Cuban general sheds light on Cuba's internationalism
`Conditions Were Ripening For Continent-Wide Revolutionary Battles'
http://www.themilitant.com and http://www.pathfinderpress.com
See also http://www.perspectivamundial.com in Spanish
BY STEVE CLARK
from the Militant, vol.61/no.26 July 28, 1997 Pombo: A Man of Che's
`Guerrilla': With Che Guevara in Bolivia 1966-68 by Harry Villegas;
Pathfinder Press, 1997; New York; 365 pp. At the Side of Che Guevara:
Interviews with Harry Villegas (Pombo); Pathfinder Press, 1997; New
York; 39 pp.; in English and Spanish.
Like most good stories, this one by Cuban Brigadier General Harry
Villegas loses a lot in the retelling. In reviewing Pathfinder's newly
released English-language edition of Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla,'
my goal is not to retell Villegas's story but to present a few good
reasons to pick it up and read it for yourself.
The book is a diary and account of the 1966-68 guerrilla campaign in
Bolivia initiated by Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born
revolutionary leader who had been forged politically in the crucible of
the Cuban revolutionary movement since the mid-1950s. The author, Harry
Villegas - also known by his nom de guerre, Pombo - was a member of
Guevara's general staff in Bolivia. As a teenager in 1957, he had
joined the Rebel Army led by Fidel Castro in Cuba's Sierra Maestra
mountains and fought under Guevara's command in the popular war to
overturn the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. That revolutionary war
culminated in a triumphant insurrection in January 1959.
Following the victory, Villegas shouldered numerous responsibilities -
from serving as head of Guevara's escort; to working under Guevara's
direction in the initial efforts by the workers and farmers government
to restructure industry on new, proletarian foundations; to
participating in the formation of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces
(FAR); and in the commission that planned the founding congress of the
Communist Party of Cuba in 1965.
In early 1965 Villegas was one of more than 100 Cuban volunteers who
joined Guevara in assisting revolutionary forces in the Congo fighting
to overturn that country's proimperialist regime. It was there that
Guevara - who had resigned all leadership posts in Cuba before taking
up this internationalist mission - gave Villegas the Swahili pseudonym
"Pombo Pojo," which he was to use throughout the Congo and subsequent
Bolivian campaigns.
Following the end of the Cuban volunteer effort in the Congo in late
1965, Villegas collaborated with Guevara in preparations to launch the
revolutionary effort in Latin America's Southern Cone. He was part of
the team that traveled to Bolivia in June 1966 to lay the political and
logistical groundwork for the guerrilla nucleus there. He served on the
general staff of the unit, functioning as its chief quartermaster, and
fought in numerous battles.
On Oct. 8, 1967, Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner by Bolivian
military forces, who had been tightening their encirclement of the
guerrillas and inflicting more fatalities. The next day Guevara and two
of his captured compañeros were murdered inside a schoolhouse in the
village of La Higuera, on orders by the Bolivian government, following
consultation with Washington. After taking an oath with the remaining
combatants to continue the struggle, Villegas commanded the group of
five who eluded the combined efforts by Bolivian and U.S. government
forces to track them down (a sixth survivor of the October battle was
killed the following month).
`Why we fight'
Since his return to Cuba in March 1968, Villegas has served in the
Revolutionary Armed Forces, including in the high command of the
375,000 internationalist volunteers who fought in Angola between 1975
and 1989 to combat invading South African troops and U.S.-backed
counterrevolutionary bands. He participated in the 1988 battle at Cuito
Cuanavale. There, Angolan, Cuban, and Namibian fighters dealt the
decisive blow to the apartheid army inside Angola and gave a powerful
new impulse to the struggle within South Africa to bring down the white
supremacist regime.
Villegas's account of the internationalist mission in Angola is told in
a pamphlet entitled At the Side of Che Guevara released by Pathfinder,
in English and Spanish, to accompany publication of his book. "Cuba's
aid to Angola was not only worthwhile," Villegas says there, "but if we
were capable of doing it again, we would do so...
