BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
HAVANA, Cuba-When he first met Ernesto Che Guevara in 1957 in
the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba, Harry Villegas told
us, "Che was already a legend. He was known throughout the
Sierra as the Argentine commander who was fighting together with
Fidel, admired and respected by the peasants and the guerrillas
alike because he was very honest, straightforward, and audacious,
very human."
Today Villegas is a brigadier general in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, a veteran of multiple internationalist aid missions to Angola between 1975 and 1990 - during which he took part in the historic defeat of South Africa's invading forces at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 - and the officer in charge of political education for the Western Army. Around the world, however, he is more likely to be known as Pombo, the nom de guerre he used as a member of the general staff of the guerrilla forces that fought with Che Guevara first in the Congo in 1965 and then in the mountains of Bolivia in 1966 and 1967. Following Guevara's capture and murder by CIA-organized Bolivian special forces, Pombo led the six Cuban and Bolivian combatants who broke out of the encirclement and eluded the intense manhunt mounted by the regime for weeks. After almost five months, the three Cubans eventually made their way to Chile and from there back to Cuba.
Following publication in 1994 by Pathfinder Press of a new English-language edition of The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara, we arranged to talk with Villegas about the Bolivian campaign and other struggles he participated in at Guevara's side. Excerpts from Pombo's own daily journal and later accounts by him of the Bolivian campaign are included in that new edition.
In February 1996 the Cuban publishing house Editora Política will bring out the complete Bolivian diary of Pombo, under the title, Pombo: Un hombre de la guerrilla del Che (Pombo: a guerilla with Che). It will include documents and correspondence from the Bolivian campaign never before released for publication, as well as Pombo's own account of the months immediately before and after Che's death, based on Villegas's carefully kept diary.
The "honest, straightforward, and audacious" young Argentine commander who Villegas first encountered 38 years ago in the Sierra Maestra mountains was to become a central leader of the Cuban revolution, known and respected in Cuba and internationally as one of the outstanding communists of the 20th century. For over a decade he would occupy a more and more central place in the struggles through which Cuba's workers and peasants transformed themselves and their society. Mobilizing by the millions they expropriated the interests of U.S. imperialism and Cuba's propertied classes and broke capital's domination. In doing so they opened the socialist revolution in the Americas.
Villegas, the tenth and youngest child of a family living in the foothills of the Sierras, was an early recruit to the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the hated military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. His father was a carpenter; his mother, who ran a couple of small stores and a bakery in the villages of Yara and Palma, managed to save enough money to allow Harry to attend school.
In December 1956 a small band of armed revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro landed on the coast of Oriente province at the eastern end of Cuba. Castro was already a well-known political figure in Cuba. He had been a student leader at the University of Havana, a leader of the opposition Orthodox Party youth beginning in the late 1940s and one of the party's candidates for the house of representatives prior to Batista's military coup on March 10, 1952. A little more than a year later, Castro burst into national, and international, prominence when he organized an armed assault on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953.(1)
Released from prison in response to a growing popular amnesty campaign, Castro and other surviving veterans of the Moncada attack founded the July 26 Movement and from Mexico organized an expedition of 82 combatants who, with their relatively few weapons, returned to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma. They were virtually annihilated during their first encounter with government troops a few days after the landing. Those who survived and escaped imprisonment-20 in all-regrouped and started guerrilla operations in the Sierra Maestra in early 1957.
Word spread rapidly throughout Oriente and the rest of Cuba that the July 26 Movement had launched an armed insurrection against the Batista dictatorship, and that Castro was in the Sierras commanding a rebel army. The news had a big impact on Harry Villegas, then a 16-year-old student in Manzanillo. He joined the movement, becoming a member of an underground cell in the city. Soon he was taking part in guerrilla operations in the nearby Cauto River valley.
"We had two skirmishes with the army," Villegas recounted. The second time "we went to the main road and attacked the soldiers, inflicting a few casualties." The army unit counterattacked and surrounded the combatants. When they broke out of the encirclement, they had to head into the mountains to escape, and there they made contact with a squad led by Chino Figueredo that was part of a column commanded by Che Guevara.
