CUBA: Castro's Brain (original) (raw)

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In Havana’s cavernous Blanquita Theater, Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara stood calmly before the intense delegates to the First Latin American Youth Congress and waited for the clamor to still. Then he ex plained the Cuban revolution with uncompromising clarity. “What is its ideology? If I were asked whether our revolution is Communist, I would define it as Marxist.

Hear me well, I said Marxist. Our revolution has discovered by its methods the paths that Marx pointed out.” He singled out land reform: “No government can call itself revolutionary if it does not carry out a profound agrarian reform. The peasant cannot be given only marginal lands. He must have the productive lands held by private interests who stole them from the peasants ages ago.”

Che then explained Cuba’s place in the world: “I say here and now, with all my strength, that the Soviet Union, China and the socialist countries and all colonial or semicolonial peoples who have liberated themselves are our friends.” The U.S., about whose own revolution and liberating doctrines Che seems to know very little, is the enemy. “There are still governments in the Americas,” he added, “that advise us to lick the hand that wants to hit us. We cannot join in a continental alliance with our great enslaver.” He urged all Latin American governments to send supporters of dictatorship “to the wall,” a method of dealing with opponents that is very familiar to him.

“Old Mr. Herter.” The cheers and the chants—”Cuba, yes! Yankees, no!”—that followed Che’s words are the mood of Cuba today. The familiar grey wood shacks with thatched roofs still stand between the moist green of mountains and banana trees and the dazzle of sparkling sea. Inside on the wall, along with stiffly formal photographs of parents and children, there usually hangs a portrait of Fidel Castro. Down the gullied road is a raw-concrete school or a new co-op store of fresh pine.

In the towns, even the slick young men in shiny black shoes and sports shirts stop flirting with their plump, pinch-waisted girl friends as the loudspeakers switch from the new music of the pachanga to news: “Old Mr. Herter is preparing ships and men at the Key West naval station to invade Cuba.” At the Esso station, a workman paints the pumps green as a reminder that the revolution has changed Cuba so much that even the gasoline, refined from Russian oil, is different.

So far, the majority of Cuba’s peasants appear to be trustingly behind the new regime, though many in the middle class, which helped bring it to power, have long since become disenchanted. The Roman Catholic Church is stirring in opposition. The press has been silenced, but in the streets much vocal dissent is heard. Eco nomic problems have been postponed, not solved. And some kind of dissension is astir in the ranks of the leadership. Fidel

Castro has been largely out of sight for three weeks, with an illness apparently more serious than the announced “touch of pneumonia.” Brother Raul rushed home last week from Moscow’s flattering and pudgy embrace. Reports inevitably spread that Cuba’s ruling triumvirate was caught up in a rivalry for power.

The Brain. Prime Minister Castro, at 33, is the heart, soul, voice and bearded visage of present-day Cuba. His younger brother, Armed Forces Chief Raul Castro, 29, is the fist that holds the revolution’s dagger. National Bank President Che Guevara, 32, is the brain. It is he who is most responsible for driving Cuba sharply left, away from the U.S. that he despises and into a volunteered alliance with Russia.

He is the most fascinating, and the most dangerous, member of the triumvirate.

Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating, Che guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor. Despite the fact that Fidel Castro has had him declared a “native-born Cuban,” Che knows that Cubans still regard him as a foreigner, and has so far realistically set the limit of his personal ambition accordingly. Even his name (pronounced Chay) comes from the Argentine equivalent of “Mac” or “Hey, you.”

One day, goes a Cuban story, Fidel was winding up a Cabinet meeting when a thought suddenly struck him. “By the way,” he said, “I had to fire the head of the National Bank today. Anybody here an economist?” Che’s hand shot up. “I am, chief,” he said. “All right, Che,” said Fidel, “you’re president of the bank.” The meeting over, Castro stayed behind for a private chat with Che. “Say, I never knew you were an economist,” said Fidel. “Economist!” said Che, astounded. “I thought you said Communist!” The most interesting thing about the story is that Che loves to tell it on himself.

