Che Guevara (88 page)

Significantly, Che had not said that he would end Cuban support for guerrilla insurgencies in the region. He had promised that “not a single weapon” would leave Cuba for use in other countries, but he had not mentioned training guerrillas, or providing funds or fighters. As for weapons, they could be obtained anywhere, even in the United States.

On August 19, the day after his meeting with Goodwin, Che flew to an airfield outside Buenos Aires. The military officer whom President Frondízi had sent to meet the plane was unaware of the identity of the person he was to take to the presidential residence; when he saw Che Guevara, he was dumbstruck.

Che met over lunch with Frondízi, who plainly wanted to use their meeting to test the waters as to Cuba’s intentions. He expressed his hopes for peaceful coexistence. Che assured Frondízi that Cuba had no intention of entering into a formal alliance with Moscow unless it was attacked by Washington.

After lunch, Che asked a favor from Frondízi. Could he see his seriously ailing aunt, María Luisa, who lived in the suburb of San Isidro? Frondízi agreed, and for the first time in eight years, Che saw the streets of
Buenos Aires again, through the windows of a presidential car, a clandestine visitor to his own country. After his visit with María Luisa—it was the last time he would see her—he was driven back to the airfield and flown across the Río de la Plata to Uruguay. He got on board the Cubana plane where his entourage awaited him and flew to Brasília.

The news of Che’s “secret” visit spread rapidly, causing consternation in military circles. That night a bomb exploded in Buenos Aires, blowing out the front door of the apartment building on Calle Arenales where Che’s uncle, Fernando Guevara Lynch, lived. Fernando told reporters that he had not seen his nephew and had learned about the visit only after it was over. “It was 1953 when he left the country. It would have given me great pleasure to have seen him,” Fernando said. Then he excused himself and, with true Guevara aplomb, told the reporters that he was going out for dinner with friends and hoped to make it “if a bomb hasn’t been placed under the hood of my car.”

The bombing was not the only fallout from Che’s visit. Over succeeding days, there were stories in the papers about the “concern” felt in the armed forces, along with photographs of grave-faced generals coming and going from tense meetings with the president. Argentina’s foreign minister was forced to resign, and seven months later, when Frondízi himself was overthrown in a military coup, most political observers agreed that his encounter with Guevara had hastened his fall.

Wherever Che alighted, calamities followed. During a speech he gave at the University of Montevideo, there were protests and a shot was fired, killing a Uruguayan professor in the crowd. Tamayito was convinced it had been a plot to kill Che, carried out by anti-Castro exiles flown in by the CIA. At Che’s meeting with Janio Quadros, the president of Brazil, he was decorated with the prestigious Orden Cruzeiro do Sol. Five days later, Quadros resigned, his political career suddenly over.

Within a few weeks of the OAS conference in Punta del Este, Washington had sent a clear message that it was not interested in Che’s overture to President Kennedy. Congress passed a bill banning U.S. assistance to any nation that dealt with Cuba. Costa Rica broke off relations with Havana, and Betancourt’s government in Venezuela followed suit. Latin America’s armies were on the alert for signs of Cuban “subversion,” and U.S. military aid and specialized training was on offer to deal with the threat. In October 1961, the first Inter-American Counterrevolutionary War Course began at Argentina’s Escuela Superior de Guerra. At the inaugural ceremony,
echoing the language used by Che Guevara to unite Latin Americans for the common struggle against imperialism, Brigadier General Carlos Turolo invoked the spirit of “international solidarity with the people of the Americas ... who are faced with the ... imperative necessity to coordinate action, and to prevent and combat the common enemy, Communism.”

Washington was, in effect, going to inoculate the hemisphere. The vaccine was a potent one: counterinsurgency training; coordinated action by the region’s military, police, and intelligence agencies; a stepped-up role for the CIA; economic and social development programs through the Alliance for Progress; and military “civic action” projects in backward areas to win the hearts and minds of the civilians who were targeted by the guerrillas.

Allen Dulles had been fired from the CIA after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, but the new director, John McCone, had a strong hand to play. In November 1961, JFK allocated $50 million for a new covert action program against Cuba. It was code-named Operation Mongoose. Coordinated out of Washington and the CIA’s Miami station, the ambitious program aimed to destabilize the Cuban regime through espionage, sabotage, military attacks, and selective assassinations. In time, it would become the CIA’s largest covert operation.

