Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla': With Che Guevara in
Bolivia 1966-68 by Harry Villegas; Pathfinder Press, 1997;
New York; 365 pp. At the Side of Che Guevara: Interviews
with Harry Villegas (Pombo); Pathfinder Press, 1997; New
York; 39 pp.; in English and Spanish.
BY STEVE CLARK
Like most good stories, this one by Cuban Brigadier
General Harry Villegas loses a lot in the retelling. In
reviewing Pathfinder's newly released English-language
edition of Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla,' my goal is not
to retell Villegas's story but to present a few good reasons
to pick it up and read it for yourself.
The book is a diary and account of the 1966-68
guerrilla campaign in Bolivia initiated by Ernesto Che
Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary leader who had
been forged politically in the crucible of the Cuban
revolutionary movement since the mid-1950s. The author,
Harry Villegas - also known by his nom de guerre,
Pombo - was a member of Guevara's general staff in Bolivia.
As a teenager in 1957, he had joined the Rebel Army led by
Fidel Castro in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains and fought
under Guevara's command in the popular war to overturn the
U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. That revolutionary war
culminated in a triumphant insurrection in January 1959.
Following the victory, Villegas shouldered numerous
responsibilities - from serving as head of Guevara's escort;
to working under Guevara's direction in the initial efforts
by the workers and farmers government to restructure
industry on new, proletarian foundations; to participating
in the formation of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR);
and in the commission that planned the founding congress of
the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965.
In early 1965 Villegas was one of more than 100 Cuban
volunteers who joined Guevara in assisting revolutionary
forces in the Congo fighting to overturn that country's
proimperialist regime. It was there that Guevara - who had
resigned all leadership posts in Cuba before taking up this
internationalist mission - gave Villegas the Swahili
pseudonym "Pombo Pojo," which he was to use throughout the
Congo and subsequent Bolivian campaigns.
Following the end of the Cuban volunteer effort in the
Congo in late 1965, Villegas collaborated with Guevara in
preparations to launch the revolutionary effort in Latin
America's Southern Cone. He was part of the team that
traveled to Bolivia in June 1966 to lay the political and
logistical groundwork for the guerrilla nucleus there. He
served on the general staff of the unit, functioning as its
chief quartermaster, and fought in numerous battles.
On Oct. 8, 1967, Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner
by Bolivian military forces, who had been tightening their
encirclement of the guerrillas and inflicting more
fatalities. The next day Guevara and two of his captured
companeros were murdered inside a schoolhouse in the
village of La Higuera, on orders by the Bolivian government,
following consultation with Washington. After taking an oath
with the remaining combatants to continue the struggle,
Villegas commanded the group of five who eluded the combined
efforts by Bolivian and U.S. government forces to track them
down (a sixth survivor of the October battle was killed the
following month).
`Why we fight'
Since his return to Cuba in March 1968, Villegas has
served in the Revolutionary Armed Forces, including in the
high command of the 375,000 internationalist volunteers who
fought in Angola between 1975 and 1989 to combat invading
South African troops and U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary
bands. He participated in the 1988 battle at Cuito
Cuanavale. There, Angolan, Cuban, and Namibian fighters
dealt the decisive blow to the apartheid army inside Angola
and gave a powerful new impulse to the struggle within South
Africa to bring down the white supremacist regime.
Villegas's account of the internationalist mission in
Angola is told in a pamphlet entitled At the Side of Che
Guevara released by Pathfinder, in English and Spanish, to
accompany publication of his book. "Cuba's aid to Angola was
not only worthwhile," Villegas says there, "but if we were
capable of doing it again, we would do so...
"If we did nothing more than indirectly help defeat
apartheid, our effort was unquestionably worthwhile.
Millions of human beings have been given the possibility to
realize their human potential. This is why Che fought, why
all progressive humanity has fought, why men and women of
dignity have fought everywhere. This is what Fidel is
fighting for. This is why the Cuban people resist."