Guevara had joined the July 26 Movement in Mexico in the summer of 1955. Che, as he was called by his Cuban comrades, had graduated from medical school in Argentina two years earlier, and he signed on to the Granma expedition as the troop's doctor. Che was the third confirmed member of the expedition to be accepted by Fidel; Raúl Castro had been the second. His combativity, courage and leadership capacities rapidly won him the respect of his fellow fighters; he was the first of the combatants to be promoted to the rank of commander.
While they were with Figueredo's detachment, Villegas said, he met Che for the first time.
"Che arrived on his mule, alone, wearing his lopsided beret. He made an extraordinary impression on us. In this first encounter he was very brusque. He asked us what we were doing in the Sierra Maestra, which was very characteristic of him. `What have you come here for? Why are you here?'
"We answered, `We have come to fight for the independence of Cuba, to fight the tyranny.'
"`With what?' he asked.
"I showed him a little single-shot .22 caliber hunting rifle. `You are planning to defeat the tyranny with that? No, no, no. You are mistaken. You must go down and disarm some soldiers.'"
Villegas told how they returned to the village to ambush and disarm some soldiers but were betrayed by an informer and failed in their mission. They returned to the Sierra a few days later, however, better armed than before, having persuaded some peasants to give them their pistols and hunting rifles.
"At that point Che accepted us," Villegas continued. "He said we had not completed the mission, but that we had shown our resolve to fight.
"Along with another comrade I was assigned to the command post squad and began carrying out the most elementary tasks of a guerrilla unit-going back and forth with messages, carrying backpacks, all those kinds of things-until we had acquired experience. In this way we began to be integrated into the Rebel Army."
"We became part of Che's personal escort and accompanied him when he was assigned by Fidel to head up the first military school in revolutionary Cuba," Villegas continued. The school for new recruits, established at Minas del Frío in April 1958, was a gigantic undertaking. In addition to receiving training and instruction, the first recruits to attend the school also had the job of constructing the necessary facilities. "We were to build three large barracks, including one for a school and another for a hospital. This was a gigantic effort, because we had to chop down the trees and carry the logs over the hills on our shoulders. And on top of that we had to go to class."
At the time, Villegas said, the school had two instructors. "One was an American named Herman Mark, a big, strong man, very demanding, who was a veteran of the Korean War. The other, named Evelio Laferté, was a young Cuban, a former military school cadet who had been a first lieutenant in Batista's army. He had been won over after being taken prisoner in the second battle of Pino del Agua, if I remember correctly. This was part of the character of our revolution, to win people from the army itself."
Che's authority with those under his command grew with time, Villegas stressed. Guevara's internationalism was an example that struck them all. "Imagine a person who is not from your country coming to offer his life for your country. A man who is capable of that is a man of extraordinary human dimension."
During Cuba's wars of independence against Spanish colonial rule in 1868-78 and 1895-98, many non-Cubans had joined the struggle. "For us at that time, we viewed them as foreigners who had come to fight with us," Villegas commented. "Today, after deepening our understanding, we say it is an expression of internationalism. At that time, we saw Che as similar to Máximo Gómez, who was the most prominent of the all the internationalists who assisted us." Gómez, a native of Santo Domingo (in what is today the Dominican Republic) who emigrated to Cuba, served as commander in chief of the independence armies during both independence wars. "In Che we saw someone similar to Gómez, a person who was one of our own, even though he was not born in Cuba. He had come to help us, to share with us all the vicissitudes and dangers of the struggle."
"Che was a lover of history," Pombo noted, "a tireless reader, a tireless student. The first thing Che did was try to get us to study. Do you understand? It was the very first thing! Che liked to surround himself with youth and force us to improve ourselves."
"We combined reading with study: mathematics, Spanish, tactics, guerrilla warfare, novels. The method we used was reading combined with discussion.
"We looked at many aspects of our history, but above all we examined the need for unity in the face of imperialist aggression. We studied the lessons of the revolutionary struggles of 1868 and 1895 against Spanish colonial domination, and the writings of José Martí.(2) We saw how Fidel was able to bring many groups, many revolutionary organizations together in support of a single aim, thus guaranteeing unity of action. In Che's study of Cuban history, he thoroughly studied the question of unity; he analyzed it, and used this history to guide us. At that time we didn't understand the question of unity very well. Today we understand it much more deeply."
