Che Guevara (83 page)

Che with Mao Tse-tung during his 1960 tour of the Communist bloc.

Although Che’s statements may have betrayed his personal sympathies, he and Fidel were taking pains not to take sides openly in the festering quarrel. Back in Pyongyang, Che diplomatically expressed his hope to Leonov that “the differences could be settled” between the two nations, but both he and Fidel must have been aware that they were in a very good position to play Beijing and Moscow off against each other. Indeed, after he returned to Moscow on December 19, the Soviets dramatically expanded their largesse, agreeing to buy 2.7 million tons of Cuba’s forthcoming sugar crop, at a rate above world market prices. The joint Soviet-Cuban communiqué issued that day expressed Cuba’s gratitude for Soviet economic assistance and stressed the U.S.S.R.’s “full support” for Cuba’s bid to maintain its independence
“in the face of aggression.” Echoing Che’s plaudits for China, the Moscow communiqué extolled Cuba as “an example for other peoples of the American continent, and also Asia and Africa.”

The next day, Che left for Cuba, stopping briefly in Prague and Budapest. He had learned that an old childhood acquaintance, the Spanish Republican refugee Fernando Barral, was living in Hungary. It had been ten years since they had last seen each other, before Barral’s arrest for “Communist agitation” and his expulsion from Argentina. Since then, Barral had gone to medical school in Hungary, had become a doctor, and had lived through the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the Soviet invasion that suppressed it. Over the last couple of years, he had read the news about revolutionary Cuba with interest. As for this Argentine-born
comandante
, Ernesto Guevara, called “Che,” he wondered, “Could it really be the same
loco
Guevara I knew?” During his brief stop in Budapest, Che had asked the Cuban embassy staff to find Barral, but they were unable to locate him. Che left the following note, which was later delivered.

Dear Fernando:

I know you had doubts about my identity but you thought that I was I. Indeed, although no, because a lot of water has gone under my bridge, and of the asthmatic, embittered, and individualistic being you knew, only the asthma remains.

I learned that you had married. I too, and I have two children,
*
but I am still an adventurer. Only now, my adventures have a just purpose. Greetings to your family from this survivor of a past epoch and a fraternal embrace from Che.

[P.S.] What do you think of my new name [?]

As it had done for Alberto Granado, the contact with Che was to provide Barral with a new direction in his life. Hungary’s entrenched and bureaucratic socialist system no longer held any surprises for him, and the chance to be part of the “new” revolution in Cuba appealed to him greatly; he wrote back to Che, expressing his interest in coming to work in Cuba. In February 1961, Che replied, welcoming him. “The salary will be decorous without permitting great luxuries but the experience of the Cuban Revolution is something that I think would be interesting for people like you, who must begin one day again in their countries of origin.” Barral accepted Che’s offer and emigrated to Cuba in November 1961. Almost immediately, Che
sent him to see Ramiro Valdés, Cuba’s security chief, who, as a test of Barral’s revolutionary commitment, dispatched him to the Escambray to fight in the “Lucha contra Bandidos.”

Che had met someone new on this trip, someone who would become an important part of his life. A twenty-two-year-old woman named Haydée Tamara Bunke was the interpreter for his meetings with German officials in Berlin. She was the daughter of Jewish Communists who fled Hitler’s Germany in 1935 for Argentina, where Tamara was born two years later. She had spent her childhood there, returning with her family to the Communist-run German Democratic Republic when she was fourteen. Her parents had raised her to be a Communist, and she became a faithful child of the socialist state, joining the youth wing of the Communist Party at eighteen. With her Spanish-language abilities, Tamara soon was made an official interpreter, but, according to a signed statement she made to the Party in 1958, her true dream was to return to Latin America—ideally to her birthplace, Argentina—and “help the Party there.”

By the time Che met her, the attractive, fair-haired Tamara was already known to some of his comrades. Six months earlier, Che had dispatched Orlando Borrego to Berlin as part of a Cuban trade delegation for which Tamara had interpreted. Borrego recalled that she was avidly interested in Cuba and wanted to go there. Within five months of meeting Che, she had her wish; in May 1961 she flew to Cuba, where she would soon be given a role in Che’s program of revolution for Latin America.

