Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Author:Jon Lee Anderson [Anderson, Jon Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political
ISBN: 9780802135582
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1997-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

IV

A great many changes had occurred in Cuba in Che’s absence. Fidel now had more political power, but the atmosphere was tenser and more polarized than ever. The agrarian reform law had begun to have heavy repercussions. The first seizures of land had been made, and the government was hedging on compensation, offering low-interest “bonds” to affected landowners instead of ready cash. The United States had issued a note of warning—so far left unanswered by Fidel—that it expected all American landowners to be compensated promptly. The wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey who were affected mounted a campaign against the land interventions, and the province’s popular military commander, Huber Matos, joined them. He denounced the Communist encroachment in the armed forces and INRA. Matos was emerging as the chief spokesman for the July 26 Movement’s anticommunist wing as the dispute with the ascendant PSP became increasingly acrimonious.

Following the resignation of the agriculture minister, Sorí-Marín, Fidel had continued to clean house. Political moderates in the cabinet had been getting the shove, and loyal Fidelistas were taking their places. Even Fidel’s old friend Luis Orlando Rodríguez, who had helped found Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra, was dropped as interior minister. Foreign Minister Roberto Agramonte was fired and replaced by Raúl Roa, the OAS ambassador and former dean of Havana University’s Social Sciences Faculty. The sphinxlike Roa had broken with the Party in his youth, but now he became both an unswerving Fidelista and a brilliant diplomat.

In mid-June, a Cuban-Dominican guerrilla expedition of some 200 fighters led by Delio Gómez Ochoa, a former July 26 commander, had landed in the Dominican Republic. The group was wiped out by Trujillo’s forces. Many of the rebels were killed or imprisoned, and the survivors became fugitives. They were pursued by an anti-Castro army calling itself the Anticommunist Legion of the Caribbean. This army, which was composed of 350-odd fighters—150 Spaniards, 100 Cubans, and an array of right-wing foreign mercenaries, including Croatians, Germans, and Greeks—had been trained at a Dominican air force base. Among the Cubans in the legion were Che’s old antagonist Ángel Sánchez Mosquera, former police officials from Havana, and Batista’s personal pilot. Trujillo had offered to pay farmers a bounty of $1,000 per head for each rebel caught, and soon peasants, taking the generalissimo quite literally, began appearing at Dominican army posts with burlap bags containing decapitated bearded heads and claiming the reward. The anticommunist legionnaires complained jokingly that the peasants, who eventually turned in more heads than there had been invaders, were not leaving them any Cubans to fight against.

Two weeks after the fiasco of the rebel incursion in the Dominican Republic, Fidel’s air force chief, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, defected. On July 14, he appeared before a Senate committee in Washington and denounced Communist infiltration of the Cuban armed forces. President Urrutia appeared on television to rebut Díaz Lanz’s charges and, in an obvious bid to get Fidel to declare himself, stated his own firm opposition to Communism.

Fidel dealt an unexpected counterblow, denouncing

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