"If we did nothing more than indirectly help defeat apartheid, our
effort was unquestionably worthwhile. Millions of human beings have
been given the possibility to realize their human potential. This is
why Che fought, why all progressive humanity has fought, why men and
women of dignity have fought everywhere. This is what Fidel is fighting
for. This is why the Cuban people resist."
The pamphlet includes two 1995 interviews with Villegas spanning his
lifetime of revolutionary activity, from the Cuban revolutionary war,
to the Congo, Bolivian, and Angolan campaigns, to today. One of the two
interviews was initially given to Militant and Perspectiva Mundial
correspondents Luis Madrid and Mary-Alice Waters; Waters is the editor
of Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' and author of the publisher's
preface to the English edition. The other interview, from the Cuban
newspaper Trabajadores, was conducted by Elsa Blaquier Ascaño.
Brigadier General Villegas is currently head of political education for
the FAR's Western Army. He is also vice president of the National
Commission organizing the commemoration this year of the 30th
anniversary of the death of Che Guevara and his fellow combatants. The
Cuban publisher Editora Política released the original Spanish edition
of Villegas's book, Pombo: Un hombre de la guerrilla del Che, in 1996
in anticipation of this anniversary, aiming to shed additional light on
these events and their place in the revolutionary past, present, and
future of the Americas.
Revolution in Southern Cone
What was the goal of Ernesto Che Guevara, Harry Villegas, and their
Bolivian, Cuban, and Peruvian comrades in launching the Bolivian
campaign?
"Che envisioned the possibility of forming a guerrilla nucleus, a
mother column that would pass through the necessary and difficult stage
of survival and development," Villegas writes in his introduction to
the English edition. "Later on it would give birth to new guerrilla
columns extending outward toward the Southern Cone of Latin America,
giving continuity to a battle that would become continent- wide in
scope...
Guevara was "totally convinced that the political conditions were
ripening and that this perspective was realizable," Villegas says. "In
his view, victory was certain to the degree that the struggle extended
as far as possible throughout Latin America." It was with that broader
revolutionary perspective in mind that "Che chose Bolivia as the place
from which to initiate his strategic course in Latin America."
Among the reasons for Guevara's decision, Villegas says, was "Bolivian
people's combative traditions." In 1952 a revolutionary upsurge in
Bolivia, led by tin miners, toppled a military regime and forced the
bourgeois- nationalist government that replaced it to nationalize the
largest tin mines, legalize trade unions, initiate a land reform, and
extend voting rights to the country's indigenous majority. Just prior
to the launching of the guerrilla front in the 1960s, Villegas notes in
his introduction, "students, peasants, miners, and workers all fought
heroically" in face of stiffening government repression.
Bolivia's geographical location in Latin America - sharing borders with
five countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru - "was
involved from the beginning in Che's strategy," Villegas adds in his
interview with Madrid and Waters. Guevara's aim "was not to lead the
Bolivians. His aim was to coordinate the whole movement in the Southern
Cone. That was his aim. Sooner or later Che aimed to go to Argentina."
Fact vs. fiction
The reliability of Pombo's account has been challenged by journalist
Jon Lee Anderson, author of one of several new biographies of Guevara
being released this year on the 30th anniversary of his death.
According to Anderson, there was little objective political basis to
the choice of Bolivia. Following the Congo mission, Anderson writes in
his book, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Cuban leader Fidel Castro
wanted Guevara to return to Cuba, but Guevara "wanted to go `directly'
to Latin America. But where?"
Other Cuban leaders "drawn into the dilemma" of selecting a location
"found that Che was not an easy man to deal with," Anderson writes. But
they finally "dissuaded Che from his plan to go straight to South
America in favor of Prague. There, he would be safer and could `wait
things out' until Cuba found somewhere for him to go."
Anderson continues: "There is enduring controversy over the true target
of Che's next - and last - war making effort... This is perhaps the
most crucial single question about the life of Ernesto Che Guevara to
remain unanswered. Who decided he should go to Bolivia; when and why
was that decision made?"
