Che Guevara (76 page)

In November, Fidel continued to consolidate his power base. He succeeded in cobbling together “unity” in the CTC labor confederation at the expense of the July 26 anticommunists by imposing his own executive committee and ending the members’ right to vote for delegates, paving the way for the CTC’s gradual takeover by the Cuban Communist Party. The creation of “National Revolutionary Militias” was announced, the first step in the realization of Che’s dream to convert Cuba into a “guerrilla society.” Foreign Minister Roa rebutted an article by Carlos Franqui in
Revolución
indicating that the Soviet deputy premier, Mikoyan, had been invited to Cuba, as, of ourse, he had been.

It was just as well that Mikoyan’s November visit had been postponed, for when the Catholic laymen’s congress took place, it became an open demonstration of clerical opposition to Communism. Although the ecclesiastical hierarchy had so far maintained a public “wait and see” posture, the Church was increasingly alarmed about the direction of the revolution, and its youthful militants had no patience for keeping quiet. Already, a few priests had begun to flee, reappearing amid great waves of publicity in Miami, where they echoed Díaz Lanz’s claims that Cuba was going “Red.” In Washington, meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency had quietly begun to study ways and means of getting rid of Fidel Castro.

In late 1959, most of Cuba’s industry, both small and large, was still in private hands. The only industrial possessions of INRA were a few small factories either abandoned by their owners or confiscated for belonging to Batista and his associates. These fell under Che’s new authority, and hand-picked veterans of the Rebel Army were dispatched to administer them, just as they were being put in charge of the new agrarian cooperatives on the expropriated
latifundios
.

Che now had a small team of economists from Chile and Ecuador working for him. More Cubans came in, some accountants were hired, and plans began to be made for the industrial development of Cuba. In the early weeks of work, Borrego sweated over annual statistical reports to get a grasp of the Cuban industrial landscape, and an an agenda gradually began to evolve. “Very soon the first interventions of factories began,” he recalled. “These were interventions,
not
nationalizations. Factories had labor conflicts, or the capitalists running them were doubtful about the revolutionary process and weren’t investing, and so we intervened.” A resolution adopted by the Ministry of Labor—now in the safe hands of Augusto Martínez Sánchez, Raúl’s former aide—enabled Che’s department to intervene and administer factories for as long as necessary. Nonetheless, Borrego said, he never imagined the interventions would be permanent. “Of course,” he added, “to Che’s way of thinking they were definitive, but that wasn’t legally declared yet.” It was Borrego’s job to operate the new properties, and his first headache was finding people to run them. “We started naming some administrators. Basically we chose them from among the members of the Rebel Army whose schooling wasn’t too low. When I talk about schooling, I mean men who had completed the sixth grade or more.”

Che estimated that more than 80 percent of Fidel’s rebels were illiterate. His literacy campaign at La Cabaña had been designed to alleviate the problem, but in late 1959 the military was still made up for the most part of semiliterate or very recently tutored
guajiros
, many of them little more than teenagers. When they were dispatched to run the factories, an inevitable series of disasters and chaos ensued. All the while, Che was cramming to overcome his own lack of economic knowledge. He studied with a Mexican economist, Juan Noyola. Doctor Vilaseca was teaching him advanced mathematics. Beginning in September, Vilaseca began coming over to the INRA office every Tuesday and Saturday morning at eight to give Che, García Vals, and Patojo an hour-long math class. For Vilaseca, the classes were the start of his day; for Che, they were a way to unwind before going home after working through the night. They began with algebra and trigonometry, and soon they went on to analytical geometry.

Che loved telling a story about how he’d gotten the bank job. He said that at the cabinet meeting held to decide on a replacement for Felipe Pazos—who had been ousted after protesting against Matos’s arrest—Fidel said that he needed a good
economista
. To his surprise, Che raised his hand. “But Che, I didn’t know you were an economist!” he said. “Oh, I thought you said you needed a good
comunista
,” Che replied.

Che’s appointment sent a flurry of cold shivers throughout the financial and business community. Few believed Fidel’s glib reassurances that Che would be “as conservative as” his predecessor. When he took over at the bank—a colonnaded stone building on a narrow street of Old Havana—he found a lot of empty desks; most of the senior staff had resigned along with Felipe Pazos.
*
Che called Dr. Vilaseca and asked him to become the bank’s administrator, his deputy, but Vilaseca balked. It was not just that he lacked any experience in finance. He was a personal friend of Pazos, whom he described as “someone extraordinarily capable in banking.” But Che was adamant; in fact, he was not so much asking Vilaseca as ordering him. “I don’t know anything about banks, either, and I’m the president,”
Che told him. “When the revolution names you to a post, you have to accept it, and then do it well.” Vilaseca accepted the job.

One of the first people Che called in to the bank was Nicolás Quintana, a thirty-five-year-old Havana architect whose firm had been assigned funds by Pazos to build a new thirty-two-story National Bank building—an American-style skyscraper—on a site overlooking the Malecón in central Havana. It was a huge project, the biggest construction scheme under way in Cuba, and was to cost an estimated $16 million. By late 1959, the building’s foundations had just been laid and the first phase of construction begun.

When Pazos was fired and reassigned to an ambassadorship abroad, he had confided to Quintana that he was planning to seek asylum as soon as he got to Europe. “What they are doing to the country is a barbarity,” he said. “You’re going to inherit a new bank president, and his name is Che Guevara. He’s not qualified for the post, and that’s one of the reaons I’m going into exile. You’re going to have to go, too; it’s inevitable.” But Quintana was young, he was involved in the biggest architectural project of his career, and he thought that the fact that he had helped the rebels (late in 1958 he provided them with topographical maps of the Escambray area) would help him with Che.