The CIA’s underground resistance network in Cuba had been devastated in the massive roundup of suspected dissidents by Cuba’s security forces after the Bay of Pigs. But in October, only a few weeks after he had left his asylum in the Venezuelan embassy, Felix Rodríguez was on his way back to the island. His mission: to rebuild the CIA’s infiltration routes for future paramilitary actions.

By the year’s end, Kennedy’s containment policy was enjoying some success. In December, an OAS resolution by Cuba’s neighbors condemning its alignment with the Soviet bloc was virtually unanimous; only Mexico voted against the resolution. That same month, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador severed relations with Cuba. In Havana, Fidel made a speech that definitively sealed Cuba’s break with the West. “I am a Marxist-Leninist,” he declared, “and will be until I die.” At the end of January 1962, the OAS voted to suspend Cuba’s membership in the organization and ban arms sales to Cuba by member states. Measures for a joint defense against Cuban actions in the region were adopted. In February, Kennedy tightened the already stringent trade embargo against Cuba, banning all exports except medical supplies.

Edward Lansdale, the director of Operation Mongoose, came up with a rip-roaring schedule for a package of actions, including attacks on key leaders, to culminate in the overthrow of Castro by October. This plan was then scaled down, but the final guidelines for Mongoose, while calling for
the CIA to make “maximum use of indigenous resources” to bring about Castro’s overthrow, also concluded that U.S. military intervention would be required.

A bomb was discovered and defused by the police outside Che’s mother’s house on Calle Araoz in Buenos Aires in February. A week later, Argentina severed diplomatic links with Cuba. In March, with agricultural production sharply down in Cuba and consumer shortages in all the shops, mandatory government rationing for foodstuffs and other basic goods was imposed. From now on, Cubans would have to line up to buy food with ration booklets used to record their weekly allowances. It had been only seven months since Che had confidently predicted that Cuba would soon be virtually self-sufficent in food.

Who was to blame for the shortages? Were they caused by the U.S. trade embargo? In part, yes. Had the revolution’s radicalization caused the crippling exodus of technicians, managers, and traders from the island? Yes. Were the revolution’s leaders incompetent in their attempt to convert a capitalist economy to a socialist one? Yes. Although neither Che nor Fidel would acknowledge the fact, food rationing heralded the end of their illusion of making Cuba a self-sufficient socialist state. As for Che’s illusion that a global fraternity of socialist nations could bring about the demise of capitalism, it was about to be dashed to pieces.

In late April 1962, Alexandr Alexiev was urgently summoned back to Moscow by Nikita Khrushchev. No explanations were given, and Alexiev was alarmed. A child of Stalinism, he immediately began thinking the worst and preparing for some kind of punishment while racking his brain to figure out what he could have possibly done wrong. He stalled for time, asking to remain in Havana for the May Day festivities. A million people were expected in the Plaza de la Revolución, and the “Internationale” was to be sung for the first time in the now openly socialist state of Cuba. He was given permission to stay, but told to come to Moscow immediately after the event.

On the third of May, Alexiev flew to Mexico, where the Soviet ambassador said he had orders to lodge Alexiev at the embassy, not in a hotel. It was the same story at his next stop, London. Quite obviously, the Kremlin wanted to keep a close eye on Alexiev, and he arrived in Moscow extremely worried. A department chief of the Soviet Foreign Ministry was waiting for him at the airport. Alexiev was by now truly mystified and was left none the wiser by the official, who would tell him only that he would learn “tomorrow” why he had been called home.

