CUBA: Venezuela’s Guerrilla Movement – Generals Finally Tell

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Mar 27 1997 (IPS) - Cuban soldiers who fought with Venezuela’s guerrillas in the 1960s suffered severe hunger, found themselves on their own more than once, and later learned that they had been the special targets of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The revelations appeared this month in the book “Declassified: Secrets of Generals”, consisting of 41 interviews of high-ranking officers by Cuban journalist Luis Baez.

The book, printed in a limited edition, throws light on the Cuban military presence – following the 1959 revolution – in Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, Syria, Tanzania, Venezuela, Yemen, and, of course, the Angolan and Ethiopian wars.

One of the least-known instances of Cuban military participation in Latin American guerrilla movements, the case of Venezuela has at last been officially recognised, through the testimony of two of the soldiers who fought there.

“They were 14 very tense months,” in which we were at an extreme disadvantage with respect to our opponents, said division General Ulises Rosales del Toro, the chief of staff of the Cuban army, a member of the political Bureau of the governing Communist Party and of the Council of State, and parliamentary deputy.

The general, who served as a soldier during the Cuban revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1952-59), and was still a soldier when he flew to Venezuela, said he did not regret his experience there, which helped him understand the conditions that led to the legendary Ernesto Che Guevara’s failure and death in Bolivia.

Venezuela was a school, which “taught me to understand the Latin American process, and why Che died,” said Rosales del Toro, alluding to the incomprehension and lack of support Guevara met with from the local Communist Party in Bolivia.

The CIA’s participation in the efforts against the Venezuelan insurgents was discovered later, almost by coincidence, when today’s Division General Raul Menendez Tomassevish, who also fought in Venezuela, headed troops that wiped out anti-Castro groups disembarking on the shores of eastern Cuba.

One of the detained anti-Castro fighters confessed to the officers interrogating him that the CIA had sent him and other agents to Venezuela to destroy the Cuban guerrillas operating in the mountains there.

Rosales del Toro and Tomassevich, selected by the army leadership to be interviewed by Baez, reached Venezuela late one night in May 1967, and were in the mountains four hours later.

The group was comprised of two other Cubans, Silvio Garcia and Harley Borges, three leaders of Venezuela’s Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), Moises Moleiro, Hector Marcano and Eduardo Ortiz Bucaram, and a peasant farmer, known simply as Aurelio. The men headed to the Bachiller mountains, in the eastern state of Anzoategui, one of three guerrilla fronts under the direction of the MIR, which had split from the then-governing Democratic Action party.

The Venezuelan insurgents were active from late 1961 until their defeat in 1967 in the Bachiller mountains, the central- western state of Lara, and the northwestern Falcon region.

“We each carried two and a half pounds of food in our backpacks. Fidel told us we couldn’t carry more than 35 pounds, including the rifle, which weighed 10, and the ammunition,” recalled Tomassevich.

But their two and a half pounds each of bouillon cubes, sausage and ham soon ran out, because the group spent three and a half months looking for the guerrillas.

“We were very hungry. Entire days with no food…We ate anything we could catch – from monkey and donkey to poisonous snakes,” said Tomassevich, who left Venezuela 10 months after arriving due to serious intestinal trouble after eating soup prepared with a rotten chicken.

Severely ill, unable to stand, Tomassevich was finally convinced he had to clear out. He left the country with a false passport, through the international airport of Maiquetia, and travelled to Paris, where he was met by people who had been given instructions by Castro.

“We were well-prepared from a physical, technical and military point of view,” said Rosales del Toro. “But the biggest problems that arose for us were not about the fighting, but political and conceptual difficulties.

“I think we were inadequately prepared for that kind of problem, which hit us hard.

“We should have accepted that the most important thing was not to fight the enemy, but to convince the leaders of the guerrilla movement, from our position as simple fighters, that the adversary had to be fought,” he added.

“Although we carried out several very successful ambush-style offensives, the initiative was almost always in the hands of the enemy,” he said, adding that in his opinion the Venezuelan rebels underestimated the Cuban soldiers’ recommendations and understanding of war.

Finally, “we understood that the position the Venezuelan guerrillas adopted was in accordance with a very internalised political and party line, which we would not be able to change.”

Rosales del Toro, of peasant origin, said that “in the most difficult moments, of which there were more than a few,” the peasant farmers-turned guerrillas helped them “survive and orient” themselves.

“Survival was not only extremely difficult due to the problems with feeding ourselves,” said the general, “but also because, in our romanticism and wanting to demonstrate how enemy attacks could be resisted, on several opportunities the four of us Cubans were left on our own.”

In 1967, the Organisation of American States imposed sanctions against Cuba, which was already excluded from that forum, based on the Venezuelan government’s denunciation of the Cuban military’s participation in the local insurgent movement.