Che Guevara (107 page)

Godefroi Chamaleso, the political commissar from Dar es Salaam, had come to help smooth the way for the Cubans; so far, he was the only official link to the revolutionaries Che intended to whip into shape. Kabila had not appeared. He had stayed on in Cairo, sending word that he would return in a fortnight, and in his absence Che had been forced to remain incognito. “To be honest,” he acknowledged later, “I wasn’t too upset, because I was very interested in the war in the Congo and I was afraid that my appearance would provoke overly sharp reactions, and that some of the Congolese, or even the friendly [Tanzanian] government, would ask me to abstain from joining in the fray.”

So far, so good. But already, in Kigoma, the Tanzanian port on the eastern shore of the lake, Che had seen the first evidence that the men he was joining were undisciplined and badly led. A Tanzanian official had complained to him about the Congolese rebels, who regularly crossed the lake to hang out and disport themselves in bars and whorehouses. And Che had had to wait for a day and a night while a boat was made ready for their crossing—nothing had been prepared for him, despite his advance man’s efforts. Then, after crossing the lake to Kibamba, he found that the rebels’ general staff headquarters was a mere stone’s throw up the
mountainside, too conveniently close to the village and the safety valve of Tanzania for his liking.

In Kabila’s absence, Che found himself dealing with a group of field commanders, the men calling the shots in the various “army brigades” stationed around the rebel zone. Fortunately, some of them spoke French, so Che was able to discern immediately that serious divisions existed among them. In their first meeting with the rebel commanders, Chamaleso enthusiastically tried to help establish rapport between his compatriots and the newcomers by proposing that Víctor Dreke, along with another Cuban of his choosing, be allowed to join in all the meetings and decisions of the general staff. But the Congolese officers were eloquently noncommittal. “I observed the faces of the participants,” Che noted drily, “and I could not see approval for the proposal; it seemed that [Chamaleso] did not enjoy the sympathies of the chiefs.”

The commanders’ displeasure with Chamaleso derived from the fact that he visited the front from Dar es Salaam only occasionally. The military men felt neglected by the head office. There was additional ill feeling between those commanders who stayed in the field and those constantly leaving on errands to Kigoma and its fleshpots. The rank-and-file fighters, for the most part, were simple peasants who spoke only their own tribal languages, or, in some cases, Swahili, and who seemed to Che to inhabit a world completely apart from their officers.

Still another unpleasant surprise for Che was the discovery of the rebels’ faith in witchcraft, or
dawa
. They believed that a magic potion protected them from harm. Che learned about this magic in his very first meeting with the Congolese command. A pleasant-seeming officer introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Lambert and explained, cheerfully, “that for them, the [enemy] airplanes were not very important because they possessed the
dawa
medicine that makes them invulnerable to bullets.” Lambert assured Che that he had been hit by bullets several times, but because of the
dawa
, they had fallen harmlessly to the ground. “He explained it between smiles,” wrote Che, “and I felt obliged to go along with the joke, which I believed was his attempt to demonstrate the little importance he conceded to the enemy’s armaments. After a little while, I realized the thing was serious, and that the magical protector was one of the great weapons of the Congolese Army.”

After the inconclusive initial meeting with the commanders, Che took Chamaleso aside and revealed his true identity. “I explained who I was,” Che wrote. “The reaction was devastating. He repeated the phrases ‘international scandal’ and ‘no one must know, please, no one must know’; it had fallen like a lightning bolt in a serene day and I feared for the consequences, but my identity could not continue hidden much longer if we wanted to take advantage of the influence that my activity here could have.”

Che, as Comandante Tatu, in the “liberated zone” of the former Belgian Congo, 1965.

After the shaken Chamaleso left, heading back to Dar and then to Cairo, this time to inform Kabila of Che’s presence, “Tatu” attempted to get his training program under way. He tried to persuade the Congolese
jefes
to let him and his men set up a permanent base more adequate for their mission on the Luluabourg ridge, three miles above them, but the commanders stalled, telling him that the base commander, Leonard Mitoudidi, was away in Kigoma and nothing could be done until he returned. In lieu of that, they suggested he begin an ad hoc training program there at the Kibamba headquarters. Che countered with a proposal to train a 100-man column divided into groups of twenty men over a five- or six-week period, then send them out with Mbili (Papi) on patrol to carry out some military actions; while they were gone, he could train a second column, which would enter the field when the first group returned. After each expedition he could select the truly worthwhile cadres to build up an effective guerrilla force. This proposal too was met with evasions.

The days began rolling by. Boats came and went across the lake, carrying rebels to and from furloughs in Kigoma, but Commander Mitoudidi didn’t return. For want of anything better to do, Che began helping out in the rebels’ clinic, where one of the Cubans, a doctor rebaptized as “Kumi,” had begun working. Che was stunned by the number of cases of venereal disease among the rebels, which he attributed to their visits to Kigoma. A few wounded men were brought in from the various fronts, but they were victims of accidents, not battle casualties. “Almost nobody had the least idea of what a firearm was,” Che recalled. “They shot themselves by playing with them, or by carelessness.” The rebels also drank a local corn- and yucca-based brew called
pombe
, and the spectacle of reeling men having fights or disobeying orders was distressingly commonplace.

Hearing of the presence of doctors in the area, local peasants began showing up in droves at the dispensary. Its depleting stocks got a boost with the arrival of a cargo of Soviet medicines, which were unceremoniously dumped on the beach along with a great pile of ammunition and weaponry. When Che asked for permission to organize the rebels’ logistics depot, that request also fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, the beach acquired the appearance of a gypsy market, Che wrote, as rebel commanders began arriving and demanding quantities of the new medicines for “fabulous sums of men.” One officer claimed he had 4,000 troops, another said 2,000, and so on, but they were “all invented numbers.”

