Cuban History Archives - Not Even Past

Che Guevara’s Last Interview

October 9th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Among the documental gems housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library is Guevara’s last interview. It occurred on the very morning of his execution. A Cuban-American agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, Félix Rodríguez, conducted the interview. Rodríguez composed a memorandum of his talk with the revolutionary and sent it from Bolivia to CIA headquarters at Langley, which forwarded it to the White House.

The CIA agent even convinced Guevara to pose for his last live photograph.

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency had been tracking the activities of the Argentinean-born revolutionary who served as Fidel Castro’s guerrilla lieutenant, economic czar, and international agent provocateur. In the spring of 1964, CIA lost the scent. They speculated that Che Guevara was dead. The White House did not learn that he might still be alive until April 1967, when Bolivia’s president, René Barrientos, wrote directly to President Johnson requesting urgent military assistance. Barrientos was facing a guerrilla uprising by both Cubans and Bolivians led by the legendary El Che.

Why Bolivia? Guevara had grown weary of his leadership role in socializing Cuba’s economy and having to explain why production had declined drastically. At the same time, his diplomatic role involved justifying Cuba’s deviation from the doctrines of its chief benefactors in Moscow. Fidel and Che aided revolutionary insurgencies abroad at a time that Soviet leaders carried on policies of “peaceful coexistence” with the West.

Guerrillero Heroico, 1960 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Ideologically, Guevara had more in common with Chairman Mao Zedong than Leonid Brezhnev. Yet on his final trip to Beijing, Mao refused to meet with Che. Other Chinese officials accused him of “revisionism” for accepting aid from the Soviets. Guevara decided to retire from politics and economics and devote himself to what he knew best – guerrilla warfare.

Che Guevara had always fancied himself as Latin America’s chief guerrilla strategist. He suggested that the lessons of the Cuban Revolution could be replayed elsewhere in Latin America. Guerrilla movements were still active in Central American and in Colombia and Venezuela. His idea was to spread thin the forces of imperialism, to “create two, three Vietnams,” as Guevara wrote in his famous message to the Tricontinental Conference. Che, then 38 years old, wanted to ignite the revolution in Southern South America while he still had the stamina he had under Fidel’s orders nine years earlier.

In the eastern foothills of Bolivia, Che assembled a fighting force of about fifty men, divided between thirty Bolivians and the rest Cubans and other foreigners. Remarkably, neither the CIA nor Latin American customs officials had picked up any indication of the movement of men and arms into the heart of South America. Guevara had planned that Paraguayans, Peruvians, and Brazilians would join his group and gain sufficient skills to begin guerrilla uprisings in their own countries. Eventually, Che wanted to return to his native Argentina with a band of his own paisanos. It was not to be.

The White House responded to President Barrientos by dispatching two Cuban-American CIA agents and seventeen Green Berets from the Panama Canal Zone. The Green Berets were to train a battalion of Bolivian guerrilla-hunting rangers. The intelligence agents offered to supervise Bolivian units in the field. Agent Félix Rodríguez was assigned to the Bolivian Army at the rank of a captain.

Che in Bolivia, 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Months of isolation and firefights with Bolivian forces had reduced Che’s group from fifty to some twenty men by the end of September 1967. At that moment, the first units of the ranger battalion trained by the US Special Forces arrived on the front lines. In its first battle with the guerrillas on October 8, a company of rangers captured the leader. “Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “I’m El Che and I’m worth more to you alive than dead.”

Guevara’s surrender allowed several of his men to retreat, though the rangers caught up and killed many of them. On the morning of the next day, Agent Félix Rodríguez flew to the small hamlet in eastern Bolivia where the wounded Che was held prisoner. The CIA agent pleaded with the commanders to permit him to take Guevara to the Panama Canal Zone for interrogation, but they informed him that President Barrientos had already announced that Che had died in battle the day before.

Rodríguez went to talk to Che Guevara. “Nobody interrogates me!” said Che, although he did consent to have a conversation with the CIA officer. Rodríguez untied the captive and invited him outside into the bright sunlight for a photo. The agent and the prisoner returned inside for a chat.

Che refused to denounce Fidel. He told Rodríguez that Castro was not a communist until after he came to power. Moreover, Guevara wanted Fidel to know that the revolution in Latin America would ultimately succeed. Che advised his wife back home in Cuba to marry again. He knew he was going to die, reported Rodríguez, but “Che never lost his composure.”

Within a few minutes, a Bolivian sergeant came to shoot the world famous revolutionary. “Let me stand up,” El Che said to him. “Know that you are killing a man! Now shoot, dammit!”

