Che Guevara (77 page)

Might it not be that our fraternity can defy the breadth of the seas, the rigors of language and the lack of cultural ties, to lose ourselves in the embrace of a fellow struggler? ...

Cuba has been invited to the new Afro-Asian People’s Conference. [And Cuba will go] to say that it is true, that Cuba exists and that Fidel Castro is a man, a popular hero and not a mythological abstraction; but it will also go to explain that Cuba is not an isolated event, merely the first signal of America’s awakening. ...

[And when they ask]: “Are you the members of the Guerrilla Army that is leading the struggle for the liberation of America? Are you, then, our allies on the other side of the sea?” I must say [to them] and to all the hundreds of millions of Afro-Asians that ... I am one brother more, one more among the multitudes of brothers in this part of the world that awaits with infinite anxiety the moment [when we can] consolidate the bloc that will destroy, once and for all, the anachronistic presence of colonial domination.

Since 1957, a dozen nations had won their independence from French, British, and Belgian colonial rule. Others, such as Algeria, were having to wage war for it, but the trend was clear. The days of colonial rule were over, and the future was in the hands of men who had faced down the dying empires, men such as Nasser and Sukarno—and why not Fidel himself? In January, Foreign Minister Roa traveled to Asia and North Africa to extend Cuba’s invitation to an international congress of developing nations to be held in Havana.

The first anecdotal accounts of Che’s experiences in the guerrilla war had also begun appearing in print. In November, “The Murdered Puppy” was published in
Humanismo
. Coinciding, as it did, with the intensifying pace of land expropriations and the resumption of the revolutionary firing squads, the story’s allegorical significance—the necessity to sacrifice innocents in a revolutionary cause—must have made disquieting reading for some Cubans.

By January 1960, the architect Nicolás Quintana had come to the conclusion that the future looked bleak for him in Cuba. The revolution’s sharp
move to the left had alienated him and most of his social class. His dream of building the National Bank had been dashed. A close friend of his, a member of the Juventud Católica, the youth branch of the militantly anticommunist Acción Católica, had just been shot by a firing squad for distributing anticommunist leaflets.

Quintana went to see Che to complain. It was to be a shattering encounter. “Che told me, ‘Look, revolutions are ugly but necessary, and part of the revolutionary process is justice at the service of future justice,’” Quintana recalled. “I will never forget that phrase. I replied that that was Thomas More’s
Utopia
. I said that we had been fucked by that tale for a long time, for believing that we would achieve something not
now
, but in the future. Che looked at me for a while and said: ‘So. You don’t believe in the future of the revolution.’ I told him I didn’t believe in anything that was based upon an injustice.”

“Even if that injustice is cleansing?” Che asked.

Quintana replied: “For those who die, I don’t believe you can talk of cleansing injustice.”

Che’s response was immediate: “You have to leave Cuba. You have three choices: You leave Cuba and there’s no problem from me; or thirty years [in prison], in the near future; or the firing squad.”

Dumbstruck and horrified, Quintana sat frozen in his chair.

“You are doing very strange things,” Che said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Quintana recalled, “but I knew what he was referring to. What surprised me was that he already
knew
, that really surprised me.”

Quintana belonged to a group of professionals who had formed an organization they called Trabajo Voluntario (Voluntary Work). It was ostensibly dedicated to carrying out civic works, but the group’s real purpose was to organize an anti-Castro opposition. “It was an excuse to meet at night and talk, well ... you know ... about what we were going to do about this [the revolution].” After Che’s warning, Quintana realized he was not going to be doing very much at all, and, within a few weeks, he fled the island.

Around the same time, José Pardo Llada, the television commentator who had had such a troublesome journey with Che the previous summer, called on the new National Bank president to take up the case of a friend, the tobacco expert Napoleón Padilla. Che had asked Padilla to work for him at INRA, organizing tobacco cooperatives in Pinar del Río. Oddly, in light of his fear and dislike of Guevara’s “Communism,” which he had already denounced to the U.S. embassy, Padilla had agreed. He had set up cooperatives for INRA, assisted in a large sale of tobacco for export, and, at Che’s behest, taught a course in business administration.