This was the process, Pombo explained, through which "we began to become seasoned cadres, to be forged as guerrillas, even though we still had not received our baptism of fire. I had fought as part of a guerrilla unit before joining the Rebel Army, but we still had not been in combat under Che's leadership."
That baptism of fire came only a few months later, in July 1958, when Pombo and others took part in the battles that turned back the Batista regime's final military offensive aimed at defeating the guerrillas in the Sierra. Then, in early September, Villegas joined the westward march of Rebel Army column no. 8, under Guevara's command, that culminated in the New Year's victory over government forces in Santa Clara, Cuba's third largest city, and the nationwide general strike and triumphant revolutionary insurrection the first week of January 1959.
We turned to a discussion of the guerrilla struggle in Bolivia where Pombo accompanied Che nearly a decade later. For eleven months, until he was wounded, captured, and executed by CIA-organized military forces in October 1967, Guevara led a group of some 40 combatants in Bolivia, attempting to forge the nucleus of a revolutionary movement that could bring down the military dictatorship in Bolivia and open the road to deepening anticapitalist struggle across Latin America.
Throughout this entire campaign, Pombo was one of its central cadres.
In Bolivia, too, Villegas commented, Che never stopped pressing those he worked with and led to study and broaden their cultural horizons. The combatants in Bolivia developed a library of some 300-400 books and established a system whereby everyone carried one or two of them in his knapsack, read them, and then passed them on to another fighter.
"For Che, raising the cultural level of the combatants was a constant," Pombo explained. "Che saw the combatants as future leaders and viewed the guerrilla unit as a school for forging revolutionaries and leaders. Being part of a social environment where abject poverty prevails, as it does among the peasantry, allows one to acquire a deeper awareness of the need for revolutionary change, to become more human, more humanistic, more conscious of the need to transform society. Out of that kind of experience come men who can be counted on politically, and that is the foundation.
"Che looked for men and women who are made of good timber. Then, as Fidel says, the wood can be shaped. Leaders who are forged in adverse conditions develop a deep sense of fraternity, of comradeship, knowing that human beings need each other, cannot live as hermits like Robinson Crusoe. In order to withstand the hostile environment of the Sierra, to really be able to fight, one has to be part of a collective effort. In such a context human qualities are born, allowing future leaders to be forged."
There is no necessary contradiction between comradeship and friendship, Villegas added. We can take Martí as our guide in this too. For Martí, "comradeship exists between human beings who are fighting for the same cause, who are fighting for the same objective. But within this bond there is also Martí's concept of friendship as presented in his `Simple Verses,' where he says, `The president has a treasure of gold and wheat, but I have something more, I have a friend. The leopard has a shelter, but in the forest I have more than the leopard, because I have a friend.'(3)
"Friendship is a feeling that develops through human contact."
Che sought to instill these human qualities in future leaders, Pombo emphasized, "And part of this process was precisely encouraging them to raise their educational and cultural level. For this he created a school. Wherever Che went, there was a school; there was a school in Africa, a school in Bolivia, a school in the Sierra Maestra, a school in Las Villas. Wherever Che began a campaign, alongside it came instruction, education."
"The study of mathematics was also obligatory," Pombo continued. Che considered it the basis for mastering any science.
"And even while we were still in the Sierra, Che taught us the art of irregular warfare. We read Clausewitz's On War and discussed it. We read Mao Zedong on guerrilla warfare.(4) Che was preparing himself through self-education, as well as teaching us."
Later, Villegas noted, when Che wrote his own book, Guerrilla Warfare, published in Cuba in 1960, "the North Americans used it as a textbook to prepare their special forces to confront the guerrilla movements in Latin America. They considered it the most finished document on irregular warfare from the military point of view, the most practical, the most objective."
In Bolivia the Cuban internationalist volunteers "confronted a world very different from our own," Pombo observed, even though both countries are part of Latin America. "Cuba is an island, where virtually no indigenous population survived. The Spaniards exterminated them. We had no idea of the life of the Indian, of their psychology. We tried to learn about it by reading novels dealing with everyday life."
Guevara was closer to the local population in Bolivia, Villegas noted, because he himself was from that part of the world. "Che had lived side by side with the indigenous people, and he was able to transmit some of his understanding to us."