172. Memorandum From Director of Central Intelligence Helms

Washington, October 13, 1967.

MEMORANDUM FOR
The Secretary of State
The Secretary of Defense
Mr. Walt W. Rostow
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs

SUBJECT
Statements by Ernesto “Che” Guevara Prior to His Execution in Bolivia

Further details have now been obtained from [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] who was on the scene in the small village of Higueras where Ernesto “Che” Guevara was taken after his capture on 8 October 1967 by the Bolivian Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion.
[less than 1 line of source text not declassified] attempted to interrogate Guevara on 9 October 1967 as soon as he got access to him at around 7 a.m. At that time “Che” Guevara was sitting on the floor in the corner of a small, dark schoolroom in Higueras [sic]. He had his hands over his face. His wrists and feet were tied. In front of him on the floor lay the corpses of two Cuban guerrillas. Guevara had a flesh wound in his leg, which was bandaged.
Guevara refused to be interrogated but permitted himself to be drawn into a conversation with [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] during which he made the following comments:
Cuban economic situation: Hunger in Cuba is the result of pressure by United States imperialism. Now Cuba has become self-sufficient in meat production and has almost reached the point where it will begin to export meat. Cuba is the only economically self-sufficient country in the Socialist world.
Camilo Cienfuegos: For many years the story has circulated that Fidel Castro Ruz had Cienfuegos, one of his foremost deputies, killed because his personal popularity presented a danger to Castro. Actually the death of Cienfuegos was an accident. Cienfuegos has been in Oriente Province when he received a call to attend a general staff meeting in Havana. He left by plane and the theory was that the plane became lost in low-ceiling flying conditions, consumed all of its fuel, and crashed in the ocean, and no trace of him was ever found. Castro had loved Cienfuegos more than any of his lieutenants.
Fidel Castro Ruz: Castro had not been a Communist prior to the success of the Cuban Revolution. Castro’s own statements on the subject are correct.
The Congo: American imperialism had not been the reason for his failure there but, rather, the Belgian mercenaries. He denied ever having several thousand troops in the Congo, as sometimes reported, but admitted having had “quite a few”.
Treatment of Guerrilla Prisoners in Cuba: During the course of the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, there had been only about 1,500 individuals killed, exclusive of armed encounters such as the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban Government, of course, executed all guerrilla leaders who invaded its territory. . . . (He stopped then with a quizzical look on his face and smiled as he recognized his own position on Bolivian soil.)
Future of the Guerrilla Movement in Bolivia: With his capture, the guerrilla movement had suffered an overwhelming setback in Bolivia, but he predicted a resurgence in the future. He insisted that his ideals would win in the end even though he was disappointed at the lack of response from the Bolivian campesinos. The guerrilla movement had failed partially because of Bolivian Government propaganda which claimed that the guerrillas represented a foreign invasion of Bolivian soil. In spite of the lack of popular response from the Bolivian campesinos, he had not planned an exfiltration route from Bolivia in case of failure. He had definitely decided to either fall or win in this effort.
According to [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] when Guevara, Simon Cuba, and Aniceto Reynaga Gordillo were captured on 8 October, the Bolivian Armed Forces Headquarters ordered that they be kept alive for a time. A telegraphic code was arranged between La Paz and Higueras with the numbers 500 representing Guevara, 600 meaning the phrase “keep alive” and 700 representing “execute”. During the course of the discussion with Guevara, Simon Cuba and Aniceto Reynaga were detained in the next room of the school house. At one stage, a burst of shots was heard and [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] learned later that Simon Cuba had been executed. A little later a single shot was heard and it was learned afterward that Aniceto Reynaga had been killed. When the order came at 11:50 a.m. from La Paz to kill Guevara, the execution was delayed as long as possible. However, when the local commander was advised that a helicopter would arrive to recover the bodies at approximately 1:30 p.m., Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m. Guevara’s last words were, “Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will again rise in the Americas.” To his executioner he said, “Remember, you are killing a man.”
At no time during the period he was under [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] observation did Guevara lose his composure.

Dick

[Richard Helms, Director of the CIA]

Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Bolivia, Vol. IV, Memoranda, January 1966-December 1968. Secret. Copies of this memorandum in CIA files indicate that it was drafted by Broe and [name not declassified] in the Western Hemisphere Division and approved by Karamessines. (Central Intelligence Agency, DDO/IMS, Operational Group, Job 78-06423A, U.S. Government-President).