Battle to Breathe. Che’s father, Architect Ernesto Rafael Guevara Lynch, also sees some humor in the fact of his son’s control of fiscal Cuba. Sitting recently in his Buenos Aires office, the elder Guevara chuckled that “nobody was more surprised than I when I heard my son was managing the Cuban economy. Any business we Guevaras put money into has always been a failure.”

Che Guevara was born in the Argentine grain port of Rosario on June 14, 1928, the first of five children in a family of Spanish-Irish descent and some small inherited wealth. Father Guevara was determined to give his premature and puny son a hardy upbringing, and sunned the sickly infant on a balcony wrapped only in a diaper despite the 45° chill of midwinter. Che was plunged into bathtubs of cold water and doused under icy showers. He developed a persistent cough and later serious allergic asthma.

So that the gasping little boy might breathe, the family had to move to the hill town of Alta Gracia. There Che began a stubborn personal battle to beat the asthma. He swam, roamed the streets ;with a gang of toughs, played golf, took odd jobs in Córdoba’s vineyards. His father taught him to shoot—and started him rambling through some of the 3,000 books, mostly leftist sociology and history, that crammed the family bookshelves. The boy was entranced with the works of Chile’s Communist Poet Pablo Neruda, memorized many of his poems.

At 14 he took his first brash step into politics as a member of a nationalistic youth group specializing in street brawls. Che finished high school with distinction, and then, moved by the suffering of his father’s mother* as she lay dying of cancer, decided to become a doctor. At 19 he entered the University of Buenos Aires Medical School.

Pinned Galahad. By this time his parents were separated, and young Che spent most of his time with his mother and her friends, who ranged the political spectrum from parlor pink to Moscow red. He battled in the streets against Dictator Juan Peron and played amateur rugby at top speed, wheezing to the sidelines from time to time for whiffs from the inevitable atomizer. He still bitterly recalls one violent episode from this period. Sitting in a Buenos Aires bar one evening, Che was annoyed when a U.S. merchant seaman made a pass at a girl near Che. Che tried to get up to swing at him, but the bigger Yankee sailor slugged him twice, then casually put a giant paw on top of his head and pinned him down. Like a butterfly on a pin, a humiliated Che struggled until the crowd hustled the sailor away.

In 1952 he broke off his studies and set off with a friend on a motorcycle tour of South America. They crossed the Andes, abandoned their motorcycle when it gave out in Chile, then hitchhiked to Peru and Ecuador, winding up with jobs as male nurses in a leper colony near the source of the Amazon. They floated downriver into Colombia, crossed into Venezuela, and snagged a lift to Miami aboard a plane carrying race horses from Buenos Aires. Che was turned back by U.S. immigration authorities. He headed home to finish the seven-year course of studies in three years. When he graduated in 1953, Peron was grabbing doctors for the army. Che ducked out of the country and set off on the long revolutionary road to Cuba.

The road led first to Bolivia, then in the throes of a historic revolution that dispossessed the rich of land and tin mines. In a filthy brown jacket, stained necktie and scuffed shoes, Che became a member of a group of coffeehouse leftists. He went on to Peru, Ecuador, Panama and finally to Costa Rica, a democratic haven for exiles from all over Latin America. Among them were five or six young Cubans who had been led in an attack on a Santiago barracks by a beardless young rebel named Fidel Castro on July 26, 1953—an anniversary that Fidel Castro celebrated last week by gathering 100,000 Cubans in his original mountain stronghold, the Sierra Maestra, for speeches and fiestas.

By this time Che had picked up a strong dislike for the U.S. and called himself a Marxist. But he did not have a clear political line, and there is no conclusive evidence that he ever got Communist indoctrination.