The pamphlet includes two 1995 interviews with Villegas
spanning his lifetime of revolutionary activity, from the
Cuban revolutionary war, to the Congo, Bolivian, and Angolan
campaigns, to today. One of the two interviews was initially
given to Militant and Perspectiva Mundial correspondents
Luis Madrid and Mary-Alice Waters; Waters is the editor of
Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' and author of the
publisher's preface to the English edition. The other
interview, from the Cuban newspaper Trabajadores, was
conducted by Elsa Blaquier Ascano.
Brigadier General Villegas is currently head of
political education for the FAR's Western Army. He is also
vice president of the National Commission organizing the
commemoration this year of the 30th anniversary of the death
of Che Guevara and his fellow combatants. The Cuban
publisher Editora Politica released the original Spanish
edition of Villegas's book, Pombo: Un hombre de la guerrilla
del Che, in 1996 in anticipation of this anniversary, aiming
to shed additional light on these events and their place in
the revolutionary past, present, and future of the Americas.
Revolution in Southern Cone
What was the goal of Ernesto Che Guevara, Harry
Villegas, and their Bolivian, Cuban, and Peruvian comrades
in launching the Bolivian campaign?
"Che envisioned the possibility of forming a guerrilla
nucleus, a mother column that would pass through the
necessary and difficult stage of survival and development,"
Villegas writes in his introduction to the English edition.
"Later on it would give birth to new guerrilla columns
extending outward toward the Southern Cone of Latin America,
giving continuity to a battle that would become continent-
wide in scope...
Guevara was "totally convinced that the political
conditions were ripening and that this perspective was
realizable," Villegas says. "In his view, victory was
certain to the degree that the struggle extended as far as
possible throughout Latin America." It was with that broader
revolutionary perspective in mind that "Che chose Bolivia as
the place from which to initiate his strategic course in
Latin America."
Among the reasons for Guevara's decision, Villegas
says, was "Bolivian people's combative traditions." In 1952
a revolutionary upsurge in Bolivia, led by tin miners,
toppled a military regime and forced the bourgeois-
nationalist government that replaced it to nationalize the
largest tin mines, legalize trade unions, initiate a land
reform, and extend voting rights to the country's indigenous
majority. Just prior to the launching of the guerrilla front
in the 1960s, Villegas notes in his introduction, "students,
peasants, miners, and workers all fought heroically" in face
of stiffening government repression.
Bolivia's geographical location in Latin
America - sharing borders with five countries, Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru - "was involved from the
beginning in Che's strategy," Villegas adds in his interview
with Madrid and Waters. Guevara's aim "was not to lead the
Bolivians. His aim was to coordinate the whole movement in
the Southern Cone. That was his aim. Sooner or later Che
aimed to go to Argentina."
Fact vs. fiction
The reliability of Pombo's account has been challenged
by journalist Jon Lee Anderson, author of one of several new
biographies of Guevara being released this year on the 30th
anniversary of his death. According to Anderson, there was
little objective political basis to the choice of Bolivia.
Following the Congo mission, Anderson writes in his book,
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Cuban leader Fidel Castro
wanted Guevara to return to Cuba, but Guevara "wanted to go
`directly' to Latin America. But where?"
Other Cuban leaders "drawn into the dilemma" of
selecting a location "found that Che was not an easy man to
deal with," Anderson writes. But they finally "dissuaded Che
from his plan to go straight to South America in favor of
Prague. There, he would be safer and could `wait things out'
until Cuba found somewhere for him to go."
Anderson continues: "There is enduring controversy over
the true target of Che's next - and last - war making
effort... This is perhaps the most crucial single question
about the life of Ernesto Che Guevara to remain unanswered.
Who decided he should go to Bolivia; when and why was that
decision made?"
The mystery, however, is in Anderson's imagination. A
decision of such scope and consequences clearly involved
discussions by Guevara with long-time revolutionary
collaborators in Cuba, including differing viewpoints and
shifting assessments. Historians and biographers can and
will debate the details ad infinitum.
