In a radio interview shortly after he entered Havana, Che Guevara gave a good clue to what lay ahead for Cuban blacks. A prominent Cuban businessman named Luis Pons, who happened to be black, called and asked Che what the revolution planned on doing to help blacks.
“We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution,” snapped Che. “By which I mean: nothing.”
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Today Pons is a prominent Cuban-American businessman in New York, and one of the founders of the Cuban American National Foundation. His mother was denied permission to leave Cuba, precisely because she was black.
“When we were training in Mexico before landing in Cuba,” recalls Miguel Sanchez, who did much of the training, “Che delighted in belittling the Cuban black guerrilla named Juan Almedia. He always sneered at him as ‘el Negrito.’ Almedia would get furious at Che so I finally told him, ‘Look, Juan, when Che calls you el Negrito call him
El Chancho
(the pig) because that guy never, but never takes baths.’ And it worked for a while. But Che soon found other targets for his innate racism, sneering at all ‘these illiterate Indians in Mexico.’ ”
2
Did this attitude hobble Che in dealing with African troops? By April 1965, Che was in Tanzania with a contingent of Cuban military officers and troops. Code-named “Tatu,” Che and his force entered the Eastern Congo, which was convulsed at the time by an incomprehensible series of civil (mostly tribal) wars. Leave it to Ernesto Guevara to size up this madhouse conflagration as a “people’s war” against “capitalist oppressors” that demanded “proletarian brotherhood.”
Tatu’s self-appointed mission was to help the alternately Soviet-and Chinese-backed “Simbas” of the Congolese Red leader, Laurent Kabila, those of Pierre Mulele, and several other bands of rapists, cutthroats, and cannibals. All these “liberation” groups were busy hacking their way through the Congolese followers of Moise Tshombe, along with many of the defenseless Europeans still left in the recently abandoned Belgian colony.
The Simbas’ sack of Stanleyville was particularly gruesome. Among those hacked to death during the murderous melee were American missionaries Dr. Paul Carlson and Phyllis Rine. U.S. Consul Michael Hoyt and his entire consulate staff and their families, though captured by the Simbas, who shrieked “
Ciyuga! Ciyuga!
[Kill! Kill!] Kill them all! Have no scruples! Men, women, children—kill them all!” while parading them through downtown Stanleyville, managed to escape alive. The Simbas had just herded their hostages into Stanleyville’s main square under the Patrice Lumumba statue and were moving in to comply with the command
“Ciyuga!”
when Belgian Foreign Legion paratroopers literally dropped in. They jumped from Hercules C-130s flown by U.S. pilots from bases in France. The Simbas scattered in panic.
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Soon the Belgian legionaries linked up with the mercenary forces of “Mad” Mike Hoare, with Congolese who opposed Kabila, and with some Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans sent by the CIA. The Cubans were mostly pilots who provided close air support for Mad Mike with North American T-28 Trojans and Douglas B-26 Invaders. A small force of Bay of Pigs veterans also formed part of Mad Mike’s Fifth Commando on the ground. They were soon making short work of the cannibal Simbas, to the lasting gratitude of Stanleyville’s terrorized residents.
Around this time Che—the mighty “Tatu”—made his entrance.
Che’s first military mission as an ally of these Simbas was to plot an attack on a garrison guarding a hydroelectric plant at Front Bendela on the Kimbi River in eastern Congo. An elaborate ambush of the garrison, it was meant to be a masterstroke. No sooner had Tatu’s ambushers blundered into position than the ambushers became the ambushed. They fell under a withering rain of mortar shells and machine-gun fire. In this first military masterstroke,
Comandante
Tatu lost half his men.
Che’s African allies started frowning a little more closely at his resume and asking a few questions (but in Swahili, which he didn’t understand). Victor Colas was a Cuban
comandante
attached to Che. “I finally decided to give the order to retreat,” he recounts about the next confrontation with Mad Mike and the CIA Cubans. “I turned around—and found I was alone! Apparently I’d been alone for a while. Everyone had fled. I’d been warned about this.”
A few more routs followed, and soon Che couldn’t get an audience with any African leader. “I tried to talk to Major Kasali,” records Che. “But he refused to see me saying he was suffering from a headache.”