For more on Che in Bolivia see Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

Also by Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

On the Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
On the Phone with LBJ and Panamanian President Roberto F. Chiari

Yoav Di-Capua on the story behind an image of Che in Gaza
Edward Shore reviews Che: A Revolutionary Life by Lee Anderson
Franz D. Hensel Riveros reviews Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey

The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura (2013)

By Rebecca Johnston

Leonardo Padura is arguably one of Cuba’s most untouchable writers. He made his name first as an investigative journalist, and then as the author of the Havana Quartet detective series, sometimes described as “morality tales for the post-Soviet era.” The Man Who Loved Dogs is by far his most ambitious work. A painstakingly-researched historical novel, it is the culmination of Padura’s twenty-year journey, beginning at the final home of Soviet exile Leon Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico and concluding with the National Prize for Literature, Cuba’s highest literary honor. It has received nearly universal critical praise, with the bemusing exception of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Their dissatisfaction may have stemmed from the premise in their review that Padura’s book is about “why revolutions and revolutionaries fail,” which it is not.

The Man Who Loved Dogs is largely a novel about struggle. The complex narrative follows the lives of three protagonists, one of whom is also the narrator, across two continents and several decades. The first, Leon Trotsky, struggles to remain politically relevant after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, fighting to maintain an alternative to Stalin’s form of communism through his global opposition movement and the Fourth International. Next is Spanish revolutionary Ramón Mercader, struggling to defend the ideals handed down to him from Moscow, pledging unwavering obedience first to his radical Marxist lover África, then to his sociopathic mother Caridad, and finally to a coercive state bureaucracy. Finally, the narrator, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, struggles to survive the reconstitutive process by which Fidel Castro’s Cuban government seeks to shape him into the “New Soviet Man.” The novel subjects Iván to a series of “falls,” one after another, until, as he puts it, “they fucked me for the rest of my life.” Throughout the book, all three protagonists struggle to come to terms with their actions, to determine who they are, and what meaning their lives may have had.

Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico, ca. 1938 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All of this struggle raises the question of what it is that the characters are struggling for. At times, the fight seems to be an end in and of itself, something the characters often seem aware of. Ramón joins the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War, “convinced that his life only had meaning if he was able to defend with a rifle the ideas in which he believed.” At the same time, those ideals “had been only recently discovered by many,” and yet he and those around him had “prepared themselves for sacrifice.” Trotsky’s first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, lays the death of their daughter at Trotsky’s feet, “accusing him of having marginalized Zinushka from the political struggle and of having thus pushed her to her death.” For Sokolovskaya, denying Zina a role in that battle was more deadly than the tuberculosis consuming her lungs. For each of them, struggle itself was a method of survival.

There are external motivations for these struggles as well. On accepting a Jason Bourne-style pact, the Soviet government transforms Ramón into Soldier 13, an entity that “did what they asked him to out of obedience and conviction.” Indeed, the importance of obedience dominates Ramón’s entire political career. Early on, África makes it clear to him that the Party is always right and obedience to the Party is mandatory, even though you may never understand the Party. Similarly, Iván’s rise from his falls was contingent on obedience to the Party line. He is given continual “correctives” until his writing falls within the acceptable standards set for him by the Cuban government, itself obeying the order to adopt them from the Soviet model.

Proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in Barcelona, 14 April 1931 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Central to both these instances of obedience, and key to understanding the book, is a denial of access to knowledge. When Iván speaks with his friend Dany about conducting research on Trotsky, Dany emphasizes the inherent danger of particular forms of knowledge. “I’m not going to become a Trotskyist or any shit like that,” Iván spits in defense. “What I need is to know…k-n-o-w, you get it? Or is it also forbidden to know?” To which Dany replies: “But you already know that Trotsky is fire!” Any type of knowledge that falls outside the Party line is potentially deadly. As a writer and radio worker, Iván is responsible for propagandizing the “correct” form of knowledge, making his transgression even more dangerous than that of a typical citizen. While Iván is coerced to shun any knowledge of Trotsky, Ramón is called upon to eliminate him in the most literal fashion. He accepts the Soviet government’s “first sacred principle: obedience,” allowing himself to be denied an understanding of truth, and ultimately destroying this alternative interpreter and propagandizer of knowledge.