As Che flew home from his long trip, he must have felt pleased with himself. He had met the leaders of the socialist world and obtained vital sales and credits for Cuba. Over the last two years, he had been instrumental in welding the Soviet-Cuban alliance. As Alexiev put it, “Che was practically the architect of our relations with Cuba.”

On New Year’s Day 1961, Fidel called for a general military mobilization and showed off Cuba’s newly acquired Soviet tanks and other weaponry in a display of strength on Havana’s streets. The next day, he demanded that Washington cut its Havana embassy staff to eleven, which was the number of people in Cuba’s embassy in Washington. It was the final straw for Eisenhower, who had only a few more days in office. On January 3, 1961, in one of his last acts before handing the presidency over to John F. Kennedy, he severed diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.

On the morning of February 24, 1961, Che left his home on Eighteenth Street in Miramar. His car turned right and headed toward Seventh Avenue. He usually turned left, toward the tree-lined boulevard of Fifth Avenue, then right, driving past State Security headquarters into the tunnel beneath the Almendares River, then down the Malecón to his office at the National Bank, in Old Havana. But that day Che headed for the Plaza de la Revolución. Fidel had turned his INRA department into a full-fledged ministry, and it was Che’s first day as Cuba’s new minister of industries. The unannounced change of route may have saved his life.

A few moments after he left home, a gun battle erupted just outside his house. Che’s bodyguards entered the fray, shooting wildly. Inside the house, Aleida threw herself and three-month-old Aleidita under the first-floor stairwell, where they were joined by the terrified latest addition to the Guevara household, the nanny Sofía Gato, a twenty-five-year-old girl from Camagüey. Afterward, Sofía was able to piece together most of what had taken place. Four or five armed men,
barbudos
, had lain in wait behind some bushes near the corner of Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. When one of the neighbors, a man named Salinas, drove by in his car, they opened fire with automatic weapons. Believing it to be an attack on Che’s house, his bodyguards returned the fire. A few minutes later, Salinas lay dead in his car, and one of the assailants, shot in the gut, writhed on the ground.

News of the shoot-out was quickly smothered, although plenty of people heard about it anyway. There was speculation, which was officially denied, that it had been an attempt to assassinate Che. But according to Oscar Fernández Mell, who also lived at the house on Eighteenth Street, Salinas was the attacker’s intended target, the victim of an affair of the heart gone
bad. As with so many things that have taken place in Cuba, the shooting became cloaked in mystery, and so it has remained for decades.

The notion that the incident on Eighteenth Street was a botched attempt to assassinate Che is entirely credible, considering what was happening in Cuba at the time. All over the country, former
barbudos
like those who fired on Salinas’s car that morning had taken up arms against the revolution, against Communism. Che was widely identified as the principal advocate of Cuba’s “submission” to the Soviet Union. He was the Red flea in Fidel’s ear. At least one other plot to kill Che had already been foiled. One night in early 1960, back in the days before Mikoyan’s visit, Alexandr Alexiev was talking with Che at his new office in the National Bank when Che suddenly said, “Look, Alejandro, let me show you the place where the counterrevolutionaries are planning to shoot me from.” He pointed to a window across the narrow street from where they sat. Alexiev was alarmed, but Che reassured him that Cuba’s intelligence services had already staked out the place and were about to move in.

Whatever the true cause of the shoot-out on Eighteenth Street, Che took new precautions afterward. Visitors to the Ministry of Industries were frisked by guards, and Che carried a cigar box full of hand grenades on the seat next to him in the car. He drove to work by a different route each day.

The last American diplomats had vacated the embassy a month before the shooting, and American citizens were prohibited from visiting Cuba. The Peruvian and Paraguayan governments also broke off relations and pulled out their diplomats. More of Cuba’s anti-Castro neighbors would follow their example in the coming months. At least 100,000 Cuban refugees had fled into exile, most of them to Miami, and the U.S. government had set up a resettlement program to house them and give them jobs. Among those who fled was José Pardo Llada, who had made some indiscreet remarks about the Communist Party’s infiltration into the government. Humberto Sorí-Marín, the former agriculture minister, was not so lucky. Captured by Cuban troops and accused of CIA-sponsored counterrevolutionary activities, Sorí-Marín was shot by a firing squad.

