http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,353354,00.html >From Cuba to Congo, dream to disaster for Che Guevara Below: the revolutionary leader describes his African war in exclusive extracts from his previously unpublished diary Read the extracts from Che Guevara's diary Saturday August 12, 2000 In 1965 Che Guevara embarked on the most dramatic of his several ambitious attempts to change the world, writes Victoria Brittain. Undercover, known only as "Tatu" (number three in swahili), the 37-year-old led a group of Cuban guerrillas into eastern Congo . There, several rebellions had begun, invoking the radical name and ideas of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister at independence who had been killed in 1961, probably by Belgians, certainly on the orders of the United States. Few people realised in the mid 1960s how important the Congo's client government was to be to Washington, and how deeply the CIA was involved in making sure that the men Guevara was working with would fail. Guevara's personal account of this catastrophic venture lay under wraps in Havana for thirty years, and is only now being published in full. In the 1970s and 80s, when the cold war raged in Africa, and Cuban soldiers, doctors and teachers stood between utter failure and relative success in countries such as Angola and Ethiopia, this document would have been a gift to Cuba's enemies, notably in the US, which was working tirelessly to bring down such leftwing regimes. Guevara's version of events has an honesty which has long since gone out of fashion. His diary gives an intimate picture of the harsh deprivations of the world of all guerrilla movements: the uncertainties, the mind-torturing moral doubts, the frustrations of lack of funds and the in-fighting. All this will make salutary reading for the next generation of foreign radicals who, for the past four years, have been trying to change the course of Congolese history. The story today is an astonishing mirror of what Guevara saw: a rebel movement fractured into three parts, as ready to fight each other as to take on the army of the weak central government in Kinshasa, and dependent on outsiders to function at all. And, as in Guevara's time, the central government is only held in power by the intervention of outsiders. But, in these post-cold war times, these outsiders are Africans, not westerners. Guevara's heirs have come from Rwanda, Uganda and Angola and they are living with the same realities described by Guevara - and have even found one of the old rebel leaders Guevara did not think too highly of: Laurent Kabila, now on the other side as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. What follows are three extracts from Guevara's diary: This is the history of a failure. It descends into anecdotic detail, as one would expect in episodes from a war, but this is blended with reflections and critical analysis. For in my view, any importance the story might have lies in the fact that it allows the experiences to be extracted for the use of other revolutionary movements. Victory is a great source of positive experiences, but so is defeat, especially if the unusual circumstances surrounding the incident are taken into account: the actors and informants are foreigners who went to risk their lives in an unknown land where people spoke a different language and were linked to them only by ties of proletarian internationalism, so that a method not practised in modern wars of liberation was thereby inaugurated. These notes will be published some time after they were dictated, and it may be that the author will no longer be able to take responsibility for what is said in them. More correctly, this is the history of a decomposition. When we arrived on Congolese soil, the revolution was in a period of reflux; then a number of incidents occurred which brought about its final regression, at this time and place at least, in the immense field of struggle that is the Congo. The most interesting aspect here is not the story of the decomposition of the Congolese revolution, whose causes and key features are too profound to be all encompassed from my particular vantage point, but rather the decomposition of our own fighting morale, since the experience we inaugurated should not go to waste and the initiative of the International Proletarian Army should not die at the first failure. It is essential to analyse in depth the problems that are posed, and to find a solution to them. A good battlefield instructor does more for the revolution than one who teaches a large number of raw recruits in a context of peace... The idea that guided us was to ensure that men experienced in liberation battles (and subsequently in the struggle with reactionary forces) fought alongside men without experience, and thereby bring about what we called the "Cubanisation" of the Congolese. It will be seen that the effect was the exact opposite, in that a "Congolisation" of the Cubans took place over a period of time. In speaking of Congolisation, we had in mind the series of habits and attitudes to the revolution that characterised the Congolese soldier at those moments of the struggle. This does not imply any derogatory view about the Congolese people, but it does about the soldiers at that time. In the course of the story, an attempt will be made to explain why those fighters had such negative traits. Letter to Castro A personal letter written by Che Guevara to Fidel Castro in October 1965 shows the strength of trust between the two men, despite Guevara having left Cuba. Only to Castro could Guevara so openly express his serious doubts about the Congo project, given the competition between rival leaders in different areas. Congo, 5/10/65 Dear Fidel I received your letter, which has aroused contradictory feelings in me - for in the name of proletarian internationalism, we are committing mistakes that may prove very costly. I am also personally worried that, either because I have failed to write with sufficient seriousness or because you do not fully understand me, I may be thought to be suffering from the terrible disease of groundless pessimism. When your Greek gift [Emilio Aragones, a member of the Cuban central committee] arrived here, he told me that one of my letters had given the impression of a condemned gladiator, and the [Cuban health] minister [Jose Ramon Machado Ventura], in passing on your optimistic message, confirmed the opinion that you were forming. You will be able to speak at length with the bearer of this letter who will tell you his firsthand impressions after visiting much of the front; for