Island that Dared (23 page)

Cuba’s revolutionaries were genuine internationalists, as they would prove in the decades to come, and seen from the Caribbean in the 1960s Africa looked like another continent ripe for a Cuban-style revolution. But of course it wasn’t. Ché’s longing to build a global opposition to Capitalism Rampant completely baffled the Africans they had set out to help. Those Congolese had never heard of the IMF or GATT or the CIA/KGB or Marx or Milton Friedman. They didn’t know what Che was talking about and he didn’t know what they were feeling about. Their conflicts and objectives, based on important (to them) tribal differences, and concentrated within comparatively small areas, were millennia away from the concept of
revolution
as an intercontinental process unifying the poor of the world. Blank stares greeted Ché’s talk of replacing predatory foreign corporations with disciplined African work-forces capable of sustaining, by their productivity, an economy that would provide for the welfare of every citizen. After three frustrating and humiliating months Che and his one hundred and twenty highly trained guerrillas (all black) retreated the way they had come, by boat across Lake Tanganyika.

When his
compañeros
had hurried home, glad to be shaking the African dust off their boots, Che lodged in the Cuban embassy in Dar-es-Salaam
for two months, editing his Congo diaries. At heart he preferred the pen to the gun and it is as a writer that he most appeals to me.
The African Dream
, unpublished until 1999, is his best book – perhaps because he knew, while working on it, that for political reasons it wouldn’t be published within the foreseeable future, if ever. It is searingly honest and innocent of political correctness. No one comes out of it well: not Che, not his
compañeros
, not their Congolese allies – least of all Laurent Kabila who, decades later, reappeared destructively on the world stage. In
The African Dream
’s final paragraph we read:

That was written in January 1966. Thirty-one years later Kabila – his defects still in place – ousted General Mobutu.

The African Dream
allows us great intimacy with Che and some readers may be shocked by the nakedness of his own cultural imperialism. He was, after all, a man of his time, a Latin American with little knowledge of other continents, lacking the flexibility essential for this self-imposed task of helping Africans. He also lacked the hypocrisy used by many contemporary leaders to disguise their racism. Had he been in a position to influence those Congolese tribes, he would have hustled them away from their own traditions and into our industrialised world as relentlessly as any colonial power or modern development agency. In an epilogue mingling sadness and bewilderment he acknowledges ‘hostility on the part of the population’ and wonders:

Ché’s Bolivian venture has been variously described as hot-headed, callous, arrogant, romantic, irresponsible, melodramatic, unrealistic.
Reviewing
The Bolivian Diaries
in 1968, less than two years after their author’s death, I chose ‘just plain daft’. (That was ten years before my own
three-month
trek in the roadless High Andes, which gave me rather a different perspective.) The English translation was published by Allen & Unwin, a guarantee of its authenticity, as the critics noted, though in fact Daniel James’ Introduction is lamentably tendentious. The Cuban edition, distributed free throughout the island, became the Che cult’s keystone. It was incomplete – heavily censored – as Fidel admitted at the time; ‘
image-building
’ had not yet been so named but
el comandante
well understood this ancient process. Thus ‘The Diaries’ became an inspiration for generations of Cubans who imbibed carefully selected quotations with their mothers’ milk – and thereafter were exposed to them on everything from exercise-book covers to
tienda
wall posters to gigantic wayside hoardings.

By now the genesis of Ché’s last campaign has been forgotten by most people. Bolivia was chosen not because its minuscule Communist Party was champing at the revolutionary bit but because Che had in his sights all five of its bordering countries (the domino effect). With Fidel, he had decided that ‘Bolivia will sacrifice itself so that conditions for revolution can be created in neighbouring countries. We have to make Latin America another Viet Nam.’

The eighteen experienced Cubans in the ‘expeditionary force’ expected the peasantry to support them as the Sierra Maestra villagers had eventually supported Fidel. But uninvited foreign forces, whether Cuban guerrillas or US marines, have trouble ‘winning hearts and minds’. Instead of flocking to Ché’s standard these Bolivian villagers were scared by the incomprehensible arrival in their remote mountains of strange
long-bearded
men (the indigenous Indians are not hirsute) who set about digging inexplicable tunnels and couldn’t speak their language. Ché’s attempt to learn Quechua was irrelevant; the tribe amongst whom they found themselves spoke Guarini which not even the Bolivian guerrillas knew. These peasants didn’t want to fight anybody but when the shooting started they usually sided with their own army, informing them of the invaders’ movements.

For all his callous talk about ‘another Viet Nam’, and his insistence on the value of guns to social reformers, the mature Che was a hesitant man of violence. Nor did he urge his team, in Bolivia, to be ruthless. Given a tiny revolutionary ‘army’, hoping to outwit a professional (though inept) national
army, one might have expected him to kill at every opportunity. Not so, however. His diary records occasions when he couldn’t bring himself to shoot vulnerable young conscripts who presented easy targets. On 3 June – ‘At 1700 an Army truck came by, with two little soldiers wrapped in blankets in the bed of the vehicle. I did not feel up to shooting them, and my brain didn’t work fast enough to take them prisoner, so we let it go by’. On 20 June – ‘The officer is a Second Lieutenant of the police that was sent with a carabinero and a teacher who came as a volunteer … His mission entailed a long trip for which they allowed him only four days … We considered killing them but then I decided to send them back alive’.

