For the second time in less than fifteen days, I landed in Havana. The intelligence services were there to meet Claudia and I. While we waited for the key to her house, we repeated our vow of friendship and wished each other good luck. Suddenly, the army appeared in the shape of Olo Pantoja, a captain in Che’s column that had won the great victory in Santa Clara. A bit chubby with curly brown hair, he told Claudia her house was ready and introduced her to the people who would be looking after her. I was to go with him. Claudia and I said our last goodbyes, not knowing if we would ever see each other again. Pantoja took the bag with my few clothes and books and we got into an army jeep. There was barely enough room because the floor was littered with guns. ‘They’re for you, to practise with’, he said. The time had come. I had to learn to kill. That is, I had to learn to die.
The Cuban saga in the Sierra Maestra had diverse and contradictory consequences. For the Cubans themselves, there was an impact on national politics and economic strategies, and it also affected ordinary people, both socially and psychologically. Abroad, there was an irreversible impact on international relations, with regard to the north–south confrontation. The economic dependence of the south was structurally linked to its military subjugation, and the empire’s repression of any sign of national or regional independence was justified by the pretext of fighting communism.
The individual Cubans who had taken part in the epic saga were affected in many different ways. The majority went on to occupy positions in Cuba to which they would never have had access before, since the new society was based not on class but on their own sense of responsibility. Some discovered late in the day that the struggle had not been fought for personal gain, that the bearded fighters had opened the door to social change. Others, like Che, realised that they had to go on through that door and turn military victory into Revolution – that if Revolution does not change society, it is nothing.
Needless to say, Revolution led to confrontation with the continent’s dominant power. Moreover, the Revolution’s ability to confront the imperial power successfully depended on its capacity to resist the inevitable reactionary attacks. The basic argument was that no small country would have the capacity to resist by itself, and especially not Cuba, an island in the ‘mare nostrum’ of the empire, a few kilometres off its coast. It would be naïve and foolish to ignore this obvious fact. It was clearly unavoidable and imperative to create this capacity to resist, not just inside Cuba but outside as well.
Yet this was not just a question of will. The means also have to exist. Without economic autonomy, there can be no political or ideological autonomy. A revolution needs to be independent in all aspects: ties of dependency block the machinery of government and prevent progress. Economic independence is the key. In the twenty-first century, this idea seems redundant because the economy is everything. But in the 1960s, notions of national identity, Western civilization, self-determination, cultural, ethical and even aesthetic patrimony were still considered important. To maintain independence, to have the freedom to negotiate, to accept or reject policies at the international level, was of paramount importance. Especially, to be able to negotiate. In this sense, it was clear that Argentina had better prospects than other Latin American countries.
A revolution will never succeed in a poor backward country. Revolutionaries can take power, but nothing else. They will never be allowed to remain in power without surrendering their ideals and corrupting their principles. They will not be allowed to succeed. A victorious revolution is like a cancer spreading through the continent, erupting here and there. Then, if the empire is caught off guard, it will devote all its surgical skills to cutting the cancer out, above all other political considerations. The strength of the Cuban Revolution was to take power by its own means, by the will of its people, in defiance of doctrinal wisdom. Its subsequent unfolding drama was that of a lonely shipwrecked sailor besieged by dangerous sharks.
For Che, the commander of the guerrilla forces in Santa Clara in 1958 that had defeated the Batista regime and brought Castro to power, the danger was only just beginning. The Revolution was prey to all kinds of aggression – political, military, diplomatic and economic – that aimed to force it to abandon its independence and capitulate, or simply be invaded and obliterated. The only way to avoid this fate was to get support from outside Cuba, from a similar kind of independent revolution in an economically important country in Latin America, a revolution capable of consolidating the task of constructing a just society for all its peoples and resisting the pressures and conditions imposed by the existing world order.
This ambitious and adventurous idea became possible only through the single golden thread that sought to marry the power of subjective action with the harsh reality of objective facts: the introduction of myth into politics and war. That is, a physical presence that would lead the struggle, a hero with no national allegiance but who had not forgotten his ties to his homeland – the presence of Che, the Argentine, who believed it was legitimate to fight for a better society, no matter the country, but all the better if it was his own.
This idea embraces everything that Che had learned both from his guerrilla experience and the exercise of power. Two things were fundamental and complementary: the theory of the foco and the theory of the ‘new man’. According to the foco theory, a small nucleus of fighters can successfully confront a regular army in a country where there are huge inequalities, because the people will support and strengthen a determined struggle for power. Armed action, directed against the forces of repression and backed up by the guerrillas’ impeccable behaviour towards its local campesino base and captured soldiers, would also constitute a lesson in how to become a new kind of human being. Personal vices and egoism would be abandoned and replaced by a process of transformation. Through sacrifice, self-control, dedication and suffering, this would eventually lead to an understanding of the importance of solidarity and justice. Were the process to be sustained and developed, an organizational or party leadership would emerge that would draw on cadres influenced by an unwavering revolutionary ethic. When the resulting revolutionary forces came to power, they would create a society without injustice or discrimination. The basis for building this new society would be the ‘new man’, someone without defects or aberrant inclinations.
Looked at so schematically, the idea is to politics what a simple sum is to mathematics. It lacks any analysis of the situation in Argentina, of the international context, or of history, let alone of the law of probabilities – not to mention common sense and folly. From the point of view of the scientific analysis of human problems, rational intellectuals of the past 150 years had studied, measured, compared and scrutinized every political and social event on the five continents. Yet the most serious and prestigious left-wing intellectuals, cocooned in the most rarefied strands of thinking, were blind to the obvious signs appearing in the edifice of world revolution like cracks in a dam. They deceived themselves and others about the ‘new socialist society’ that was itself being built, as a matter of fact, on injustice, bloodshed and suffering. Some got a whiff of the smell of death, from tales of famine and repression, but they disguised it – like the bourgeoisie of centuries past – with the perfume of their own intellect and their own theories, and encouraged others to engage in collective