Soviet technicians, Russian-language teachers, economists, and military advisers were flowing into Havana. The Mongolians, Albanians, Hungarians, Chinese, and North Vietnamese opened up embassies. Eastern-bloc trade and cultural delegations came and went. On January 17, Fidel had announced that a thousand Cuban youths would be sent to the Soviet Union to study “agrarian collectives.”

Even working-class Cubans were struck by the difference between the
rusos
and the Americans they had replaced. The Americans had been rich and loud and spoke terrible Spanish, but these newcomers looked and acted
like peasants. They were rough-hewn and poorly dressed. The women were fat and wore long peasant dresses and head scarves. The men wore ill-fitting suits of poor-quality cloth. They sweated heavily in Cuba’s heat but used no deodorant, and to the finicky Cubans, the Russians smelled bad. They didn’t speak any Spanish at all and stuck to themselves. They were trucked through the city to their new residential enclaves like so many cattle. They stared in wonder at the modern city, with its shiny American consumer products still in shop windows—televisions, refrigerators, and air conditioners—and at the swank homes with swimming pools and landscaped gardens. The huge American cars, luxuriant with chrome and fins, had them goggle-eyed.

As representatives of the vaunted socialist “superpower,” the Soviets were not inspiring. Che knew about the popular skepticism and addressed it while appearing on Cuban television on January 6 to talk about his recent trip to the Soviet Union. After waxing poetic about all the nations he had visited, singling out North Korea and China for special praise, he turned to the Soviets’ evident backwardness in areas many Cubans had long taken for granted:

We had to bring up some problems there that embarrassed us a little, really. ... For example, we brought up the problem that the Cuban people needed some raw materials to make deodorant with, and in those countries they don’t understand that, because they are nations that are developing all their production for the general welfare of the people and have still to overcome some enormous backwardnesses. ... They can’t be bothered with these things. We too now have to occupy ourselves with more important things.

Che was speaking as diplomatically as he could in the circumstances. He
understood
, he was telling the urbane
habaneros
, but times had changed.

The economic influence of the Soviet bloc had become more visible. The disorganized cooperative farms favored in the early days of land expropriations had been replaced by Soviet-style state farms called
granjas del pueblo
.
*
Czech and Soviet advisers now worked at Che’s ministry alongside the first-generation crew of South American economists. Che organized
a weekly Marxism study circle with Anastasio Mansilla, a Hispano-Soviet political economist, for himself and some of his aides. Along with most American influences—such as Santa Claus, who had been banned—the learning of English was now discouraged. Russian was the second language to learn in the “new” Cuba. Che began taking twice-weekly Russian-language classes from Yuri Pevtsov, a philologist sent from Lermonstov University to be his interpreter and personal tutor. They had no Russian-Spanish manual to work from, so the two made do with a Russian-French primer.

Inevitably, in spite of the early popular ridicule of the
bolos
, as the Russians were called, a kind of Sovietization began to seep into Cuban life in ways that were initially superficial. The government spearheaded the transformation. There was already the new central planning board,
JUCEPLAN
, an imitation of the Soviet Union’s
GOSPLAN
. Streets, theaters, and factories were rebaptized with the names of homegrown and foreign revolutionary heroes and martyrs such as Camilo Cienfuegos and Patrice Lumumba. The old Chaplin Cinema on First Avenue would become the Carlos Marx, and before long, there would be day-care centers named Heroes de Vietnam and Rosa Luxemburg. Since the revolution there had been a spate of Cuban babies named Fidel and Ernesto. Now, more and more Cubans began naming their children Alexei and Natasha. Before long, Che’s own newest daughter had a Russian nickname—Aliusha.

In the view of Washington’s intelligence analysts, the island’s dramatic embrace of the socialist bloc was largely attributable to the efforts of Che Guevara. On March 23, in a secret assessment of Che’s recently completed mission abroad, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research listed the trip’s considerable achievements: “By the end of the visit, Cuba had trade and payments agreements and cultural ties with every country in the bloc, diplomatic relations with every country except East Germany, and scientific and technical assistance accords with all but Albania.”