Aside from Iván and Ramón, Padura shows us one of the twentieth centuries’ most violent displays of state control of knowledge: Stalin’s show trials. During the Soviet Terror of the 1930s, it was not enough to confess to being a Trotskyist-Bukharinite Japanese-German fascist spy. Defendants were made to perform self-criticism, ultimately regurgitating newly-fashioned realities of their nonexistent transgressions in public court. The Soviet government had the power to extract these false confessions, even from its own executioners, and then to force them to speak them into reality. Understanding the power of this performance is why Ramón’s handlers in Moscow bring him to not just any show trial, but the trial of Genrikh Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD (later the KGB). The lesson here for Ramón was precisely about truth, which in his case means one thing: obedience. As his handler puts it: “No one resists. Not even Yagoda. Neither will Yezhov when his turn comes.” Spoiler: Nikolai Yezhov, Yagoda’s successor, doesn’t even last another two years.

Soviet newspaper “Perekovka” (“Reforging”), front page announcing the replacement of Genrikh Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov, 1936 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Trotsky, on the other hand, is more characterized by disobedience than anything else, and his own struggle helps to put the others in perspective. Our narrator tells us: “The struggle on which he had to focus from that moment on would be one against men, against a faction, never against the Idea.” Trotsky’s struggle was against Stalin and anyone who bought into Stalin’s interpretation of the “Idea.” The Idea, he explains, is “the truth of the revolution,” and he wishes to “throw himself into the void and proclaim the need for a new party capable of recovering” it. His crusade had always been to establish himself as the bearer of that truth, for the sake of which he committed bloody “excesses” that he would later claim to regret. Whereas Ramón and Iván are coerced to obediently accept and promote the Soviet government’s Truth, Trotsky seeks to convince others that he is the one with the real Truth, so everyone should obey him. The guilt over his “excesses,” and the fear that his command over Truth might transform him into “a pseudo-communist czar” like Stalin, was ultimately insufficient to dissuade him altogether.

Josef Stalin, 1949 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Tragically for the book’s heroes, it turns out they were struggling for nothing. In fighting “men” instead of the “Idea,” Trotsky forgot, as Dany reminds us, to “think about people.” They are the ones, after all, creating the ideas. The Soviet government certainly recognized as much, since in ordering Ramón to destroy Trotsky, they sought to destroy a particular set of ideas that threatened their own. Of course, we’ve heard these critiques of Soviet-style communism before. But at the heart of Padura’s book is something much farther reaching: it is the impossibility of utopia, communist or otherwise, and moreover, the destruction of knowledge that utopian projects inherently entail. For Padura, the construction of any utopia is a violent struggle over control of the “truth,” a struggle that leaves no room for the people for whom the utopia is supposedly built. Trotsky even acknowledges as much when he notes that the first executions from the show trials spelled the “death rattle of utopia;” Iván and Ramón were its “gullible” victims. It is no mistake, as Dany concludes, that the only utopia available to them is the one beyond the grave.

Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

Also by Rebecca Johnston on Not Even Past:
Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia.

You may also like:
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba, by Jonathan C. Brown.
The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba, by Frank A. Guridy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

by Priya Ramamoorthy, Kavya Ramamoorthy, Smrithi Mahadevan and Maanasa Nathan
Westwood High School
Senior Division
Group Website

Over thirteen tense days in October, 1962, nuclear conflict nearly broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union. These global superpowers were engaged in a bitter standoff over the appearance of Soviet nuclear missiles on the newly communist island of Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida. Fortunately, after days of diplomacy and negotiation, tensions cooled and neither side deployed their nuclear arsenal. According to Stacey Bredhoff, Curator of the Kennedy Library, those terrifying two weeks, later dubbed The Cuban Missile Crisis, “was certainly the most dangerous episode in human history.”

A map of the Cuban missile positions (Getty 50th Anniversary Gallery)

Westwood High School students Priya Ramamoorthy, Kavya Ramamoorthy, Smrithi Mahadevan and Maanasa Nathan won first place in the Senior Group Website category at Texas History Day with their digital report on this infamous moment in world history. The site explores the political context of the crisis, the individuals involved, key events and its aftermath. You can explore their award winning site, “The Cuban Missile Crisis” here.

“Danger off our shores: This newspaper map shows the distances from Cuba to various cities on the North American continent.” – (Bettmann/CORBIS, TIME Magazine)

The group concludes that it was a seminal moment in not only American history but global history:

The crucible of the Cuban Missile Crisis captured the attention of President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev and forced them to prioritize world stability over national rights. This culminated in an increased understanding of each political adversary’s perspective. The crisis proved that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is an unreliable deterrent. Although fifty years have passed, its lessons remain relevant. As more nations develop nuclear weapons with each passing year, the risk of a devastating exchange increases. To prevent nuclear war diplomacy must be prioritized at all times. While exercising their sovereign rights, countries must consider the bigger picture of global stability.

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