[Campaign Events] [News from Cuba] [International news and events] [UK Events] [Reviews]
Pombo: A Man of Che's Guerrilla.
With Che Guevara in Bolivia 1966-68.
By Harry Villegas.
Pathfinder Books
Book Review by Javier Molina
"You are alive because you were aggressive, because you did not show fear, if you'd shown fear, you would have perished, that is your revolutionary strength and conviction, in your resistance in your capacity for struggle" Those are Fidel's words to Harry Villegas or Pombo as he was called and the few survivors of that glorious internationalist attempt to start a revolutionary uprising in Bolivia.
Hunger, cold, thirst: "We had no food or water for three days..." a phrase that is repeated time and time again. Fear, and the relentless drive of a conviction. The pain of death and the pain of a loss: "Ñato (Julio Mendez Corme, Bolivian) lagged behind... and was hit in the back severing his spinal column. We regrouped trying to form a line of defence around him to rescue him. Impossible, he could not move...The situation was difficult, on the one hand Ñato demanded to be finished off, begging us not to let him be captured, and on the other, it was the life of our comrade with whom we had shared dangers and vicissitudes, we were joined to him by a bond of love and respect, faithful to the cause for so long...The painful decision was to fulfil his request. As Che had already defined it, he had reached the highest level of the human species: that of a revolutionary."
All biographies, including auto-biographies are a point of view of an individual about an individual. A campaign diary such as this and such as Che's diaries, contrary to the fatuous comment expressed by Anderson about Che's writings, are a spontaneous recording of events as they happen with the brevity and almost clinical presentation under tremendous pressure: the pressure of time slipping away, the pressured of constantly moving, Death hovering in the guise of the enemy.
There is no need for biographies and interpretations of other people's lives. All one needs is to read their diaries. Pombo's diary is a full compliment to Che's Bolivian diary.
Wanting to find some more details about Che's life, I bought and reviewed the biography written by Anderson. Both acts were pointless. All one needs to do is read His diary and to complement the truth of his character nothing better than Harry Villegas' words, comrade and companion from the time of the Sierra Maestra uprising, when at a young age Pombo (Dove in Swahili) joined the Rebel Army under his command.
Another thought crosses my mind every time a pick up this diary: the total and complete surrender of one's will to the Greater Cause: humanity, the Ideal, not as a romantic chimera but as a working reality, in the words of Che: "Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as motivation." Che, Bompo, Inti, Miguel, Coco, Julio, etc. feared nothing and suffered stoically.
Che, while being interrogated by Selich (who was beaten to death years later by army thugs under orders of today's Bolivian president Hugo Banzer Suarez) in his last hour, looking over his shoulder to the bodies of his fallen comrades said: "Colonel, look at them. These boys had everything they could want in Cuba and yet they come here to die.."
But not all is perfect. There is petty bickering and theft. Discipline is loose. Moral is low. Pombo mentions those moments of human weakness without judgement, they are facts. Even the desertion of committed guerrillas and later their betrayal causing their final downfall are mentioned without bitterness or recrimination.
It is the blood of these martyrs that makes this Earth a Hallowed ground. It is their tears and their sweat, their pain, hunger and thirst. They have nothing to gain personally and everything to lose. In our contemporary society where gain and profit selfishness and egoism are the rule and norm, the actions of these martyrs is incomprehensible. Yet what greater act of love than surrendering one's life for the another.