No more damning charge could be made against a
revolutionary leadership, however, than Anderson's
implication that the decision to launch the Bolivian
operation was largely lacking in serious political grounds,
that it was an adventure - that confronted with a man "not
easy to deal with," Cuban leaders "found somewhere for him
to go."
Such a charge, in fact, is ultimately more damaging to
the Cuban revolution than the slanders that have circulated
ever since Guevara's death that Fidel Castro and other Cuban
leaders wanted Che out of the country because of political
differences, and that they rejected steps that could have
rescued him and his comrades from death in Bolivia. These
smears are so much at odds with the proven record of the
Cuban leadership that they are less and less likely to be
taken seriously by revolutionary-minded workers and youth.
The most recent attempt to give new life to this tall
tale has largely fallen flat, even in bourgeois public
opinion. That was the publication in France last year of the
"memoirs" of one the two other Cuban survivors of the
Bolivian campaign, Dariel Alarcon Ramirez, who fought
under the pseudonym Benigno. Alarco'n turned against the
revolution and defected from Cuba in 1996.
Benigno's book was intended as an authoritative
rejoinder to Villegas's account. Its falsifications were so
numerous, its sensationalism so flagrant, and its author's
self-serving rancor so transparent, however, that the book's
political impact reverberated little beyond circles of
openly counterrevolutionary Cuban exiles and handfuls of
middle-class apologists for imperialist "democracy." It
isn't necessary to be a partisan of Cuba's socialist
revolution and communist leadership to recognize that
Alarco'n has neither the personal integrity nor the earned
political standing of Harry Villegas, Ernesto Che Guevara,
or Fidel Castro.
Anderson's cleaned-up account is, if anything, more
insidious. Eschewing wild claims that have stood neither the
tests of time nor truth, he places a question mark over the
political seriousness and responsibility of the Cuban
leadership, including Guevara himself. Where the lives of
dozens of revolutionary cadres are at stake, as well as the
future of toilers across Latin America, light-minded
adventurism and utopian schemes are not political
misdemeanors.
Nothing in the facts of the Bolivian campaign or
preparations for it, however, corroborates Anderson's
treatment.
Second Declaration of Havana
From the outset of the Cuban revolution at the opening
of the 1960s, its leaders made no secret of their aim to do
everything within their power to set an example for - and
provide active solidarity with - others in the Americas and
around the world engaged in struggles against imperialist
oppression and capitalist exploitation.
In an uncompromising public response to Washington's
intensifying drive to crush the first socialist revolution
in the Western Hemisphere militarily and economically, more
than a million Cuban working people filled the streets of
Havana in February 1962 to issue a call for a continent-wide
struggle against imperialism.
"What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees' hatred
of the Cuban revolution?" said that document, which became
known as The Second Declaration of Havana (available from
Pathfinder in English, Spanish, French, and Greek editions).
"What unites them and stirs them up is fear," it said.
". . .Not fear of the Cuban revolution but fear of the Latin
American revolution."
The Second Declaration of Havana directly challenged
the decades-long course of the Stalinist Communist parties
and Social Democratic parties alike in Latin America. These
parties had subordinated the interests of working people to
bourgeois political misleaderships that repeatedly betrayed
their struggles for land, national sovereignty, and labor
rights and repressed their social movements and
organizations.
"In the actual historic conditions of Latin America,"
the declaration said, "the national bourgeoisie cannot lead
the antifeudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience
shows that in our nations that class, even when its
interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee
imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for the
national bourgeoisie is paralyzed by fear of social
revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited
masses."
Encouraged by the victory in Cuba, workers and peasants
across Latin America were beginning to take up the struggle
against the U.S.-backed regimes of the exploiters, the
declaration said. "That wave is composed of the greatest
number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labor
amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they
are awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they
had been subjected.
"For this great mass of humanity has said, `Enough!'
and has begun to march."
Message to the Tricontinental
In January 1966, not long after Guevara's departure
from Cuba to take up internationalist duties, the Cuban
leadership organized a conference in Havana of anti-
imperialist fighters from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The gathering established an organization that became
popularly known as the Tricontinental, and Guevara sometime
that year addressed his last major political article to it.