4
For weeks, Simba head Laurent Kabila himself pointedly refused to answer any of Tatu’s correspondence. Finally he answered one missive brusquely, and Che was jubilant, responding like a neglected puppy to a man he had met only once, and briefly. “Dear Comrade,” Tatu wrote him back. “Thank you so much for your letter. I await your arrival here with impatience because I consider you an old friend, and I owe you an explanation. Also be assured: I put myself unconditionally under your orders. I also ask you a favor. Give me permission to join the fight with no other title than political commissar of my comrades.”
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Obviously, Che’s battlefield fame was spreading in Africa.
Some Simbas spoke halting French and were able to communicate with Che. “One of the first Congolese I met, a chief named Lambert,” recalls Che in his diaries, “explained to me while pounding his chest how he and his troops merely laughed at the enemy planes. Lambert explained that the planes were completely harmless, their bullets had struck him many times and simply bounced off and dropped to the ground. The reason was because he and his troops were completely protected by a
dawa
applied by a local
muganga,
or witch doctor, a very powerful one at that. This consisted of many magical herbs sprinkled over them before battle. The only problem came if the combatant either touched a woman before battle or experienced any fear during it. Then he would lose the
dawa
protection. The power of the particular
muganga
was also important.”
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Che, avowed Marxist theoretician that he was, seemed unfazed by this disclosure, reporting it in the same languid tone as the rest of his writings. Many of the Simbas’ “helmets” were manes of monkey fur and chicken feathers.
After one of the very few successful ambushes of Mad Mike’s Fifth Commando column, Che’s troops discovered that the ambushed truck contained a major stash of whiskey. Having evaded a complete stomping that day, Tatu was in proud form. His victory discourse on “proletarian internationalism” and “imperialist exploitation” was louder and longer than usual. Not that anyone ever listened particularly closely to Tatu’s promulgations. But that day his soldiers were truly distracted as they fell upon the captured truck’s contents. Soon the revelry started.
For the full picture here, let’s recall that “Tatu,” when known as “Che” in Cuba, had decreed a ban on liquor, dancing, and cock-fighting when he marched into Santa Clara. (This might come as something of a surprise to all the spring break revelers in Cancun who bear his image.)
It didn’t take long for the ambush site to become a madhouse of yelling and laughing as Tatu screeched hoarsely and futilely from the sidelines about “proletarian internationalism.” Alas, the Simbas had plenty of ammo left in their weapons, and soon the fireworks started, at first into the air. But soon aiming became difficult, and several Simbas ended up shooting themselves and each other in the festive melee. A poor peasant was quickly mowed down. The man was clearly a “spy of the mercenaries,” explained a soused Simba.
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(Richard Pryor’s famous skit where he played a pistol-packing Idi Amin Dada comes to mind here.)
Tatu soon hit upon a familiar solution to such problematic behavior by his troops. He proposed setting up a “Congolese Military Academy,” to properly indoctrinate his “African Liberation Army” in “proletarian brotherhood, and revolutionary consciousness,” much as he’d done with the militia recruits in Cuba.
The Cubans under Che Guevara’s command weren’t quite as sanguine. “This whole thing is a stupid pile of sh*t!” one complained. As rout followed rout for the Congolese rebels and their Cuban allies at the hands of Mad Mike Hoare, the Belgians, and the CIA Cubans, morale plummeted. “Many revolutionary comrades are doing a dishonor to their pledge as revolutionaries,” is how Tatu described this outburst of common sense among the Cuban troops in his
Congo Diaries
. “Their actions are the most reprehensible that can be imagined for a revolutionary. I am taking the most severe disciplinary measures against them.”
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So Che/Tatu hit upon the disciplinary measure of
threatening to send his Cuban colleagues home!
“We had no idea why we were in the Congo,” recalls Dariel Alarcon, who as a teenager was recruited into Che’s column in Cuba’s Sierra and accompanied him on every catastrophe from then on. “That Congo thing was very hasty and reckless. We were simply soldiers following orders. But it was impossible to tell Che anything. We were very immature at the time, and Che treated us like marionettes. Whenever he called a meeting it was to browbeat us. No one dared contradict anything he said or offer an opinion. ‘You there—shut your mouth!’ was all he’d say.”
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(Recall Castañeda’s statement that “Che’s decency and nobility always led him to apologize.”)