From Dislike to Hate. Che’s progress, mostly by foot, continued to Guatemala in December 1953. The country was then controlled by the Communists around President Jacobo Arbenz, and was a natural haven for Latin American leftists of all degrees. Che fitted right in. His closest friend was a plump, almond-eyed young Peruvian girl named Hilda Gadea, an ardent, exiled member of Apra, Peru’s leftist revolutionary movement. Hilda lent Che money to pay his room rent, kept him fed. For a while he peddled encyclopedias, then got a minor job in Guatemala’s agrarian-reform program.

Recalls an Argentine who met him then: “Once we came across a group of undernourished, belly-bloated kids. We were in United Fruit land. Che went into one of his rages. He cursed everybody from God to North American ‘exploiters,’ and wound up with a frightening asthmatic attack that lasted two hours.”

In 1954, at the Caracas conference of the hemisphere’s foreign ministers in March, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pushed through a resolution opposing Communist domination of any Latin American nation. The disapproval among Che’s friends in Guatemala was immediate and violent, and he was swept along by their passion. Two months later, with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as a silent partner, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas launched his counter-revolutionary invasion of the Red-dominated country. As F-47s swooped down over Guatemala City with U.S. pilots at the controls, Guevara dashed blindly around town trying to organize a resistance force. When Arbenz caved in without a fight, Guevara’s wounded idealism and urge to do battle combined with his strong dislike of the U.S. to become a deep and deadly hatred.

Fidel, Meet Che. He darted into the Argentine embassy, stayed nearly two months as a dish-washing guest, then cut north across Guatemala to Mexico, where he rejoined Hilda Gadea. Welcomed as a member of Apra into the city’s revolutionary-exile set, she met Fidel and Raul Castro, who had just been amnestied from prison in Cuba by Dictator Batista. She introduced them to Che, and the four became close friends. When Hilda and Che legalized their relationship in May 1955, Raul was best man. But it was Fidel and Che who hit it off. “Those two talked nothing but revolution,” she says. “I lost my husband to the Cuban revolution.”

When, on Nov. 26, 1956, Castro and his 81 men cast off for Cuba in the 62-ft. yacht Granma, Che was aboard. Batista’s troops cut down the seasick invaders at the foot of the Sierra Maestra on Dec. 2.

The tragedy of Cuba began in that farce. Che was one of the twelve survivors who straggled into the tangled hills with Fidel.

In the hills, Che felt at home for the first time in his life. Castro quickly made him a lieutenant. Survival meant keeping constantly on the move, and Che ruthlessly goaded his men into motion. During the day he was the merciless martinet, intolerant of weakness and inspiringly confident. In the evening he taught tactics and the use of weapons, read to his men from Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Venezuelan novelist (and ex-President) Romulo Gallegos, or recited Pablo Neruda’s Communist poetry from memory. As they proved themselves in battle, his men proudly christened themselves “Che’s Suicide Squad.”

Study the Leader. Riding the mountain trails on a mule he called Martin Fierro,* Che puffed endless cigars and pondered his leader. He saw Castro clearly as an inspired and inspiring zealot, brimming with a disorganized flood of liberal ideals, incapable of accepting criticism, dependent on others to put his schemes into action. Che adapted himself to Castro. He never contradicted Castro in public. Allowing Fidel to take credit for Guevara accomplishments, he carefully avoided bruising the massive Castro ego. Che even wrote a “Rhapsody to Fidel”:

When your “voice cries to the four winds, “Land reform, justice, bread, liberty!” There at your side we shall be fighting. We are yours.

As he pondered Fidel, Che also pondered the objectives of the revolution he was fighting. Out of his own catch-as-catch-can Marxist reading, Che proceeded to map out Cuba’s first true, peasant-based social revolution. He plotted total destruction of the old political and economic system, under which U.S. investors owned one-third of Cuba’s largest crop (sugar), and the country was run by a tough and crooked former army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista. Che proposed to nationalize industry and agriculture, to reorganize that traditional prop of Cuban political power, the army, and to cut Cuba’s historic ties with the U.S. With the cold-eyed dedication of a Marxist zealot, Che meant to concentrate and hold power until the old system was irreparably destroyed. First he had to convince Fidel.