The article was first published in April 1967 in the
inaugural issue of the organization's magazine, under
Guevara's title, "Create two, three . . . many
Vietnams - that is the watchword." Often referred to as the
Message to the Tricontinental, Guevara's 1966 article is
included in the opening pages of the book under review.
In the interview with Madrid and Waters, Villegas
underlines the importance of this document for the fighters
in Bolivia. "As combatants we studied the world situation
that Che evaluates in his `Message to the Tricontinental,'"
Villegas says. "That was part of the school, the training of
future leaders. Above all, the world situation was marked by
the genocidal war being waged against the people of
Vietnam," and by their ultimately victorious struggle
against imperialist domination.
"The war in Vietnam, as you know better than we do,
shook the world," Villegas told the two U.S.-based
revolutionary journalists. "It shook U.S. society - the
Vietnam syndrome, the economic crisis generated by the war
and from which imperialism has never completely recovered."
Just as Vietnam's struggle was giving the Cuban
revolution greater maneuvering room to resist Washington's
military probes and threats, Guevara explained in the 1966
message, so too the most effective solidarity Latin American
revolutionists could extend their Indochinese brothers and
sisters was "the creation of the world's second or third
Vietnam, or second and third Vietnam."
Thus, in acting to advance the growing revolutionary
wave in Latin America's Southern Cone, Guevara and his co-
combatants were putting into practice the course presented
at the close of the Message to the Tricontinental - "Let it
be known that we have measured the scope of our acts and
that we consider ourselves no more than a part of the great
army of the proletariat."
Preparing for battle
Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' is a valuable
companion piece to Guevara's own Bolivian Diary, also
published by Pathfinder in English translation. The story
Villegas tells consists of two parts.
The first is the diary he kept from the time of his
arrival in Bolivia in July 1966 through May 28, 1967. That
notebook, as he explains in his introduction, was "captured
together with Che's diary and other documents" in October
1967, during the battle in which Guevara was wounded and
taken prisoner. The following year, Villegas says, Bolivia's
minister of the interior sent a retyped copy of it to Cuba.
"The original, which I did not receive a photographic copy
of, remained in Bolivia, in the custody of the army high
command."
The second part of the book, covering the period from
May 1967 through Villegas's return to Cuba the following
March, is based on a series of talks he gave in Havana's La
Caban~a military fortress.
In the diary's initial entries, written in July and
early August 1966 just after Villegas had arrived in
Bolivia, he describes the political and logistical
preparations for the campaign by a nucleus of Cuban and
Bolivian cadres. This included discussions with Peruvian
revolutionists about why Guevara and the Cuban leadership
had decided against launching operations initially in Peru,
which they had previously considered.
"We explained that for the moment conditions are better
in Bolivia, given the turn of events [in Peru] following the
defeat of the armed struggle there." Between October 1965
and January 1966, several guerrilla fronts in Peru had
sustained heavy blows, including the deaths or imprisonment
of their central leaders. Despite initial hesitations over
this decision, three Peruvian revolutionists joined the
forces gathering in Bolivia.
Villegas also describes the negotiations he and other
members of the preparations team conducted with the
leadership of the Bolivian Communist Party, in particular
its general secretary Mario Monje. Seventeen members of the
CP and its youth organization were among the 29 Bolivians
who joined in the revolutionary operation. Among them was
Inti Peredo, who survived the Bolivian army encirclement in
late 1967 along with Pombo and others and wrote an account
in early 1969 entitled My Campaign with Che. (It is included
as an appendix to Pathfinder's edition of Guevara's Bolivian
Diary.) Peredo was murdered later that year after resisting
an assault by Bolivian cops on the house in La Paz where he
was living clandestinely.
The actions of the Bolivian CP leadership were another
matter altogether. The Jan. 1, 1967, entry in Pombo's diary
recounts the political showdown with Monje at the
guerrilla's base camp in southeastern Bolivia, following
Guevara's arrival in the country the previous November.
