BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND LEA SHERMAN
HOUSTON - "Originally Harry Villegas was scheduled to be our featured speaker as part of a panel on Che Guevara, internationalism, and his legacy today," said Farida Meguid, opening an October 28 meeting at the University of Houston. "But the U.S. government denied him a visa."

Meguid, president of the U of H chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), welcomed about 70 students and others to the event. Renamed a week earlier "Why is Washington afraid to let Harry Villegas of Cuba come to the U.S.?" the meeting was sponsored by the university's Department of History, African American Studies Center, Dean of Humanities Lois Zamora, and a number of other professors and student and community groups. Those included the Latina Coalition, Pan Afrikan People for Progressive Action (PAPPA), MEChA, Irish Unity Committee, Cuba Friendship Committee of Houston, and S.H.A.P.E. Center.

"(Villegas) is an extraordinarily important historical resource," said Thomas O'Brien, chairman of the History Department, in an interview that was quoted in a front-page article in the October 29 Daily Cougar, the main campus newspaper. "He was a companion of (Guevara). They fought together in Bolivia and the Congo._ I don't know that there is another living figure who can offer the same perspective."

María González, Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of English at U of H, and Tom Kleven, a law professor at Texas Southern University, co-chaired the meeting. They asked participants to write and call the State Department demanding that the U.S. government reverse its decision and grant Villegas a visa. Kleven introduced a 14-minute videotaped interview with Villegas shown on Cuban television last year.

Villegas, also known by his nom-de-guerre Pombo, is today a brigadier general of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces. While a young man in his late teens, Villegas, whose father was a carpenter in a small village in eastern Cuba, joined the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement that led the 1956-58 revolutionary war in Cuba, culminating with the overthrow of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Batista. He fought with Ernesto Che Guevara, Argentine by birth and one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution, in Cuba's Sierra Maestra and in internationalist missions in the Congo in 1965 and later in Bolivia. Villegas wrote Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla,' his account of the Bolivia campaign, which was published in Cuba in 1996. Pathfinder Press published the English-language edition of the book last summer. The October 28 event marked the 30th anniversary of the fall in combat of Guevara and his comrades in Bolivia.

`A model of an honest human being'
"By banning Villegas, the State Department has denied us as students a choice that we should have a right to make," said Patrick Hawkins, a representative of PAPPA, in bringing greetings to the event from the student group. Hawkins then read a message from Villegas to the students.

"It's very gratifying to know that today you are holding this scientific event on the thought and works of commander Ernesto Che Guevara, a model for all humanity of an honest human being," Villegas wrote.

"Che's example is more relevant every day because the evils afflicting the societies of the third world are growing: there is more poverty, more hunger, more illiteracy. But sooner rather than later, the social justice you and others are fighting for will prevail throughout the world."

The panel featured Dagoberto Rodríguez, First Secretary for Political Affairs at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the English-language edition of Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' and president of Pathfinder Press. The sponsoring professors and student groups decided to invite these speakers when they learned on October 20 that the State Department had denied Villegas a visa, Kleven said, in introducing Rodríguez, "so we could have a chance to hear and discuss the ideas the U.S. government is trying to censor."

Rodríguez described how Guevara, after graduating from medical school in Argentina, traveled throughout Latin America in the early 1950s experiencing first hand the terrible social conditions working people faced and their struggles to change them. He also told the story of how Guevara joined Fidel Castro and other Cuban fighters in Mexico in 1955 and subsequently became a commander of the Rebel Army and a central leader of the Cuban revolution.

"Che was not just a guerrilla fighter and military strategist, as some people try to portray him," Rodríguez said. "As president of the National Bank in Cuba and minister of industry in the early 1960s, Che set an example of the new human being he argued millions can become through the revolution. He was a man who combined action and ideas. He was a tireless reader, with indomitable persistence, and took time as he held heavy responsibilities in the new government in Cuba to write about the revolutionary process, leaving us a rich record.

"Today his ideas are more alive than ever. His legacy is expressed in the determination of millions of Cubans to defend the revolution under tremendous odds," he said, referring to Washington's escalating economic war against the Cuban people and the loss of much of the trade and aid from the former Soviet bloc countries since the opening of the 1990s.

Che is about the present
Iram Hernández, president of the U of H Cuba Friendship Committee, then introduced Waters, who had returned from Cuba just the day before.

Waters, who had met with Villegas a few days earlier, conveyed a personal salutation from him to the meeting. "Villegas had been very much looking forward to this trip," Waters said, "because the invitations from the professors and student groups here would have given him the opportunity to speak to an audience of young people - people of the age he was when he first met Che Guevara and began to look to Che for the example that he set."

Che Guevara is not about the past, Waters stated. "Just like the Cuban revolution from which Che is absolutely inseparable," she noted, "Che remains an example for us here today and for fighters all over the globe who are not willing to accept a world with the kind of poverty, injustice, and exploitation that Che gave his life fighting to change."

Pointing to the statement in the message from Villegas that Che set an example of an honest human being, Waters said, "This is a very simple, yet a very profound idea. Che was the kind of person who was capable of leading men and women to realize their capacity to do things they never thought they were capable of doing and to transform themselves in the process."

October 1962 `missile crisis'
This month also marks the 35th anniversary of one of the most important events of the last half of this century, Waters stated, referring to what is known in the United States as the "missile crisis" and is described in Cuba and elsewhere as the October crisis. In October 1962 the administration of John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war after its intelligence flights confirmed the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The Cuban government agreed to this installation earlier that year in face of Washington's escalating aggression. The recently published book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Missile Crisis contains transcripts of many of the meetings between Kennedy and his advisers at the time, shedding some new light on those events.

About the third day of those meetings, Waters said, the transcripts show that Kennedy had decided to launch an invasion of Cuba. But when his advisors informed Kennedy that in the first ten days of such an invasion the U.S. military would suffer an estimated 18,000 casualties the administration changed course and began considering other alternatives. "That figure was greater than the total casualties U.S. forces were to sustain in Vietnam between 1961 and 1966," Waters said.

"It was the determination of the Cuban people to fight to defend their revolution, whatever the cost, that saved the world from nuclear holocaust. Not the `calm and cool heads' of Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev," the Soviet premier at the time.

On the threshold of the 21st century, Waters continued, as the vulnerability and weakness of U.S. imperialism become more apparent, and the barriers to unity in struggle of working- class fighters from around the world continue to lessen, this same determination by the Cuban people and the example of Che, Pombo, and their comrades will gain greater weight. "That's why Washington is afraid for men and women like Pombo to come to the United States to talk to you directly about their lives and their struggle."

Others who made brief remarks from the panel included Marilyn White, representing the Latin American Committee of the Presbyterian church, and Robert Buzzanco of the U of H History Department. Ned Palmer of the Young Socialists read a message to Pombo and a letter demanding the State Department grant Villegas a visa, which the meeting approved.

Other messages protesting Washington's decision to deny Villegas a visa can be sent to James Theis, Cuba Desk, U.S. Department of State, 2201 C Street NW, Washington, D.C., 20250; Tel: (202) 647-9273; Fax: (202) 736-4475.

Lea Sherman is a member of the International Association of Machinists in Houston.  
 
 
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