Che Guevara (60 page)

No matter how much Che depended on the PSP, he wanted to avoid the appearance that he was in their pocket. Ovidio Díaz Rodríguez, the Socialist Youth leader who helped coordinate Che’s agrarian reform efforts in Las Villas, was present when a Party man came to a meeting carrying a present for Che. “It was a tin of Argentine
mate
and in front of everyone he said: ‘Look, Commander, this is a gift from the Party Directorate.’ Che accepted it without saying anything, but afterward he told me: ‘Tell the Party not to send me such indiscreet comrades.’”

Simply because he had launched attacks—as few of the other groups had done—Che became the de facto authority in the Escambray, and people began arriving to pay him their respects. On November 8, two dairy company inspectors visited to ask if they could continue to collect milk in the area; their dairy business was almost paralyzed because of the rebels’ activities. “I told them yes, but that we would charge an extraordinary war tax, with which they agreed.” A transport union leader from Santa Clara came proposing joint actions in the city. Che said he was willing if the man could organize a union meeting and if all the leaders requested it. A delegation from Placetas brought Che diagrams of the town and offered him support if he attacked.

Clearly put out by Che’s seizure of the limelight in “their” zone of influence, the warlords of the Second Front were making increasingly bellicose noises. Che received notes from William Morgan, the American military veteran helping Gutiérrez Menoyo, ordering him to return the weapons that Bordón’s men had brought with them when they joined Che. Entirely ignoring Morgan, Che wrote a strongly worded letter to Gutiérrez Menoyo and ordered his men “not to hand over a single weapon and to repel any
attack.” Che also wrote to the Directorio leader Faure Chomón to inform him of the “delicate situation” with the Second Front. The situation was of “crisis proportions,” he said, “making it impossible to reach an agreement with this organization.” He also urged Chomón to consider including the PSP in a proposed alliance. “In official talks with members of the Popular Socialist Party, they have openly expressed a pro-unity stance and have placed their organization in the towns and their guerrillas on the Yaguajay front at the disposal of this unity.”

Che speaking to the citizens of Cabaiguán during the final push to victory in December 1958.

Che heard that soldiers loyal to Commander Peña of the Second Front were extorting money from local civilians, and he sent out men to detain the culprits. Within a few days, two complete Second Front columns were brought in. Che warned them that they could no longer operate in the zone, much less use their arms for extortion. One of the columns asked to join him, and Che accepted. Before letting the rest go, he confiscated the “war taxes” they had extorted—a total of 3,000 pesos—and sent a note to Commander Peña. In this “Military Order No. 1,” Che’s first decree as
“commander in chief of the Las Villas region for the July 26 Movement,” he made it clear that life in the area was about to change. After outlining the terms for agrarian reform, he turned, obliquely, to his competitors in the Second Front: “Any member of a revolutionary organization other than the July 26 Movement may pass through, live, and operate military in this territory. The only requirement shall be to abide by the military orders that have been or will be promulgated.

“No one who is not the member of a revolutionary organization has the right to bear arms in this territory. No member of any revolutionary body is permitted to drink alcoholic beverages in public establishments. ... Any shedding of blood due to violation of this order will fall under the Penal Code of the revolutionary army. ...

“All military or civil crimes committed within the borders of the administrative territory encompassed by this order will fall under the jurisdiction of our appropriate regulations.”

Perhaps because they were intimidated, the Directorio faction accepted unification with Che’s group and agreed to impose a single tax in the area and to divide the proceeds equally between their two organizations. As a practical first step for their new alliance, they planned to begin launching joint attacks. The one area of disagreement that remained was Chomón’s refusal to widen the alliance to include the PSP. Che let the matter rest, but on December 3, less than three weeks after the unity agreement between the Directorio and the July 26 Movement, he and the PSP leader Rolando Cubela signed the “Pedrero Pact,” declaring their alliance in the struggle as “brothers.”

The quarrels within the July 26 Movement continued. Enrique Oltuski, together with Marcelo Fernández, the new July 26 Havana chief, and three officials from the Las Villas directorate, called on Che in late November for another round of talks. Che found Fernández “full of airs about himself,” and he prepared for battle. “We argued all night. ... We accused each other mutually. They accused me of being a Communist and I accused them of being imperialists. I told them the facts on which I based myself to give such an opinion and they did the same to me. When the argument ended we were more apart than when we began.”

As Oltuski recalled, Che was away when they arrived, and they were received by one of his young bodyguards, Olo Pantoja. As an act of courtesy, Pantoja offered them some goat meat, which they noticed was already green with rot. So as not to offend, they each tried a bite, a decision Oltuski immediately regretted: overcome by nausea, he discreetly went outside and spat out his mouthful. When Che returned at midnight and settled down before the meal, Oltuski watched with horrified fascination.

“As he spoke,” Oltuski wrote, “he took the pieces of meat with dirty fingers. Judging from the relish with which he ate, it tasted gloriously to him. He finished eating and we went outside. ... Che handed out cigars. They were rough, no doubt made in the zone by some
guajiro
. I inhaled the bitter and strong smoke: I felt a warmth in my body and a light dizziness. To my side, Che smoked and coughed, a damp cough, as if he was all wet inside. He smelled bad. He stank of decomposed sweat. It was a penetrating odor and I fought it with the tobacco smoke. ... Che and Marcelo had some verbal wrangles. Among other things, they argued over the program of the 26 of July. ...

“When we were on our way back, Marcelo asked me: ‘What do you think?’

“‘In spite of everything, one can’t help admiring him. He knows what he wants better than we do. And he lives entirely for it.’”

