The Death of Che Guevara Read online

  Acclaim for Jay Cantor’s

  THE DEATH OF

  CHE GUEVARA

  “Ambitious and provocative.… An impressive achievement.… For better or worse, no reader will close the book with the pillars of his political convictions unshaken.”

  — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A lucid, compassionate work.… A profuse and powerful first novel.”

  — The New York Times

  “A fine book.… Cantor has produced in his fiction a truly realistic Che Guevara.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Intriguing because it both penetrates and enshrines the aura that was Che, melding fact and fancy.… [Cantor] immerses himself, capturing the flavor and feel of the small villages, the heat of the jungle, the oppression.… It is a book about a man whose life may have been in vain … but it also about an enigma, and it forms a decent tribute to the person who was that riddle.”

  — Indianapolis Star

  “Create[s] a dense, impassioned portrait of Castro’s revolution.”

  — Vanity Fair

  “This big novel is so lush, so intelligent, and arises so deeply from within the depths of the author’s knowledge of Guevara that serious readers will be eager to spread the word about it.… Guevara is evoked splendidly.… The final picture is amazing in its intimacy.”

  —Booklist

  “Cantor takes risks. His work is … ambitious, brave and fascinating.”

  — Houston Chronicle

  “A profound, immensely powerful book.… The dilemmas of Che Guevara’s life in the end become the dilemmas of political action and conscience in this century.”

  —Frank Bidart

  “Complex but wholly convincing.… What is unique here is that Jay Cantor has brought his North American sensibility to [the] celebration —and he seems right at home.”

  — Newsday

  “Cantor has created nothing short of a masterpiece. His prose is poignant and true and skillful and as hard-hitting as a bullet in the gut. This should be required reading not only for its literary imagery and for its powerful story, but also for its insight into today’s unsettled Third World nations.”

  — Tulsa World

  “Rich in political/psychological interplay and imaginative detail.… The prose is assured, intensely focused.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “A thrilling, masterfully written novel, especially in its portrayals of political desire.”

  —Richard Poirier

  Jay Cantor

  THE DEATH OF

  CHE GUEVARA

  Jay Cantor is the author of two other novels, Great Neck and Krazy Kat, and two books of essays, The Space Between: Literature and Politics and On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. A MacArthur Prize fellow, Cantor teaches at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.

  Also by Jay Cantor

  FICTION

  Great Neck

  Krazy Kat

  ESSAYS

  On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother

  The Space Between: Literature and Politics

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 2005

  Copyright © 1977, 1979, 1983 by Jay Cantor

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1983.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this book have appeared previously, in slightly different form, in the following publications: Canto, Raritan, and Triquarterly.

  In addition, there are fragments from the translation of Che Guevara’s Bolivian diaries from both Ramparts Magazine (July 27, 1968) and Daniel James’s The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara (Stein and Day), and fragments from the translations of Inca documents in John Hemmings’s The Conquest of the Incas (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973). “Life is not a walk across an open field” is from Boris Pasternak’s poem “Hamlet.”

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint excerpts from The Critical Difference by Barbara Johnson. Copyright © 1980 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Cantor, Jay.

  The death of Che Guevara.

  1. Guevara, Ernesto, 1928–1967 — Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.A5475 D4 1983

  813′.54

  83-17487

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77844-4

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  My part in this story

  is for my father,

  Alfred Joseph Cantor.