Che didn’t have anything like that leverage over his African charges, who usually laughed at him. One day Tatu finally put his foot down with the soldiers of his “African Liberation Army.” They had refused to dig trenches, to carry any supplies, to do any work whatsoever. “We’re not trucks,” they said, laughing at Che as he thundered his commands. “And we’re not Cubans” (here referring to the ones doing all the grunt work). Che finally lost it.
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“In my fury,” writes Che in his diaries, “I yelled at them that they were behaving like women. That I’d have to put aprons on them and baskets on their heads so they could carry yucca around like women.”
But Che’s tirade had to first pass through an interpreter. A French-speaking African would stand close to Che and translate his exhortations for the troops. This meant a slight time lag until his grandiloquence hit home. First the troops turned to face the sputtering Che. Then they turned to the interpreter, who would disclose what all that red-faced sputtering was about.
When the message finally sank in, “they started cackling hysterically,” Che writes, “and in a very ingenious and disconcerting manner.” It never seemed to occur to the shrewd Che, who didn’t understand a word of Swahili, that his interpreters might deliberately mistranslate, thus framing the mighty Tatu as an even bigger jackass than his local fame already proclaimed.
Weeks and months went by and finally one of Che’s Cubans, a high Cuban Communist Party official, Emilio Aragones, burst out: “Che!—
que cojones!
[roughly, “what the fuck”] are we doing here!” Che responded with his standard rhetoric about international proletarian solidarity and anti-imperialism. His comrades rolled their eyes, nodded, and walked off.
The Cubans on the other side of the battlefield had a very different experience. Mad Mike Hoare, after watching his allies, noted: “These Cuban CIA men were as tough, dedicated, and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding. Their leader [Rip Robertson] was the most extraordinary and dedicated soldier I’ve ever met. Those Cuban airmen put on an aerial show to compete with any. They’d swoop down, strafing and bombing with an aggressive spirit that was contagious to the ground troops who then advanced in full spirit of close-quarter combat.”
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Gus Ponzoa is a Cuban-American pilot who flew near-suicidal missions over Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion, where half of his pilot brothers in arms were killed in action. Gus inflicted dreadful damage on his communist enemies at the Bay of Pigs. Four years later he itched to fight those enemies again and ripped into them in the Congo.
“I really hate to laugh about what we did against Che Guevara in the Congo,” he says. “And I’m honored that Mad Mike Hoare thinks highly of us. We certainly think highly of him. That man was a fighter! He was a tank commander against Rommel at El Alamein, then in southern Africa he was a brave and resourceful commander again. But when I think back at those African cannibals we were up against, the ones Che—the mighty ‘Tatu’—supposedly led, good grief! . . . I’d fly air cover over Hoare’s Fifth Commando, which also included Cuban Americans, Bay of Pigs veterans and friends of mine. That was a thick jungle in the Congo, as you can imagine. We had to fly low—very low, usually following the roads. That was the only way to navigate over that jungle area. I’d spot the enemy and I’d radio down to Hoare’s men: ‘Throw a smoke grenade, let us know where you are.’ And we’d see it—me and my wingmates Luis Ardois, Rene Garcia, and the others, all of us Bay of Pigs vets—we’d swoop down blasting with our fifty-calibers and shooting rockets . . . what a mess down there!
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“Then Hoare would radio up. ‘We’re down here! You guys are gonna hit us! You’re too close!’
“ ‘We know you’re down there, Mike,’ we’d shout back. ‘We know exactly where you are. You’ve got enemy close to you and we’re taking them out.’ ” It took a couple of missions before Hoare felt comfortable with the Cuban CIA air support. He’d never had any that was quite
that
close before, certainly not in the expansive deserts of North Africa. But this was jungle; any air support
had
to be close.”
Gus goes on to recall, “But after a couple of missions, Hoare loved us. He saw that we knew how to fly—and how to shoot. From then on, he couldn’t do without us. He was always slapping us on the back when we met, all smiles.”
When Ponzoa and his fellow pilots dove on a strafing run with guns and rockets blazing, they were often flabbergasted to see their African enemies standing in the road or in the few jungle openings, calmly looking skyward. They behaved more like spectators at an air show than targets. “Some would even wave at us right before we blasted them to smithereens,” he recalls.