Che Guevara in Congo

In 1965 Guevara decided to venture to West Africa and offer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the ongoing conflict in the Congo. According to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, Guevara thought that Africa was imperialism's weak link and therefore had enormous revolutionary potential.[72] Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser who had fraternal relations with Che dating back to his 1959 visit, saw Guevara's plans to fight in the Congo as "unwise" and warned that he would become a "Tarzan" figure, doomed to failure.[73] Despite the warning, Guevara led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement, which had emerged from the ongoing Congo Crisis. Guevara, his second-in-command Victor Dreke, and twelve other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in the Congo on April 24, 1965 with a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joining them soon afterward.[74][75] They collaborated for a time with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had previously helped supporters of the slain Patrice Lumumba lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. Disillusioned with the discipline of Kabila's troops, Guevara would dismiss him, stating "nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour."[76]
South African mercenaries, led by Mike Hoare in concert with Cuban exiles and the CIA, worked with the Congolese army to thwart Guevara. They were able to monitor his communications, and so pre-empted his attacks and interdicted his supply lines. Despite the fact that Guevara sought to conceal his presence in the Congo, the U.S. government was aware of his location and activities: The National Security Agency was intercepting all of his incoming and outgoing transmissions via equipment aboard the USNS Valdez, a floating listening post which continuously cruised the Indian Ocean off Dar es Salaam for that purpose.[77]
Guevara's aim was to export the Cuban Revolution by instructing local Simba fighters in Marxist ideology and foco theory strategies of guerrilla warfare. In his Congo Diary, he cites the incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces as key reasons for the revolt's failure.[78] Later that year, ill with dysentery, suffering from asthma, and disheartened after seven months of frustrations, Guevara left the Congo with the Cuban survivors. (Six members of his column had died.) At one point Guevara considered sending the wounded back to Cuba, and fighting alone until the end in the Congo, as a revolutionary example; however, after being urged by his comrades and pressed by two emissaries sent by Castro, at the last moment he reluctantly agreed to retreat. A few weeks later, when writing the preface to the diary he kept during the Congo venture, he began: "This is the history of a failure."[79]
Guevara was reluctant to return to Cuba, because Castro had made public Guevara's "farewell letter" —a letter intended to only be revealed in the case of his death—wherein he severed all ties in order to devote himself to revolution throughout the world.[80] As a result, Guevara spent the next six months living clandestinely in Dar es Salaam and Prague. During this time he compiled his memoirs of the Congo experience, and wrote drafts of two more books, one on philosophy and the other on economics. He also visited several Western European countries to test his new new false identity papers, created by Cuban Intelligence for his later travels to South America. Throughout this period Castro continued to importune his return to Cuba, but Guevara only agreed to do so under the basis of preparing a revolutionary effort somewhere in Latin America, and that his presence on the island would be secret.[citation needed]