Vol. 75/No. 32      September 12, 2011

The following is an interview with Víctor Dreke and Harry Villegas, two leaders of the Cuban Revolution who fought alongside Ernesto Che Guevara in the 1956-58 Cuban revolutionary war and internationalist combat missions.

The interview was conducted by Argentine writer José Coco López in June while the two were in Rosario, Argentina, participating in an international conference marking the 83rd anniversary of Guevara’s birth in that city. The event was organized by the National University of Rosario and the Center for the Study of Che Guevara. The interview appeared in Rosario/12, an Argentine newspaper, and Por Cuba, a bulletin published by the Cuban Ministry of Culture.

Rich lessons and examples from Villegas’s and Dreke’s lives of revolutionary struggle are contained in Pombo: A Man of Che’s ‘guerrilla’ and From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, both published by Pathfinder Press.

Dreke has served in military and diplomatic responsibilities for the Cuban government and is today president of the Africa-Cuba Friendship Society. Villegas, a brigadier general, serves today as executive vice president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

Translation from Spanish and footnotes are by the Militant.
 

He was accompanied on his trip from Cuba by Commander Víctor Dreke, second in command of the Cuban contingent in the guerrilla war in the Congo. When Che was murdered, Dreke was in Guinea-Bissau with Amilcar Cabral,¹ fighting for the country’s independence from Portugal.

They were deeply affected by Guevara’s death and in their homage to him pledged to intensify the battles for the liberation of the Portuguese colony. They pledged and they delivered.

To talk with them is to look back on the last 50 years of Latin American and world politics. Pombo is undoubtedly the most important source for answering any military question having to do with Che. He was at his side in three guerrilla campaigns: the Sierra Maestra, the Congo, and Bolivia. At the age of fourteen he went up into the mountains to fight Batista. When he arrived triumphant in Havana as part of Che’s column, he was the head of Che’s escort.

Víctor Dreke saw Che for the first time in the Escambray mountains. Che was examining a bullet wound in Dreke’s shoulder and his prognosis was for a quick recovery. In Africa, years later, they would fight side by side.

“I definitely do not agree with Che’s assessment.” Dreke did not hesitate, when I asked him if the struggle in the Congo had been a failure, as Che says in his diary. He told me he’s working on Cuba’s internationalist mission in Africa. “I want to make it very clear that Che did not go to the Congo to hide. He who hides does not fight. One of our constant discussions was that he, as commander, should not expose himself so much in combat.”

Pombo is a good conversationalist, notable for his analytical abilities and the depth of his thinking. He always remembers that his jefe said that a guerrilla is not just someone who fires bullets. He thinks it’s nonsense to say that Che was seeking death. He’s convinced Che could have saved himself if he had given more importance to his personal situation, rather than to the sick and wounded and to the combatants from other Latin American countries.

When I ask him if it would have been possible to rescue Che from Bolivia with troops sent from Cuba, he gives me a surprised look and says such a question could only come through a lack of knowledge about the real situation of the guerrilla struggle in Bolivia.

Pombo and Dreke agree that Che led by example. He never asked a subordinate to do anything he was not prepared to do himself. That is not the only thing they agree on. Both give great importance to the call to create two, three, many Vietnams to confront imperialism, which Che put forward in 1967.²

Pombo believes that the guerrilla struggle in Bolivia was the Moncada of Latin America and that Che’s ultimate objective was to fight in Argentina. “But there is something more. When you speak of continent-wide liberation, you’re talking about the Cuban Revolution, about Che and Fidel.”

Pombo came to Rosario for the first time in 1996 to launch his book, Pombo: A Man of Che’s ‘guerrilla’.” At that time he was bewildered by questions others asked him about where Che’s soccer sympathies lay. He was more comfortable answering questions about the guerrilla struggle. In the presence of Perico Pérez, a well-known soccer fan, Pombo confessed to me that Che had never spoken to him about soccer.

There have been other trips since then. In 2008, he was struck by the favorable response to the Che statue,³ something we shared on the banks of the Paraná River. There, for the first time, he felt that the people of Rosario had made Che their own.

We had three days of conversations. We gave ourselves time to discuss the Argentine Ciro Bustos, and Régis Debray.⁴ Pombo believes Bustos wrote Che Wants to See You [subtitled: The Untold Story of Che in Bolivia] as a self-justification. He also believes that Debray was not completely fair about Che, although Che was about him. Che realized the Frenchman had talked too much but emphasized, “we have to know the context in which he talked.”

This was Dreke’s first visit to Rosario. The day of his departure he visited the house where Che was born. Enviably good-natured, mas- ters of a history worth listening to, Pombo and Dreke were honored with a medal conferred by the City Council. They went from Rosario to Alta Gracia, another of the cities on Che’s route. There they were met with more questions about this illustrious native of Rosario, who would have been eighty-three on June 14. This native of Rosario known as Che, as Eduardo Galeano says, has this dangerous habit of being born again and again.

2. Reference is to Guevara’s last public statement, and the only one he made between the time he left Cuba in 1965 and his death in October 1967. His message to the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America—often called “Message to the Tricontinental”—was made public by the Cuban government in April 1967.

3. In June 2008 hundreds attended the unveiling of a statue of Guevara in Rosario marking the 80th anniversary of his birth.

4. Ciro Bustos is a painter and journalist who met with Guevara in Bolivia in March 1967 to discuss support activities for the Bolivian campaign in Argentina. Captured by the Bolivian army in April, he testified about his discussions with Guevara and provided sketches of the guerilla combatants. Régis Debray is a French journalist who conducted a survey of Alto Beni zone in Bolivia at Guevara’s request in late 1966. He discussed support activities with Guevara in March 1967 and was captured at the same time as Bustos. The two were imprisoned in Bolivia until 1970.