  One of the thirty-six.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dates

  I

  CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

  Isle of Pines, June 1965

  Argentina, 1928

  Argentina, 1952

  Isle of Pines, June 1965

  Argentina-Bolivia, 1953

  Bolivia, 1953

  Isle of Pines, July 1965

  Peru, September 1953

  Isle of Pines, July 1965

  Ecuador, September 1953

  Isle of Pines, July 1965

  Guatemala, June 1954

  Isle of Pines, July 1965

  Cuba, 1956-57

  Isle of Pines July 1965

  Dates

  II

  THE DIARIES OF THE BOLIVIAN CAMPAIGN

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  Bolivia, 1966

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  Bolivia, 1967

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  Bolivia, 1967

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  Bolivia, 1967

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  Bolivia, 1967

  Isle of Pines, June 1968

  Bolivia, August 1967

  Isle of Pines, July 1968

  Bolivia, August 1967

  Isle of Pines, July 1968

  Bolivia, September 1967

  Isle of Pines, July 1968

  Dates

  Dates

  1927 The Communist Party of China leads an uprising in Shanghai, a general strike, an assault on the police station to gain arms for the rebels. The uprising—badly coordinated, poorly armed—misfires, is put down, is … (but what word for political error, historical misfortune might make vivid so many deaths?) … by Kuomintang troops. Thirty-five years later, Regis Debray, a French theoretician, gathers up the dead from the streets of Shanghai, orders them into the cunning of history, draws a lesson, a moral: “But the blood shed in Shanghai must not be inscribed in the deficit column of the Revolution, as though it were the result of an error of judgment … the theoretical proof that an isolated urban insurrection cannot achieve victory in a semi-colonial country had to be made in practice.” (The country surrounds the city.) 1928 Profitable outlets cannot be found for the reinvestment of profits made by the industrial monopolies. Money is drained from the economy or wagered pointlessly. Inventories build. These manufactured things, things that too few can buy, stand against their makers, menace them. 1929 Panic on Wall Street, and in the City of London. Argentina, whose wealth is beef sold to the industrialized countries, discovers again that it d
oes not make history, but, like a terrified dreamer, merely suffers events. 1930 Irigoyen, the blind, now unpopular President of Argentina, sits alone in an unlit room. He is overthrown by the Army under General Uriburu. In China, Chiang’s troops move against the Communist bases in Kiangsi, Fukien, Hopeh. Gandhi gaily walks two hundred miles across India to the Arabian Sea. In defiance of British law, he picks up some salt from the shore. His gesture enters the imagination of the Indian masses, is completed by them, becomes an action. Thousands join Gandhi in defiance, illegally dry seawater on the rooftops for salt, hawk it openly in the streets. Nonviolent marchers move towards the Dharasana Salt Works, the British monopoly. (Their chests are naked, their ribs exposed.) Native policemen, goaded on by their British officers, shatter the marchers’ heads with steel lathes. The marchers do not even raise their arms against the blows. Enraged by this passivity, this restraint, the police fracture men’s skulls, kick and stab marchers in the testicles. 1931 The Roca-Runciman Agreement is signed: the British to buy Argentine beef; the Argentines to purchase British manufactured goods. Few national industries are developed in Argentina. Through this, and other measures, the large landowners secure their power over the country. 1934 The Long March of the Chinese Red Army begins, away from Kiangsi and into northern Shensi, away from the cities and deep into the countryside. (The country surrounds the city.) Tens of thousands of soldiers die on the march, from lack of food, from lack of warm clothing, from lack of boots. (This is not the sort of world where a fellow can take his boots off.) In Cuba, Sergeant Fulgencio Batista leads the overthrow of the government of Grau San Martin. Those who protest are tortured and then shot. (Batista himself sets the style for his administration: He announces his coup to a meeting of his fellow officers. A colleague objects. Batista puts his arm around the man’s shoulders, and shoots his fellow officer’s head off with his own service revolver.) The United States extends recognition to the new government. 1935 Hitler defies the Versailles Treaty, and establishes military training for all Germans. The Comintern, in the Soviet Union, calls for formation of Popular Front governments. The Soviet Union announces that when the capitalist jackals fight, it will side with the capitalist democracies against the Fascists. 1936 General Franco leads a rising of dissident troops against the Spanish Republican government. Irregular forces of Anarchist miners and P.O.U.M. (Partido Oberero de Unificacion Marxista) resist the advance of the Fascists. A Revolutionary Committee comes to power in Barcelona. The Germans send ten thousand troops to the aid of Franco. The Fascists begin a massive aerial bombardment of soldiers and civilians, of the men, women, and children of Madrid. In Argentina, the Radical Party wins the congressional elections. An Argentine Popular Front is organized. It is a hopeful time (for even bad marriages seem full of possibility at the start). Victory in the next presidential election seems certain. In the Soviet Union the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev begin. (They will be executed by firing squad as “agents of Trotsky and spies of the Nazis.”) 