Che Guevara (85 page)

One day, seeing that Che was wearing no watch, his friend Oscar Fernández Mell gave him his own, a fine watch with a gold wristband that he had bought for himself after graduating from medical school. Sometime later, Che handed Fernández Mell a piece of paper. It was a receipt from the National Bank declaring that Oscar Fernández Mell had donated his gold wristband as a contribution to Cuba’s gold reserves. Che was still wearing the watch, but it now had a leather wristband.

Che had refused to collect the salary he was due as president of the National Bank, and he continued the practice at the Ministry of Industries, steadfastly drawing only his minuscule
comandante
’s wages. Orlando Borrego, by now a vice minister, felt obliged to draw an equivalent amount of his own salary, donating the rest to an agrarian reform fund; it would have been unseemly to be earning more money than his boss. But self-abnegation and revolutionary showmanship cut particularly close to the bone when Che forced Borrego to give up the car of his dreams. During a visit to an “intervened” cigarette factory, a manager had pointed out a brand-new Jaguar sports car that had been abandoned by its owner, a wealthy Cuban who had fled the country. He suggested that Borrego take it, since no one else knew how to run it. Borrego fell in love with the car and drove it proudly for about a week, until the day Che spotted him in the garage where they both parked. “You’re a
chulo
—a pimp!” Che yelled. What was Borrego doing, driving around in a car like that? It was not a car for a representative of the people. Borrego’s heart fell, and he told Che he would return it. “Good,” Che said, “I’ll give you two hours.” Back at the office, Che said that Borrego should be driving a car more like Che’s own, a modest, year-old green Chevy Impala. Before long, Borrego was given a car exactly like his
jefe
’s, except that his was two-tone. He would
drive it for the next twelve years. “Che was superstrict,” Borrego recalled, “like Jesus Christ.”

The extent of Che’s vision of a new society was made very clear to Ricardo Rojo, the Argentinian lawyer who had introduced him to Hilda when they were all living in Guatemala. Rojo now had a diplomatic post in Bonn under the Argentine government of Arturo Frondízi, which had tried, unsuccessfully, to intercede in the intensifying dispute between the United States and Cuba. Rojo had shown up in Havana, evidently hoping to use his relationship with Che to take soundings of Cuba’s intentions. He could see that Cuba was preparing for war. He observed militiamen jackhammering Havana’s streets to lay explosive charges, and everywhere he looked, uniformed men and women wandered around with weapons. After passing through a crowd of bearded, armed men in the foyer of the Ministry of Industries, he found Che in a half-furnished office. It had been six years since they had last seen each other, in Mexico. Che looked heavier, and Rojo told him so. Che replied that his moon face was a consequence of cortisone treatments for his chronic asthma. He wasn’t fat.

No doubt aware that whatever he showed or said to the well-connected Rojo would filter back to Western policy makers, Che took him on a worker’s tour of the Cuban countryside: to factories, to the cane fields, and to meet with peasant soldiers fighting in the Escambray against the counter-revolutionaries. He even press-ganged him into a day of volunteer labor cutting cane. Rojo came away certain of several things: that Cuba was definitely on the path to Communism; that the revolution was well armed and enjoyed widespread support among Cubans; and—judging from several comments his old friend had made—that Che was interested in extending the revolution to South America.

Toward the end of March, Che accompanied Rojo to the airport. As they drove past numerous antiaircraft gun emplacements, Che turned to him. “They’ll come,” he said, referring to the Americans. “But we’ll give them a reception. It’s a pity you’re leaving right now, when the party is about to begin.”

On April 3, the White House released a white paper on Cuba. It was the Kennedy administration’s call to arms for the military expedition that would soon be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. Cuba, it said, posed a “clear and present danger” to the Americas.

Five days later, with invasion jitters at a fever pitch, Che published an article in
Verde Olivo
titled “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonialist Struggle?” Che answered his own question: Cuba was no exception, but merely the first Latin American nation to break the mold of
economic dependency and domination by imperialists. Its example was the path for its neighbors to follow to the goal of revolutionary freedom:

What did we do to free ourselves from the vast imperialist system, with its entourage of puppet rulers in each country and mercenary armies to protect the puppets and the whole complex social system of the exploitation of man by man? We applied certain formulas, [the results] of discoveries of our empirical medicine for the great ailments of our beloved Latin America, empirical medicine that rapidly became part of scientific truth.

This was the “scientific” discovery that Ernesto Guevara had been destined for, the culmination of a search that had begun with his work in medicine. Treating individuals’ illnesses had never been his real interest; his motivation had always been that of the researcher looking for a cure, or a means to prevent; and, as it had been with medicine, so it had become with politics. Searching, crossing solutions off the list of possibilities as he went—reformism, democracy, elections—he had found Marx, then Guatemala, then Cuba and the realization that the cure to society’s ills was Marxism-Leninism and that guerrilla warfare was the means to achieve it. Before
Cuba’s revolution, he explained, “Latin America lacked the subjective conditions, the most important of which is consciousness of the possibility of victory through violent struggle against the imperialist powers and their internal allies. These conditions were created through the armed struggle that clarified the need for change ... and the defeat and subsequent annihilation of the army by the popular forces (an absolutely necessary condition for every genuine revolution). ... The peasant class of Latin America, basing itself on the ideology of the working class, whose great thinkers discovered the social laws governing us, will provide the great liberating army of the future, as it has already done in Cuba.”

Che working on the docks in Havana in 1961.

Scientific truth is a natural law not malleable by theories. In essence, Che was arguing that his formula for attaining socialism through armed struggle amounted to a scientific discovery, and that the discovery would lead to the end of injustice and the creation of a new form of man.