"Che had gone through an important experience in Africa too," Pombo continued, referring to the six months Guevara spent during 1965 helping to advance the national liberation struggle in the Congo (now Zaire).(5) "It is not easy to assimilate a culture overnight," he said. "One must have a grounding. It requires a broadly cultured person, someone capable of assimilating that culture without being assimilated by it. Che became very conscious of this in Africa."
"In Bolivia he struggled to have us understand the indigenous people's world view, their life, traditions, and rich history. Despite having lived through a revolution in Cuba, we did not have this understanding."
Che had "studied the combative traditions of the Bolivians, their history of struggles," Pombo said. "He went looking for it, and this was one of the things he explained to us. Che knew the characteristics of the Indians, in the same way he knew the peasants in Cuba.
"Peasants are conservative," Pombo continued. "In the Sierra, despite all the work that had been done by Celia [Sánchez](6), who had already recruited peasants and organized them into a cell of the movement, this was true. The peasant is not inclined to support a movement until he sees possibilities of success in that movement. This is even more true when the movement is not completely an agrarian one"-as the July 26 Movement was not; most of its initial cadres and leaders were from cities or small towns.
"When it is an agrarian movement, in which the peasant is defending his little plot of land, he develops somewhat more rapidly. Che knew this," Villegas said. "This was what he explained to us." It was to advance this process that Che paid special attention to the leadership development of the Bolivian combatants.
In Bolivia, as earlier in Cuba, Che's goal was to bring all the diverse forces together in action to overthrow the Bolivian dictatorship and advance the struggle against imperialist domination throughout the entire region.
"The foundations of the National Liberation Army of Bolivia were very broad," Pombo noted. Che never conceived of the war in a sectarian manner. He worked primarily with the Communist Party; it was our job to work with them. But he also worked with the factions within the Communist Party.(7) He called on the party of Juan Lechín for support.(8) He worked with all the organizations that supported Bolivia's freedom. He always worked for the participation of all honest people, all revolutionaries, everyone who wanted to fight for independence, for the liberation of Latin America-because his conception in Bolivia involved not only Bolivia, but Latin America."
It is necessary to remember what was happening in Latin America and the world at the time Che decided to go to Bolivia, Pombo continued. "As combatants we studied the world situation that Che evaluates in his `Message to the Tricontinental.'(9) That was part of the school, the training of future leaders. Above all, the world situation was marked by the genocidal war being waged against the people of Vietnam."
"The war in Vietnam, as you know better than we do, shook the world. It shook U.S. society-the Vietnam syndrome, the economic crisis generated by the war and from which imperialism has never completely recovered.
"Che was a man who analyzed things deeply. He was convinced that it was necessary to take advantage of that conjuncture to inflict defeats on imperialism, to take advantage of the war's political and economic impact. That was the most effective way to assist the heroic people of Vietnam. Out of these considerations came the call contained in the message Che sent to the Tricontinental to create `two, three, many Vietnams,' right here on the doorstep of U.S. imperialism. The peoples of Latin America were the ones who had already taken the first step."
Throughout Latin America, Pombo explained, there were guerrilla movements fighting in Venezuela, in Colombia, Guatemala, Peru. "It was a propitious moment. Vietnam was the center, but revolutionary movements were flowering throughout the world; other forces too were standing up to oppression. Che was aware of this, and that is how he developed the strategy he elaborated in the `Message to the Tricontinental.' "
This was not just Che's evaluation, however, Villegas stressed. "In all honesty, we must say that the Cuban revolution supported this course entirely. This is what Fidel was teaching too. Remember what Che said in his letter to Fidel: that he was leaving to do `that which is denied you owing to your responsibility at the head of Cuba.'(10) Che was completely convinced that Fidel would have been the first to go, had he been able. And for this reason we also participated. We had Cuban comrades in Venezuela at the time; others were in Guatemala, or on their way to Colombia. The Cuban revolution gave support to all these movements that sought liberation for the world's hungry masses."
In launching the Bolivian campaign, Villegas said, Guevara was "looking for an integration of the peoples, not only of revolutionaries, not only of honest people as individuals, but of nations that truly need to achieve their independence in all regards-economically and socially. There were Peruvians, Argentines, Bolivians and Cubans fighting together, shoulder to shoulder.