1937 Fraudulent elections are held in Argentina. The army candidates defeat the Popular Front. General Ortiz, a diabetic, takes power. His fellow officers find him too weak towards the opposition. He will resign in favor of General Castillo. The Soviet Union sends advisers and guns to the Republicans in Spain. The Communist Party reads the Agenda of History for the Spanish people. The time for a Communist revolution is … not yet. There can be only one leadership, one direction, one vanguard party. Negrin takes over as head of the Republican government. He declares, “The War must be won before the Revolution can be carried further.” By command of the party, the P.O.U.M. is suppressed, its leaders jailed or killed. The miners’ militias are not sent arms or supplies, are left to die before the Fascist advance. Other socialist, but non-party, units are dissolved, and their men are reintegrated into brigades of the regular Army. Their officers are jailed. Throughout the Left there is a pervasive confusion about what is happening in Spain, an icy wind that leaves each person isolated, afraid to move for fear of touching something unintentionally, while his limbs are tender. Had the Communists betrayed the miners so as not to disturb the digestion of their new allies, the Paris bourgeoisie? Or were the miners treacherously undisciplined cowards, the class enemy in one of the many disguises that only the Party can penetrate? The confusion—the lack of clarity—is worse for the Left (the Argentine left) than even the worst knowledge might have been. It invades all their certainties, makes them unsure of all they thought they knew, ironic towards themselves, paralyzed. 1938 The Communist Party of Cuba begins cooperation with the Batista government. The Munich Pact is signed. Germany occupies Austria. The Soviet show trials of Bukharin, Rykov, and Yagoda end with their sham confessions. 1939 The Soviets sign a ten-year nonaggression pact with Germany. (No longer able to locate the hero in this movie, one twists uncomfortably in one’s seat.) Franco takes Barcelona, executing tens of thousands of Loyalists. During the Spanish Civil War seven hundred thousand men are killed in battle. Fifteen thousand people die (that solemn word!) in aerial bombardment. Three hundred thousand are executed or assassinated. (You and he are of the same family. He must be annihilated utterly.) 1940 Batista makes himself President of Cuba. (A day’s work for the dictator: he chooses his clothes, ties his tie, puts commas in letters, reties his tie.) 1941 Argentina, its army officers sympathetic to fascism and opposed to Britain and the United States, refuses to join with the other American republics in breaking with the Axis. Yugoslavia surrenders to Germany, but partisan guerrilla units continue to fight in the mountains. Chinese Communist guerrillas and regular units lead the resistance to the Japanese invaders. 1943 In Argentina a group of German-trained army officers overthrow the government of General Castillo. General Ramirez becomes head of state. The Ministry of Education is turned over to a fascist and anti-Semite, Gustavo Zuirria. He purges all democratic teachers from the schools. Catholic education is restored. Students protest (even in the mountain province of Cordoba, a place good for one’s asthma but far from the métropole). The German Sixth Army surrenders at Stalingrad. Six hundred thousand soldiers and civilians die in the battle, or are destroyed by cold and famine. 1944 The United States, its attention elsewhere, relaxes its hold on Latin America, for a time; a nationalist revolution, led by the army, begins in Guatemala. In Argentina, Colonel Peron becomes Minister of Labor. He raises wages and gains the support of the grandsons of Italian and Spanish immigrants, his “shirtless ones.” 1945 Colonel Peron is forced to resign by Argentina’s generals, who fear his growing power. They imprison Peron on Martin Garcia Island. His wife, Evita, an actress, rallies his supporters, leads a demonstration in Buenos Aires of millions of workers. They take over the streets and squares of the city. The unions call for a general strike. Peron is freed. Ho Chi Minh, who led the guerrilla forces against the Japanese in Indochina, proclaims the independence of Vietnam from France. He begins a “regular” war against the French, to free Vietnam, and make all of Indochina one state. France has the “Republic of Cochin China” declared at Saigon. 1946 Fidel Castro, an ambitious man, is elected President of the Association of Cuban Law Students. Peron is overwhelmingly elected President of Argentina. The French bombard the port and people of Haiphong. 1947 Castro, an adventurous man, joins an expedition to liberate the Dominican Republic from the tyrant Trujillo. The expedition fails, most of the band is killed, but Castro, a fortunate man, escapes. Civil war spreads throughout China, the Communist forces against those of the Kuomintang. Peron, in conflict with Great Britain and the United States, purges the courts of all but the most loyal Peronistas. After years of mass unrest, nonviolent demonstrations, and sporadic rioting, the British find that it is no longer in their interest to remain in India as its colonial rulers. The colony is freed. 1948 Fidel Castro, a convincing man, attends the Conference of Latin American Students in Bogota, Colombia. During the conference Eliecer Gaitan, a popular Colombian leader, is assassinated by rightists. There is a vast rising in the city. It is said later (by the United States ambassador to Cuba) that Castr
