Vol. 72/No. 9      March 3, 2008

Three of these titles, presented during the opening days of the February 14-24 fair, were Pombo: A man of Che’s guerrilla by Harry Villegas; Controlling the Air: Memoirs of a Combat Pilot, 1943-1988 by Enrique Carreras; and From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, by Víctor Dreke.

Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, released these books as part of the Cuban Book Institute’s Special Plan, funded by the Ministry of Culture to make books broadly available to the Cuban people at heavily subsidized prices. The books by Villegas and Carreras, previously available in only very limited quantities, have now been printed in runs of 20,000 and 10,000 copies, respectively. Dreke’s book, published six years ago in the United States by Pathfinder Press, has been published in Cuba for the first time, printed in a run of 15,000.

The book presentations are part of the broad range of cultural activities that make up the Havana book fair, which has already drawn hundreds of thousands of people to poetry readings, concerts, displays of handicrafts, film showings, and panel discussions on a variety of subjects.

Villegas spoke at the February 14 presentation of Pombo: A man of Che’s guerrilla. Introducing him, Iraida Aguirrechu, a senior editor at Editora Política, noted that “he didn’t write this book sitting behind a desk. He wrote it in action.”

The book, Aguirrechu said, is based on the field diary kept by Villegas, known by his nom de guerre of Pombo, during the 1966-67 revolutionary campaign in Bolivia by a guerrilla column led by Argentine-born Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the central leaders of the Cuban Revolution. After Guevara was killed in combat in October 1967, Pombo led a small group of remaining combatants in breaking through the Bolivian army’s encirclement.

Today Brigadier General Villegas is a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party and vice president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, which organizes several generations of Cubans who have taken part in revolutionary struggles.

Aguirrechu pointed out that this second edition of the book, first published a decade ago, includes attractive new photos, maps, and facsimile pages from Pombo’s original diary. An English-language edition was published by New York-based Pathfinder Press in 1997. The new edition also contains a section taken from Guevara’s own Bolivian diary, containing his detailed evaluations of each of the guerrilla combatants. Villegas is described by Guevara as “a pillar” of the revolutionary column, she noted.

“A guerrilla fighter is a revolutionary, a man who fights to change society,” Villegas said, explaining why Guevara maintained high standards of conduct among the combatants. For Guevara, two key measures of conduct were the fighters’ reactions in combat and how they handled the question of food—or, better, lack of food under the harsh conditions of guerrilla warfare. “Since we did not have food to eat every day, Che gave exceptional attention to this question. He did not allow anyone to offer him the slightest courtesy of giving him even a tiny extra spoonful of food” beyond what each member of the unit received.  
 
‘Cannot give imperialism an inch’
It was through his own experiences that Guevara became convinced that to transform society it was necessary to lead a revolutionary struggle to take power and overthrow capitalist rule, Villegas said. As a young man traveling through Latin America in the early 1950s, Che had spent time in Bolivia in the wake of the revolutionary struggles of 1952 in which tin miners and other urban and rural toilers had battled the army. The new government that arose from these struggles initiated a land reform and other important social measures but failed to carry these changes to the end, leading to “the decline of the revolution,” he said.

A few years later, in Mexico, Guevara was recruited to the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, which under the leadership of Fidel Castro had launched a revolutionary struggle in Cuba. Workers and farmers there succeeded in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship in January 1959, opening the way to the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

Throughout the 1960s, Villegas said, the Cuban leadership “backed armed struggles in many countries in Latin America,” from Guatemala to Argentina. Like Castro and his other fellow revolutionaries, Guevara concluded that “with an oligarchy in power, there was no other road to take power,” Villegas said. The revolutionary campaign in Bolivia “was not viewed as only for Bolivia. It was launched in Bolivia, but it was a movement aimed at the liberation of countries throughout the Southern Cone” of South America.

Guevara’s revolutionary perspective is relevant in today’s world, Villegas said. “Can we say that this road to power is completely ruled out at the present time? No.

“Can we say that Che’s approach of not conceding imperialism a single inch is unfounded today? No.”

Citing the case of Venezuela as well as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, the Cuban leader said that in recent years “there has been a period when armed struggle was not required for progressive forces” to take control of the government, having done so through elections. In those countries “there are possibilities for transforming society.

