Che Guevara (75 page)

Leonov recalled that in November 1956—around the time the
Granma
took off for Cuba—he had been told to return to Moscow and had been discharged from the foreign service. He decided to pursue a career as a historian of Latin America and went to work as a translator for the official Soviet Spanish-language publishing house, Editorial Progreso. In the late summer of 1958, he said, he was invited to join the KGB, and he accepted.
That fall, Leonov began a two-year intelligence training course that he didn’t complete “because of the Cuban revolution.”
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In October 1959, Leonov’s KGB superiors ordered him to leave his studies and escort Mikoyan on his trip to Mexico to open the trade exposition. Because Mikoyan had been invited not by the Mexican government but by the Soviet ambassador, he could not travel with the usual phalanx of aides; as someone who had previously lived in Mexico, Leonov could play the roles of bodyguard, Spanish-Russian interpreter, and “adviser.”

Leonov was with Mikoyan in Mexico when Alexandr Alexiev arrived on his secret mission from Cuba. As Alexiev recalled it, he went straight to see Mikoyan. “I spoke of Fidel, of Che, of Raúl, of the revolution, and he listened with great interest. Since Mikoyan had been in the [Bolshevik] revolution in his youth, it reminded him of his youthful days, of the revolutionary romanticism of that time.” Alexiev told Mikoyan of Fidel’s overture. “They don’t want
just
the exhibition.
Fidel wants to talk
.” After hearing him out, Mikoyan remarked that he too—like Fidel—was against “formalities,” but as the Soviet deputy premier, he couldn’t travel to a country with which Moscow had no diplomatic ties. He sent off a cable to the Kremlin and dispatched Alexiev to Moscow to explain things. “Moscow agreed to move the exhibition from Mexico to Cuba,” Alexiev said, “because Khrushchev had by now also fallen in love with the Cuban revolution. I don’t know exactly why, but I think he was happy to have another pawn against the Americans.” The date originally set for the opening of the exhibit was November 28, 1959, but it coincided with a Catholic congress being held in Havana. Fidel saw little reason to rile conservatives, so he postponed it until the following February.

By the time Leonov arrived in Havana with Mikoyan, Che and Aleida had moved from their remote country house into the more secure confines
of Ciudad Libertad, the sprawling former military headquarters on Havana’s western edge. They now lived in one of the homes that formerly housed Batista’s officers, next to the military airstrip. When Leonov’s car pulled up in in front of the house it was almost noon, but Che was still asleep. “He was exhausted,” Leonov said, “but he got up and was really excited to see me. ‘
Hombre!
What a miracle, it’s like you dropped in from heaven!’” Over coffee, Leonov handed him the marksman’s pistol, which pleased Che immensely.

Leonov congratulated Che on the rebels’ victory, and then, reminding him of their past conversations and the Soviet books Che had been so avid to read in Mexico, asked, “So, it’s true, you are really serious about building socialism?” “Yes,” Che replied, “I’m going to devote my life to it. That’s why I was reading first, to build later.”

If Leonov was curious to know why Che was still asleep so late in the day, he soon learned the answer. Along with his job at INRA, Che had become president of Cuba’s National Bank. He had an extremely heavy workload, and his unusual working hours had become legendary. Stories abounded in Havana of foreign dignitaries who showed up at his offices at 3:00
P.M.
for an appointment only to be informed by José Manuel Manresa that the appointment was for 3:00
A.M.
The after-midnight meeting Alexiev had with Che in October was now the rule, not the exception.

In a Christmas letter to his parents, Che had tried to give them a sense of his strange new life.

Dear
viejos:

You know how hard it is for me to write. I am taking a pause at 6:30 in the morning, not at the beginning but at the end of the day, to wish you all that is wishable. Cuba is experiencing a moment that is decisive for the Americas. At one time I wanted to be one of Pizarro’s soldiers, but that is no longer necessary to fulfill my desire for adventure and my yearning to be an eyewitness to history. Today it is all here, and with an ideal to fight for, together with the responsibility of creating a legacy. We are not men, but working machines, fighting against time in the midst of difficult and luminous circumstances.