"The idea of Latin American unity is not an idea dreamed up by Che; it is an idea with a history. It has a basis in the history of struggle of our America. It was the program of Simón Bolívar(11) and José Martí that Che was trying to make a reality because the question of unity has never been resolved. To be strong and equal with the other America, the integration of the Latin American peoples is needed."
"Martí's program for Latin America," Villegas explained, "has never been achieved, and this is not only a question of unity. In his writings, Martí says: `Create a republic where the first law will be respect for the dignity of man.' This cannot be achieved under capitalism. He was thinking of a different society. And when he says: `This is a republic including all and for the welfare of all,' he is talking of a more universal republic, where men are truly equal in rights, in possibilities, and this can be achieved only under socialism.
"In other words, one of the things Che discovered through his study of Cuba's history is that the goals of Martí converge with the course of Marxism-Leninism. This is true even with regard to the party, and the conception of how to lead, how to conduct the struggle. Martí's ideas are not at all separate from the conceptions of Marxism.
"This is an indigenous part of Cuba's history, an extraordinarily profound phenomenon. That is what gives us greater strength.
"That is why today we can say that all our political work must deepen patriotism," Villegas added. Not nationalism, but patriotism, a pride in our history of struggle. "Because patriotism has very deep roots in Martí, and we can go back even further, to Céspedes; to Maceo.(12) Martí fought hard for unity between the veterans of the war of 1868 and the `new pines,' as he called the next generation.
"All this is part of Martí's body of ideas, and you can see how it has been put into practice by Fidel, and how Che was totally connected with it. We can say that, in a real sense, drawing on this body of ideas, Che matures in Cuba."
To construct the republic that Martí "dreamed about," Pombo said, "it could be nothing but a socialist republic-one without exploitation, without inequalities. There would be no other way, and this is part of our roots, of our history, of our own conceptions.... That is why we always say, `What Martí promised, Fidel carried out.' That is the truth."
Che's military plan in Bolivia aimed at achieving an element of strategic surprise, Pombo noted, by launching a guerrilla struggle where U.S. imperialism was least prepared.
Strategic surprise, Villegas explained, is different from tactical surprise. The U.S. forces attacking Iraq in 1991, he noted, based their military plan on their fire power and numerical superiority. "They could afford to say, `We are going to attack Iraq' and begin to prepare, to assemble their forces openly six months in advance. There was no strategic surprise, even though they could have achieved a tactical surprise. No one knew the moment when the war was to be unleashed."
"But Che wanted strategic surprise. Why? Because with the flowering of revolutionary struggles throughout Latin America in the wake of imperialism's defeat in Cuba, the North American government had spent millions looking for a way to respond. They established the Alliance for Progress(13) in the economic sphere, and in the military realm they gave massive assistance with their Green Berets, creating powerful counterinsurgency forces. No one knows how much the Pentagon and the CIA spent to defeat the revolutionary movements in Latin America."
"But the imperialists were not expecting the rise of a guerrilla movement in Bolivia. They considered it impossible, as did the Bolivian generals at that time, because they thought there had already been a revolution in Bolivia. That is how they looked at the revolt of 1952."(14)
Che with his typically biting humor called the Bolivian revolution of 1952 the "DDT revolution," Pombo remarked, because "before Paz Estenssoro would meet with an Indian, with a worker, he would have the person fumigated so they could not infect him with any diseases."
Washington and the Pentagon didn't understand any of this, however, Villegas said. "They thought there could not be a revolution where there had been a revolution. Che's military plan was unquestionably well conceived. It was a total surprise. They had to scurry to get the counterinsurgency troops prepared."
Che's plan assumed, as a condition for success, the participation and support of the Bolivian Communist Party, Pombo noted. But the commitments made by that party's general secretary, Mario Monje, were never fulfilled. The guerrilla forces were annihilated before they could reach the area they intended to operate from and establish lines of communication and supply. Yet, politically, Che's assessment of the social explosion building in Bolivia was accurate. A profound new revolutionary upsurge did occur in Bolivia-and elsewhere in Latin America's Southern Cone(15)-in the years just following the movement's defeat.
"Imagine if things had gone as planned," Pombo remarked, "if a general uprising had occurred when the guerrillas were already operating in their zones, and had been able to incorporate new forces. If that had happened, it would not have taken long to seize power in Bolivia.
