The Death of Che Guevara Read Free Page B

does not engage in battle unless certain of victory.) The army occupies rebel positions at Las Mercedes, and continues to advance, terrorizing the peasants who have been sympathetic to the rebels, and who are now without protection. The army occupies Las Vegas, four hours’ march from the rebel “capital.” The rebels begin a counteroffensive at the San Domingo River. Two army battalions are routed, fleeing in disorder. At El Jigue the rebels take two hundred fifty army prisoners and hand them over to the Red Cross, as part of “Operation Trojan Horse.” (That is: the Cuban Army vindictively tortures and then kills rebel prisoners. Thus there is no point in surrendering to the government, you may as well fight until you are killed. But the rebels free prisoners unharmed. In any engagement government soldiers can save their lives simply by giving up.) The columns of Che Guevara and Camillo Cienfuegos recapture Las Vegas. The army, its spirit broken, turns and withdraws from the Sierras. The Guevara and Cienfuegos columns begin a march down from the mountains, into the plains, towards the cities. Fidel Castro’s column descends into Oriente Province. Raul Castro organizes a Congress of Peasants in the liberated areas. Guevara’s column moves across thelength of the island, to Santa Clara. Batista’s air force bombards the outskirts of Santa Clara. The columns of Guevara and Cienfuegos, raggedy, tired, hungry, and footsore from the march, meet outside the city, and begin the battle. The army garrison capitulates. Batista flees to the Dominican Republic. In Algeria, the French Army revolts. De Gaulle becomes President of France. In Venezuela, Perez Jimenez is overthrown by nationalist army officers under Fabricio Ojeda. In Peru, Hugo Blanco begins organizing peasant unions. 1959 Che and Camillo’s columns advance on Havana. Fidel Castro’s column crosses the island, and the three enter the capital in triumph. Guerrillas appear in the countryside in Paraguay. There are rebellions in Panama, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. (All are defeated by the army.) Haiti is invaded by rebels (the rebellion fails). Peronist guerrillas appear in Argentina. The Peasant Leagues are organized by Juliao in Brazil. The Vietnamese Communists organize guerrilla resistance to the United States. Before his eyes, the world of the second half of the century appears to take shape. Death from hunger, death from parasites, death from cold, these have been the most ordinary facts for most of the people of the world. Suddenly, with the success of the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, these facts seem extraordinary. The people of the industrialized countries will learn that there is not, has never been silence. What was called a time of peace was only the moment before the victim cried out. The Chinese Revolution, the Vietnamese Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution: a nursery refrain: the country surrounds the city: the revolution is in the countryside, among the peasants. Colonialism is a city being strangled, and as it dies it releases its final savagery. It becomes a fire on the skin of the colonized countries.
But colonialism is dying
. 1960 (Year of the Agrarian Reform) Cuba and the Soviet Union sign a commercial treaty. Eisenhower orders the CIA to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island. (The CIA are in this text, but as a subtext, in secret. One will not know of them until, like a pun, a mistake, a slip of the tongue—that joke just kills me!—they break the surface, break cover.) A French ship, carrying arms for the Cuban government, explodes in Havana Harbor, killing seventy; Castro, a suspicious man, accuses the CIA of sabotage. The United States refuses to buy the remainder of that year’s Cuban sugar quota, some seven hundred thousand pounds of sweet stuff; the Soviet Union agrees to purchase this residue. At a mass meeting outside the