The mystery, however, is in Anderson's imagination. A decision of such
scope and consequences clearly involved discussions by Guevara with
long-time revolutionary collaborators in Cuba, including differing
viewpoints and shifting assessments. Historians and biographers can and
will debate the details ad infinitum.
No more damning charge could be made against a revolutionary
leadership, however, than Anderson's implication that the decision to
launch the Bolivian operation was largely lacking in serious political
grounds, that it was an adventure - that confronted with a man "not
easy to deal with," Cuban leaders "found somewhere for him to go."
Such a charge, in fact, is ultimately more damaging to the Cuban
revolution than the slanders that have circulated ever since Guevara's
death that Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders wanted Che out of the
country because of political differences, and that they rejected steps
that could have rescued him and his comrades from death in Bolivia.
These smears are so much at odds with the proven record of the Cuban
leadership that they are less and less likely to be taken seriously by
revolutionary-minded workers and youth.
The most recent attempt to give new life to this tall tale has largely
fallen flat, even in bourgeois public opinion. That was the publication
in France last year of the "memoirs" of one the two other Cuban
survivors of the Bolivian campaign, Dariel Alarcón Ramírez, who fought
under the pseudonym Benigno. Alarcón turned against the revolution and
defected from Cuba in 1996.
Benigno's book was intended as an authoritative rejoinder to Villegas's
account. Its falsifications were so numerous, its sensationalism so
flagrant, and its author's self-serving rancor so transparent, however,
that the book's political impact reverberated little beyond circles of
openly counterrevolutionary Cuban exiles and handfuls of middle-class
apologists for imperialist "democracy." It isn't necessary to be a
partisan of Cuba's socialist revolution and communist leadership to
recognize that Alarcón has neither the personal integrity nor the
earned political standing of Harry Villegas, Ernesto Che Guevara, or
Fidel Castro.
Anderson's cleaned-up account is, if anything, more insidious.
Eschewing wild claims that have stood neither the tests of time nor
truth, he places a question mark over the political seriousness and
responsibility of the Cuban leadership, including Guevara himself.
Where the lives of dozens of revolutionary cadres are at stake, as well
as the future of toilers across Latin America, light-minded adventurism
and utopian schemes are not political misdemeanors.
Nothing in the facts of the Bolivian campaign or preparations for it,
however, corroborates Anderson's treatment.
Second Declaration of Havana
From the outset of the Cuban revolution at the opening of the 1960s,
its leaders made no secret of their aim to do everything within their
power to set an example for - and provide active solidarity with -
others in the Americas and around the world engaged in struggles
against imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation.
In an uncompromising public response to Washington's intensifying drive
to crush the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere
militarily and economically, more than a million Cuban working people
filled the streets of Havana in February 1962 to issue a call for a
continent-wide struggle against imperialism.
"What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees' hatred of the Cuban
revolution?" said that document, which became known as The Second
Declaration of Havana (available from Pathfinder in English, Spanish,
French, and Greek editions).
"What unites them and stirs them up is fear," it said. ". . .Not fear
of the Cuban revolution but fear of the Latin American revolution."
The Second Declaration of Havana directly challenged the decades-long
course of the Stalinist Communist parties and Social Democratic parties
alike in Latin America. These parties had subordinated the interests of
working people to bourgeois political misleaderships that repeatedly
betrayed their struggles for land, national sovereignty, and labor
rights and repressed their social movements and organizations.
"In the actual historic conditions of Latin America," the declaration
said, "the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the antifeudal and
anti-imperialist struggle. Experience shows that in our nations that
class, even when its interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee
imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for the national
bourgeoisie is paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by
the cry of the exploited masses."
Encouraged by the victory in Cuba, workers and peasants across Latin
America were beginning to take up the struggle against the U.S.-backed
regimes of the exploiters, the declaration said. "That wave is composed
of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose
labor amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they are
awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been
subjected.
"For this great mass of humanity has said, `Enough!' and has begun to
march."