o’s voice was heard over the radio, announcing, inciting, instructing, cajoling the rising. The demonstrations are put down. 1949 The Argentine Constitution is changed, so that Peron can succeed himself. The Communists are victorious in China. (The country surrounds the city.) Mao Tse-tung heads the new government. 1950 War begins between the Korean Communists and the Koreans who have the support of the United States. 1951 Paz Estenssoro, a leader of the nationalist and anti-feudal forces, is elected President of Bolivia. But the election is annulled by the army. (Pieces of a new interpretation: In Latin America power belongs to the army. And to whoever can purchase the army. This thesis will be inscribed, and reinscribed, on the body of the Latin American masses.) The Vietnamese Communists return to guerrilla tactics against the French. (The country surrounds the city.) 1952 In Cuba, the Ortodoxos party wins the general election. Batista (now General Batista) annuls the elections and takes power again. (He has telephone conversations taped all over the island and sent to him. What do people say about him? How do they live?) Fidel Castro, a courageous man, brings charges against Batista in the Cuban courts, accusing him of violating the Constitution. (Castro’s gesture, his tactic, will become theory: a people’s war cannot be begun until every hope of legal redress has been exhausted.) General Perez Jimenez takes over Venezuela by coup. In Bolivia a force made up of Indians, peasants, miners, and cadre of the Movement for a National Revolution smash the regular army and bring Paz Estenssoro to power. (Pieces of a new interpretaion: if power belongs to the army, or those who can purchase the army, then only another armed force can defeat the regular army, gain power for the people. In Latin America the peasant will be the base of the Revolution.) In Argentina, Peron’s policies, the corruption of his government, and the opposition of the industrialized countries have crippled the Argentine economy. Land reform begins in China. In Guatemala, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman signs a land-reform bill expropriating 225,000 acres of United Fruit Company land, for distribution to the peasantry. The United Fruit Company, and the State Department of the United States, express their displeasure. The United States takes over the financing of French forces in Vietnam. (Greece, Macedonia, Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, as all schoolchildren know, had empires.) In Argentina, Eva Peron, Protector of the Forsaken, Defender of the Workers, Guiding Light of the Children, dies. Peron, perhaps not sensitive enough to the country’s feelings, takes up with a series of attractive women. 1953 Fidel Castro, a reckless man, leads a hundred twenty people in an attack against the Moncada barracks in Santiago. They plan to seize arms, and by their actions spark a general uprising. The attack occurs during the confusion of carnival time. The rebels, disguised in carnival costumes, had planned to emerge from the crowd, and move on the barracks. Badly coordinated, poorly armed, the insurgents lose their way in the streets of Santiago. Those who make it to the barracks are defeated by the soldiers. The rebel reinforcements, wandering in the unfamiliar streets, never arrive. Most of the insurgents are captured, tortured, and then killed by the police. Fidel Castro, a fortunate man, escapes to the mountains, and is not discovered until after the Bishop of Santiago has interceded to stop the executions. Fidel Castro, isolated, is tried in secret for the rebellion. A rhetorical man when menaced, Castro delivers a speech to the court, concluding that “History will absolve me.” He is sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the Isle of Pines. The United States, no longer diverted, has recovered economically from the war. The State Department, and the CIA, begin operations to overthrow the government of Guatemala. They train mercenaries in Honduras for the invasion. Bolivia nationalizes its tin mines and passes land-reform laws that are acceptable to the United States. The Vietnamese Communists have an army now of 125,000. The French have 230,000 soldiers in Vietnam. The main center of French strength is the huge entrenched (and doomed) camp at Dien Bien Phu. 1954 Batista again declares himself President of Cuba. (He takes the commas out of letters, reties his tie. He plays canasta for hours, sitting on the edge of his bed. He has the television stations show more horror movies, his favorites.) Peron begins an attack against the Catholic Church and its power. There is an insurrection in the city of Algiers against the French. The insurrection is quelled. (Certain theoretical proofs must be made in practice.) The war against the French will continue in the countryside for seven more years. In Vietnam Dien Bien Phu falls, overrun by the Communist forces. (The country surrounds the city: a children’s nursery rhyme.) Peron makes all labor decrees of his government binding on the now powerless unions. General Castillo Armas, leading his army of CIA-trained mercenaries (their symbol: the cross and the sword), overthrows the nationalist government of Guatemala. 1955 Batista, hoping to increase his popularity, establish some legitimacy, declares a general amnesty for political prisoners. Fidel Castro, a free man, goes to Mexico, Costa Rica, and the United States, to organize Cuban exiles and prepare an armed landing. In a suburban house near Mexico City, he meets an asthmatic Argentine doctor, Ernesto Guevara. They talk through the night. Peron bars Catholic education in the schools. He is excommunicated by the Pope. Peron signs an agreement with Standard Oil. Eva gone, and his economic programs in shambles, enthusiasm for Peron wanes in working-class quarters. They wish him well, but they do not wish to die for him. He is overthrown by the air force and the navy. Demonstrators for Peron in the public squares of Buenos Aires are bombed by air force planes. The Geneva Accords are signed, ending the fighting in Vietnam. The United States does not sign. Elections called for by the accords are never held. The United States establishes a puppet regime in Saigon. 