By early May, Che had received word that the rebel council’s summit in Cairo had been a success but that Kabila wouldn’t be returning just yet;
he needed to have an operation on a cyst, and it would be several more weeks before he was back. The Cubans were beginning to feel the first symptoms of malaise brought on by inactivity, and to keep them occupied, Che began daily classes in French, Swahili, and “general culture.” “Our morale was still high,” Che recalled, “but already the murmurs were beginning among the comrades about how the days were fruitlessly slipping by.” The next afflictions to hit them were malaria and tropical infections. Che handed out anti-malarial tablets regularly, but he observed that their side effects included weakness, apathy, and lack of appetite, and he later blamed the medication for exacerbating the “incipient pessimism” felt by the Cubans, including, although he was loath to admit it, himself.

Che was getting an ongoing private debriefing about the situation inside the rebel movement from an informant called Kiwe. Kiwe was one of the more voluble general staff officers, “an inexhaustible talker who spoke French at almost supersonic speed” and who had plenty to confide. As was his longtime habit, Che wrote pithy little profiles laced with his own remarks based on Kiwe’s information. Kiwe claimed that General Nicholas Olenga, the “liberator” of Stanleyville, had been a soldier whom Kiwe had personally dispatched to make some explorations in the north. Olenga had then begun attacking, giving himself a new military rank with each town he seized. The current president of the rebel council, Christophe Gbenye, was the political leader for whom General Olenga had liberated Stanleyville, but to Kiwe, Gbenye was a dangerous, immoral figure; Kiwe held Gbenye responsible for an assassination attempt against the current council’s military chief of staff, Commander Mitoudidi. As for Antoine Gizenga, one of the early revolutionary figures to emerge in the wake of Lumumba’s death, Kiwe declared him a left-wing opportunist who was interested more than anything else in using the rebels’ effort to build his own political party. As Che wrote afterward, the chats with Kiwe had been enlightening, giving him an idea of the complex internal rivalries within the not so very revolutionary Congolese Liberation Council.

On May 8, Leonard Mitoudidi finally arrived, bringing eighteen new Cubans with him and word from Kabila that for the time being, Che’s identity should remain a secret. Mitoudidi left almost immediately, but for the first time since meeting Kabila, Che was favorably impressed with a Congolese officer, finding him “assured, serious, and possessing an organizational spirit.” Even better, Mitoudidi approved Che’s transfer to the upper base on Luluabourg mountain.

Che took his men up to the huge grassy plateau that began at the top of the escarpment. It was four hard hours of steep hiking and took them to a chilly, damp altitude of more than 8,000 feet above sea level, but as Che
looked around and surveyed the scene, he felt renewed optimism. Herds of cattle and the tiny hamlets of ethnic Tutsi Rwandans dotted the plain. Good Argentine that he was, Che wrote that during his stay there, the availability of “wonderful beef was almost a cure for nostalgia.”

Che quickly began getting organized, overseeing the building of huts to house his fighters together with about twenty bored and lonely Congolese. Once again he began daily classes to cut through the mounting apathy and listlessness that threatened to consume them, but very soon Che became aware of still more problems he would have to deal with. In addition to the civilian herdsmen living around Luluabourg, he learned, there were several thousand more Tutsi living in the area who were armed and had allied themselves with the Congolese rebels. They had fled their country following Rwanda’s independence from France a few years earlier, when their traditional rivals, the Hutu, had begun massacring them. By helping the Congolese to victory, they hoped next to carry the revolution to Rwanda, but despite their marriage of convenience, the Rwandans and Congolese didn’t get along at all. This enmity, like
dawa
, was to cause serious problems in the months ahead.

After only a few days, Che developed an extremely high fever and became delirious. It was a month before he regained his strength or his appetite. He was not the only man affected; ten of the thirty Cubans were ill with one fever or another. “During the first month, at least a dozen comrades paid for their initiation into hostile territory with these violent fevers,” Che wrote, “the aftereffects of which were bothersome.”

Coinciding with Che’s return to health, Leonard Mitoudidi arrived back, with ambitious orders for Che to lead a force of two rebel columns in an attack against the enemy bastion at Albertville. “The order is absurd,” Che wrote at the time. “There’s only 30 of us, of whom 10 are sick or convalescing.” But despite his strong misgivings, Che didn’t want to start out on the wrong foot, and so he told his men to prepare themselves for battle.

On May 22, as they were thus engaged, a Congolese runner arrived in camp announcing excitedly that a “Cuban minister” had arrived. By now, Che was accustomed to hearing all sorts of wild rumors, the Congolese having a “Radio Bemba” bush telegraph every bit as florid as Cuba’s own, but shortly afterward he was stunned to see none other than Osmany Cienfuegos appear before him at the head of a fresh contingent of seventeen new Cubans. A further seventeen had remained behind in Kigoma, awaiting transportation across the lake. This brought the number of Cuban guerrillas on hand to more than sixty.

“In general, the news [Osmany] brought was very good,” Che recalled in the Congolese
Pasajes
. “But he brought for me personally the saddest
news of the war. Telephone calls from Buenos Aires had revealed that my mother was very sick. The implication was that this was just a preparatory announcement. ... I had to spend a month in sad uncertainty, awaiting the results of something I could guess but with the hope that the report had been a mistake. Then the confirmation of my mother’s death arrived. ... She never saw the farewell letter that I had left in Havana for my parents.”
*

The fact that Che included something so personal in his account is an indication of how deeply the episode affected him, but “sad uncertainty” was an understatement. Among Che’s personal belongings that later came into Aleida’s possession were three pieces of writing, rather like short stories, all very dark and anguished, written in the tortured symbolism of some of his youthful literary efforts, including one that expressed his grief over the loss of his mother.
†