Along with Osmany came 17 of the 34 men who had arrived in Kigoma. In general, he brought good news, but for me personally it included the saddest news of the whole war. Telephone calls from Buenos Aires reported that my mother was very ill, leading me to expect the worst. Osmany had not been able to get any further information and I had a month of uncertainty, waiting to hear something that I already suspected, but hoping that there had been a mistake, until finally my mother’s death was confirmed.2 She had wanted to see me shortly before my departure, probably because she was already feeling unwell, but the advanced state of the preparations for my trip had made this impossible. Moreover, she never received the farewell letter addressed to her and my father that I had left in Havana; it would only be delivered in October, when my departure was made public.
Mitoudidi came to the Upper Base, and we discussed various aspects of the military situation. He insisted on drawing up a grand strategic plan for the capture of Albertville, but I managed to convince him that at this stage this was too ambitious, and hence too risky, to deal with Albertville, and that it was more important to acquire real knowledge of the whole zone of operations and of the resources at our disposal as the General Staff had no clear picture of what was happening at each of the isolated fronts. Everything depended on reports from the field commanders, but in order to get what they wanted, they inflated their figures and, in order to escape blame, attributed disasters to a lack of weapons or ammunition. We agreed to send delegations to the various fronts, in order to clarify the respective situations of our men and the enemy, as well as the relationship of forces.
Four groups were organized to conduct the appropriate investigations: Aly, with three other compañeros, was to go to the Kabimba area; Nne, with two others, to Front de Force; Moja and Paulu, to the area of Baraka, Fizi and Lulimba; Mitoudidi and I would go to Uvira. The last of these trips did not happen in the end. First, there were the usual delays: a lack of boats, shortage of gasoline and unforeseen circumstances; then Kabila announced his imminent arrival, and we had to wait for him day after day—in vain.
The first reports of the inspections in Kabimba and Front de Force showed that there were real armed forces there, apparently with a will to fight, although in the case of Kabimba with no training or discipline, and only a certain amount in the case of Front de Force, but all with the same degree of disorganization in keeping track of weapons, observation of the enemy, political work, etc.
In summarizing the situation at the end of May, roughly a month after the first group arrived on April 24, I noted the following in my field diary:
Until Mitoudidi arrived, it was time lost; since then, we have been able to do reconnaissance and have found good receptivity to our suggestions. Perhaps tomorrow, serious training will begin with a group of men that has been promised. It is almost certain that, in the month of June, we will be able to show something by engaging in combat for the first time.
The main defect of the Congolese is that they don’t know how to shoot, so ammunition is wasted; so it’s necessary to begin there. The discipline here is very bad, but one has the impression that things change at the front, where the guys are subject to an accepted discipline although there is always a notable lack of organization.
The most important tasks are: teaching them how to shoot, to fight by laying ambushes (real guerrilla warfare), and establishing certain military norms of organization that will allow us to concentrate our full strength at the point being attacked.
Today we can recognize that the apparently greater discipline at the front was false, and that our three priorities—shooting, ambush technique and the concentration of units for major attacks—were never achieved in the Congo.
The groupings had a tribal character and adopted a positional warfare approach; that is, the combatants occupied what they called barriers. They were generally located in well-chosen places from a tactical point of view, in very high hills to which access was difficult. But camp life for the men meant carrying out no military operations or even undergoing training, confident in the enemy army’s inactivity and relying on the peasants for supplies. The peasants had to bring them food and were frequently humiliated and mistreated. The fundamental character of the People’s Liberation Army was that it was a parasitic army that did not work, did not train, did not fight, and demanded provisions and labor from the local population, sometimes with extreme brutality. The peasants were at the mercy of groups who came on leave from the camps to demand extra food, and who repeatedly consumed their poultry and little luxury food items they kept in reserve.
The revolutionary soldier’s staple food was bukali, which is prepared in the following way: cassava root is peeled and left to dry in the sun for a few days; then it is ground in a mortar exactly like those used for grinding coffee in our mountainous regions; the resulting flour is sifted, boiled in water until it forms a paste, and then eaten. With a good effort, bukali provides the necessary carbohydrates, but what was eaten there was semi-raw, unsalted cassava; this was sometimes complemented with zombe, cassava leaves pounded and boiled, and seasoned with a little palm oil and the meat of some hunted animal. There was plenty of game in that region, but meat was eaten only occasionally. It cannot be said that the combatants were well fed; very little was caught in the lake. But one of their bad habits was their incapacity to march to the base to look for food. On their shoulders they only carried a rifle, a cartridge-belt and their personal effects, which generally was no more than a blanket.
After a while, when we had begun communal living with this unique army, we heard some statements typical of their view of the world. If someone was given something to carry, he would say: “Mimi hapana motocari!” (“I’m not a truck!”). In some cases, when he was with Cubans, this would become: “Mimi hapana Cuban!”(“I’m not a Cuban!”). The food, as well as the weapons and ammunition for the front, therefore, had to be transported by the peasants. It’s clear this type of army can only be justified if, like its enemy counterpart, it actually fights now and again. But as will be seen, this requirement was not met either. And if this state of affairs did not change, the Congolese revolution was inevitably doomed to failure as a result of its own internal weaknesses.