1956 Fidel Castro, a bold man, announces in Mexico, “This year we will be free or else martyrs.” His boat, the Granma, leaves Mexico for Cuba, with eighty-two rebels aboard. To coincide with their landing, an armed rising is to be led by Frank Pais in Santiago. But the Granma is delayed by choppy seas. The rising in Santiago is put down. (“Put down”? And if one could find the words that would make so much death palpable? And to what end?) The rebels land, but they are betrayed by a guide and are surprised by the army in a sugar-cane field near Alegria de Pio. They are strafed from the air and the ground. Twelve men (or was it twenty? Mythology—or is it propaganda?—here has needs that long ago overwhelmed history) survive. The men, isolated, in small groups, lost, are helped by peasants, and make their way to the Sierra Maestra Mountains. There they are reunited with Castro. A few men, most of their weapons lost, wander in land barely known to them. “The days of the dictatorship,” Castro says, “are numbered.” An uprising in the city of Budapest is crushed by the Soviet Army. 1957 Duvalier, a juju man, seizes power in Haiti. The Cuban guerrillas make successful attacks on the army barracks at La Plata, and at El Uvero. The army, the police, the militia arrest any suspected rebels throughout the island. The police shoot down Frank Pais on the streets of Santiago. A spontaneous strike is sparked by Pais’s death, paralyzing the western provinces of the island. Demonstrators and mourners at Pais’s funeral are machine-gunned by the army. Radicals leave the cities and make their way to join Castro in the mountains. Castro forms a second rebel column in the Sierras, under the command of Ernesto Guevara. The guerrillas declare El Hombrito, in the Sierras, a “free territory.” They decree a land reform for the region, set up a shoe “factory” to make boots for the peasants and soldiers, and they establish a radio station, a rebel newspaper, and a hospital. The urban resistance organizes a series of attacks on power plants and government buildings in Havana and Santiago. These urban rebels suffer heavy losses to the army and the police. More than twenty thousand will die during the Revolution. (In the Cuban Revolution death is in the cities.) 1958 The urban movement blows up the electric plant and the water works in Havana. Airport runways are cratered by rebel bombs. Raul Castro, with sixty-seven men, opens a second front in the northern provinces. Fidel Castro, an inspired leader, calls for a general strike in Havana. But the plans for the strike fall into government hands, and it is crushed, its leaders arrested and shot. Street battles break out in several towns throughout the
island. The army begins a major offensive against the Sierra strongholds. (In a guerrilla war, one does not engage in battle unless certain of victory.) The army occupies rebel positions at Las Mercedes, and continues to advance, terrorizing the peasants who have been sympathetic to the rebels, and who are now without protection. The army occupies Las Vegas, four hours’ march from the rebel “capital.” The rebels begin a counteroffensive at the San Domingo River. Two army battalions are routed, fleeing in disorder. At El Jigue the rebels take two hundred fifty army prisoners and hand them over to the Red Cross, as part of “Operation Trojan Horse.” (That is: the Cuban Army vindictively tortures and then kills rebel prisoners. Thus there is no point in surrendering to the government, you may as well fight until you are killed. But the rebels free prisoners unharmed. In any engagement government soldiers can save their lives simply by giving up.) The columns of Che Guevara and Camillo Cienfuegos recapture Las Vegas. The army, its spirit broken, turns and withdraws from the Sierras. The Guevara and Cienfuegos columns begin a march down from the mountains, into the plains, towards the cities. Fidel Castro’s column descends into Oriente Province. Raul Castro organizes a Congress of Peasants in the liberated areas. Guevara’s column moves across the length of the island, to Santa Clara. Batista’s air force bombards the outskirts of Santa Clara. The columns of Guevara and Cienfuegos, raggedy, tired, hungry, and footsore from the march, meet outside the city, and begin the battle. The army garrison capitulates. Batista flees to the Dominican Republic. In Algeria, the French Army revolts. De Gaulle becomes President of France. In Venezuela, Perez Jimenez is overthrown by nationalist army officers under Fabricio Ojeda. In Peru, Hugo Blanco begins organizing peasant unions. 1959 Che and Camillo’s columns advance on Havana. Fidel Castro’s column crosses the island, and the three enter the capital in triumph. Guerrillas appear in the countryside in Paraguay. There are rebellions in Panama, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. (All are defeated by the army.) Haiti is invaded by rebels (the rebellion fails). Peronist guerrillas appear in Argentina. The Peasant Leagues are organized by Juliao in Brazil. The Vietnamese Communists organize guerrilla resistance to the United States. Before his eyes, the world of the second half of the century appears to take shape. Death from hunger, death from parasites, death from cold, these have been the most ordinary facts for most of the people of the world. Suddenly, with the success of the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, these facts seem extraordinary. The people of the industrialized countries will learn that there is not, has never been silence. What was called a time of peace was only the moment before the victim cried out. The Chinese Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution: a nursery refrain: the country surrounds the city: the revolution is in the countryside, among the peasants. Colonialism is a city being strangled, and as it dies it releases its final savagery. It becomes a fire on the skin of the colonized countries. But colonialism is dying. 