Villegas, also known by his nom de guerre Pombo, was addressing 1,500 young people attending the 14th World Festival of Youth and Students, which took place in the Caribbean island July 28-August 5. He spoke to the delegates along with three other officers of the FAR: division general Ramón Pardo Guerra, and brigadier generals Luis Alfonso Zayas and Enrique Acevedo González.

The four officers fought with Guevara in the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba during the 1956-58 revolutionary war that led to the overthrow of the U.S.- backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and opened the socialist revolution in the Americas.

The event took place on the evening of August 2, at the conclusion of the festival's Anti-imperialist Tribunal. The Union of Young Communists and other Cuban organizations hosting the gathering had dedicated the festival to Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his death. The panel discussion highlighted this dedication and received media attention internationally.

An August 28 Associated Press report from Havana, for example, said, "Earlier this month, four army generals in olive uniforms strode onto a stage in Havana to speak to 1,000 young foreigners about life as soldiers for communism, loyalty to [Cuban president Fidel] Castro, and love for the revolutionary martyr Che Guevara." A slightly edited version of this article was published in the August 30 New York Times.

"Military officers for the first time are giving government-approved interviews to Cuban journalists for books and magazine articles, mostly about the country's revolutionary past," the AP dispatch continued. "Most notable was this year's `Secrets of Generals,' a collection of interviews with 41 of the nation's military leaders."

Three of the four generals who spoke at the August 2 event - Acevedo, Pardo, and Villegas - were interviewed by Cuban journalist Luis Báez in 1995 and 1996. Their interviews appear in Secrets of Generals, which the Militant reviewed earlier this year (see "Cuban generals discuss record of Revolutionary Armed Forces" in May 26, 1997, Militant).

High-ranking officers of the FAR spoke at several other forums and discussions throughout the festival. Delsa Esther Puebla Viltre, for example, a brigadier general and the only woman among the 41 FAR officers interviewed in Secrets of Generals, spoke at the festival's Club of the Americas on August 3, on a panel that included 20 other women from the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC).

Battle of El Uvero
Pardo Guerra, 61 years old today, was one of 18 children of a peasant family. He was born in El Cobre, a small village on the Sierra Maestra. He told festival delegates how he first met Che after the battle of El Uvero. A Rebel Army column of 80, led by Fidel Castro, overtook that small army garrison in May 1957 after fierce combat for nearly three hours. Fifteen guerrillas, and a greater number of enemy soldiers, were wounded in that battle, including Rebel Army commander Juan Almeida.

Che Guevara was put in charge of taking care of the wounded, organizing safe houses for their recovery, and leading their reintegration into the guerrilla units. Prior to joining the Cuban revolutionary movement in Mexico, Guevara had graduated from medical school in Argentina, where he was born, and had traveled throughout South America.

Ramón Pardo's brother, Israel, met Guevara after the Uvero battle, and led his group to the Pardo family house to get some rest and new supplies. "That's where I first met Che, Almeida, and the other fighters wounded in Uvero," the Cuban general told the delegates.

After the battle of El Uvero, Pardo said, "Che was responsible not just as a doctor, but as an organizer, opening up contacts with [the July 26 Movement in] Santiago de Cuba where some of the wounded had to be sent for treatment, creating the conditions for the subsistence of the group. That's when the second Rebel Army column was created, after Che led successfully that group of combatants to rejoin Fidel's troops and he was promoted to the rank of commander for that feat."

The July 26 Movement had been founded by Fidel Castro and other Cuban revolutionaries in 1955. It was the main political organization that led the anti-Batista movement in the cities, while the Rebel Army operated mainly in the Sierra Maestra.

Che always led by example, Pardo added. "He was the first to join each battle. He was the first in taking risks. In that way he educated all of us."

Villegas came back to this point at a forum on Che Guevara at the Club of the Americas two days later. "Che told us he dreamed of becoming a revolutionary doctor in his youth," Villegas said. But after he traveled throughout Latin America and saw first hand the miserable conditions most peasants and workers lived in, "he figured that to be a revolutionary doctor you have to have a revolution first."

Che always insisted on combining study with action, Villegas said, and on raising the cultural level of the combatants. "The very first thing Che did was try to get us to study. He liked to surround himself with youth and force us to improve ourselves."

At the August 2 panel discussion, Villegas described his first encounter with Che in the Sierra Maestra in 1957, where he joined the Rebel Army at age 17. (For a detailed description of this see Pathfinder's At the Side of Che Guevara; Interviews with Harry Villegas.) "Che was very honest and audacious; he was incessantly seeking the truth," Villegas said. "He was very human."

Brigadier general Zayas described how he took part in the westward advance of the Rebel Army's Column no. 8, commanded by Guevara. That march culminated in the victory over government forces in Santa Clara, Cuba's third largest city, on New Year's Day in 1959, in a battle that sealed the fate of the Batista dictatorship.

All four generals were members of Column no. 8 and fought in the battle of Santa Clara.

Comradeship and friendship
The fourth panelist, brigadier general Enrique Acevedo González, 55, pointed to a book he has written on his experiences in the Sierra Maestra, called Descamisados (The Shirtless).

"I came from a petty bourgeois family in the north of Las Villas," in central Cuba, Acevedo told the delegates. "I went to the Sierra Maestra for two reasons. First because of my hatred for the dictatorship.. and second because I had been accused of being a terrorist and faced the prospect of seven years in jail. So I felt obliged to leave for the mountains rapidly, at age 14."

Enrique Acevedo and his brother Rogelio, today a division general of the FAR who is also interviewed in Secrets of Generals, met Guevara when they tried to join the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. "That first meeting with Che was difficult," Acevedo said. "Che was responsible for making sure we were not agents of the dictatorship."

