Date: Sat, 8 Feb 1997 12:19:54 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Che Guevara in Africa (lnp post #1)


While drinking my morning coffee, I came across an article in the morning
NY Times titled "As Rebels Gain in Zaire, Army Morale is Declining." This
made reflect on the Cuban role in Africa and the importance of Mandela's
rise to power. 

This gave me the excuse I needed to read Richard Gott's "Che Guevara and
the Congo" which appeared in the Nov./Dec. New Left Review. Gott worked
for the Guardian until it was revealed that he had accepted cash donations
and other favors from the KGB in the 1980s.  The Tories had made a big
deal of this, stating that this proved that the British left was a puppet
of the Kremlin. The only reason Gott took money, I would guess, is that
he, like Alex Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens and other British left-wing
journalists from privileged circles, has an appetite for the good life. He
was much more of a Castroite politically, as I am. 

I once had dinner at a Japanese restaurant with Gott, his wife, a Peruvian
diplomat, and Carole Ashley, Gott's sister-in-law and bosom buddy of mine.
I got to know Carole through Nicaragua solidarity activities and love to
take in a movie with her from time to time. She has postmodernist
deviations, but, other than that, is a swell person. 

Now Gott went through sushi and saki that evening like it was going out of
style. Carole mentioned to me the next day that Richard was extremely
sybaritic, but was renowned on the British left, like Cockburn, for his
embrace of the most puritanical communist movements. I concluded that he
took KGB money to help out with his dining expenses while urging
guerrillas to get along on monkey meat.

He is in a unique position to write about Che Guevara and the Congo. He
was the Guardian correspondent in Bolivia in 1967 and identified Che's
body in the town of Vallegrande, not far from where Che had been gunned
down. He was the only person in the vicinity who knew Che. In 1963 Gott
visited Cuba under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs
and got Che to write an article for the Institute's journal "International
Affairs." Then in 1970, Gott went to work for the Tanzanian Standard, a
newspaper based in Dar El Salaam. On this assignment, he learned about
African revolutionary politics. 

Gott makes the same point in his NLR that I have made on the list a number
of times: Che Guevara never really mastered political strategy outside of
the Cuban revolutionary arena. His activities in Bolivia and the Congo
showed that on his own, he was "an outsider unable to impose his will on
the local politicians. Political failure led to military disaster--covered
up in the Congo, terminal in Bolivia." 

In 1964, a number of Lumumba-inspired revolts began against the Tshombe
dictatorship. One of these began in the east and was led by a provincial
leader named Gaston Soumaliot whose chief lieutenant was Laurent Kabila,
currently the leader of the anti-Mobutu forces advancing across Zaire. 

Che Guevara, accompanied by about a hundred Cuban fighters, entered the
Congo in 1965 through Tanzania to fight against Tshombe's troops and white
mercenaries led by the infamous Mike "Mad Dog" Hoare, a Rhodesian. Mobutu
was Tshombe's top military aide, and would later replace Tshombe as
dictator. 

Gott reports that on a visit to Egypt in 1964, Guevara announced to Nasser
that, "I shall go to the Congo because it is the hottest spot in the world
now...I think we can hurt the imperialists at the core of their interests
in Katanga." An astonished Nasser warned Guevara not to become "another
Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading them and protecting them..."
Nasser shook his head sadly: "It can't be done." 

The Cuban's plan was to set up a liberated zone in the Congo on the shores
of Lake Tanganyika near the Tanzanian border and use it as a training-camp
for African revolutionaries in the fight against Tshombe and imperialism.
Unfortunately the plan was overly optimistic since the "revolutionaries"
had petty tribal rivalries and did not share Guevara's undiluted Marxist
internationalism. Also, Guevara relied on local politicians to assist him
in this ambitious project, but they, like the Bolivian CP, were cautious
reformists, not revolutionaries. 

The Cubans made an effort to learn Swahili, but got nowhere. Che conversed
in French with the Congolese but he was the only one among the Cubans who
knew French. 

The Congolese guerrillas who the Cubans were supposed to train were not of
the highest caliber. They made nightly forays into Tanzania for visits to
brothels and often returned with venereal diseases. Guevara, a trained
doctor, treated the men and was shocked. Not only were they taking time
away from training, but they were also wasting money better spent on arms
or food. Years later, he would of course also be shocked by the element of
sexism involved. 