On April 14, Havana’s largest and most luxurious department store, El Encanto, was burned down by one of the underground groups backed by the CIA. Felix Rodríguez had been forewarned by his contacts that “something big” was about to happen and that he might want to leave town, because there would be “a lot of heat.”

The next morning, in the predawn darkness of April 15, Sofía, the Guevaras’ nanny, awoke to the frightening noise of diving airplanes and exploding bombs. She ran into the hall and called to Che. Still shirtless, he emerged from his bedroom. “The bastards have finally attacked us,” he said.

From a window they watched the flashes and explosions; planes were bombing the airfield at nearby Campamento Libertad. Che’s
escolta
were running around wildly, yelling and waving pistols. Che shouted out the window, “I’ll shoot the first man who fires!” and they calmed down. Within a few minutes he had driven off with them. They went to Pinar del Río, his secret battle station for the invasion. To have the end of the island closest to the United States well covered, Fidel had given Che command of Cuba’s western army.

The next day, at the funeral for the victims of the bombing, which had destroyed the greater part of Cuba’s minuscule air force, Fidel gave a fiery speech blaming the attack on the United States. The Americans had attacked, he claimed, because they could not forgive Cuba for having brought about a socialist revolution under their noses. For the first time since seizing power, Fidel had uttered the dreaded word. Later, a bronze plaque would be secured on the spot, consecrating the moment when Fidel “revealed the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution.”

Among the crowd listening to Fidel that historic afternoon were a young, prematurely balding artist from the Argentine mountain city of Mendoza named Ciro Roberto Bustos and his wife. They had just arrived in Cuba as volunteers to participate in the Cuban revolutionary experiment. As they walked along Havana’s streets, soaking up the tropical atmosphere, the air was charged with portent. The future seemed promising and threatening at the same time—as indeed it was. Before long, Ciro Bustos’s life would be completely absorbed, and irrevocably altered, by Che’s vision of a continental revolution.

Just after midnight on April 17, the Cuban exile Liberation Army, 1,500 men, came ashore at Playa Girón on the Bay of Pigs. Days earlier, the units based in Guatemala had been transferred to the Nicaraguan port of Puerto Cabezas, where they had been seen off by Nicaragua’s dictator, Luís Somoza. He told them to bring him back a hair from Castro’s beard. They made the crossing to Cuba aboard ships lent them, as Che had forecast, probably jokingly, by the United Fruit Company, with U.S. naval destroyers as escorts. They were not told exactly where they were to disembark until they were at sea.

Within hours of their landing, which was trumpeted loudly over the CIA’s Radio Swan transmitter, Fidel had mobilized his forces. Rather than push inland, the invaders dug into positions on the beach and awaited reinforcements. None came. By mid-morning, the fighting had begun. By dawn the next day, Dulles informed Kennedy that the exiles were bogged down; unless the United States intervened, they would be wiped out. Kennedy refused to authorize more than minimal air support.

In Havana, Felix Rodríguez heard about the invasion on the radio. The CIA had not dared warn anyone in the resistance inside Cuba, for fear of a leak. Cut off from the other members of his Gray Team, he tried to reach his Havana contacts on the telephone. In each case, either there was no reply or strange voices that told him to “come over right away.” Realizing that many of the resistance people had probably already been arrested, and that the voices were those of security agents, he stayed where he was. Over the next three days he watched the events unfold on television and wept in frustration.

In Pinar del Río, Che’s forces saw no action, but Che himself was nearly killed in a shooting accident. Aleida first learned of it when Celia Sánchez called to tell her that Che had been lightly “wounded,” grazed on the cheek and ear when his pistol fell out of its holster and a bullet went off. Celia sent a car to take Aleida to him, and another car to pick up Aliusha and the nanny, Sofía, and bring them to her flat. Celia’s flat had become a communications nerve center for the revolutionary leadership. At one point, a weary-looking
Fidel came in, directly from the battleground, and collapsed on the bed where Sofía lay with Che’s daughter. As he slept, the baby played with his beard.

The bullet had come within a hairbreadth of penetrating Che’s brain. His greatest moment of danger, though, had come not from the bullet, but from the antitetanus injection that medics had insisted on giving him. It had brought on a toxic shock reaction. As Che joked afterward to Alberto Granado, “My friends almost managed to do what my enemies couldn’t. I nearly died!”

By the afternoon of April 20, the exile force had bogged down, run out of supplies, and given up. Of the invaders, 114 were dead, and nearly 1,200 had been taken prisoner. At the happy news, Che returned to Havana from his post in Pinar del Río, picked up Granado, and drove to Playa Girón. The Central Australia sugar mill, Fidel’s command post during the battle, was a chaos of military equipment, troops, and POWs. Soldiers were still combing the surrounding area for fugitives who had fled into the swamp. Jeeps roared off in all directions.

Che and Granado approached a group of prisoners. One of them was so terrified to see Che that he defecated and urinated in his trousers. Che tried to question the man, but he could not even speak properly. Finally, Che turned away and said to one of his bodyguards, “Get a bucket of water for that poor bastard.”

Fidel, of course, was jubilant. He himself had directed the battle at Playa Girón, and he had personally fired a tank cannon at one of the American “mother ships”; his men swore afterward that he had scored a direct hit. All folklore aside, the battle had been a stunning victory for Cuba’s revolution. The “people” had stood up to Washington, and they had won.

On the morning of April 26, Felix Rodríguez went from his safe house in Havana to the Venezuelan embassy compound in a chauffeur-driven green Mercedes belonging to the Spanish ambassador. Four months later, he would be granted diplomatic safe-passage to leave the country. But he would soon be back in Cuba; neither he nor the CIA had given up the battle.