Aleida March met Che in late November. Her first impression was that he looked old, not to mention skinny and dirty. He didn’t seem like much of a romantic prospect.
*
Aleida had traveled to Che’s base from Santa Clara on behalf of Diego, her boss in the Las Villas rebel underground, who entrusted her with his most delicate missions. In the dossiers of Batista’s secret police, she appeared as “Cara Cortada” (Scarface) and “Teta Manchada” (Stained Tit). Aleida’s unlovely nicknames had been coined from the descriptions of
chivatos
, who told the police about the small scar on her right cheek, from a childhood dog bite, and the large pink birthmark that spread from her left breast to above her collarbone. But the police intelligence sheets were misleading. In spite of her scars, Aleida March was a pretty blond woman of twenty-four.

The youngest of six children, Aleida had been raised on a fifty-acre tenant farm in the hilly agricultural country south of Santa Clara. Her mother was tiny, barely five feet, while her father was tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. Both were from formerly affluent Spanish émigré families who had lost their wealth, but Aleida liked to say that her family was “middle class” because their home had a concrete floor. Their neighbors’ homes and the one-room grammar school she attended until the sixth grade had dirt floors.

Their two-bedroom house was much like everyone else’s, with a palm-thatched roof and whitewashed mud walls, a family room with a kitchen, and a front room for receiving visitors. The ceiling was yellow from all the rice bags Aleida’s father stored in the attic. A vertical wood strut rising from the floor between the living room and the kitchen held up the roof, and in the evenings her father leaned his back against it to read her stories. At night, Aleida could hear her mother singing to her father in their bedroom, next to hers. A river ran across their land; this was where her mother washed their clothes, and where Aleida and her sisters bathed.

Their part of Las Villas was populated by people much like themselves—poor white farmers, the descendants of immigrants from impoverished parts of Spain—Galicians, Andalusians, and
isleños
(Canary Islanders). In the socially and racially stratified pecking order of the region, as in much of Cuba, such families remained at the bottom rung of white society, but they were still head and shoulders above the mulattos and blacks. Only three generations out of slavery,
los negros
were the dirt-poor laborers, the despised effluvia of Cuban society. In 1958, Santa Clara’s central park was still off-limits to blacks; there was a fence around it, and blacks could congregate around its edges, but not go inside.

Like many poor whites, Aleida’s mother, Eudoxia de la Torre, was both a racist and a snob. She liked to brag about the illustrious lineage of Aleida’s father, Juan March, whose Catalan ancestors had supposedly been noblemen. When she was small, mimicking her mother, Aleida used to tell people she was related to the “dukes of Catalunya.” Whether her father was of direct noble lineage or an illegitimate offspring, Aleida never knew, but it
was
true that both her parents’ families had once possessed land and money. Her father’s family had owned a sugar plantation but had lost their land years before, and the land her father now sharecropped had belonged to Aleida’s maternal grandparents, before they lost it in the hard times of the 1920s. When her parents married, they had rented the land and settled in as tenant farmers. The last remaining legacy of their comfortable past, an antique crystal
bonbonnière
, stood prominently displayed on an old wooden bureau in the front room, where guests were received.

The family’s status was further bolstered by the fact that the local schoolteacher lodged with them throughout Aleida’s childhood. They had the only home in the area “decent” enough for her. But the Marches also had their blemishes. Her mother, a devout churchgoing Presbyterian, had caused a local scandal by giving birth to Aleida at the age of forty-two, well past the “appropriate” childbearing years. This was a source of perpetual mortification for Aleida’s sisters—the next closest in age was fifteen years
older—and they used to tell people that Aleida was not their sister at all, but the daughter of the much younger schoolteacher.

The nearest community was Seibabo, a hamlet with a few houses in it, and once a month her father saddled up his horse and rode into the city of Santa Clara to buy provisions on credit from the Chinese bodegas. He had fruit orchards, grew vegetables, and owned a couple of dairy cows, but he still had to go into debt to feed his family. When the crops didn’t give him enough to pay off the landlord, he had to sell things.

When Aleida reached the sixth grade, she went to live with a married sister in Santa Clara and attended high school there. She decided to become a teacher and, when she finished high school, went on to Santa Clara University to earn a degree in education. While she was there, Fidel carried out his Moncada assault. The event and its violent aftermath awakened her politically, as they did many other young Cubans of her generation. By the time the
Granma
landed, she had graduated from college and was an active member of the local July 26 underground.

Until she reached her early twenties, Santa Clara was the biggest city Aleida had ever been in. She first saw four-lane roads when she made a trip to Havana on a mission for the July 26 Movement. She first heard Che Guevara’s name when an Italian merchant marine, Gino Donne, mentioned it to her. Donne had been on the
Granma
, become separated from his comrades at Alegría del Pío, and eventually, after many misadventures, made it to Santa Clara. Covered with blisters, famished, and with a pounding tooth-ache, he was given refuge at the house of María Dolores “Lolita” Rossell, a pretty, dark-haired mother of four who was a kindergarten teacher. Lolita’s brother Allan Rossell was the July 26 coordinator for Las Villas, and her house functioned as a way station on the rebels’ underground railroad.

It was because of Donne’s arrival that Lolita and Aleida met, and they soon became close friends. By then, Aleida was chief liaison for the July 26 action chief in Villa Clara and was earning a reputation as extremely audacious, smuggling weapons and bombs around the province under her full-length skirts. “She wasn’t afraid of anything,” Lolita recalled. “She was totally dedicated, very serious, had stayed single, and wasn’t one for parties and that kind of thing.” Aleida came to Lolita’s house to plan sabotage attacks with Donne, and for a time the two carried out missions around the city. But Donne didn’t stay long; disillusioned by the festive mood he saw in Santa Clara that first Christmas—which he perceived as revealing a lack of insurrectionary spirit—he found a ship leaving Cuba and went with it.