BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

HAVANA, Cuba - Cuban brigadier general Harry Villegas recently completed a highly successful tour of Argentina and Uruguay to promote his new book, Pombo: Un hombre de la guerrilla del Che (Pombo: A Man in Che's Guerrilla Army). The book, which Pathfinder Press will publish in English in the coming months, is based on the diary that Villegas - who was known as Pombo - kept during the Bolivian guerrilla campaign led by Ernesto Che Guevara in the mid-1960s.

The Cuban publishing house Editora Política launched the book in February at the Havana Book Fair. The Buenos Aires-based publisher Colihue then produced another edition. Colihue invited Villegas to the Buenos Aires book fair in late May and sponsored his two-week tour in the two South American countries.

Iraida Aguirrechu, editor of the Cuban edition, reported in an interview that the Argentine edition sold out all 5,000 copies during the tour, and Colihue is planning a new run of 10,000.

In 1957 Villegas joined the Rebel Army, which under the leadership of Fidel Castro was spearheading the struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. The young fighter served in Che Guevara's column. Guevara, an Argentine- born revolutionary who joined the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, became one of the central leaders of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba.

After the victory of the Cuban revolution, Villegas fought with Guevara in the Congo in 1965, and then in Bolivia in 1966- 67. Following Guevara's capture and murder by CIA-organized Bolivian troops in October 1967, Pombo led the six Cuban and Bolivian combatants who eluded the Bolivian army's encirclement. After almost five months, the three Cubans eventually made their way to Chile and then back to Cuba.

A veteran of three internationalist aid missions to Angola between 1975 and 1990, Villegas took part in the defeat of the invading apartheid army at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Today he is the officer in charge of political education for Cuba's Western Army.

The following is an interview Villegas gave here June 22.

Question. Given the topic of your book, the revolutionary struggle led by Che Guevara in Bolivia, what was the response to your tour in Argentina and Uruguay?

Answer. There was an extraordinary response. I didn't expect this book would stimulate Argentine and Uruguayan youth as much as it did.

At the Buenos Aires book fair, a large event that draws people from many countries, Cuba's booth and the Colihue booth were permanently jammed. The two stands, and this book in particular, were the center of attention.

For the book launch we had to find a bigger room, and many people couldn't get in.

I traveled to Buenos Aires, Rosario, La Plata, Córdoba, and Santa Fe in Argentina, as well as Montevideo, Uruguay. I did four book launch meetings, all of which drew big audiences. In Rosario there were so many people they couldn't all fit in the hall. We had to repeat the meeting the following morning.

Students as well as others we spoke to -such as the children of the disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo - were full of questions and interest.(1)

In Uruguay I had the opportunity to talk to various groups of members and leaders of the Broad Front. This gave us an ample platform to talk about Cuba, because you can't talk about Che without talking about Cuba. Che's revolutionary perspective was based on the experiences he acquired in Cuba.(2)

The young people asked why the book has been published now. I explained that my diary had previously been published in the United States, along with Che's diary, by Stein and Day. It had later been published in Venezuela and Mexico. But these had all been very partial and limited versions of the diary. It was only the section of the diary that had been seized in Che's knapsack when he was captured.

But my book includes the other section of the diary, which I continued to write after Che's death. That part was captured in Chile but was later returned. This is a more complete edition because it includes the organizational phase of the struggle, the development of the war, and the later period, after Che's death, when the group of survivors was able to leave Bolivia.(3)

People really liked the book's message, which is about Che's example: his spirit of sacrifice, his leadership capacity, his confidence in the future and the ability to achieve victory, the enthusiasm with which he confronted everything.

We received coverage in practically all the media. Between the press interviews and university meetings, I must have taken part in 10 events a day - every day - during the two weeks I was there. We were on almost all the TV stations and live radio shows.

We were able to explain the truth about the Cuban revolution, the situation we are confronting today, what the U.S. blockade against Cuba means, and how, through our efforts and work, we are overcoming the conditions imposed by the blockade.

We were also able to explain why the U.S. government is trying to implement the Helms-Burton law right now. It's an effort to prevent the current process of economic and social revitalization of the Cuban revolution.

We spoke about the values of the Cuban revolution, and why youth in Cuba support our revolution.

Q. What was the reaction to what you said about the Cuban revolution?

A. It was very good. Above all it was a desire to find out the truth.

We talked about their concept of democracy and ours. We explained how in Cuba we have a truly participatory democracy, which is much broader than in other countries. Even the children, in the Pioneers organization, take part in organizing their activities as students and raise their views about how they should be taught.

We explained that even within the narrow framework of bourgeois democracy, our country is more democratic than the United States. In the United States Clinton was elected with a turnout of somewhat over 40 percent of the voters. In our case, there was 96 percent participation in the last elections.

But we added that the most important thing about democracy isn't that, but rather how our people take part in the decision- making, in managing the economy and directing social life. And that process has been institutionalized. We explained the process of how the trade unions discuss all the economic and other measures the government is planning to take, and how every union assembly has become a parliament, a "workers parliament."

People in the audience were surprised. They would ask: Is that possible in Cuba?

Q. Was the social crisis in Argentina and Uruguay reflected in the course of your tour and your discussions?

A. We saw that Cordoba was one of the cities hit hardest by the social crisis. Many big factories have been privatized and some have shut down. And this has a big impact on the population.

In Rosario we passed through some villas miseria [slums] that were extremely poor. We also saw them in Santa Fe. On the outskirts of Buenos Aires we saw the slums in El Tigre, where people are putting up shacks.