1. Osmany Cienfuegos was the brother of Commander Camilo Cienfuegos. He was minister of public works of the Cuban revolutionary government and president of the foreign relations commission of the first Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, whose members were Foreign Minister Raúl Roa and Commander Manuel Piñeiro Losada. Osmany Cienfuegos was also general secretary of the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), and, until 2009, vice-president of the Council of Ministers.
2. This painful moment for Che is reflected in the autobiographical short story, The Stone, which shows his great sensibility and literary talent. See: Self-Portrait: A Photographic and Literary Memoir by Ernesto Che Guevara (Ocean Press).
A HOPE DIES
The days that followed were much like the preceding ones. It was a distressing time because we started to hate the angle formed by the two hills that led down to the lake, affording a glimpse only of the stretch of water that they defined as the horizon.
In spite of his goodwill, Mitoudidi did not find the formula that would have allowed us to get down to work. He was most likely restrained by a concrete order from Kabila, whose arrival he anxiously awaited. We all waited, while days passed, one after another, with no change for our expeditionary force.
Moja returned from his tour of inspection to Baraka, Fizi and Lulimba. The impression he brought back was really disastrous. Although he had been received with enthusiasm by the local population, and quite correctly by the leading compañeros, a number of dangerous symptoms were obvious. The first was the open hostility with which people spoke of Kabila and Massengo, as well as Compañero Mitoudidi. All of them were accused, more or less, of not only being outsiders in the region but also of being mere transients who were never w
here their people needed them.1 There were plenty of armed men in the zone, but they were held back by appalling disorganization, the effects of which, it can be said, were not just similar but even worse than in other cases we had encountered. The big shots spent the day drinking until they got into the most incredible state, without worrying how it might appear to the local people because they considered it the natural behavior of “men.” Considering the facilities at that time for the transport of essential materials across the lake, they had access to enough gasoline to keep traveling back and forth from one end of their extensive sector to the other, although no one could believe these trips served any purpose.
The barrier near Lulimba was seven kilometers from the town, in the highest part of the mountains. It had been a long time since the revolutionary forces had come down to launch an attack, or even to carry out any reconnaissance in the zone; their only activity was to fire off a recoilless 75 mm. cannon. Without knowing the rules of indirect fire (that gun can be used to score a direct hit on a target only up to a distance of 1.5 kilometers), and without knowing the enemy’s exact position, they entertained themselves with massive rocket displays with 75 mm. shells.
I drew all this to Mitoudidi’s attention, and he affirmed the envoys’ impressions, that Moulana, a self-styled major-general in charge of the area, was an anarchist devoid of all revolutionary consciousness who had to be replaced. Mitoudidi had called him in for discussions, but he had refused to come, suspecting that he would be arrested.
As nothing else could be done, we kept insisting on reconnaissance missions and again sent Nane and Nne leading small groups to continue the inspections of the Front de Force and Katenga zones that seemed to offer some possibilities. Aly also set out on a mission to reconnoiter the area around the town of Kabimba and the road from Kabimba to Albertville, and to find some practical route between Front de Force and Kabimba. But he found himself impotent in face of the obstacles put in his way by the head of that sector.
Each morning we heard the same old tune: Kabila has not arrived today, but tomorrow for sure, or the day after tomorrow…
Boats continued to arrive with plenty of high-quality weapons; it was a great pity to see how they squandered the resources of friendly countries (mainly China and the Soviet Union), the efforts of Tanzania, and the lives of some combatants and civilians with so little results.
Mitoudidi, now committed to organizing the [Upper] Base, took on the no small task of cracking down on the drinkers and thereby confronted 90 or 95 percent of the men. He also put a freeze on the delivery of arms and ammunition and, among other things, demanded that those who were using heavy weapons should show proof of their ability before they were given anything else, which at least ensured that nothing more would be distributed. But the challenges were too great and he was only one man; his assistants gave him very little help in this task.
We became quite good friends. I explained that my greatest handicap was my lack of direct contact with the combatants who didn’t speak French, so he sent one of his aides to teach me Swahili, so that I could communicate directly with the Congolese in that language. Ernest Ilunga, charged with initiating me into the mysteries of the language, was an intelligent young man. We began our classes with great enthusiasm, dedicating three hours a day, but the truth is that I was the first to reduce this to one hour, not for lack of time—I had too much of that, unfortunately—but because my character is completely incompatible with learning other languages. Another difficulty I was unable to overcome during my time in the Congo was the fact that Swahili is a language with quite a rich and advanced grammar, but in this country it is used as what they call their national language, alongside the mother tongue or dialect of their own tribe, so that Swahili has to some extent become the language of conquerors and a symbol of superior power. It is the second language of nearly all the peasants, but the backwardness of the region means that what they actually speak is a highly simplified “basic Swahili.” Moreover, they adapted very easily to our halfway language, because they found it easier to communicate in this way. Bound up as I was in these contradictions, I could not speak either grammatical Swahili or the peculiar regional version in that part of the Congo in my entire time there.