Message to the Tricontinental
In January 1966, not long after Guevara's departure from Cuba to take
up internationalist duties, the Cuban leadership organized a conference
in Havana of anti- imperialist fighters from Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. The gathering established an organization that became
popularly known as the Tricontinental, and Guevara sometime that year
addressed his last major political article to it. The article was first
published in April 1967 in the inaugural issue of the organization's
magazine, under Guevara's title, "Create two, three . . . many Vietnams
- that is the watchword." Often referred to as the Message to the
Tricontinental, Guevara's 1966 article is included in the opening pages
of the book under review.
In the interview with Madrid and Waters, Villegas underlines the
importance of this document for the fighters in Bolivia. "As combatants
we studied the world situation that Che evaluates in his `Message to
the Tricontinental,'" Villegas says. "That was part of the school, the
training of future leaders. Above all, the world situation was marked
by the genocidal war being waged against the people of Vietnam," and by
their ultimately victorious struggle against imperialist domination.
"The war in Vietnam, as you know better than we do, shook the world,"
Villegas told the two U.S.-based revolutionary journalists. "It shook
U.S. society - the Vietnam syndrome, the economic crisis generated by
the war and from which imperialism has never completely recovered."
Just as Vietnam's struggle was giving the Cuban revolution greater
maneuvering room to resist Washington's military probes and threats,
Guevara explained in the 1966 message, so too the most effective
solidarity Latin American revolutionists could extend their Indochinese
brothers and sisters was "the creation of the world's second or third
Vietnam, or second and third Vietnam."
Thus, in acting to advance the growing revolutionary wave in Latin
America's Southern Cone, Guevara and his co- combatants were putting
into practice the course presented at the close of the Message to the
Tricontinental - "Let it be known that we have measured the scope of
our acts and that we consider ourselves no more than a part of the
great army of the proletariat."
Preparing for battle
Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' is a valuable companion piece to
Guevara's own Bolivian Diary, also published by Pathfinder in English
translation. The story Villegas tells consists of two parts.
The first is the diary he kept from the time of his arrival in Bolivia
in July 1966 through May 28, 1967. That notebook, as he explains in his
introduction, was "captured together with Che's diary and other
documents" in October 1967, during the battle in which Guevara was
wounded and taken prisoner. The following year, Villegas says,
Bolivia's minister of the interior sent a retyped copy of it to Cuba.
"The original, which I did not receive a photographic copy of, remained
in Bolivia, in the custody of the army high command."
The second part of the book, covering the period from May 1967 through
Villegas's return to Cuba the following March, is based on a series of
talks he gave in Havana's La Cabaña military fortress.
In the diary's initial entries, written in July and early August 1966
just after Villegas had arrived in Bolivia, he describes the political
and logistical preparations for the campaign by a nucleus of Cuban and
Bolivian cadres. This included discussions with Peruvian revolutionists
about why Guevara and the Cuban leadership had decided against
launching operations initially in Peru, which they had previously
considered.
"We explained that for the moment conditions are better in Bolivia,
given the turn of events [in Peru] following the defeat of the armed
struggle there." Between October 1965 and January 1966, several
guerrilla fronts in Peru had sustained heavy blows, including the
deaths or imprisonment of their central leaders. Despite initial
hesitations over this decision, three Peruvian revolutionists joined
the forces gathering in Bolivia.
Villegas also describes the negotiations he and other members of the
preparations team conducted with the leadership of the Bolivian
Communist Party, in particular its general secretary Mario Monje.
Seventeen members of the CP and its youth organization were among the
29 Bolivians who joined in the revolutionary operation. Among them was
Inti Peredo, who survived the Bolivian army encirclement in late 1967
along with Pombo and others and wrote an account in early 1969 entitled
My Campaign with Che. (It is included as an appendix to Pathfinder's
edition of Guevara's Bolivian Diary.) Peredo was murdered later that
year after resisting an assault by Bolivian cops on the house in La Paz
where he was living clandestinely.
The actions of the Bolivian CP leadership were another matter
altogether. The Jan. 1, 1967, entry in Pombo's diary recounts the
political showdown with Monje at the guerrilla's base camp in
southeastern Bolivia, following Guevara's arrival in the country the
previous November. Monje laid down a series of preconditions for
supporting the struggle, first and foremost that political and military
leadership be in the hands of the Bolivian CP.