The Industrial Department was my own creation; I half-relinquished it, with the pain of a worn-out father, to plunge myself into my apparently God-given gift for finance. I also have
the job of Chief of Training of the E. Rebelde and the direct command of a regiment in Oriente. We walk over pure history of the highest American variety; we are the future and we know it, we build with happiness although we have forgotten individual affections. Receive an affectionate embrace from this machine dispensing calculating love to 160 million Americans, and sometimes, the prodigal son who returns in the memory.

Che.

Aleida saw Che at work, as his secretary, but they had little privacy during his hours at home. His Guatemalan friend Patojo had lived with them off and on since early 1959, and Oscar Fernández Mell moved into their spare bedroom at the front of the house in Ciudad Libertad; he worked nearby, in Batista’s old naval headquarters, as chief of medical services of the new army. Aleida took all of this in stride, but something
did
bother her, and that was the unflagging presence of Hilda Gadea on the scene. Che’s ex-wife worked on another floor of INRA in an office set up to help peasant farmers whose homes had been destroyed during the war. Aleida thought that Hilda had not given up hope of winning Che back. She seemed to make her presence felt at every opportunity, dropping her daughter Hildita off to play in Che’s office or taking her there to eat her lunch. Che didn’t mind: his feelings for his only daughter were complex, paternal love mixed with guilt for the broken marriage and his long absence, and he tried to make up for it by having her with him as much as possible. When Hilda permitted it, the little girl stayed at his home on the weekends.

Aleida put up with Hildita for Che’s sake, but when the office visits became too frequent, with Hilda seeming to use them to dally and engage Che in conversation, she simmered with fury. Che kept his own temper in check to avoid making a scene. One day, however, he stormed out of his office, shouting loud enough to be heard by a young secretary: “I might as well not have gotten divorced.”

Hilda often spoke to the secretary to confide her feelings and to bad-mouth Aleida. Aleida, in turn, fumed to the secretary about her talks with Hilda. She demanded to know what they discussed. Finally, after a few months, the secretary could no longer stand feeling like “a pig in the middle,” as she recalled, and asked to be transferred out of the department.

The country itself was in an increasingly divisive mood as Fidel forced through more and more radical policies. Che was urging him along, using cajolery in private and applause in public. Observers began to take note of a pattern. What started out as “radical-sounding” proposals from Che were actually important early-warning signals, for almost invariably Fidel soon
made them official policy. In January 1959, and again in April, Che had talked about Cuba’s need to nationalize its oil and mineral wealth. In September 1959, Fidel said this was an issue that needed to be “carefully studied.” Nine months later, he would seize the refineries owned by Texaco, Esso, and British Shell.

In November 1959, the U.S. embassy noted a recent interview with Che in
Revolución
, which made plain that “regardless of what the Agrarian Reform Law may say about making the peasants small property owners, as far as Guevara is concerned, reform will be aimed more in the direction of cooperatives or communies [
sic
].” Three months after the interview, in January 1960, Fidel issued a decree seizing all sugar plantations and large cattle ranches and making them state-run cooperatives. As for the issue that was becoming Washington’s greatest grievance, the “nonpayment and illegal seizures” of American-owned properties in violation of both Cuba’s 1940 constitution and the 1959 agrarian reform law, in the very first weeks of the revolution’s triumph, Che had given an early warning, publicly calling for the constitution’s compensation clause to be waived.

October 1959 had been a particularly crucial time. By the end of the month, the stage had been set for what Hugh Thomas has called the “eclipse of the liberals” and the final ascendancy of the anti-American, “radical” wing of the revolution. The course long advocated by Che was now being steered, more and more openly, by Fidel himself.

Employing the heavily loaded argument for “revolutionary unity,” Fidel had successfully orchestrated the takeover of Havana University’s student union by Rolando Cubela, the former Directorio commander who had recently returned from a few months in Prague as Fidel’s military attaché. Cubela’s election victory was a de facto government takeover of a campus that had traditionally been both autonomous and a hotbed of antigovernment plotting. Fidel knew this only too well, since that is where he had begun his own political career.