Of course, this is the impression from a visit of a few days. We weren't able to live among the people. Nonetheless, we noticed a deep concern that the privatization measures have in no way benefited the population. Instead, they have only enriched a few people. And we saw how there has been a huge rise in the cost of living, leading to impoverishment.

Although the indicators of economic development are higher in these two countries, there is a social layer that is becoming pauperized and has less and less access to the wealth.

Growing numbers of people are falling into debt. This creates more tensions, hardships, and worries for them. They see a future of uncertainty.

We met primarily with intellectuals and people from the middle class, not workers. But people we talked to were asking, with a great deal of insistence, how to fight against all this. They didn't see the way out, but they thought there had to be a solution to these problems.

Q. In this context, did some people view Cuba as an alternative?

A. Some people are longing to achieve all the things we have won in Cuba, despite the fact that we are in the midst of the special period.(4)

When you compare our economic situation in absolute numbers with the situation facing the rest of Latin America, you realize that our special period may be very difficult for us, but it's relative and temporary. In contrast, people in other Latin American countries live in a permanent special period.

Also, here in Cuba people are aware of why these conditions exist and what they are fighting for.

Q. "Benigno," as Dariel Alarcón, one of the three Cuban survivors of the Bolivian guerrilla campaign, is known, recently defected in Paris and published a book against the revolution and its leadership. Did you find out about Benigno's desertion during your South American tour?(5)

A. Yes. I think Benigno betrayed himself, because he betrayed the Cuban revolution, which made him who he was. Benigno was a peasant in the Sierra Maestra mountains who was illiterate, and it was the revolution that gave him the opportunity to learn to read and write.

Personally I was outraged. I was outraged that a person who had fought alongside Che could have committed treason.

He has told a lot of lies. I won't try to expose all of them. What's important is for people to know the fake assertions he has made about himself in order to justify what he's saying right now.

It's a lie that he was head of Che's personal escort.

It's a lie that he was ever the national prison director in Cuba.

It's a lie that he graduated in history and social sciences. He doesn't have a degree.

It's a lie that he was a member of the commander-in-chief's [Fidel Castro's] personal escort.

It's a lie that he fought with Che in Africa. That's easy to verify because there's a book, El año que estuvimos en ninguna parte [The Year We Were Nowhere], which at the end lists all the participants in that struggle.(6)

It's a lie that he was in Algeria.

You can't equate the Benigno of the Sierra Maestra, the humble peasant who joined the struggle, with the Benigno who betrayed. The original Benigno disappeared. He's a traitor worthy only of contempt, because he betrayed his homeland and the cause to which he had devoted more than 30 years.

Q. The last two issues of `Juventud Rebeldé, the newspaper of the UJC [Union of Young Communists], ran an excerpt from your book and then an interview with you. What has been the response of youth in Cuba to your book?

A. The response to the book in Cuba has been very positive. I recently had a meeting with the UJC members at the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television. I also had the opportunity to discuss the book with the young people on the Blas Roca voluntary work contingent. The book inspired them because it conveys the capacity of self-sacrifice of a group of Cuban revolutionaries, because of its message of ideological firmness and confidence in the future.

Among Cuban youth there is a great desire to know this history. Many aspects [of the Bolivian guerrilla campaign] are not well known, such as the part about the departure from Bolivia by those of us who remained. This attracts their interest.

Neither Che's Bolivian diary nor this book reflects a trace of weakening. Instead, what you see is militancy and a determination to keep fighting. Nowhere is there a hint of giving up. That word - giving up, cease-fire, surrender - does not appear. In the book you see Che acting as the leader of the guerrillas. You can see his leadership capacity.

I believe Che's heroic undertaking in Bolivia is extremely important for us today, because history takes us to our roots. And when we go to our roots we see a history of combativity and steadfastness, a history of fighting for justice. And we see that the Cuban revolution is the fruit of all those years of struggle.

These are the kinds of things that inspired Che, when he wrote Socialism and Man in Cuba, to describe the man of the future who is imbued with human and cultural richness. These are qualities we will fight to maintain. And the special period is not going to corrupt our system of human and cultural values.

We can say the special period has helped us learn that the future depends on our own efforts, on what we are capable of doing. Our goal can be achieved only through devoted work and a firm conviction that we are defending our cause.

The special period has forced us to keep our feet on the ground, to strive to be more efficient, more productive, and less wasteful. It has led us to fight and defend more vigorously the gains we have won.

1. The organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo has fought for justice for the tens of thousands of political activists who were "disappeared" and murdered by the Argentine military dictatorship in 1976-82. Children of the disappeared in Argentina have also formed a human rights group.

2. The Broad Front is a bloc of social democratic, liberal, and other parties in Uruguay.

3. The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents, published by Stein and Day in 1968, was based on the documents captured and released by the Bolivian regime. The rest of Villegas's diary, covering the period beginning May 29, 1967, was seized by the Chilean regime when the surviving guerrilla fighters entered that country in February 1968. The notebooks were subsequently returned to Villegas by Salvador Allende, then president of Chile's Senate.

4. The "special period" refers to the economic crisis in Cuba that was precipitated in the early 1990s by the collapse in aid and trade at preferential prices with the Soviet bloc countries.

5. Dariel Alarcón's book Vie et mort de la révolution cubaine (Life and death of the Cuban revolution), which has appeared only in French so far, was released in Paris in early May by the publisher Fayard. His defection and book briefly received extensive press coverage, mainly in France and in the Spanish-language media internationally.

6. El año que estuvimos en ninguna parte (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz publishers, 1994) documents the guerrilla struggle led by Guevara in the Congo (now Zaire) in 1965. The book, which draws on Guevara's unpublished Congo diary, is by the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo Jr. and two Cuban journalists, Froilán Escobar and Félix Guerra.  
 
 
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