Padilla had become increasingly uncomfortable about what he saw at INRA, and he argued with Nuñez Jiménez and the PSP’s Oscar Pino Santos, now a top INRA official, over the way they were implementing the agrarian reform. Finally, he exploded and accused Pino Santos of “practicing Communism.” From that day on, Padilla felt that he was being frozen out of things. Then, on the evening of January 26, an anonymous phone caller had warned him: “Napoleón, hide yourself right away, they’re going to arrest you.” The caller had hung up, and, terrified, Padilla drove to the Honduran embassy to ask for political asylum. The ambassador advised him to try to find out what his real status was before he took such an extreme step, and Padilla called Pardo Llada to ask for his help.

At the National Bank offices, Pardo asked Guevara if Padilla had a problem with the authorities. Che showed him a piece of paper. It was an affidavit signed by an army sergeant at the tobacco cooperative where Padilla worked, accusing him of being a counterrevolutionary and of speaking ill of Che’s wife, Aleida.

Pardo expressed his surprise that Che paid any attention to such petty gossip, and Che then revealed his hand. He also happened to know, he told Pardo, that Padilla met frequently with the U.S. embassy’s agricultural attaché, and that he had spoken negatively about the government in front of INRA officials. Pardo still insisted these weren’t reasons to persecute Padilla. “All right,” Che told him. “He can resign and leave INRA. And if he wants to leave the country, he can go join his gringo friends.” Che’s word was good. Six months later—“with Che’s express permission,” Pardo acknowledged—Padilla was allowed to leave Cuba, taking his car and furniture with him, on the ferry to Miami.

Fidel had dubbed 1960 “The Year of Agrarian Reform,” but a better label might have been “The Year of Confrontation.” The month leading up to Mikoyan’s visit in February saw a rapid deterioration in U.S.-Cuban relations and an open acceleration of Cuba’s “socialization.” A tit-for-tat war began in early January with a note of protest sent by Secretary of State Herter over the “illegal seizures” of American-owned property, for which no compensation had been paid. Cuba responded by seizing all the large cattle ranches and all sugar plantations in the country, including those owned by Americans. More unidentified airplanes flew out of the United States, firebombing Cuban cane fields. The runs were being organized by the CIA, which was now planning to train a Cuban exile force for an eventual guerrilla campaign against Castro.

Che and his protégé Orlando Borrego doing volunteer labor on a construction site in 1960.

Reaction in Washington was being fueled by domestic politics. President Eisenhower was in the final year of his second term as president, and the jockeying to succeed him had already begun. Vice President Nixon used Cuba as a rallying cry, warning Castro that he could be punished for his actions. The quota of sugar that the Cubans were permitted to sell to the United States might be cut. Fidel responded defiantly. On January 19, INRA announced the immediate confiscation of “all
latifúndia
,” both Cuban and foreign-owned, in the country. The edict put every large remaining agrarian holding in the revolution’s hands.

Next, a bizarre altercation between Fidel and the Spanish ambassador, Juan Pablo de Lojendio, occurred on live television. Fidel insinuated during a televised speech that Spain’s embassy was implicated in a covert U.S. program to smuggle anti-Castroites out of the island. While Fidel was still on the air, the indignant ambassador stormed into the studio to accuse him of slander. A shouting match ensued, and the apoplectic envoy was forcibly escorted from the building. Fidel resumed his speech with an announcement that Lojendio had twenty-four hours to leave Cuba. Then he veered off into a rant against the United States. Secretary of State Herter reacted by going to Capitol Hill to request passage of a bill that would give Eisenhower the power to alter Cuba’s sugar quota. Ambassador Bonsal was recalled to Washington.