Che carried the same message to Cuba’s second university, in Santiago, where he bluntly announced that university autonomy was over. Henceforth the state would design the curriculum. Central planning was necessary, Cuba was going to industrialize, and it needed qualified technicians—agronomists, agricultural teachers, and chemical engineers—not a new crop of lawyers. “Who has the right to say that only 10 lawyers should graduate per year and that 100 industrial chemists should graduate?” Che asked. “Some would say that that is dictatorship, and all right: it is dictatorship.” Students should join the “great army of those who
do
, leaving by the wayside that small patrol of those who simply talk.” (Two months later, in December, while accepting an honorary teacher’s degree at the University
of Las Villas, Che told the gathered faculty and students that the days when education was a privilege of the white middle class had ended. “The University, he said, “must
paint
itself black, mulatto, worker and peasant.” If it didn’t, he warned, the people would break down its doors “and paint the University the colors they like.”)

Che spoke in a tense climate caused by the first outbreaks of counter-revolutionary activity. In Pinar del Río, a sugar mill had been bombed by an unidentified plane and a group of suspected rebels that included two Americans had been captured. At the same time, the long-simmering Huber Matos affair was finally about to blow up. On October 20, following Raúl’s promotion to minister of the armed forces, Matos wrote to Fidel from Camagüey, tendering his resignation, urging him to alter his present course, and accusing him of “burying the revolution.” Some fifteen of Matos’s officers planned to resign with him. Fidel immediately repudiated Matos’s claims and accused him of disloyalty and “ambition,” among other offenses. He ordered Camilo to fly to Camagüey and arrest Matos and the other dissident officers. Fidel then flew to Camagüey himself to make a speech accusing Matos of planning an armed revolt—treason. Matos and the officers were taken to Havana and imprisoned in La Cabaña.

As Fidel, also back in Havana, prepared to address a convention of more than 2,000 American travel agents to encourage the expansion of U.S. tourism to Cuba, the defector Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz appeared overhead, piloting a B-26 bomber. He dropped leaflets calling on Fidel to purge the Communists in his regime. Cuban air force planes scrambled to intercept him, and army personnel at La Cabaña opened fire with antiaircraft batteries, but Díaz Lanz flew away unscathed.

At the INRA building on the Plaza de la Revolución, Che and José Manuel Manresa and a secretary named Cristína stood by a window watching Díaz Lanz loop down low and buzz the building, flying so close they could see him inside the pilot’s cabin. Che said nothing, but he was icy with rage and frustration. Che’s
escolta
asked for permission to go up to the roof and shoot down the plane, but Che told them no—they were bound to do more damage than the plane could. The incident ended on a humorous note. One of the secretaries, a plump, nervous girl, had hidden under a desk when the plane appeared. She got stuck, and everyone laughed as several of the
escolta
finally pulled her free.

Díaz Lanz’s “bombing attack” was a public relations disaster for Fidel. The visiting travel agents began leaving town in alarm as he was denouncing it. At least two civilians had been killed and several were injured. Safely back in the United States, Díaz Lanz acknowledged making the flight but denied dropping anything but leaflets over Havana. If there were casualties,
they had probably been the result of the Cuban soldiers’ random shooting or fallout from antiaircraft fire. Nevertheless, the story that he had launched an aerial attack was officially adopted. The next day, large crowds demonstrated in front of the American embassy, and Fidel appeared on television, accusing Matos of plotting a military revolt in Camagüey, in complicity with Díaz Lanz. (There had also been an attack by an unidentified plane that dropped bombs on a sugar mill in Camagüey.) The United States, Fidel charged, harbored “war criminals” and had supplied Díaz Lanz with the plane.

On October 26, at a rally in the Plaza de la Revolución attended by an estimated 500,000 Cubans, Fidel repeated his charges and vowed that Cuba would defend itself. The people would be trained and armed, and Cuba would get the planes and other weapons it needed. The next day, the U.S. ambassador, Philip Bonsal, delivered a note of protest to Foreign Minister Roa. Fidel’s cabinet voted to reinstate the revolutionary tribunals.

On October 28, after reorganizing the military command in Camagüey, Camilo Cienfuegos boarded his Cessna airplane for the return to Havana. He never arrived. Fidel and Che joined a three-day search for the missing plane, but no wreckage was found. What had happened? Camilo’s pilot was experienced, and the weather that day had been fine. Many conspiracy theories sprang up. One was that Fidel had done away with Camilo, either because he was in cahoots with Matos, or because he was becoming too popular. Another theory was that a Cuban air force fighter plane shot him down, mistaking his aircraft for a hostile intruder. In any case, his plane had vanished forever beneath the blue Caribbean waters that lay under his flight path. The revolution had lost one of its most charismatic and popular figures.
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