Persuading by Doing. Che convinced Castro with competence, diplomacy and patience. When grenades were needed, Che set up a factory to make them. When bread was wanted, Che set up ovens to bake it. When new recruits needed to learn tactics and discipline, Che taught them. When a school was needed to teach peasants to read and write, Che organized it. If a situation called for a revolution ary expert, Che knew how it had been done in Bolivia or Guatemala. Through the long evenings, without ever appearing to contradict, Che encouraged Castro’s leftism, planted the seeds of a deep-cutting and basic grab for power.

The measure of Che’s competence is the fact that it was he who led the mili tary action that finally overturned Batista. Thrusting out of the sheltering Sierra Maestra, he led his men—perhaps 150—boldly through the canebrakes and swamps of Camaguey province, fighting toward Cuba’s heart. Batista’s forces blasted away with fighter planes, tanks and machine guns, but could not stop Che’s men. When they swept into Santa Clara, in central Las Villas province, Cuba was cut in two, and Batista boarded a plane for exile.

En route Che had picked up a “secretary,” an attractive, high-cheekboned Cuban girl named Aleida March. When Che took over his victory headquarters—the commandant’s house at Havana’s La Cabana fortress—Aleida was with him.

Later he divorced Hilda (who had borne him a daughter after he left Mexico) and married Aleida.

Banker’s Green. Through Castro, Che’s revolution got to work. Firing-squad rifles cracked, and 553 Batista “war criminals” —most of them stalwarts of the old army —fell dead, after drumhead trials. Elections were put off indefinitely. There was a brief backslide when Castro, warmed by his welcome to the U.S. in April 1959, told Cuban newsmen traveling with him, “Don’t worry. I will get rid of Che.” He sent Che off on a world trip. The repudiation lasted only until the afterglow of Castro’s U.S. trip died away. In November Fidel finally turned Cuba’s economy over to Che by naming him to run the National Bank, which in addition to acting as Cuba’s central bank and bank of issue controls foreign trade.

In appearance as in action, Che is the world’s most unorthodox banker. Dressed in black beret, green battle tunic and paratrooper jump boots, he drives his own Ford Falcon from his seaside home to the National Bank each working day just in time to begin his normal office hours—3 p.m. to 6 a.m. In the back seat, two guards carry Tommy guns at the ready. In his 30-ft., deep-carpeted office, Che tosses his Luger onto the long, cluttered desk, calls in the two Chilean Marxists who are his main economic advisers, and buckles down to work. His wife Aleida serves as his secretary, while his ex-wife Hilda, having moved to Havana with their four-year-old daughter, works at the Che-influenced Agrarian Reform Institute.

Despite his lack of training in economics, he now speaks with assurance of such technical topics as balance of payments, rediscount rates or expansion of commercial paper. As one Washington banker puts it, “It’s just like talking to another banker.” One of Che’s irritations comes from Prime Minister Castro, who carries a checkbook in his shirt pocket. When a project seems worthy, Castro tugs out the book and writes a check. His account is now overdrawn by $7,343,000.

To pay the costs of the revolution, Che has printed enough Cuban currency to increase the amount in circulation by 62%, to 800 million pesos. The peso, nominally worth $1, has depreciated to 52¢ on the New York market. In the space for the National Bank president’s signature, the new bills say simply “Che.” (AntiCommunist Cubans put a small cross before the Che, making it cruz-Che, which pronounced rapidly sounds like Khrushchev.) When Che took over the bank, he found that its gold and dollar reserves were deposited in the U.S. He transferred them to Switzerland.