The first big joint Cuban-Congolese military action was a disaster. They
attacked the garrison defending a hydroelectric dam near Bendera and were
routed. Gott reports, "In an analysis of what went wrong, the Cubans noted
that out of 160 men available, sixty had deserted before the attack began,
and many of the remaining 100 had never fired a shot. Guevara had already
expressed his dismay at the Congolese inability to learn to shoot. Given a
machine-gun, they would close their eyes, fire into the air, and keep
their finger on the trigger until the ammunition had run out. No amount of
training would persuade them to fire in rapid bursts." 

By the middle of 1965, the Cubans, including Guevara, had become
demoralized by their experience. Che wrote a letter to Fidel Castro in
which he casts doubt on the whole operation, including a negative analysis
of Laurent Kabila whose name dominates today's NY Times article: 

"More serious still is the state of mind which prevails among the groups
in our zone, the only one which has contacts with the exterior. The
divisions between Kabila and Soumalior have become even more disastrous,
and serve as a pretext for continuing to abandon towns without a fight. I
know Kabila well enough to have no illusions on that score. I cannot say
the same of Soumalior, but I have acquired enough information about him
already--the tissue of lies that he has woven for you, and the fact that
he no longer deigns even to visit these god-forsaken territories..."

What a contrast to the report in today's Times, which states that the
anti-Mobutu forces led by this very same Kabila, are "greeted with
courtesy, if not fanfare, by the residents as they marched in orderly
formation through the area." Thirty years these soldiers were incompetent
and debauched. Today they are sweeping across territory that they
forfeited to Mobutu's troops and their foreign mercenaries.

Indeed, there are still mercenaries in Zaire, but they are getting their
asses kicked. The Times reports that "Even people close to Mr. Mobutu have
acknowledged discouragement in the ranks of the 300 or so foreign
mercenaries recently flown into Kisangani. The mercenaries have complained
that they lack the mans to fight a surprisingly well-organized enemy in
unfamiliar jungle terrain." 

What is responsible for this turn of affairs? The answer quite simply is
that revolutions can not be created from the outside. Castro and Guevara
made the same sort of mistake that the Bolsheviks made, all-powerful and
all-knowing Lenin himself included, when they created a Third
International. The Congolese guerrillas had to learn for themselves, just
as the Cubans did in their fight against Batista.

There is another aspect to Cuban aid that came years later that is more
positive. The Cubans were invited in by the Angolan government to help
them defeat Afrikaner military forces allied with Jonah Savimbi. The
coalition of Angolan, Cuban and ANC fighters turned back the reactionaries
and drove a nail into apartheid plans to dominate the continent. The
Cubans came to Angola not as "Tarzans", to use Nasser's blunt phrase, but
as invited guests of a revolutionary government. 

This victory had everything to do with the eventual acceptance of the ANC
as a legal political party and the election of Mandela. Mandela's victory,
while a disappointment in social and economic terms within South African,
has had an enormous impact on the relationship of forces between
imperialism and liberation forces through the rest of the continent.
Angola and Mozambique have both been stabilized under nationalist
governments whose social agenda has, like Mandela's, been set back under
pressure from imperialism. However, these governments are a far cry better
than what imperialism had in mind. 

Most importantly, imperialism lacks a cats-paw to intervene in the Zairean
civil war. South African troops can not be dispatched to put down the
anti-Mobutu challenge. If Kabila's forces are victorious, there will be a
nationalist and left-leaning government in place in potentially one of the
most economically important countries of Africa. A revolutionary Zaire,
combined with like-minded states in South Africa, Angola, Namibia,
Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda puts pressure on Nigeria, ruled by a
dictatorship that rival's Mobutu's for its greed and corruption. A
democratic and anti-imperialist Nigeria, one of the world's major
oil-producers, would certainly advance the class struggle internationally.

Che Guevara's vision was correct. Unfortunately, he defeated his own
purposes by trying to realize this vision through his ill-conceived
guerrilla adventures in the Congo and Bolivia. Internationalism can not be
superimposed from the outside. It can only arise through the free
collaboration of revolutionary movements and governments who respect each
others as equals. The Comintern, the Fourth International and the Cuban's
fitful attempts at building their own international movement missed this
completely. Let's hope that we socialists of the late 20th century can
finally get this right. A lot is riding on it.


Louis Proyect




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