Guevara rejected this ultimatum and called the fighters together to
explain what had happened. "I explained that I could not accept the
position of adviser," Villegas quotes Guevara as saying. "I told him I
believed that I was more qualified than he was, both militarily and
politically, since I have had the advantage of going through a
revolutionary process in which I acquired the necessary experience, and
that false modesty served no purpose. I explained that I did not aspire
to lead the revolutionary struggle in Bolivia but to collaborate in the
continent-wide struggle."
Villegas reports that Monje "then held a meeting with the Bolivians
[who had joined the guerrilla unit] and told them that the party is not
going to join in the armed struggle. He told them they must go back to
the city. If not, they would be expelled from the party and payments to
their families would be stopped inasmuch as they had leadership
standing." Monje's appeals to desert were to no avail. But the Bolivian
CP leadership henceforth urged its followers not to join Che's
guerrilla.
Cuba's unstinting support
The effort to advance the developing revolutionary situation in the
Americas from a base in Bolivia had the active backing of the
leadership in Cuba. "In all honesty," Villegas says in the interview
with Madrid and Waters, "we must say that the Cuban revolution
supported this course entirely. This is what Fidel was teaching too...
"And for this reason," he added, "we also participated. We had Cuban
comrades in Venezuela at the time; others were in Guatemala, or on
their way to Colombia. The Cuban revolution gave support to all these
movements that sought liberation for the world's hungry masses."
This internationalist record is documented in another new book
published in Cuba earlier this year, entitled Secrets of Generals. It
contains 41 interviews with top officers of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed
Forces, including information never before made public about their
experiences fighting alongside revolutionary movements in Latin America
and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. A review of the
book appeared in the May 26 Militant.
The oath Pombo and other combatants took following Guevara's death to
continue the struggle, says Mary-Alice Waters in the publishers'
preface to Villegas's book, "embodies the internationalist commitment
evident through the entire course of the leadership of the Cuban
revolution: from the war against the Batista dictatorship itself, to
Venezuela, to Algeria, to Vietnam, to the Congo, to Bolivia, to Angola
and the battle against the apartheid invaders at Cuito Cuanavale, to
Nicaragua, Grenada, and many others, to today.
"The most intransigent foes of the Cuban revolution in Washington and
elsewhere have no doubt that if conditions allow, the revolutionary
leadership of Cuba, from Fidel Castro on down, will not hesitate to act
again with exactly the same internationalist selflessness."
`We believed in Che's course'
Fidel Castro himself clearly explained the Cuban leadership's attitude
toward the Bolivian operation in his June 1968 "A Necessary
Introduction" to Guevara's Bolivian Diary. There, Castro condemns those
who "call themselves Marxists, Communists, and other such titles" but
label "Che a mistaken adventurer, or, when they speak more benignly, an
idealist whose death marked the swan song of revolutionary armed
struggle in Latin America...
"That is how they justify those who do not want to fight, who will
never fight for the people and their liberation," Castro said. "That is
how they justify those who have made a caricature of revolutionary
ideas, turning them into an opium-like dogma with neither content nor
message for the masses; those who have converted the organizations of
popular struggle into instruments of conciliation with domestic and
foreign exploiters." The Cuban leader continued: "In all epochs and
under all circumstances, there will always be an abundance of pretexts
for not fighting; but not fighting is the surest way to never attain
freedom...
"Che conceived of the struggle in Bolivia not as an isolated
occurrence," Castro pointed out, "but as part of a revolutionary
liberation movement that would rapidly extend to other countries in
South America."
Castro returned to this question on the occasion of the 20th
anniversary of Guevara's death in combat, in a 1987 interview with
Italian journalist Gianni Mina. It was Guevara himself that conceived
of the Bolivian operation, Castro said. "The idea, the plan, everything
was his." But "we believed in what [Che] was doing, and we believed he
could carry out what he proposed," Castro added. "What we did was help
him. We helped something we thought was possible."