“But we are also seeing the truth of what Che said: you cannot give imperialism even an inch. Because today we are seeing a reaction by the ruling classes,” Villegas said. “These movements are being subjected to aggression led by imperialism in order to block progress.”

He asked, “Can we guarantee that the Venezuelan revolution can be maintained under all circumstances through the peaceful road? We’ll see.”

The revolutionary transformations in Cuba were a response to the attacks by the U.S. and Cuban capitalists, Villegas said. The Cuban experience shows that the reaction by the ruling classes at home and abroad “will not allow a peaceful change, a peaceful revolution to resolve society’s problems. We always have to keep this in mind.”  
 
Birth of revolutionary air force
The book by Villegas was presented together with Por el dominio del aire: Memorias de un piloto de combate, 1943-1988 (Controlling the Air: Memoirs of a Combat Pilot, 1943-1988) by Enrique Carreras, widely regarded here as “the father of Cuba’s revolutionary air force.” Introduced by Sergio Ravelo of Editora Política, Brig. Gen. Arnaldo Tamayo spoke about the book. First published in 1995, it was reprinted last year and quickly sold out. The new, second edition came out as part of the Special Plan.

Addressing an audience that included members of Carreras’s family and a couple of dozen young officers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), Tamayo spoke with admiration and affection for Carreras, who had been his teacher when he first joined Cuba’s revolutionary air force and trained as a fighter pilot. In 1980 Tamayo became the first Cuban cosmonaut—and, as Cubans proudly point out, the first Latin American and first of African descendent to travel in space.

Carreras, now a division general of the FAR, had been an officer in the Cuban air force before the revolution. He was one of the young military officers who opposed the Batista dictatorship, which came to power in a 1952 coup.

Tamayo explained that in September 1957 Carreras took part in a military plot against the regime, which had ordered its air force to bomb the city of Cienfuegos to put down an insurrection organized by the July 26 Movement there. Carreras and other rebel pilots “decided to drop their bombs in the sea. That is when he began his history as a revolutionary and collaborator of the July 26 Movement. He and others in the group of conspirators were court-martialed and jailed on the Island of Pines,” now the Isle of Youth.

Behind bars, Carreras collaborated with militants of the July 26 Movement. On their release from prison with the January 1959 revolutionary victory, Carreras was named head of the revolutionary air force, which at that time had only a handful of fighter planes and even fewer experienced combat pilots. He began training classes for new pilots at the military base of San Antonio de los Baños in Havana province.

Tamayo recalled that Carreras set an example of personal integrity and of respect for fellow aviators, in contrast to the abusive conduct of the military brass under the capitalist regime. “I never experienced any offensive remark by Carreras against me or any other pilot,” he noted. “If he had to tell you about errors you had made, he would tell you in a modest, calm tone and with a tremendous revolutionary spirit.”

Carreras fought prejudices and arbitrary practice. In medical evaluations of new recruits, for example, there was a category, dating from prerevolutionary days, called “repulsive ugliness.” During the early years of the revolution, some doctors “would check off ‘repulsive ugliness’ if someone had acne, for example, but most often it was used to bar blacks, or anyone they didn’t like. Carreras fought those notions. He would argue with doctors to oppose that.”

Carreras and other Cuban aviators played an outstanding role in the April 1961 battle at the Bay of Pigs, when Cuba’s revolutionary militias, armed forces, and revolutionary police crushed a U.S.-backed mercenary invasion—Washington’s first military defeat in the Americas.

Cuba had a tiny air force with dilapidated planes and a shortage of parts, while the mercenaries had many more pilots, planes, ammunition, and spare parts, not to mention the backing of the U.S. armed forces. Yet the Cuban pilots, led by Carreras, quickly achieved air superiority and ended up downing the majority of the enemy planes.

“There are anecdotes of how our mechanics and technicians even had to install modified auto brake systems in our planes to get them functioning,” Tamayo said. “But we shot down more planes than the total number of aircraft we ourselves had available. The mercenaries were defeated in less than 72 hours.”

Ten Cuban pilots with eight rickety planes flew 70 missions, downing nine B-26 bombers and sinking two of the invaders’ transport ships and eight landing craft. Carreras himself shot down two of these planes and sank the two transport ships.

