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Still they come. In August alone, 259 Cubans made it across to the U.S. Two weeks ago the U.S. Coast Guard came upon two boats jammed with 67 refugees, including the chauffeur of Fidel's brother Ramon (an obscure bureaucrat in the Department of Sugar Transport) and Orlando Contreras, once one of Cuba's most popular singers, now declared "decadent." Said Contreras: "They wouldn't let me sing what I wanted to, and they wouldn't let me make a tour inside the country, and finally they put a 70% tax on my wages to make me stop asking." So he and the others set sail to join their countrymen in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and pray for a return to a free Cuba one day.
Compulsive v. Cool. If the refugees were embarrassing to Castro, the curious case of Che Guevara was doubly so. For that had to do with Cuba's independence and leadership. In the early days of the revolution, Castro and Guevara were virtually inseparable, one the compulsive man of action, the other the cool, brainy tactician. Some wags called the Argentine Guevara a "Gau-cho Marx," but they said it with a sour smile. Che was in the original rebel band in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1956, the man who mapped Castro's guerrilla tactics against Dictator Fulgencio Batista and became world-famous for his handbook of dirty tricks, La Guerra de Guerrillas. He was Cuba's first economic czar, running the national bank, then the Ministry of Industries, all the while plotting to extend Castro's revolution throughout Latin America with "wars of national liberation." Always he spouted hatred for the U.S., contempt for the "soft" Moscow line, and admiration for the warlike cries coming from the Chinese Communists.
Guevara was at his most consistent during an incredible three-month tour that started last December with a U.N. appearance and continued on to Algeria, West Africa, Cairo and Peking. The U.N. speech attacking the U.S. and other "imperialist powers" was ultrabelligerent, going so far as to accuse U.S. marines of "sexual exhibitionism" on the perimeter of the Guantanamo naval base. A few days later, on CBS-TV's Face the Nation, Guevara loudly owned up to promoting Communist revolution in Latin America. "When people are fighting for their freedom, it would not be moral for us not to assist them. We have taught some of them to acquire military knowledge. There will be fighting in every country of Latin America." On and on it went, with Che making a special point of accusing Russia and its East European partners of being "accomplices of imperialist exploitation" by selling their machines to underdeveloped nations for a profit. Real Communists would give them away.
The Russians plainly could not let this statement go by unchallenged, and reportedly told Castro so in no uncertain terms. "When Guevara got back to Havana last March," says an observer in Cuba, "Castro called him in and the two had it out on the subject." They disappeared for a week. Then Castro popped up. Guevara has not been seen or heard from since.