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"On the 30th Anniversary of the Death of Che Guevara: Che as I knew him."
Ahmed Ben Bella (October 1997)
From beyond space and time, we hear Che's call, which demands we answer: YES, only the revolution can sometimes transform man into a being of light. We saw this light illuminating his naked body lying somewhere in distant Ñancahuasú, in the photographs that appeared in newspapers all over the world. The message of his final gaze continues to touch the depths of our soul.
Che was a courageous fighter, but a conscious one, with a body weakened by asthma. Sometimes, when I climed with him to the Chréa heights overlooking the town of Blida, I saw him suffer an attack that turned him green in the face. Anyone who has read his Bolivian diary knows in what poor health he faced the terrible physical and mental ordeals with which his path was strewn.
It is impossible to speak of Che without speaking of Cuba and the special relations which united us, since his story and his life were so closely bound up with the country that became his second home before he turned to wherever the revolution called him.
I first met Ernesto Che Guevara in the autumn of 1962, on the eve of the international crisis around the missile affair and the US blockade of Cuba. Algeria has just achieved independence and formed its first government. As head of that government, I was due to attend the September 1962 session of the United nations in New York at which the Algerian flag would be raised for the first time over the UN building, a ceremony marking the victory of our national liberation struggle and Algeria's entry into the concert of free nations.
The National Liberation Front's Political Bureau had decided that the trip to the United nations should be followed by a visit to Cuba. More than just a visit, it was intended as an act of faith demonstrating our political commitment. Algeria wished to emphasize publicly its total solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, specially at this difficult moment in its history.
I was invited to the White House on the morning of October 15, 1962 and had a frank and heated discussion about Cuba with the President, John F. Kennedy. I asked him point blank: "Are you heading towards a confrontation with Cuba?" His reply left no doubt about his real intentions. "No", he said, "if there are no soviet missiles. Yes, if there are." Kennedy tried hard to dissuade me from flying to Cuba direct from New York. He even suggested that the Cuban military aircraft that was to fly me to Havana might be attacked by Cuban opposition forces based in Miami. To theses thinly veiled threats I retorted that I was a fellah who could not be intimidated by harkis, whether Algerian or Cuban.
Che Guevara had left Algeria by the time of the military coup on June 19, 1965. He had warned me to be on my guard. His departure from Algeria, his death in Bolivia and my own disappearance for 15 years need to be studied in the historical context of the ebb that followed the period of victorious liberation struggles. After the assassination of Lumumba, it spelt the end of the progressive regimes of the Third World, including those of N'Krumah, Modibo, Keita, Sukarno and Nasser, etc.
The date October 9 1967 is written in fire in our memory. For me, a solitary prisoner, it was a day of immeasurable sadness. The radio announced the death of my brother, and the enemies we had fought together celebrated their sinister victory. But as time passes, and the circumstances of the guerrilla struggle that ended that day in the Ñancahuazú faded from memory, Che, more than ever is present in the thoughts of all those who struggle and hope. He is part of the fabric of their daily lives. Something of him remains attached to their heart and soul, buried like a treasure in the deepest, most secret, and richest part of their being, rekindling their courage and renewing their strength.
One day in May 1972, the opaque silence of my prison, jealously guarded by hundreds of soldiers, was broken by a tremendous din. I learnt that Fidel was visiting a model farm only a few hundred yards away, no doubt unaware of my presence in the secluded Moorish house on the hill whose roof he could glimpse above the treetops. It is certainly for the same reasons of discretion that this very house was, not so long ago, chosen as a torture center by the colonial army.
At this moment the memories flooded back. A kaleidoscope of faces passed before my eyes like and old, faded newsreel. Never since we parted had Che Guevara been so vivid in my memory.
In reality, my wife and I have never forgotten him. A large photograph of Che was pinned to the wall of our prison, and his gaze witnessed our day-to-day life, our joys and our sorrows. But another, smaller photo, cut out of a magazine, which i had stuck unto a piece of card and cover with plastic, accompanied us on all our wanderings and is the one that is closest to our hearts. It is now in my late parent's house in Maghnia, the village where I was born, where we deposited our most precious souvenirs before going into exile. It is the photograph of Ernesto Che Guevara stretched out on the ground, naked to the waist, blazing with light. So much light and so much hope.