this reason I will dispense with anecdotes. I will just say to you that, according to people close to me here, I have lost my reputation for objectivity by maintaining a groundless optimism in the face of the actual situation. I can assure you that were it not for me, this fine dream would have collapsed with catastrophe all around. In my previous letters, I asked to be sent not many people but cadres; there is no real lack of arms here (except for special weapons) - indeed there are too many armed men; what is lacking are soldiers. I especially warned that no more money should be given out unless it was with a dropper and after many requests. None of what I said has been heeded, and fantastic plans have been made which threaten to discredit us internationally and may land me in a very difficult position. I shall now explain to you. Soumialot [Gaston Soumialot, president of the Supreme Council of the Revolution] and his comrades have been leading you all right up the garden path. It would be tedious to list the huge number of lies they have spun. There are two zones where something of an organised revolution exists - the one where we ourselves are, and part of Kasai province (the great unknown quantity) where Mulele [Pierre Mulele, former minister under Lumumba and the first leader to take up arms] is based. In the rest of the country there are bands living in the forest, not connected to one another; they lost everything without a fight, as they lost Stanleyville without a fight. More serious than this, however, is the way in which the groups in this area (the only one with contacts to the outside) relate to one another. The dissensions between Kabila [then second vice-president of the Supreme Council of the Revolution and head of the eastern front where Guevara was] and Soumialot are becoming more serious all the time, and are used as a pretext to keep handing towns over without a fight. I know Kabila well enough not to have any illusions about him. I cannot say the same about Soumialot, but I have some indications such as the string of lies he has been feeding you, the fact that he does not deign to come to these godforsaken parts, his frequent bouts of drunkenness in Dar es Salaam, where he lives in the best hotels, and the kind of people he has as allies here against the other group. Recently a group from the Tshombist [pro-government] army landed, in the Baraka area (where a major-general loyal to Soumialot has no fewer than a thousand armed men) and captured this strategically important place almost without a fight. Now they are arguing about who was to blame - those who did not put up a fight, or those at the lake who did not send enough ammunition. The fact is that they shamelessly ran away, ditching in the open a 75mm recoilless gun and two 82 mortars; all the men assigned to these weapons have disappeared, and now they are asking me for Cubans to get them back from wherever they are (no one quite knows where) and to use them in battle. Nor are they doing anything to defend Fizi, 36km from here; they don't want to dig trenches on the only access road through the mountains. This will give you a faint idea of the situation. As for the need to choose men well rather than send me large numbers, you and the commissar assure me that the men here are good; I'm sure most of them are - otherwise they'd have quit long ago. But that's not the point. You have to be really well tempered to put up with the things that happen here. It's not good men but supermen that are needed... And there are still my 200; believe me, they would do more harm than good at the present time - unless we decide once and for all to fight alone, in which case we'll need a division and we'll have to see how many the enemy put up against us. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration; maybe a battalion would be enough to get back to the frontiers we had when we arrived here and to threaten Albertville. But numbers are not what matters; we can't liberate by ourselves a country that does not want to fight; you've got to create a fighting spirit and look for soldiers with the torch of Diogenes and the patience of Job - a task that becomes more difficult, the more shits there are doing things along the way. The business with the money is what hurts me most, after all the warnings I gave. At the height of my "spending spree" and only after they had kicked up a lot of fuss, I undertook to supply one front (the most important one) on condition that I would direct the struggle and form a special mixed column under my direct command, in accordance with the strategy that I outlined and communicated to you. With a very heavy heart, I calculated that it would require $5,000 a month. Now I learn that a sum 20 times higher is given to people who pass through just once, so that they can live well in all the capitals of the African world, with no allowance for the fact that they receive free board and lodging and often their travel costs from the main progressive countries. Not a cent will reach a wretched front where the peasants suffer every misery you can imagine, including the rapaciousness of their own protectors; nor will anything get through to the poor devils stuck In Sudan. (Whisky and women are not on the list of expenses covered by friendly governments, and they cost a lot if you want quality.) Finally, 50 doctors will give the liberated area of the Congo an enviable proportion of one per thousand inhabitants - a level surpassed only by the USSR, the United States and two or three of the most advanced countries in the world. But no allowance is made for the fact that here they are distributed according to political preference, without a trace of public health organisation. Instead of such gigantism, it would be better to send a contingent of revolutionary doctors and to increase it as I request, along with highly practical nurses of a similar kind. As the attached map sums up the military situation, I shall limit myself to a few recommendations that I would ask you all to consider objectively: forget all the men in charge of phantom groups; train up to a hundred cadres (not necessarily all blacks)... As for weapons: the new bazooka, percussion caps with their own power supply, a few R-4s and nothing else for the moment; forget about rifles, which won't solve anything unless they are electronic. Our mortars must be in Tanzania, and with those plus a new complement of men to operate them we would have more than enough for now. Forget about Burundi and tactfully discuss the question of the launches. (Don't forget that Tanzania is an independent country