Over the following months, Carreras organized accelerated training courses for young pilots like Tamayo. In his book, Carreras explains that not only did instructors come to Cuba from the Soviet Union but that trainees went to Czechoslovakia and China for instruction.

When the young pilots returned from this training abroad, Tamayo noted, “we were still very inexperienced—we basically knew how to take off and land. The older pilots, beginning with Carreras, became our teachers. They taught us elements of combat—the aggressiveness a pilot must have in the air.

“Carreras is a very calm person, very down to earth. But in the air he was a lion, pursuing targets, quickly detecting any sign of danger, launching offensives. Those were the qualities he instilled in us.”  
 
October 1962 crisis
In May 1962, Tamayo said, “we returned to Cuba, and by October, thanks to the training by Carreras and others, we were ready for air combat.” That was when the Cuban people faced down a threatened U.S. invasion of the island during the so-called Missile Crisis, or October Crisis as it is known here.

“I remember one night, when U.S. planes were flying over Cuba everywhere,” he recalled. “The commander-in-chief [Fidel Castro] came to our base and gathered all the pilots. He told us that by daybreak we had to be ready, in our planes, with guns loaded, at the end of the runway and ready for action. Of course, the dangers were extremely high, and the most experienced pilots were placed at the front. Carreras was lucky to be in the front row of the planes that were to take off to confront that powerful [U.S.] air force. But all our pilots displayed the same readiness to go into the air and give the aggressors the fight they deserved.”

Tamayo added that combat did not occur. The mass mobilizations of Cuba’s workers and farmers stayed the hand of Washington, which pulled back from the brink of war.

Over the years Cuba’s air force became increasingly experienced. “The firepower and courage of our air force was demonstrated in Angola, Ethiopia, the Congo, Yemen, and other countries where they served in internationalist missions,” he said.  
 
‘From the Escambray to the Congo’
Two days later, on February 16, Editora Política also presented From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution. In its pages Víctor Dreke recounts his participation in the 1950s revolutionary war and, in the first half of the 1960s, his responsibility in helping lead Cuba’s armed forces and militias to crush U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary units in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba. In 1965 Dreke was second in command under Che Guevara of the column of Cuban volunteer combatants who joined forces with anti-imperialist fighters in the Congo.

Dreke, who today is Cuba’s ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, had planned to speak at the book presentation, but was unable to attend at the last minute due to a schedule change in a state visit to Havana by the president of that African country.

Six years ago Dreke spoke at the first presentation of From the Escambray to the Congo at the Havana International Book Fair, to an overflow meeting that drew more than 200 people.

Introduced by Iraida Aguirrechu, Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press, who interviewed Dreke and edited the book, spoke at the presentation of the new Cuban edition.

Waters’s remarks focused on the impact of the book in the United States and the broadly successful speaking tour by Dreke in the United States in the fall of 2002. (See the full text of her remarks on page 8 and 9.)

From the Escambray to the Congo, she told the audience, “is the story, told with humor, without exaggeration or oversimplification, of how hundreds of thousands like Dreke were transformed from inexperienced if unflinchingly courageous youth into seasoned proletarian internationalists and leaders of a people capable of defying the multifaceted aggressions of the Yankee rulers for half a century.

“Throughout the Americas, and in the United States especially, Dreke’s story has an additional powerful message. It shows us the kind of revolutionary power of the workers and farmers that is necessary to even begin to eradicate the legacy of centuries of African slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination in our hemisphere. Whatever its imperfections, only socialist Cuba provides an example of how the discrimination that still permeates all aspects of social and economic relations in the United States, and elsewhere in the Americas, can be eliminated.”
 

In the opening days of the book fair, hundreds of thousands of people have flocked to the Spanish colonial fort of San Carlos de la Cabaña overlooking Havana Bay, where the annual event is being held. To ease overcrowding at the fair site and help meet the growing demand for literature, this year many new titles were made available at bookstores around the city starting a week before the opening of the festival.

The book fair, which ends here February 24, will then travel to 41 other cities and towns across the island.
 
 
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Cuba, Africa, the fight against racism from 1959 to today
Cuba’s National Assembly to elect president  
 
 
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