1960 (Year of the Agrarian Reform) Cuba and the Soviet Union sign a commercial treaty. Eisenhower orders the CIA to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island. (The CIA are in this text, but as a subtext, in secret. One will not know of them until, like a pun, a mistake, a slip of the tongue—that joke just kills me!—they break the surface, break cover.) A French ship, carrying arms for the Cuban government, explodes in Havana Harbor, killing seventy; Castro, a suspicious man, accuses the CIA of sabotage. The United States refuses to buy the remainder of that year’s Cuban sugar quota, some seven hundred thousand pounds of sweet stuff; the Soviet Union agrees to purchase this residue. At a mass meeting outside the Presidential Palace in Havana, Ernesto Guevara thanks the Soviet Union: “Cuba is a glorious island in the center of the Caribbean, defended by the rockets of the greatest power in history.” The Cuban government nationalizes the telephone company, the sugar mills, the oil refineries—belonging, as so much of the island does, to U.S. corporations. The United States declares a partial embargo on trade with Cuba. (The steps seem now as ordained, as formal, as some terrible dance … but you are unwilling … your partner comes towards you.) The Chinese government denounces its “Elder Brother” the Soviet Union for its unfamilial dictatorial ways. The Soviet Union recalls all its technicians from China and begins its own economic blockade. In Guatemala, Yon Sosa, a dissident army officer, establishes a guerrilla center. It is a lyric time in Latin America. Rebels hope that the bourgeoisie of their country will “side with the nation” against the imperialists. Once power is gained a social revolution can be carried out under the protection of Soviet missiles (Cuba’s example is a difficult poem to interpret). Paz Estenssoro, leader of the Bolivian MNR, grown rich, his party rotten with U.S. money, becomes, once again, President of Bolivia. The Belgian Congo declares its independence. Moise Tshombe, financed by Belgian mining interests, leads a secessionist movement in Katanga Province. Prime Minister Lumumba appeals to the United Nations. Lumumba, betrayed, ignored by the UN forces, his death desired, plotted by the CIA (those jokers!), will be delivered to his enemies and assassinated. Tshombe becomes head of the Congo. 1961 (Year of Education) One hundred thousand young people leave Havana to begin a great literacy campaign in the countryside; peasants of all ages will be taught to read. The United States breaks off all diplomatic relations with Cuba. Ernesto Guevara—an advocate of strong central planning, and of socialist development based not on “profit accounting” but on the social needs of the people, becomes Minister of Industries. He begins an ambitious program of factory development. (The epic of industrialization, read as the epic of national independence: plans for the construction of a sulpho-metallic plant, “Patrice Lumumba,” producing three hundred metric tons of sulphuric acid daily; a brush factory; a screw factory; an iron and steel foundry; a factory for picks and shovels; factories for welding electrodes; barbed-wire factories; a cement plant; the island has iron ores, hemalites, magnetites, laterites, nickel, cobalt, chromite, manganese, silicon, dolomites, limestone, copper; plans for a shipping industry; sucrochemistry, fermentation of sugar, paper pulp from bagazo, synthetic fibers from sugar, plywood from sugar pulp; machinery for cutting cane; technical training for workers; radio and television courses. “We must perfect the plan’s control mechanisms, eliminate unemployment, establish work standards, avoid supply shortages, subsidize laid-off workers, establish complete salary justice.” Cuba will read the poem of industrialization not in two hundred years, but in ten years! To arrive, within the shortest possible time, at socialism.) The Central Intelligence Agency, and the anti-Castro forces trained by them, bomb the Havana and Santiago airports, to prepare for the landing of their expeditionary force. At the funeral for the victims of this bombing, Castro, an angry man, declares the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. The anti-Castro forces land from U.S. ships at the Bay of Pigs. Their plan: to set up a small beachhead, declare themselves the free government of Cuba, and, as that “government,” request that the U.S. military invade. But the Cuban Army and militia surround the invaders, and within two days take twelve hundred prisoners. The U.S. declares a total embargo on all trade with Cuba. (An embargo: All Cuban machinery before the Revolution was made in the United States; all spare parts and supplies have come from there. Now each machine feeds on the others, till there are no parts left.) John Kennedy begins the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, to “promote the continent’s development” (or at least that development which does not infringe on the prerogatives of the United States). The U.S., a generous donor, will provide the bullets for the army, the penicillin for the hospitals, the textbooks for the schools, the ideas for the government, the most modern techniques for the police … the bullets for the army. Fidel Castro establishes the United Party of Socialist Revolution: “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I shall remain one until the end of my life.” The United States has formed its own interpretation of the Cuban poem. And it will enforce it. Kennedy intensifies the anti-guerrilla campaigns in Latin America, in Vietnam and Laos, in