When Quintana went to his meeting with Che at the bank, he was shocked at the way things looked. The once pristine financial building was “dirty and disorganized,” with papers lying all over the floor. “In fifteen days, everything had changed,” Quintana said. The first thing Che asked him was, “Are you a petit bourgeois?” Quintana answered: “No, I’m not.” “No? So, you’re a revolutionary.” “No, Comandante, I haven’t said I’m a revolutionary. I am a
gran
bourgeois. My
shopkeeper
is a bourgeois.” Che’s eyes warmed, and, looking pleased, he said: “You’re the only honest person of your class I’ve met since I got here.” Quintana thought he’d won Che over, and he responded in the same witty fashion, “No, there are many, the problem is that you don’t give them a chance to talk.” Che’s expression froze, and he told Quintana to remember that he was speaking to Comandante Guevara. Quintana realized that he had pushed his limits.

At a second meeting, Quintana and his senior partner presented the building plans and specifications that required Che’s approval. They showed him the list of materials that had to be imported and explained that the exposed seafront building would need hurricane-proof windows with rust-proof stainless steel frames. Quintana recommended that the elevators be bought from an American firm, Otis, which had offices in Havana.

Che listened to Quintana’s suggestions and finally asked, “Why elevators?” Quintana said that the building would be be thirty-two stories high.
Che said he thought stairs would do; if
he
could climb them, with his asthma, why couldn’t everyone else? At this, Quintana’s partner got up and left the meeting in disgust, but the younger architect persisted. They returned to the matter of the windows. Che asked Quintana why they had to come from the United States or Germany; why couldn’t something cheaper be found, perhaps made from plastic, right in Havana? Next they talked about the number of lavatories proposed; Che looked at the figures and said: “Well, we can eliminate at least half of them.”

“But in revolutions,” Quintana pointed out, “people go to the bathroom just as much as before it.” “Not the
new man
,” Che countered. “He can sacrifice.” When the architect tried to return once again to the matter of the hurricane-proof windows, Che cut him off: “Look, Quintana. For the shit we’re going to be guarding here within three years, it’s preferable that the wind takes the lot.”

Quintana finally understood. This wasn’t about windows or toilets; Che didn’t want the new bank at all. “He was sending me a message that the system was going to change so absolutely that everything we were talking about was unnecessary.” The bank was never built. Some years later, the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital was erected in its place.

Before long, new Cuban ten- and twenty-peso banknotes were issued. As president of the National Bank, it was Che’s job to sign them—which he did, writing simply and dismissively, “Che.” To Cuban businessmen, the symbolism of the gesture was quickly understood and bitterly resented. In the new Cuba, money was no longer a hallowed commodity but an onerous vestige of the soon-to-disappear era of capitalist private enterprise.

Huber Matos’s sedition trial took place in December 1959, and it quickly turned bitter and ugly. Raúl called for Matos’s execution, as did the prosecutor, Major Jorge “Papito” Serguera. Instead, the judges, all handpicked army officers and revolutionary veterans, sentenced Matos to twenty years in prison and gave his junior officers lesser sentences. But several other men were tried, sentenced, and executed for “counterrevolution” in December. Rafael del Pino, Fidel’s old friend who had been suspected of betraying a fellow rebel in Mexico City just before the
Granma
left for Cuba, was caught, charged with aiding
batístianos
fleeing the country, and given thirty years.

As he had promised Alexandr Alexiev over vodka and caviar, Fidel began to wage a battle against the “reactionary” press in Cuba. The conservative daily
Avance
was “intervened” after its editor fled the country; Fidel had accused him of siding with the counterrevolution for printing Díaz Lanz’s accusations about Communist infiltration of the armed forces. Cuba’s second television channel, 12, was intervened, too.
El Mundo
was taken over and put under the editorship of a Fidelista journalist, Luis Wangüemert. The operation to close down the opposition mouthpiece
Diario de la Marina
and the rest of Cuba’s independent press would come soon. For now, the editors of
Bohemia
and
Revolución
remained publicly loyal, although they too were becoming nervous about Fidel’s accommodation with the Communists. Cuba’s international wire agency, Prensa Latina, was up and running under the committed editorship of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, with bureaus opening around the hemisphere. (For a time, a young Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, worked alongside Masetti in Havana.) Prensa Latina tried to combat the reports put out by the AP and UPI, the two U.S. news agencies most galling to Che and Fidel.

Che with his mother, Celia, who was visiting Havana in 1960 during the annual Ernest Hemingway Marlin Fishing Tournament. Celia Sánchez, Fidel’s confidante, is at the far right.

The newspaper takeovers were aided by the printers’ and journalists’ unions, which were in the hands of Fidelistas and were functioning as pro-government strike forces in the surviving private media outlets. The CTC purge had continued over David Salvador’s protests, spearheaded by the Communists now on its executive committee. Even in the Union of Graphic Artists, there was purging to be done; the Communist actress Violeta Casals, Alexiev’s initial contact for Che, became the head of the union after her predecessor was accused of being a counterrevolutionary and fled the country.

Che’s overseas mission of the previous summer had begun paying some dividends. Official diplomatic and trade delegations from Japan, Indonesia, and Egypt had visited Cuba. A few trade agreements were signed, although they were more significant for their symbolism than their commercial benefits. Che had kept up a steady stream of blatantly political articles about the countries he had visited. In “America from the Afro-Asian Balcony,” published in the September–October issue of the magazine
Humanismo
, he wrote that the common bond between Cuba and the newly independent former colonial states was the dream of freedom from economic
exploitation. He argued that revolutionary Cuba, personified by Fidel Castro, was a model for change not only in Latin America but in Asia and Africa as well, and he called for an international anti-imperialist alliance. Fidel, he seemed to be saying, could be its leader.