Monje laid down a series of preconditions for supporting the
struggle, first and foremost that political and military
leadership be in the hands of the Bolivian CP.
Guevara rejected this ultimatum and called the fighters
together to explain what had happened. "I explained that I
could not accept the position of adviser," Villegas quotes
Guevara as saying. "I told him I believed that I was more
qualified than he was, both militarily and politically,
since I have had the advantage of going through a
revolutionary process in which I acquired the necessary
experience, and that false modesty served no purpose. I
explained that I did not aspire to lead the revolutionary
struggle in Bolivia but to collaborate in the continent-wide
struggle."
Villegas reports that Monje "then held a meeting with
the Bolivians [who had joined the guerrilla unit] and told
them that the party is not going to join in the armed
struggle. He told them they must go back to the city. If
not, they would be expelled from the party and payments to
their families would be stopped inasmuch as they had
leadership standing." Monje's appeals to desert were to no
avail. But the Bolivian CP leadership henceforth urged its
followers not to join Che's guerrilla.
Cuba's unstinting support
The effort to advance the developing revolutionary
situation in the Americas from a base in Bolivia had the
active backing of the leadership in Cuba. "In all honesty,"
Villegas says in the interview with Madrid and Waters, "we
must say that the Cuban revolution supported this course
entirely. This is what Fidel was teaching too...
"And for this reason," he added, "we also participated.
We had Cuban comrades in Venezuela at the time; others were
in Guatemala, or on their way to Colombia. The Cuban
revolution gave support to all these movements that sought
liberation for the world's hungry masses."
This internationalist record is documented in another
new book published in Cuba earlier this year, entitled
Secrets of Generals. It contains 41 interviews with top
officers of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, including
information never before made public about their experiences
fighting alongside revolutionary movements in Latin America
and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. A
review of the book appeared in the May 26 Militant.
The oath Pombo and other combatants took following
Guevara's death to continue the struggle, says Mary-Alice
Waters in the publishers' preface to Villegas's book,
"embodies the internationalist commitment evident through
the entire course of the leadership of the Cuban revolution:
from the war against the Batista dictatorship itself, to
Venezuela, to Algeria, to Vietnam, to the Congo, to Bolivia,
to Angola and the battle against the apartheid invaders at
Cuito Cuanavale, to Nicaragua, Grenada, and many others, to
today.
"The most intransigent foes of the Cuban revolution in
Washington and elsewhere have no doubt that if conditions
allow, the revolutionary leadership of Cuba, from Fidel
Castro on down, will not hesitate to act again with exactly
the same internationalist selflessness."
`We believed in Che's course'
Fidel Castro himself clearly explained the Cuban
leadership's attitude toward the Bolivian operation in his
June 1968 "A Necessary Introduction" to Guevara's Bolivian
Diary. There, Castro condemns those who "call themselves
Marxists, Communists, and other such titles" but label "Che
a mistaken adventurer, or, when they speak more benignly, an
idealist whose death marked the swan song of revolutionary
armed struggle in Latin America...
"That is how they justify those who do not want to
fight, who will never fight for the people and their
liberation," Castro said. "That is how they justify those
who have made a caricature of revolutionary ideas, turning
them into an opium-like dogma with neither content nor
message for the masses; those who have converted the
organizations of popular struggle into instruments of
conciliation with domestic and foreign exploiters." The
Cuban leader continued: "In all epochs and under all
circumstances, there will always be an abundance of pretexts
for not fighting; but not fighting is the surest way to
never attain freedom...
"Che conceived of the struggle in Bolivia not as an
isolated occurrence," Castro pointed out, "but as part of a
revolutionary liberation movement that would rapidly extend
to other countries in South America."
Castro returned to this question on the occasion of the
20th anniversary of Guevara's death in combat, in a 1987
interview with Italian journalist Gianni Mina. It was
Guevara himself that conceived of the Bolivian operation,
Castro said. "The idea, the plan, everything was his." But
"we believed in what [Che] was doing, and we believed he
could carry out what he proposed," Castro added. "What we
did was help him. We helped something we thought was
possible."
