hotel Sevilla. “Mr. Alejandro Alexiev,” a voice said, “what are you doing at this moment?” “Nothing,” he replied. “Good. You asked for an interview with Comandante Fidel Castro. If you are available, he will see you right now; we are coming to pick you up.”

Alexiev got ready as quickly as he could. “I put on a dark suit, white shirt, gray tie, to present a diplomatic image.” He took some Soviet vodka and caviar he had brought as gifts for the occasion and went down to await his escorts. Two bearded boys with machine guns approached him in the foyer and took him to the same INRA building where he had met with Che, but this time he took the elevator to the top floor. When he stepped out, two more bearded men in uniform were waiting for him: Fidel Castro and Nuñez Jiménez. They ushered him into Fidel’s office, where they sat around a large round wooden table and began to talk. After a few minutes of polite
chitchat, Fidel asked what was in the package he had brought. Alexiev pulled out the caviar and vodka and Fidel suggested they sample them. Moments later, as they sat drinking the vodka and eating the caviar with biscuits, Fidel, obviously enjoying himself, turned to Nuñez Jiménez and, as if the idea had just occurred to him, said, “The Soviet merchandise is great, isn’t it? I never tried it before. It seems to me it would be worthwhile reestablishing commercial relations with the Soviet Union.”

Alexiev immediately said: “Very well, Fidel—it is as good as done. But I am also interested in cultural relations and, even more importantly, diplomatic relations.” According to Alexiev, Fidel quickly responded: “No, I don’t think so, not
yet
. Formalities aren’t important; I’m against formalisms. You have arrived, you’re an emissary of the Kremlin, and we can say that we now have relations. But we can’t tell this yet to the [Cuban] people. The people aren’t ready, they have been poisoned by the bourgeois American propaganda to be against Communism.”

Fidel cited Lenin on the revolutionary strategy of “preparing the masses”—telling Alexiev he was going to heed the dictum; he would eradicate the anticommunist press campaign and, gradually, the people’s prejudices, but he needed time. Until then, Alexiev had harbored a skeptical view of Fidel, but the evidence that he had read Lenin (“not too deep but pretty good”) impressed him. Still, he was a bit suspicious. He stared pointedly at the gold medallion of the Virgen del Cobre, Cuba’s Catholic patron saint, hanging prominently on Fidel’s chest. “Alejandro,” Fidel said. “Don’t pay it any mind. My mother sent it to me when I was in the sierra.”

Alexiev understood that there was more to it than that. There was a strong Catholic movement in Cuba, and it did Fidel little harm to keep up appearances by wearing a medallion on his chest.

Despite himself, Alexiev found himself warming to Fidel and pointed out that they had several things in common. His first name, in Spanish, was the same as Fidel’s second name—Alejandro. They were also joined by the number thirteen. Fidel was born on August 13, and Alexiev was thirteen years older than he. In addition, Alexiev was born on August 1, so their birthdays were thirteen days apart. Fidel, known for his fascination with numerology, was delighted by Alexiev’s attempt to find their affinities.

Alexiev continued probing to ascertain how much Fidel’s conception of his revolution matched or differed from Che’s. “It’s a true revolution,” Fidel told him, “made by the people and for the people. We want to build a just society without man exploiting his fellow man, and with an armed people to defend their victories. If Marx were to arise now he would be pleased to see me giving arms to the people.” Although Alexiev noted that
Fidel avoided using the word “socialism,” whereas Che
had
used it, Fidel “made it understood” that they shared the same philosophy.

By the time their meeting ended, Alexiev had been given a mission to fulfill. It came about in the same seemingly spontaneous fashion as Fidel’s decision to renew Soviet-Cuban commercial relations while sipping Alexiev’s vodka. As Alexiev told it, after Fidel’s explanation about the need to “go slow” with Cubans because of their rampant anticommunism, Nuñez Jiménez cut in, suggesting to Fidel that it might be a good idea to have Alexiev ask his government to bring the Soviet trade exposition, which was then in Mexico, to Havana. The exposition had been in New York in July, and Nuñez Jiménez had visited it there and had been impressed. “It’s worthwhile, really!” Alexiev recalled Nuñez Jiménez saying to Fidel. “It would open the eyes of the Cuban people about the Soviet Union by showing that the American propaganda about its backwardness is untrue.”

Fidel asked Alexiev his own opinion. Was it really good, this exposition? Alexiev said yes, he thought it was, but believed it would be hard to arrange. The itinerary for the exposition was already scheduled, Cuba was not on the list of countries to be visited, and, in view of the grinding Soviet bureaucracy, it would be hard to alter the plan.

But already, Fidel had made Nuñez Jiménez’s idea his own and refused to take no for an answer. “It
has
to come!” he told Alexiev emphatically. The Soviet deputy premier, Anastas Mikoyan, had inaugurated the exposition in New York and was now with it in Mexico. “Mikoyan has to come here and open it,” Fidel said. “Sure, it’s all been planned but it
has
to come! We are revolutionaries! Go to Mexico and tell Mikoyan what kind of revolution this is—that it’s worth him coming.” Alexiev agreed to try but warned Fidel that he couldn’t travel very freely on his Soviet passport. “Don’t worry,” Fidel told him. “Our ambassador in Mexico will fix everything.”

Within days, Alexiev was on a plane to meet Mikoyan in Mexico City. So far, his mission to Havana was paying off. With Che’s nudge, followed by Fidel’s approval, the wheels of political destiny leading Cuba into the Soviet orbit had begun to turn.

When Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan arrived in Havana on February 4, 1960, he brought along his thirty-year-old son, Sergo; the Soviet ambassador to Mexico; a personal assistant; and, as his bodyguard and interpreter, a young KGB officer, Nikolai Leonov. Mikoyan asked Leonov, as Leonov recalled many years later, to deliver gifts to “the principal leaders of the revolution.” The task gave him an opportunity to see his old acquaintances from Mexico privately, and the first person he went to see was Che Guevara.

A little over three years had passed since Leonov had given some Soviet books to the young Argentine doctor in Mexico City who was so eager to learn about socialism, but already his intemperate early contacts with Castro’s rebel group had been vindicated. Here he was, in Cuba, escorting an important Soviet official. As for Guevara and the Castro brothers, they were no longer political exiles espousing a wild scheme but the undisputed leaders of a new revolutionary Cuba, evidently prepared to “go socialist” and forge an alliance with his country at the risk of war with the United States. Now, “on behalf of the Soviet people,” Leonov carried as a gift for Che a Soviet-made precision marksman’s pistol in a beautiful holster, with a good supply of ammunition.