During these days I also got to know Mundandi, the Rwandan commander at Front de Force. He had studied in China and made quite a good impression of being firm and serious; but in our first conversation he revealed he had caused 35 enemy casualties in one battle. I asked him how many weapons he had captured as a result of the 35 casualties. He answered “none,” explaining that they had attacked with bazookas and that the enemy weapons had been blown into tiny fragments. My diplomatic qualities have never been very refined, and I told him quite bluntly that he must be lying. He then exonerated himself, on the grounds that he had not been present at the actual fighting but had been informed by his subordinates, etc. The matter was left to rest there—but since exaggeration is the norm in that region, to call a lie a lie is not the best way to establish fraternal relations with anyone.
On June 7, I set out for the Upper Base, after having consulted with Mitoudidi about the veracity of the promises that Kabila would be coming in the morning. He tacitly led me to believe that he was not expecting Kabila to return in the near future, especially as Chou En-lai2 was visiting Dar es-Salaam at the time and it made sense for Kabila to go there to try to put various requests with the Chinese leader.
As I was making the difficult climb back to the Upper Base, a messenger caught up with us to say that Mitoudidi had just drowned. His body remained in the water for three days, before being discovered on the 10th, when his body rose to the surface of the lake. Due to the fact that two Cubans had been in the boat at the time of the accident, I was able to reach the following conclusion from a series of personal conversations and inquiries.
Mitoudidi had been on his way to Rwandasi, the place where he was thinking of transferring the General Staff. It was hardly three kilometers from the Kibamba [Lake] Base,3 but he went by water because of the poor state of the road. There was a strong wind and big waves on the lake. It would appear that he accidentally fell into the lake. From then on a series of strange events occurred that could be attributed to outright stupidity, extraordinary superstition (the lake supposedly being inhabited by all manner of spirits), or to something more serious. The fact is that Mitoudidi, who could swim a little, managed to remove his boots and—according to various witnesses—called out for help for some 10 to 15 minutes. People threw themselves into the water to save him, and one of these, his orderly, also drowned; Commander François, who was accompanying him on the journey, also disappeared (I never found out whether he fell in at the same time or jumped in to save Mitoudidi). When the accident happened, they stopped the outboard motor, which made it impossible to maneuver the boat in any way. Then they started it up again, but it seems that some magical force prevented them from approaching the spot where Mitoudidi was floundering. In the end, while he continued to call for help, the boat headed for shore and the compañeros saw him go under shortly afterwards.
The nature of human relations among the Congolese leaders is so complex that it’s hard to know what to make of this. What is certain is that the man in charge of the boat at the time, who was also an army commander, was later sent to a different front—the explanation given to me being that the compañero had been involved in a number of incidents at the base.
Thus, a stupid accident took the life of the man who had begun to implant some organization in the terrible chaos of the [Kibamba] base. Mitoudidi had been young (no more than 30 years old), and had served as a functionary with [Patrice] Lumumba and a combatant with Mulele. Mitoudidi had said that Mulele had sent him to this area at a time when no revolutionary organization was functioning there. In our frequent conversations, he said Mulele had diametrically opposed methods, and described the completely different character of the struggle in that other part of the Congo, although he never gave any hint of cri
ticism of Kabila or Massengo and he attributed all the disorganization to the peculiarities of the region.
I don’t know the reason—perhaps it had something to do with race or former reputation—but when Kabila arrived in the region, he was the chief and Mitoudidi became the head of his General Staff. The truth was that the only person with authority had now disappeared in the lake. The next day, the news was already known in the surrounding area, and Kabila gave signs of life by sending me the following brief note:
I have just heard about the fate of brother Mitu, and of the other brothers. As you can see, I am deeply hurt by it.
I am worried about your safety; I want to come right away. For us, this sad story is our destiny. All the comrades with whom you arrived should remain where they are until my return, unless they want to go to Kabimba or to see Mundandi in Bendera.
I trust in your steadfastness. We will put everything into motion so that we can transfer the base on a date certain.
During my absence, I have sorted out some matters with Compañero Muteba, and with Bulengai and Kasabi.
In friendship,
Kabila
Compañero Muteba, who was deeply affected by Mitoudidi’s death, came to see me to ascertain exactly our views about what had happened. It was probably due to superstition that they were contemplating the move to a different base; but I didn’t want to raise any objections because it seemed a very delicate issue and I thought it wiser to avoid giving a clear answer. We discussed the most important problems that had brought us to the Congo; we had been there nearly two months and still had achieved absolutely nothing. I mentioned the reports I had written for Compañero Mitoudidi that had disappeared with him, and then he asked me to do a general report for him about the situation to forward to Kabila. I took on this task and wrote the following. (I should explain that this text is slightly different from the original, as in several places, my deficient French forced me to look for the word I knew, rather than the one I really intended. The letter is addressed to Compañero Muteba and was confidential.)