And help they did, unstintingly.
A journey through the useful glossary of names and
organizations in Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' - based
on that in the Spanish-language edition prepared by Editora
Poli'tica - paints a striking picture of the 16 Cuban cadres
who volunteered to join the effort and were released from
other duties to do so. Each of them was a veteran of the
Rebel Army campaigns that overthrew the Yankee-backed
Batista dictatorship (that story is told in Guevara's
Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956 - 58, also
published by Pathfinder). Many were officers of the FAR or
the Ministry of the Interior, and one had been the head of
G-2, the counterintelligence division of the Cuban police.
Five fought with Guevara in the Congo. Three, not including
Guevara, had been members of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Cuba.
What's more, between July and September 1966, the Cuban
leadership established a clandestine training ground for Che
and his co-combatants in the Pinar del Ri'o province in
western Cuba.
Guevara based his perspectives for the Bolivian
campaign on the judgment, as he put it in the Message to the
Tricontinental, that "rebellion is ripening at an
accelerated rate" in Latin America and "will in due time
acquire continental dimensions."
Revolutionary perspectives
How was this judgment borne out in the aftermath of the
defeat in Bolivia in October 1967? Villegas's account ends
with his return to Cuba in March 1968, but the chronology,
photos, and captions in the book take the story forward a
few years.
In Bolivia itself, efforts to renew the guerrilla
struggle in 1969 - 70 were brutally crushed by the regime.
In late 1970 and early 1971, however, the armed forces
divided in face of rising popular mobilizations and an armed
uprising by workers, peasants, and students. A People's
Assembly - an incipient workers' parliament - was formed in
February 1971. When workers' leaders failed over several
months to organize the toilers in fighting to establish a
workers and peasants government, however, rightist forces
reasserted their dominance and unleashed murderous
repression.
In May 1969 massive worker-led uprisings in the
Argentine industrial cities of Rosario and Co'rdoba - the
latter imprinted to this day as the Cordobazo in the
consciousness of millions of workers in that
country - ushered in some seven years of sharpening class
struggle. As in Bolivia, however, the class-collaborationist
political course of the workers' leadership paved the way
for a military coup in 1976 and the notorious "dirty war" in
which more than 10,000 Argentines were killed or
"disappeared."
In Chile rising working-class and peasant struggles
created the conditions in which Socialist Party leader
Salvador Allende was elected president of the country in
September 1970. The working class continued to mobilize over
the next several years. Disarmed both literally and
politically by the Socialist Party and Communist Party
leaderships, however, the workers' movement was dealt a
decisive defeat by a rightist coup in September 1973.
Today, as the 30th anniversary of the death of Che and
his comrades approaches, there is once again a rise of
struggles in Latin America's Southern Cone. In Argentina, in
particular, there has been an explosion of working-class and
student revolts in recent months against the devastating
consequences of joblessness and government belt-tightening,
following similar rebellions since the end of 1993.
In Bolivia tens of thousands of workers and peasants
took to the streets last year to resist the government's
sell-off of the national patrimony, protest cop murders, and
demand land reform. In Chile coal miners and copper miners
have waged strikes and protest actions. In Brazil peasants
and rural workers are fighting for land rights.
These struggles are part of a broader pattern of
resistance today by working people to the consequences of
world capitalism's depression conditions, including, to a
growing degree, in the imperialist countries of Europe and
North America.
Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla' is must reading for
youth and workers engaged in the struggles that are now
under way and will increase in the years ahead. It describes
the kind of disciplined, politically conscious, and self-
sacrificing men and women who can forge revolutionary
organizations capable of leading these struggles to victory,
and of opening the road to the socialist future Ernesto Che
Guevara and his compan~eros fought and died for.
At the close of the introduction to his book, Brigadier
General Harry Villegas says that in preparing his diary and
account for publication, he had in mind its usefulness "to
young people who wish to study the life and work" of Che
Guev