creasing the number of elite forces and advisers. The Venezuelan ruling party splits over the extent (and the evil) of United States control of their industries, their country. Fabricio Ojeda, now a prominent parliamentary delegate, resigns and joins the guerrillas. The nationalist party in Peru, APRA, divides over the necessity of armed struggle for the independence of Peru. (Second Havana Declaration: “We cannot stand in our doorway and watch the corpse of imperialism carried by, with the national bourgeoisie and the Soviet Union as pallbearers. It is the duty of revolutionaries to make the revolution. One cannot make the revolution without willing it.”) Luis de la Puente sets up the “Rebel APRA.” 1962 (Year of Planning) The Organization of American States expels Cuba. Cuba institutes the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations, the block-level organs of party rule, party participation, party surveillance, party control. Rationing is introduced for food and clothing, with severe penalties for speculators, hoarders, and (that useful but vague category) counterrevolutionaries. (Many will be arrested, imprisoned; at the end of each of these declarations, these sentences, many will find themselves sentenced. Many more, when allowed, and with very few of their possessions unconfiscated, will flee Cuba for the wealthier United States.) The United States warns the Soviet Union that it must remove its missiles from Cuba. The U.S. Navy is sent to blockade the island and turn back all Soviet ships. The U.S. Marines prepare for invasion; the people of North America, speechless audience to their kings, think on last things, and sweat. Cuba, too, prepares for invasion and (but how does one do this, except by resigning oneself, conforming oneself, to one’s own rhetoric) prepares for nuclear attack. Guevara says: “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims. The Cuban people are advancing fearlessly towards the hecatomb which specifies final redemption.” But Cuba finds itself another spectator at the court of kings, almost a jester, excessive in its rhetoric, clownish. It may comment, it may howl, but it only observes. Soviet ships on their way towards Cuba are told by their government to turn about from “final redemption”; the missiles are dismantled and withdrawn. Castro is not consulted but only, eventually, informed. Hearing the news, he swears, kicks the walls, throws a glass to the floor in impotent fury: “They betrayed us as they did in Spain.” (Pieces of his new, his always changing, interpretation: The Soviet Union will not protect an independent government in Latin America; Latin America must protect itself. Only a united Third World, struggling together, can defeat the savagery of imperialism.) President Frondizi of Argentina is deposed by the military. Guerrilla groups, mostly of students, appear briefly, flicker, and are put out in Ecuador, forty-eight hours after taking to the mountains. Leftist elements of the military in Venezuela rebel against the government and are put down; survivors join the guerrillas under Douglas Bravo. Guerrillas in Guatemala, under Turcios Lima and Yon Sosa, inflict casualties on the army. Haya de la Torre, the much-compromised nationalist leader in Peru, wins the presidential election but is prevented from taking office by the military. The Rebel APRA under de la Puente and Javier Heraud begins guerrilla operations. China condemns the Soviet Union as revisionists, betrayers of Communism, and social imperialists; it is inevitable, they declare, that One Splits into Two. (This quarrel will divide the Communist world; and sharp fragments—of propaganda that keeps people from moving, of supplies not delivered, of betrayal—will enter the hearts of many Latin American guerrilla movements, splintering them, rendering them, often, immobile, dead.) Algeria, its long war finally over, becomes independent of France. 1963 (Year of Organization) Fidel Castro visits the Soviet Union; he negotiates large sugar purchases by the Russians. Ernesto Guevara visits Algeria to establish economic cooperation among the socialist countries of the Third World. (Do they have something more to share than their poverty?) The Second Agrarian Reform Law in Cuba restricts all privately held estates to no more than a hundred acres. Jorge Masetti, an Argentine journalist who had first come to Cuba to interview his famous countryman Che Guevara, is encouraged by Guevara to establish a guerrilla center in Argentina. Masetti’s men gather at a Bolivian farm near the Argentine jungle. (Piece of his new interpretation: guerrilla war is the method for class struggle on our continent.) In Bolivia the tin miners of Catavi go on strike against the government. President Ydigoras Fuentes of Guatemala is overthrown by the military. Hugo Blanco, the peasant organizer, alone and sick with fever, is captured in Peru. Javier Heraud, the Peruvian guerrilla leader, is killed, and his men decimated by the army at Puerto Maldonado. 