There was one final attempt to find a way out of the spiraling crisis. On January 21, Eisenhower issued a statement calling for negotiations to halt further deterioration in the relations between the two nations. That same day in Havana, Daniel Braddock, the deputy chief of mission, asked the Argentine ambassador, Julio Amoeda, to serve as intermediary between his government and Castro. Amoeda went to see Fidel with a proposal from the Americans. If Fidel stopped the anti-American attacks and met with Bonsal in Havana, Washington would consider extending economic aid to Cuba. After first refusing, Fidel relented, telling Amoeda he would halt the press campaign. Osvaldo Dorticós, the Cuban figurehead president, followed up the next day with a declaration that Cuba wished to keep and strengthen its “traditional friendship” with the United States.

The truce held. In Fidel’s next speech, on January 28, he did not mention the United States at all. The temporary backing down gave him breathing space before the next round, which he knew would be very soon in coming. On January 31, Cuba’s government finally acknowledged the truth of the long-standing rumors and announced the imminent arrival of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan.

The Soviet trade fair in February turned out to be a great success. More than 100,000 Cubans visited during a period of three weeks. They viewed the Sputnik replica; the models of Soviet homes, factories, and sports facilities; the tractors and displays of farm and industrial equipment. These were the technological achievements of the nation that Nikita Khrushchev had told Americans would “bury” them in the not too distant future. To the average untraveled Cuban in early 1960, such claims were credible. After all, hadn’t Russia been the first country to put a satellite—even a live dog—into orbit?

Not all Cubans were impressed. Mikoyan’s visit was accompanied by some angry demonstrations, and Cuba’s independent media waged an unstinting campaign to expose the inequities and inefficiencies of the Soviet system. Throughout Mikoyan’s stay, nocturnal attacks on Cuban sugar mills and cane fields by small planes based in the United States continued without letup. In late February, one of the marauding planes crashed on Cuban soil, killing its occupants, and the identity papers of one of the dead showed him to be a U.S. citizen. Fidel cited this as evidence of U.S. complicity in the attacks. When CIA Director Dulles informed Eisenhower that the dead man and those piloting the other sabotage missions were in fact CIA hire-lings, Eisenhower quietly urged Dulles to come up with a more comprehensive plan to overthrow Castro. Eisenhower had only recently ordered customs officials to halt and prosecute any Cuba-bound flights leaving illegally from the United States.

On February 13, the Soviets and Cubans had made public the terms of their new commercial agreement. The Soviets agreed to buy almost 500,000 tons of sugar during 1960, and would buy a million tons per year for the next four years, in return for which Cuba would receive not cash but Soviet products, including oil. In the fifth and final year of the agreement, Moscow would pay cash. Cuba was also to receive $100 million in credit at a bargain-basement 2.5 percent interest rate over ten years, for the purchase of machinery and factory buildings—thus financing Che’s industrialization plans. As for Fidel’s dream of draining the Ciénaga de Zapáta swamp, which he showed Mikoyan from a helicopter, Mikoyan promised Soviet technical assistance.

Fidel and Che crowed happily about the new deal, calling it a further step toward the economic independence of Cuba. Polish and East German trade delegations arrived and signed their own trade deals with Cuba. The Czechs and the Chinese were not far behind. On February 20, fulfilling another of Che’s recent public pronouncements, the era of Soviet-style central planning was ushered into being with the creation of the Junta Central de Planificación (
JUCEPLAN
). Fidel was its chairman, and Che, its main proponent, was on the management council.

Sergo Mikoyan accompanied his father on most of his peregrinations around the island and was able to observe Cuba’s leaders closely. Right away, he noticed the difference between Che and Fidel. He had read about Che, and he recalled that he had expected to meet a “manic guerrilla,” a kind of fire-eating Latin American Bolshevik, but Che didn’t fit the image. “I now saw a man who was very silent, with very tender eyes,” Sergo said. “You feel a little distance when you talk with Fidel [because] ... he almost doesn’t listen to you, but with Che one didn’t feel that. Although I had expected
him to be the obstinate one, I realized he wasn’t stubborn, but inclined to talk, to discuss, and to listen.”