Che Guevara , After the revolution in Cuba

“
Che was practically the architect of the Soviet-Cuban relationship.
”

— Alexander Alexiev, KGB official [38]
On January 8, 1959, Castro's army rolled victoriously into Havana. In February, the revolutionary government proclaimed Guevara "a Cuban citizen by birth" in recognition of his role in the triumph.[39] When Hilda Gadea arrived in Cuba in late January, Guevara told her that he was involved with another woman, and the two "agreed on a divorce,"[40] which became finalized on May 22.[41] On June 2, 1959, he married Aleida March, a Cuban-born member of the 26th of July movement with whom he had been living since late 1958.[42]
During the rebellion against Batista's dictatorship, the general command of the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, "introduced into the liberated territories the 19th-century penal law commonly known as the Ley de la Sierra".[43] "This law included the death penalty for extremely serious crimes, whether perpetrated by the dictatorship or by supporters of the revolution. In 1959, the revolutionary government extended its application to the whole of the republic and to war criminals captured and tried after the revolution. This latter extension, supported by the majority of the population, followed the same procedure as that seen in" the Nuremberg Trials held by the Allies after World War II.[44] To implement this plan, Castro named Guevara commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, for a five-month tenure (January 2 through June 12, 1959).[45] Guevara was charged with purging the Batista army and consolidating victory by exacting "revolutionary justice" against traitors, chivatos, and Batista's war criminals.[46] Serving in the post as "supreme prosecutor" on the appellate bench, Guevara oversaw the trials and executions of those convicted by revolutionary tribunal. Raúl Gómez Treto, senior legal advisor to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, considered removing restrictions on the death penalty to be justified in order to prevent citizens themselves from taking justice into their own hands.[47]
It is estimated that several hundred people were executed on Guevara's orders during this time.[48]

On June 12, 1959, as soon as Guevara returned to Havana, Castro sent him out on a three-month tour of fourteen countries, most of them Bandung Pact members in Africa and Asia. Sending Guevara from Havana also allowed Castro to appear to be distancing himself from Guevara and his Marxist sympathies, that troubled both the United States and some of Castro's 26th of July Movement members.[50] He spent twelve days in Japan (July 15–27), participating in negotiations aimed at expanding Cuba's trade relations with that nation. During this visit Guevara also secretly visited the city of Hiroshima, where the American military had detonated an atom-bomb fourteen years earlier. Guevara was "really shocked" at what he witnessed and by his visit to a hospital where A-bomb survivors were being treated.[51]
Upon returning to Cuba in September 1959, it was evident that Castro now had more political power. The government had begun land seizures included in the agrarian reform law, but was hedging on compensation offers to landowners, instead offering low interest "bonds", which put the U.S. on alert. At this point the affected wealthy cattlemen of Camagüey mounted a campaign against the land redistributions, and enlisted the newly disaffected rebel leader Huber Matos, who along with the anti-Communist wing of the 26th of July Movement, joined them in denouncing the "Communist encroachment."[52] During this time Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was offering assistance to the "Anti-Communist Legion of the Caribbean" who was training in the Dominican Republic. This multi-national force comprised mostly of Spaniards and Cubans, but also of Croatians, Germans, Greeks, and right-wing mercenaries, were plotting to topple Fidel Castro.[53]
These developments prompted Castro to further clean house of "counter-revolutionaries", and appoint Guevara chief official at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform INRA and later President of the National Bank of Cuba BNC, while allowing him to retain his military rank.[54] At first glance it seemed a strange choice for the important position, Guevara had been promoting the creation of self-sufficient industries since his days in the Sierra Maestra. Guevara was expecting the U.S. to invade, and the Cuban population to then leave the cities and fight as guerrillas, although Guevara's hopes for armed uprisings elsewhere were failing.[55]

In 1960 Guevara provided first aid to victims when the freighter La Coubre, a French vessel carrying munitions from the port of Antwerp, exploded twice while it was being unloaded in Havana harbor, resulting in well over a hundred dead.[56] It was at the memorial service for the victims of this explosion that Alberto Korda took the famous photograph now known as Guerrillero Heroico.
Guevara desired to see a diversification in Cuba’s economy, as well as an elimination of material incentives, in favor of moral ones. Guevara viewed capitalism as a “contest among wolves” where “one can only win at the cost of others”, and thus desired to see the creation of a “new man and woman”.[57] An integral part of fostering a sense of “unity between the individual and the mass”, Guevara believed, was volunteer work and will. To display this, Guevara "led by example", working "endlessly at his ministry job, in construction, and even cutting sugar cane" on his day off.[58] During this time he also wrote several publications advocating a replication of the Cuban revolutionary model, promoting small rural guerrilla groups (foco theory) as an alternative to massive armed insurrection.
Guevara did not participate in the fighting of the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, having been ordered by Castro to a secretly prearranged command post in Cuba's western Pinar del Río province, where he fended off a decoy force.[59] He suffered a bullet grazing to the cheek during this deployment, however, when his pistol fell out of its holster and accidentally discharged.[60] In August 1961, during an economic conference of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Che Guevara sent a note of "gratitude" to U.S. President John F. Kennedy through Richard N. Goodwin, a young secretary of the White House. It read "Thanks for Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs). Before the invasion, the revolution was shaky. Now it's stronger than ever."[61]
Guevara played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During an interview with the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker a few weeks after the crisis, Guevara still fuming, stated that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.[62] Sam Russell, the British correspondent who spoke to Guevara at the time came away with "mixed feelings", calling him "a warm character" and "clearly a man of great intelligence", but "crackers from the way he went on about the missiles."[63]