The uncensored
Bolivian Diaries
is a movingly honest record of a tragically ill-planned campaign. It is also a gripping adventure story. For eleven months the guerrillas endured extreme hardship amidst one of the Andes’ most formidable ranges. For days they went without food or water, were lost (together or in two anxiously wandering groups), had to use machetes to clear the way on jungly pathless slopes, had to retrace their weary footsteps when thwarted by sheer precipices, had to make rafts to cross wide rapid rivers in which a few
compañeros
were drowned and several precious weapons lost. Meanwhile the Bolivian army was tracking them, ineffectually, until reinforcements arrived, troops specially trained and equipped by the US army for the Che-hunt.

The day after their quarry was wounded and captured the CIA conferred with the military junta in La Paz who then ordered Sergeant Mario Teran to kill his prisoner. Expediency demanded Ché’s murder. As a Cuban government representative, he had addressed the Organization of American States, the 1964 UN Conference on Trade and Development, the UN General Assembly, the Organization of Afro-Asian Solidarity meeting in Algiers. Internationally, he had made his mark as a passionate spokesman for the voiceless. Had he been brought to trial millions, already enthralled by his deeds and words, would have listened attentively to his speech from the dock. And many would certainly have been inspired to take up where Che had to leave off – shades of Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia peroration. A helicopter took his body to a small hospital in the hill town of Vallegrande where the open-eyed corpse was photographed and identified by a Cuban-American agent of the CIA, known as ‘Eduardo Gonzalez’, who had directed the Che-hunt. Almost forty years later, in that same hospital, a blind octogenarian, a retired army sergeant named Mario Teran, had his two cataracts removed by a Cuban opthalmic surgeon, one of a team of twenty providing free medical care to the local
campesiños.

In 1960 Che had spent months in the Soviet Union being feted and to some extent brainwashed. But only to a limited extent; thereafter he presented himself as an internationalist Marxist rather than as a
Kremlin-controlled
Communist. He openly criticised Soviet imperialism, finding it too similar, where foreign aid was concerned, to the capitalist version. Genuine Communists, argued Che, would provide stringless aid to
undeveloped
countries – how else could the poor be freed from their trap? Doubtless this straight talk partly explains the Soviet reaction to his death. All around the world pro-Soviet journalists and broadcasters used his ignominious (as they interpreted it) end to prove the Kremlin’s point that in Latin America armed insurgency was not the way forward.

Observing the World Bank, the IMF, GATT et al., as they deftly
manipulated
the Majority World, Che accurately foretold the consequences. Our current proliferation of books dissecting the stratagems employed by Capitalism Rampant would not have surprised him. Long before the Washington Consensus was declared, he clearly saw that pattern emerging.

In our day, Che would of course rank as a terrorist. So how come this idol of the rebellious ’68-ers, this Marxist gunman, this purveyor of violence and sedition, was eulogised in a variety of unexpected quarters? I quote from US reviews of
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
, published in the mid-’60s:

Thus was Ché’s fervent adherence to Marxism indulged in the midst of the Cold War. His extraordinary qualities were recognised, even by those whose way of life would have been demolished had his thinking
prevailed, and despite his active promotion of armed insurrection against Washington’s satellite regimes. Now he would be relentlessly demonised, his integrity impugned and his ideals scorned – a disturbing measure of how intolerance has gained momentum under the aegis of ‘the new imperialists’.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 prompts a similar comparison. In those days world leaders exchanged real, personal letters and, reading the correspondence between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel, one is struck both by the courteous wording (even when the writer is angry and/or frightened) and by the efforts being made to see the other point of view. Granted, that fraught atmosphere – with nuclear weapons pointing in every direction – made diplomatic tip-toeing and whispering seem advisable. Yet one senses that the civilised tone of those exchanges also had to do with the personalities involved. An equivalent crisis, given the aggression-glorification and coarse phraseology of the present US
administration
, would be unlikely to have a non-violent ending.

Had President Kennedy survived, he and Khrushchev might have radically changed the Cold War chemistry, to the arms industry’s detriment. And Fidel believes that the Cuban-US relationship would almost certainly have benefited. As he said in an interview with Ignacio Ramonet:

Some January nights can be blessedly chilly and I approached the Che Memorial at dawn through a silver-grey fog, dense enough to obscure Che until I was standing directly below José Delarra’s bronze statue – water-bottle on hip, one arm in a sling, the right hand rather casually carrying a rifle. Then the rising sun created an eerie optical illusion: as the mist thinned and shifted, it seemed that Che himself was moving.

This statue was erected on the twentieth anniversary of Ché’s death.
Ten years later his bones, and the remains of seventeen other guerrillas, were flown from Bolivia and interred in a simple mausoleum behind the monument, a building that could easily be overlooked. Tania had shown me photographs of countless thousands watching Ché’s coffin being lowered from an aeroplane while an army band played
Suite de las Americas
. ‘Emotions were mixed,’ she recalled. ‘My generation, we wept … For younger Cubans, Che had been as remote as Martí, then suddenly he became real because of his coffin! Real because he was dead! Soon many of them wept too. Other youths became jubilant in a belligerent way – all very interesting. A sociologist colleague of mine wrote an essay about the different reactions. Everyone noticed how
sad
Fidel looked. Through the worst times, Che was his best friend.’