1964 (Year of the Economy) The voice reading the epic of industrialization reads too quickly, stumbles over its words, makes disastrous mistakes. Blockade (the lack of spare parts, of raw materials), sabotage (defective ball bearings insinuated into shipments from Europe to destroy machinery), absenteeism (working for oneself under socialism—and with few things to buy—one gives oneself a vacation), poor planning (peasants leaving the land to move to the factories, wounding agricultural production; factories built far from transport, without roads, without access to materials; factories producing quantities of sulphuric acid before there is a place in the industrial process for sulphuric acid), all these things damage, nearly cripple, the Cuban economy. The Soviets advise their Cuban comrades, their Cuban clients, to concentrate on agriculture, to see themselves as interdependent with the Soviet bloc; agriculture will provide foreign exchange for future development. (Perhaps, they suggest, Guevara’s idea that workers do not require material incentives, that they will produce for “moral” reasons—to build socialism, to destroy imperialism—is idealistic, unrealistic.) The bourgeoisie of Brazil make it clear that even the mildest nationalism offends them; with the aid of the United States, Marshal Castelo Branco leads a military overthrow of President Goulart. (Further piece of his new interpretation: the national bourgeoisie, such as it is, is a weak parasite, in the pay of the imperialists.) In Bolivia, Paz Estenssoro is elected President again, only to be overthrown by Generals Ovando and Barrientos. In Peru, Hugo Blanco is sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. 1965 (Year of Agriculture) Guevara tours Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana, Guinea, Algeria, establishing new links between Africa and Cuba. (Do they have more to offer each other than their poverty? The Third World, he says, must draw together, like soldiers at the front line, to make themselves independent of the first world.) Fidel Castro, Premier of Cuba, makes himself Minister of Agriculture. A trade agreement is signed with the Soviet Union, granting Cuba a credit of 167 million dollars. Che Guevara, at the second Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference—and as if in dissidence to the Soviet loans—criticizes those “so-called socialist methods of aid which are no different from capitalism, that still leave one partner subservient to the other.” Upon his return to Cuba, Guevara drops from sight. Castro declares: “Major Ernesto Guevara will be found where he is most useful to the revolution.” Ben Bella, in Algeria, is overthrown by the rightist Colonel Boumedienne. A U.S.-financed military coup in Indonesia, led by Suharto, overthrows President Sukarno. Coordinated with CIA help, a massacre of Indonesia’s Communists follows; in a few months half a million people will be killed. The United States sends twenty-two thousand Marines to the Dominican Republic, to prevent the election of Juan Bosch. At Catavi, the Bolivian miners do not become a mobile force, a guerrilla force; they remain with their homes and families. The Bolivian military blockades the area: the miners have no milk to give their children, no cough syrup for their silicosis. General Barrientos declares: “We will keep faith with the nation.” (A joke, repeated over and over, becomes threatening.) The Bolivian military occupies the mining area of Catavi and massacres the leaders of the strike. Luis de la Puente, the new leader of the Peruvian guerrillas, is killed. The Communist guerrilla base in Colombia, the “independent Republic of La Pato,” is eliminated by government troops. Camillo Torres, a Jesuit priest of prominent family, condemns the government for collaborating in the poverty of the people, and leaves the priesthood to join the guerrillas; in a few months his body is brought back t
o the capital by the army. Splits between the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet Communist parties mar the activities of the Peruvian guerrillas; the parties guard their ideological purity; neither aids the guerrillas. The Venezuelan Communist Party, like the Bolivian Communist Party, rejects the Cuban thesis, embraces the Soviet line of “peaceful coexistence.” One must support and strengthen the national bourgeoisie; competition between the national bourgeoisie and the United States will weaken the imperialists. Then, revolution will be on the agenda. Now one must distribute leaflets, build the consciousness of the masses. The party—not the guerrillas—is, and will remain, the vanguard of the Revolution, that Revolution whose time is not yet. (Piece of a new interpretation: the orthodox Communist parties are so much debris to be swept up by the guerrilla movement and the revolution they will lead.) Jorge Masetti’s guerrillas, containing both Argentines and Cubans, are infiltrated by the army and betrayed before ever attacking. Some of the men retreat into the jungle; there they are decimated by starvation, by internal disputes, by disease. Masetti, alone, goes deeper into the jungle to hide, to die. (A Cuban guerrilla, Joaquin, escapes to tell the story.) U.S. military action, delayed briefly by a presidential election, “escalates” in Vietnam. Half a million troops are sent to aid the regime in Saigon. The daily bombing of North Vietnam—Operation Rolling Thunder—begins. Areas of the South are “carpet bombed.” A new vocabulary for the world: forced urbanization (if the country surrounds the city, destroy the countryside so that none can live there), pacification (stillness, death, peace, all made the same); new words: they mean a fire in the home, in the bed, on the skin. (Pieces of his new interpretation: Only an armed people, prepared for a long march, for a struggle like that of the Vietnamese, can oppose the imperialists. The revolution must be made by and for the peasants; it must offer them socialism from the start. Only the New Man created by the struggle, by the fires and crucible of revolution, by violence, will build and defend socialism. “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”) Fidel Castro reads the farewell letter of Ernesto Guevara to the Cuban people. 1966