To find those who wanted to devote their lives to the revolutionary struggle and select the ones who could withstand the harsh conditions of guerrilla life, the FAR general continued, "Che had developed a mechanism, the squad of the shirtless." The recruits who were not disciplined during rigorous training were punished by being assigned to the shirtless brigade, Acevedo said. "Sometimes this group would include drunks and future deserters. The atmosphere was bad, it was like being in a monastery. We had to march with a lot of weight up and down the slopes with little food. Many would leave quickly... It seemed like my brother and I were permanent members of the shirtless squad for a period."

After Guevara was wounded in November 1957, the Acevedos were assigned to Fidel Castro's column. "Even though I had a rough experience as a young recruit under Che's command, a few months later I volunteered to join his column that would march toward Santa Clara," the general stated. "I did it out of ambition, at the time, to get a higher rank in the Rebel Army. My older brother was lieutenant and I wanted to become a lieutenant too."

Acevedo said he admired Guevara but never became friends with him in the Sierra Maestra. Che had a caustic sense of humor, he said. "I couldn't understand his jokes. Later, as I matured, I realized that was his way of showing affection. It was really I who lacked a sense of humor."

Years later, Fidel Castro told the FAR general that Guevara had requested that Acevedo be asked to join the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia Che was preparing to lead. Castro turned down the request, so that the two Acevedo brothers would not be separated. "I was overwhelmed when Fidel told me that story," Acevedo said. "That's who Che was. I was finally able to get rid of the shirtless syndrome."

Under discussion, Villegas came back to the question of friendship that Acevedo touched on. There is no necessary contradiction between comradeship and friendship, Villegas said. "Comradeship exists between human beings who are fighting for the same cause, for the same principles. It goes beyond reciprocal feelings of simple friendship. Within the bond of comradeship, there is the concept of friendship. There is plenty in Che's actions toward Acevedo, some of which he pointed to, that showed Che's friendship toward him, even though there wasn't reciprocity from Acevedo back then." Che tried to instill these human qualities among the combatants, Villegas said.

Acevedo, Villegas, and the two other generals referred to their experiences in Angola, where they volunteered for tours of duty in the 1970s and 1980s to help defeat invasions of that country by the armies of the apartheid regime in South Africa and defend Angola's hard-fought independence from Portugal. "Che's internationalist example was multiplied many times as you can see from the 300,000 Cuban volunteers from this small island who went to Angola," Villegas said. He also referred to his experiences fighting with Che Guevara to advance the national liberation struggle in the Congo in 1965 and later in Bolivia.

In the Congo and Bolivia with Che
Villegas expanded on these points at the August 4 meeting at the Club of the Americas, which was attended by more than 250.

"Che set an example that needs to be followed by millions of youth around the world today," Villegas said, responding to a question from Andrés Guzmán, a delegate from Venezuela. Social conditions similar to those that led working people to rebel in Latin America in the 1950s and 60s, the FAR general said, exist now. "Today there is more unemployment, more illiteracy. Nearly 50 percent of the peoples of Latin America live below the official level of poverty."

It's necessary to remember what was happening in Latin America and the world when Che decided to go to Bolivia, Pombo said. "The social, economic, and political situation in Latin America was explosive. A revolutionary movement had swept Bolivia in 1952. With the triumph of the Cuban revolution peoples throughout the continent saw a way to achieve their independence, put an end to their misery and exploitation, and begin building just societies." At the same time, Villegas said, the people of Vietnam were heroically resisting a genocidal war by Washington and in Africa the anticolonial movements were gaining momentum.

"That's when Che issued his message to the Tricontinental, calling for creating two, three, many Vietnams. He thought the revolutionary movement could inflict defeats on imperialism."

Villegas described the social and political conditions in the Latin America's Southern Cone that led the Cuban revolutionaries to pick Bolivia, aiming to build a movement of workers and peasants who could overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship there and open the road toward forming their own government.

Che assumed the participation and support of the Bolivian Communist Party, as a condition of success, Villegas said. "But Mario Monje, the general secretary of that party betrayed the struggle by not fulfilling the commitments made." The guerrillas were annihilated before they could reach the main area they intended to operate out of. Che was wounded and captured on Oct. 8, 1967. He was killed the next day in cold blood by Bolivian army officers after consultation with Washington. Villegas led the group of the six survivors in breaking the encirclement of the Bolivian army. Five of these fighters made their way out of the country and eventually reached Cuba. Villegas described how they accomplished this at a meeting of 50 delegates at the Middle East Club at the beginning of the youth festival.

Was the Bolivia campaign an adventure since Che and his co-fighters did not achieve their immediate goals? one delegate asked. "We fought for a just society, you can call it a socialist society, the name is not important," Villegas said. "For a society where millions of children do not die of hunger, are not illiterate." The revolutionary upheavals in Latin America that followed for a decade after the Bolivia campaign were one confirmation of the correctness of Che's course, Villegas said.

"Revolutionaries always dream, imagine how to transform society, that's the essence of what Che fought for. You can see the fruit of Fidel and Che's ideas in the 15-year victorious struggle in Angola, as a result of which the integrity of Angola was preserved, Namibia gained its independence, and the most oppressive regime humanity experienced since Nazism, the apartheid regime, was overthrown.

"Today there are millions of human beings who can be won to revolutionary convictions, like those Che fought for. You are one example of that," he said, pointing to delegates from the United States who came to the festival despite Washington's denial of travel licenses to Cuba. "The U.S. government told you you couldn't come here, but you said it's my right to go. It's among people like you that Che's example lives in a latent stage and can be awakened by the horrible conditions capitalism offers humanity today and the struggle against them."  
 
 
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