"And after taking power, to defend their revolution the Bolivian masses would have been compelled to come to the aid of revolutionary struggles in surrounding countries. They would have had to do so to survive, because Bolivia is a landlocked country, and this was another element in Che's thinking. Bolivia is a mediterranean country, one without access to the sea-which is not the way the term mediterranean is used in other parts of the world to signify a sea surrounded by land."(16)
"But first we had to take an area and then establish political power in a country. The point was not to begin everything at the same time, but to begin in one place and extend outward to other areas. The Peruvians fighting with us would go to Peru, and so forth. Che's aim was to develop political and military leaders among the Bolivians and others. He saw Inti [Peredo] as a man with extraordinary potential to lead the entire movement, for example. He noted that Coco [Peredo] was beginning to show signs of military leadership"(17)
Che rarely talked about the Cuban cadres in his Diary, Pombo recalled, because "he took it for granted that we were there to play the roll of a catalyst, to transmit experiences and knowledge." The composition of the general staff of the Bolivian campaign is important. "Notice the assignments Che made: how there was a political officer to attend to the Cubans, but also a political officer for the Bolivians.(18) This was the integration he conceived of. In other words, his aim was not to lead the Bolivians. His aim was to coordinate the whole movement in the Southern Cone. That was his aim.
"Sooner or later," Pombo said, "Che aimed to go to Argentina. He considered himself an Argentine."
Had Washington eventually been drawn in and intervened with its own forces, Villegas explained, "they would have had to establish overland supply lines that would have been extremely vulnerable. If they entered through Argentina, for example, they would have been unable to protect their supply lines without an enormous investment of men. In this way alone, we would have already achieved an objective: they eventually would have had to send in even more troops than went to Vietnam.
"The North American people would not have put up with that. The U.S. military, even today, does not want to fight anywhere their troops would be at risk. They need technical superiority, with maximum assurance that there will be no deaths. That is a legacy of Vietnam.
"But while they might have a high level of technology, they have not been able to invent anything to destroy homemade weapons-like a Vietnamese trap, where a man simply falls into a hole and is buried. What can they invent to use against a man in hiding, who resists for days? Against a man who, when the enemy comes in to get him, has laid a mine for them?
"Against a man who is willing to give his life, they have not been able to find an answer in technology-nor will they ever.
"This is the conviction that guides our concept of the war of the entire people here in Cuba today.(19) Che was very clear on this; he had thought about it deeply."
Recalling Fidel Castro's reaffirmation in December 1988 that "whoever is incapable of fighting for others will never be capable of fighting for himself,"(20) we asked Villegas to return to the question of internationalism, of Guevara's example, and the contribution of the Cuban revolution in helping to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.
From 1975 to 1989 nearly half a million Cuban volunteers took part in internationalist missions in the former Portuguese colony of Angola. They were responding to the request from the newly independent government there to help defeat the invading troops of South Africa and Zaire and the rightist Angolan forces led by Jonas Savimbi, which were financed and aided not only by the apartheid regime but by Washington as well.
The defeat of the South African armed forces and their allies at the historic battle of Cuito Cuanavale in March 1988-a battle in which Villegas participated-was a decisive turning point in the history of all southern Africa. It led to negotiations later that year involving the Cuban, South African, and U.S. governments that opened the door to ending the civil war in Angola; achieving independence for the South African-controlled territory of Namibia; and bringing Cuba's internationalist mission in Angola to a close. The victory at Cuito Cuanavale gave a powerful boost to the mass antiapartheid struggle in South Africa as well.
The internationalist aid to Angola over a 13-year period was an enormous effort for a relatively small and economically underdeveloped nation such as Cuba. Beginning in 1989, almost simultaneous with the end of the Angolan mission, the disintegration of the Eastern European and Soviet regimes led to the collapse of most of Cuba's foreign trade agreements and many aid projects. Amid the severe economic crisis that has marked Cuba for the last half decade, it has not been unusual to hear some Cubans express the view that the resources that went to help Angola would have been better utilized at home.
We asked Villegas, who spent most of his life from 1981 to 1990 in Angola, for his opinion.