Red Dividend. Since Castro handed him power, Che has taken three crucial steps. He has cut Cuba’s main economic ties with the West and hooked them to the Communist world. He has started preparing for the war he expects the U.S. to wage against him. And he has taken bold action to spread his revolutionary influence across the rest of Latin America.

In deals behind the Iron Curtain, Che got more than $100 million worth of promised Communist aid—much of it in the form of factories to produce such former U.S. imports as knives, radios, cameras, tubing, flour, cable, screwdrivers, electric motors, hinges, light bulbs, farm machines, printing presses, office equipment, medical instruments. The deal also included a barter exchange—sugar, the nation’s major export, for oil, the major import. To refine the Russian crude, Che seized the three foreign refineries—Shell, Esso and Texaco—without compensation.

When the U.S. angrily reacted by virtually cutting off 1960 Cuban-sugar imports, Che got a Russian dividend—a threat by Premier Khrushchev to fire rockets at the U.S. if it intervened in Cuba. The gesture moved Che to call Cuba “a glorious island in the middle of the Caribbean, defended by the rockets of the greatest military power in history.” Where tanning U.S. tourists and businessmen once sipped daiquiris on the brink of clear blue hotel pools, broad-cheeked Russian and impassive Red Chinese technicians now take their ease.

Acquisition of these powerful big brothers—who might or might not in a pinch come to Castro’s aid—did not stop Che from training his first line of defense, a civilian militia reported to be 350,000 strong. Needing a guerrilla-warfare textbook for the militiamen, Che wrote one. Excerpts: “The great exasperation of the enemy army will be that of not finding anything solid to come up against; everything will be a gelatinous mass, moving, impenetrable, that goes on retreating and, while wounding on all sides, does not present a solid front.”

In his book, Che also talks of the effect of the Cuban revolution on the rest of Latin America: it “breaks down all of the barriers of the news agencies and spreads its truth like a blast of gunpowder among the American masses who are anxious for a better life.” Cuban diplomats across the hemisphere are hard at work spreading Che’s “truth” and Communist propaganda. Allied with anyone who will cooperate, from Communists to sincere social work ers, they organize July 26 movements, show films of revolutionary progress, lend a hand in subversive plots, campaign for support among the backland peasants. In Venezuela last week, cops set out to arrest the leader of the July 26 movement after clashes of pro-and anti-Castro rioters and fatally shot him in a doorway. In Argentina, intelligence agents confronted the Cuban ambassador with documentary proof of his complicity in a plot by followers of ex-Dictator Juan Peron to overthrow President Arturo Frondizi; the agents also found his diplomatic pouch stuffed with Che’s pamphlets on guerrilla warfare and instructions on how to bomb bridges. Brazil also expelled an intriguing Cuban embassy attache.

Outmoded Words. Against so clear a danger to the security of the hemisphere from Cuba-based and Communist-in spired infiltration, the U.S. and other Latin American states must take steps. But what steps? Cancellation of Cuba’s sugar quota was probably a violation of the article in the charter of the Organization of American States that bars economic intervention; it may also prove ineffectual. Russia has promised to purchase the entire quota cut at only 24millionlessthantheartificiallyhighpricetheU.S.usedtopay.CommunistChinahaspromisedtobuy500,000tonsmore.ButCommunistbargains,involvingoverpricedgoods,usuallyturnouttobepoorbargains.ChehasincreasedCuba’sforeignexchangereservesfrom24 million less than the artificially high price the U.S. used to pay. Communist China has promised to buy 500,000 tons more. But Communist bargains, involving overpriced goods, usually turn out to be poor bargains. Che has increased Cuba’s foreign exchange reserves from 24millionlessthantheartificiallyhighpricetheU.S.usedtopay.CommunistChinahaspromisedtobuy500,000tonsmore.ButCommunistbargains,involvingoverpricedgoods,usuallyturnouttobepoorbargains.ChehasincreasedCuba’sforeignexchangereservesfrom50 million to 196million,largelybythesimpledeviceofrefusingtopayhisU.S.bills.TheSovietsarekeepingCubasuppliedwithoilatpricesrunning196 million, largely by the simple device of refusing to pay his U.S. bills. The Soviets are keeping Cuba supplied with oil at prices running 196million,largelybythesimpledeviceofrefusingtopayhisU.S.bills.TheSovietsarekeepingCubasuppliedwithoilatpricesrunning14 million a year less than the price of the Venezuelan crude it replaces, though the high cost of transport must in the end be paid by Cuba. Economic sanctions, so long as Castro’s popularity lasts with his people, may even increase their fervor for a time.