The next morning, Alexiev was escorted into the Kremlin and taken to the office of Mikhail Suslov, Khrushchev’s deputy. Suslov wasn’t there, but two high-ranking secretaries of the Central Committee were: Yuri Andropov and the KGB chief, Alexander Shelepin, who took Alexiev into his office and explained that he was to be the new Soviet ambassador to Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev himself had made the decision. While they talked, Khrushchev called and asked Alexiev to come to his office. Khrushchev was alone, and the two of them talked for about an hour. Alexiev tried to decline the ambassadorship. What Cuba needed, he said, was an ambassador who knew about economics, and he was an illiterate in that field. “That’s not important,” Khrushchev told him. “What is important is that you are friendly with Fidel, with the leadership. They believe in you.” As for economists, he would give Fidel however many experts he needed. Right there and then, Khrushchev made a call and ordered a team of twenty top-level ministerial advisers from every field of the economy to be assembled. They would accompany Alexiev back to Cuba. He then turned to Alexiev and said that he wanted to see him in a couple of weeks to talk more “concretely.”

Toward the end of May, Khrushchev sent for Alexiev again. This time, there were five other officials in the office: Khrushchev’s aide, Frol Koslov; Deputy Premier Mikoyan; Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; Defense Minister Rodion Malinovski; and a Politburo alternate member, Sharif Rashidov. Alexiev was invited to sit down. “It was a very strange conversation,” he recalled. “Khrushchev asked me again about Cuba, the Cuban comrades, and I talked about each one, and then, when I was least expecting it, Khrushchev said, ‘Comrade Alexiev, to help Cuba, to save the Cuban revolution, we have reached a decision to place [nuclear] rockets in Cuba. What do you think? How will Fidel react? Will he accept or not?’”

Alexiev was astounded. He told Khrushchev that he thought Fidel wouldn’t accept the offer because his long-held public stance was that the revolution had been carried out to restore Cuba’s independence. They had thrown out the American military advisers, and if they accepted Soviet rockets on their soil, it would seem to violate their own principles. It would also be viewed through the eyes of international public opinion, and especially by Cuba’s Latin American neighbors, as a serious breach of trust. “For these reasons,” Alexiev concluded, “I don’t think they will accept.”

Malinovski reacted angrily. “He attacked me,” Alexiev recalled. “What kind of revolution is this that you say they won’t accept? I fought in
bourgeois
Republican Spain, which accepted our help ... and socialist Cuba has even more reason to!” Alexiev was intimidated and kept quiet as another official rallied to his defense, but Khrushchev said nothing, and the argument
fizzled. They began talking about other subjects and finally adjourned for lunch in Khrushchev’s dining room.

Over lunch, Khrushchev announced that he was going to send a couple of high-ranking officials—Sharif Rashidov and Marshal Sergei Biryusov, commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces—back to Havana with Alexiev to talk with Fidel. “There’s no other way for us to defend him,” Khrushchev said. “The Americans only understand force. We can give them the same medicine they gave us in Turkey. Kennedy is pragmatic, he is an intellectual, he’ll comprehend and won’t go to war, because war is war. Our gesture is intended to avoid war. Any idiot can start one, and we’re not doing that, it’s just to frighten them a bit. They should be made to feel the same way we do. They have to swallow the pill like we swallowed the Turkish one.” (Khrushchev was referring to the United States’ deployment of nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles taking place in neighboring Turkey that same month—the culmination of an agreement negotiated by the Eisenhower administration with its
NATO
partner in 1959 and reluctantly followed through by Kennedy.)

Khrushchev warned that the operation to install the missiles in Cuba would have to be carried out with the utmost secrecy, so that the Americans wouldn’t suspect anything until after their upcoming congressional elections in November. It could not be allowed to become a campaign issue. If it was done right, he said, he was convinced that the Americans would be too busy with their campaigning to notice anything before the missiles were in place.

A day or two before he was to leave for Cuba, Alexiev was tracked down by Kremlin officials; Nikita Khrushchev wanted to see him again. They took him to Khrushchev’s dacha at Peredelkino in the forested countryside outside Moscow, where he found the premier and the entire Politburo gathered. Khrushchev presented him to the assembled officials, and then announced: “Alexiev says Fidel won’t accept our proposal.” Khrushchev had thought up an approach that might work, however, and he tried it out on the others. He would tell Fidel that the missiles would be placed only as a last resort; first, the Soviet Union would attempt all other means of persuasion to dissuade the Americans from attacking Cuba, but he would offer his strong personal opinion that only the missiles would do the job. He hoped that would convince Fidel, he said, and told Alexiev to relay the proposal.