"Cuba's aid to Angola was not only worthwhile," he replied, "but if we were capable of doing it again, we would do so."
"More than half a million Cubans carried out internationalist missions in Africa, between Angola and Ethiopia(21) and elsewhere-some 375,000 military personnel, plus those who went as public health workers, to teach, and to do other work. It is a large number. We can say that Cuba is a nation of internationalists. And when one speaks of internationalism in Cuba, what people see is Che. That is, Che's example opened up for us a broader concept of internationalism."
"Fidel said that when we go to Africa, we go to pay our debt to the African peoples. And in large measure that is true. But I think that the justice of the sacrifice-of the effort made in Angola, in particular-has borne fruit. Why is this so?
"In the first place, do you believe we could be speaking today of a South Africa led by Nelson Mandela had it not been for this effort? That the Black majority of 75 percent or 85 percent would be in power? Do you think that if the South Africans had not been defeated militarily and economically, apartheid would have been eliminated? If we did nothing more than indirectly help defeat apartheid, our effort was unquestionably worthwhile.
"Millions of human beings have been given the possibility to realize their human potential. This is why Che fought, why all progressive humanity has fought, why men and women of dignity have fought everywhere. This is what Fidel is fighting for. This is why the Cuban people resist.
"And that battle was won. Not only do we see what has been conquered in South Africa, we also see the independence of Namibia that has been established, and the right of the African peoples there to speak as full human beings. "In the case of Angola, independence was achieved, with whatever qualifications, and it could not have been realized any other way. Perhaps it was a dream of ours to think that socialism could be built in Angola. But South Africa was prevented from dominating Angola; its aim of carving up Angola, in connivance with the regime in Zaire, could not be carried out.
"For these reasons, I am totally convinced that there is no work of greater value than the internationalism of Cuba in Africa, and not only in Africa, in Latin America too. Whether or not the final objectives were achieved, these are glorious pages in the history of the peoples that have created the foundations for the future."
1. Some 160 combatants took part in the simultaneous attacks on the military garrisons in Santiago de Cuba and nearby Bayamo, launching the revolutionary armed struggle against Batista. The attacks failed, and over 50 revolutionaries were captured, brutally tortured, and murdered; 28 were tried and sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.
2. José Martí (1853-1895) is Cuba's national hero. He founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 and was the central leader of the war of independence from Spain launched in 1895. He was killed in battle later that year. Martí was a noted poet, writer, and journalist.
3. "The leopard has a shelter / in his forest brown and dry: / I have more than the leopard, / Because I have a good friend.... / The president has / a garden with a fountain, / and a treasure of gold and wheat: / I have more; I have a friend." José Martí, "Versos sencillos" in Obras completas, vol. 16 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), p. 122.
4. Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian general who served under both the Prussian and Russian monarchies in the wars against Napoleon. He was the author of On War, long considered a classic of military strategy.
Mao Zedong, the central leader of the Chinese Communist Party from the mid-1930s until his death in 1976, was the dominant strategist of the People's Liberation Army that triumphed over the landlord-capitalist regime of Chiang Kai- shek in the Chinese revolution of 1949. Mao was the author of numerous articles on guerrilla warfare and other military writings.
5. In January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, central leader of the Congo's independence movement, who was under "protection" by United Nations troops, was murdered by imperialist-backed forces loyal to rightist figure Moise Tshombe. When Tshombe became the Congo's prime minister in 1964, Lumumba's forces revolted and appealed to the Cuban leadership for help in defeating the Belgian and South African mercenary armies (politically and militarily backed by Washington) whose assignment was to prevent the vast mineral wealth of the Congo from escaping imperialist control.
6. Celia Sánchez (1920-1980) was a founding leader of the July 26 Movement in Oriente Province and the first woman combatant in the Rebel Army.
7. A split occurred in the Bolivian Communist Party in early 1965, leading to the formation of a rival party sympathetic to Maoism. Members of both groups participated in the guerrilla unit led by Guevara. For more on the Bolivian Communist Party and the treacherous role of its central leadership in relationship to the Bolivian guerrilla front led by Guevara, see Che's own account in the Bolivian Diary; Fidel Castro's June 1968 "A Necessary Introduction" to the diary (pp. 51-70); and the appendix "My Campaign with Che," by Inti Peredo (pp. 330-346).