After years of inactivity in the face of growing pressure for social aid, the U.S. is now switching its policy in Latin America. It began last week when Roy Richard

Rubottom, the man nominally responsible for the earlier policy as head of the State Department’s Latin American desk, was forced to walk the plank. He now becomes U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, will be succeeded by Thomas C. Mann, 47, another career diplomat. The U.S. is resolved (and committed by treaty) not to intervene militarily in Cuba. Raul Castro says, “We’re not going to touch” the $76 million U.S. naval base at Guantanamo.

In the rest of Latin America, Cuba seems the underdog, and suspicions of “Yankee imperialism” are easily recalled. But the Latinos’ natural sympathy with the Cuban revolution has been shaken by Khrushchev’s rocket-rattling, and by the discovery that the agents of Communism and subversion are already spreading from the Cuban beachhead to the interior of the hemisphere. Last week the Organization of American States unanimously approved a Peruvian proposal to consider the threat of Soviet intervention at a meeting of Latin American foreign ministers at San Jose, Costa Rica on Aug. 16.

In the past five years, eight dictators have been overthrown and replaced by democratically elected governments. But in many Latin American nations, democracy has not yet satisfied man’s craving for enough food for his family, a decent house, an education and medicine. A month ago Latin Americans cheered the announcement from the summer White House at Newport that the U.S. at long last was ready to start a big program of loans for social needs. A high-level team of U.S. loan experts arrived in Peru almost immediately to sign a 2,000,000U.S.housingloan(theU.S.’sfirstforhousing)andtoworkoutdetailsfor2,000,000 U.S. housing loan (the U.S.’s first for housing) and to work out details for 2,000,000U.S.housingloan(theU.S.’sfirstforhousing)andtoworkoutdetailsfor53.2 million more in loans aimed at direct help to people.

But because the new U.S. aid program coincided so transparently with the U.S. need to counter Cuba’s and-Yankee campaign, Latin American skeptics call it “the Castro plan.” Ike recently sent a personal note to Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek concerning the September meeting in Bogota of the “Committee of 21,” a committee dreamed up by Kubitschek to guide the hemisphere’s economic growth and win U.S. aid. Kubitschek thought the letter would amplify Ike’s promise of U.S. loans for social ends, such as housing and land reform. Instead, Eisenhower merely hoped in general for “concrete results in Bogota” in “economic development, technical assistance in industrial and agricultural production and further consideration of problems concerning basic products.” Kubitschek sent a blunt and worried reply: “Your Excellency knows very well that words have no meaning for peoples of stagnated regions where life is continual sacrifice, patience and resignation.”

The U.S. has not yet got itself squared away in Latin America, though it belatedly recognizes its obligations and perhaps its opportunities. Luckily Che Guevara and the Brothers Castro, with their own hostile designs on Latin America, are meeting increased resistance abroad, and are having increased difficulty at home.

*Who was a California-born U.S. citizen. Her husband was the son of an Argentine who took part in the gold rush—a tie that later pulled Che’s grandparents back to Argentina. *The legendary Gaucho hero of a famed Argentine epic poem—roughly equivalent to Daniel Boone. -Arriving in Havana last week with his violently anti-U.S. wife Vilma, herself a veteran of fighting in the Sierra Maestra.