And help they did, unstintingly.
A journey through the useful glossary of names and organizations in
Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' - based on that in the
Spanish-language edition prepared by Editora Política - paints a
striking picture of the 16 Cuban cadres who volunteered to join the
effort and were released from other duties to do so. Each of them was a
veteran of the Rebel Army campaigns that overthrew the Yankee-backed
Batista dictatorship (that story is told in Guevara's Episodes of the
Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956 - 58, also published by Pathfinder). Many
were officers of the FAR or the Ministry of the Interior, and one had
been the head of G-2, the counterintelligence division of the Cuban
police. Five fought with Guevara in the Congo. Three, not including
Guevara, had been members of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Cuba.
What's more, between July and September 1966, the Cuban leadership
established a clandestine training ground for Che and his co-combatants
in the Pinar del Río province in western Cuba.
Guevara based his perspectives for the Bolivian campaign on the
judgment, as he put it in the Message to the Tricontinental, that
"rebellion is ripening at an accelerated rate" in Latin America and
"will in due time acquire continental dimensions."
Revolutionary perspectives
How was this judgment borne out in the aftermath of the defeat in
Bolivia in October 1967? Villegas's account ends with his return to
Cuba in March 1968, but the chronology, photos, and captions in the
book take the story forward a few years.
In Bolivia itself, efforts to renew the guerrilla struggle in 1969 - 70
were brutally crushed by the regime. In late 1970 and early 1971,
however, the armed forces divided in face of rising popular
mobilizations and an armed uprising by workers, peasants, and students.
A People's Assembly - an incipient workers' parliament - was formed in
February 1971. When workers' leaders failed over several months to
organize the toilers in fighting to establish a workers and peasants
government, however, rightist forces reasserted their dominance and
unleashed murderous repression.
In May 1969 massive worker-led uprisings in the Argentine industrial
cities of Rosario and Co'rdoba - the latter imprinted to this day as
the Cordobazo in the consciousness of millions of workers in that
country - ushered in some seven years of sharpening class struggle. As
in Bolivia, however, the class-collaborationist political course of the
workers' leadership paved the way for a military coup in 1976 and the
notorious "dirty war" in which more than 10,000 Argentines were killed
or "disappeared."
In Chile rising working-class and peasant struggles created the
conditions in which Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende was elected
president of the country in September 1970. The working class continued
to mobilize over the next several years. Disarmed both literally and
politically by the Socialist Party and Communist Party leaderships,
however, the workers' movement was dealt a decisive defeat by a
rightist coup in September 1973.
Today, as the 30th anniversary of the death of Che and his comrades
approaches, there is once again a rise of struggles in Latin America's
Southern Cone. In Argentina, in particular, there has been an explosion
of working-class and student revolts in recent months against the
devastating consequences of joblessness and government belt-tightening,
following similar rebellions since the end of 1993.
In Bolivia tens of thousands of workers and peasants took to the
streets last year to resist the government's sell-off of the national
patrimony, protest cop murders, and demand land reform. In Chile coal
miners and copper miners have waged strikes and protest actions. In
Brazil peasants and rural workers are fighting for land rights.
These struggles are part of a broader pattern of resistance today by
working people to the consequences of world capitalism's depression
conditions, including, to a growing degree, in the imperialist
countries of Europe and North America.
Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' is must reading for youth and workers
engaged in the struggles that are now under way and will increase in
the years ahead. It describes the kind of disciplined, politically
conscious, and self- sacrificing men and women who can forge
revolutionary organizations capable of leading these struggles to
victory, and of opening the road to the socialist future Ernesto Che
Guevara and his compañeros fought and died for.
At the close of the introduction to his book, Brigadier General Harry
Villegas says that in preparing his diary and account for publication,
he had in mind its usefulness "to young people who wish to study the
life and work" of Che Guevara. "It is my hope," Villegas says, "that
these youth get a better understanding and appreciation of the times we
are living through and of the greatness of the human values embodied in
Che's life, expressed through his early and lifelong decision to fight
for humanity."
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