8. In 1964 Juan Lechín, the central leader of Bolivia's trade union federation since the 1940s, organized the Revolutionary Party of the National Left (PRIN).
9. In 1966, on the eve of his departure to Bolivia, Guevara wrote a message to the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America - better known as OSPAAAL, or, at the time, the Tricontinental - which had been formed earlier that year following an international conference in Havana. The message was published in April 1967 - shortly after the existence of Guevara's guerrilla front in Bolivia had become public knowledge - in the magazine Tricontinental, under the title, "Create Two, Three...Many Vietnams, That is the Watchword." See Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, p. 347-360.
10. See Guevara's 1965 letter to Fidel Castro, published in the Bolivian Diary under the title, "Other nations of the world summon my assistance," pp. 71-73.
11. Simo'n Bolívar, (1783-1830) - Led the armed rebellion that helped win independence from Spain for much of Latin America.
12. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was the central leader of the Cuban independence war launched in 1868; he was ambushed by Spanish troops and killed in 1874. Antonio Maceo was a military leader of both independence wars who was killed in battle in 1896.
13. The Alliance for Progress, announced by Washington in 1961 in hopes of countering the example of the Cuban revolution, allocated $20 billion in loans to Latin American governments over a 10 year period, and millions more in gratuities to line the pockets of willing political allies, in exchange for their compliance in measures to isolate Cuba. Guevara dissected this imperialist maneuver and denounced it in a speech to an August 1961 conference sponsored by the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay. See "The Real Meaning of the Alliance for Progress" in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution.
14. A powerful mass upsurge in Bolivia in 1952 resulted in nationalization of the largest tin mines, legalization of the trade unions, initiation of land reform, and the elimination of the literacy requirement that had effectively disenfranchised the majority of Bolivia's people, the Aymará- and Quechua-speaking population. But Bolivia remained one of the most impoverished countries of the Americas. The increasingly corrupt and fractured government of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), a bourgeois party that initially had strong support from Bolivia's superexploited tin miners, was overthrown by a military coup in 1964.
15. The countries of the Southern Cone are Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
16. The Spanish word mediterráneo, which means "landlocked," is also, as in many other languages, the name of the sea surrounded by northern Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East.
17. Inti Peredo (1937-1969) was a member of the Central Committee of the Bolivian Communist Party in November 1966 when he joined the guerrilla unit being organized by Che. Peredo was a member of the unit's general staff and one of the two Bolivian veterans who escaped the regime's encirclement and manhunt following the murder of Che in October 1967. Peredo's 1969 account My campaign with Che, which includes his assessment of the Bolivian CP's betrayal of the effort, appears in English for the first time in Pathfinder's edition of the Bolivian Diary. Peredo attempted to organize new forces to relaunch an armed struggle to bring down the Bolivian dictatorship, but in September 1969 the army, tipped off by an informer, raided the house in La Paz where he was staying. Wounded while resisting the assault, Inti Peredo was captured and murdered by the military.
Coco Peredo, brother of Inti, was a founder of the Bolivian Communist Youth and one of the original cadres assigned to begin guerrilla preparations in Bolivia. He was killed in battle in September 1967.
18. As a member of the general staff, Inti Peredo was one of two officers assigned as a political commissar of the unit, responsible for political leadership of the combatants. The other was Eliseo Reyes (nom de guerre, Rolando), a veteran of Che's column in the Rebel Army and previously a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba who volunteered for the internationalist mission in Bolivia and was killed in combat in April 1967.
19. The "war of the entire people" is the name by which the defense strategy of the Cuban revolution is popularly known there. Every adult Cuban is trained to fight and has an assigned post to report for duty in case of imperialist aggression.
20. See Fidel Castro's December 5, 1988, speech, "As Long as the Empire Exists, We Will Never Lower Our Guard," in Pathfinder's In Defense of Socialism: Four Speeches on the 30th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, p. 28.
21. In 1977, Cuba responded
to a request by the government of Ethiopia to help defeat a U.S.-backed
invasion by the regime in neighboring Somalia aimed at seizing
the Ogaden region. Washington hoped a Somalian victory would
help turn back land redistribution and other measures that had
been taken in Ethiopia following the overthrow of the landlord-based
monarchy of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.
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