and we've got to play it fair there, leaving aside the little problem I caused.) Send the mechanics as soon as possible, as well as someone who can steer across the lake reasonably safely; that has been discussed and Tanzania has agreed. Leave me to handle the problem of the doctors, which I will do by giving some of them to Tanzania. Don't make the mistake again of dishing out money like that; for they cling to me when they feel hard up and certainly won't pay me any attention if the money is flowing freely. Trust my judgment a little and don't go by appearances. Shake the representatives into giving truthful information, because they are not capable of figuring things out and present utopian pictures which have nothing to do with reality. I have tried to be explicit and objective, synthetic and truthful. Do you believe me? Warm greetings ... Evacuation By November 1965 Guevara's dream had collapsed against the reality of the Congolese forces' complete incompetence and lack of realism. Grimly he had asked Havana for help to pull out his men, though he toyed with the idea of staying on as a lone exemplar of revolutionary duty. There was an almost complete disintegration of the troops; some party members even proposed to hold a meeting to ask me to pull out. I was extremely sharp in my replies, warning that I would not accept any such demand or any meeting of that kind and would treat it as treachery, and that I would brand as cowardice even any act of allowing such proposals to circulate. I still had a remnant of authority which kept some degree of cohesion among the Cubans; that was all. But much worse things were happening on the Congolese side. This paragraph will give some idea of the limbo in which the revolution was then sailing. I will take the liberty of reproducing for you the aspirations, wishes and proposals of the whole population in the Fizi region. 1. The people demand that the military power of our revolution should be entrusted to the friendly forces who are coming to help us, until the country is stabilised. 2. The people request intensive aid from friendly countries, consisting of: a) military operations, personnel, weapons, equipment, money, etc; b) technical assistance, engineers, various kinds of technicians, doctors, etc; c) social assistance, teachers, traders, industrialists. At 2.30pm we made contact with [the Tanzanian port of] Kigoma. Our message read: Changa: [the Cuban captain responsible for transporting supplies and messages] Total men to evacuate less than 200, will be more difficult each day that passes. We are at Sele, 10 or 15km south of Kibamba. And I received the longed-for reply. Tatu: The crossing is set for tonight. Yesterday the commissioner did not let us cross. The men were euphoric. I spoke with Masengo [the chief of staff of the eastern front] and suggested leaving from that very point at night. As there were a lot of Congolese, the general staff held a meeting at which it was decided that one commander would remain in the Congo with his men and we and the various leaders would evacuate; the troops who were originally from that area would remain there; they would not be told of our intention to withdraw but would be sent on various pretexts to the nearby village. One of the little boats we still had to ply between various points on the lake arrived and took a large number of the Congolese, but those who were part of our force smelt a rat and wanted to stay. I ordered a selection to be made of those who had conducted themselves best up to that point, so that they would be taken across as Cubans. For me it was a critical situation. Two men who had comprehensively fulfilled their mission would now be left behind unless they made their way back within a few hours. The full weight of calumnies - both inside and outside the Congo -would fall upon us as soon as we left. My troops were a mixed bunch, and my investigations suggested that I could extract up to 20 to follow me, this time with knitted brows. And then what would I do? All the leaders were pulling out, the peasants were displaying ever greater hostility towards us. But I was deeply pained at the thought of simply departing as we had come, leaving behind defenceless peasants and armed men whose poor battle sense left them effectively defenceless, defeated and with a feeling of betrayal. For me, to stay in the Congo was not a sacrifice - not for a year, or even for the five years with which I had scared my men. It was part of a concept of struggle that had fully taken shape in my brain. I could reasonably expect six or eight men to accompany me without furrowed brows. But the rest would do it as a duty, either towards me personally, or as a moral duty to the revolution; I would be sacrificing people who could not muster any enthusiasm to fight. In reality, the thought of remaining in the Congo continued to haunt me long into the night, and perhaps I did not so much take the decision as become one fugitive more. The way in which the Congolese comrades would view the evacuation seemed to me degrading; our withdrawal was a mere flight, or worse, we were accomplices in the deception with which people had been left on the land. Moreover, who was I now? I had the feeling that, after my farewell letter to Fidel, the comrades began to see me as a man from other climes rather distant from Cuba's specific problems, and I could not bring myself to demand the final sacrifice of remaining behind. I spent the final hours like this, alone and perplexed, until the boats eventually put in at two o'clock in the morning, with a Cuban crew who arrived and set off immediately that very night. There were too many people for the boats at that late hour. I set three o'clock as the last possible hour for departure, since it would be daylight at 5.30 and we would be in the middle of the lake. Work got under way on organising the evacuation. The sick went aboard, then the whole of Masengo's general staff - some 40 men chosen by himself - and finally all the Cubans. It was a plaintive, inglorious spectacle; I had to chase away men who kept imploring us to take them too; there was no element of grandeur in this retreat, no gesture of defiance. The machine-guns were in position, and I kept the men at the ready, as usual, in case they tried to intimidate us by attacking from the land. But nothing like that happened. There was just a lot of grumbling, while the leader of the would-be escapees cursed in time with the beating of the loose moorings --------------------------------------------------------------------<e|- _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
