The death of Che Guevara - Memoranda

A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

The death of Che Guevara
Memoranda

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1










The death of Che Guevara

“Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.

“Then it would die, of course.”

“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

“It always happens,” said the Gnat.

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 3






CAN WE READ POLITICS AS literature? Perhaps, sometimes, in certain cases. For example: on 8 October 1967, a small battalion of Bolivian army rangers trapped a group of guerrilleros in a scrubby gully in the wilderness east of Sucre, near the village of La Higuera. Two were captured alive: a Bolivian fighter, known simply as Willy, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, leader of what Bolivia’s president, General René Barrientos, called “the foreign invasion of agents of Castro-Communism.” Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich, hearing the news, scrambled into a helicopter and flew to La Higuera. In the ramshackle schoolhouse, Selich held a forty-five-minute dialogue with his captive. Until the late 1990s, little was known of Che’s last hours; after a silence of twenty-nine years, Selich’s widow finally allowed the American journalist Jon Lee Anderson to consult Selich’s notes of that extraordinary conversation. Beyond their importance as a historical document, there is something poignant about the fact that a man’s last words were respectfully recorded by his enemy.

“Comandante, I find you somewhat depressed,” Selich said. “Can you explain the reasons why I get this impression?”

“I’ve failed,” Che replied. “It’s all over, and that’s the reason why you see me in this state.”

“Are you Cuban or Argentinean?” asked Selich.

“I am Cuban, Argentinean, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc…. You understand.”

“What made you decide to operate in our country?”

“Can’t you see the state in which the peasants live?” asked Che. “They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals …”

“But the same thing happens in Cuba,” retorted Selich.

“No, that’s not true” Che fired back. “I don’t deny that in Cuba poverty exists, but [at least] the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the Bolivian lives without hope. Just as he is born, he dies, without ever seeing improvements in his human condition.”

The CIA wanted Che alive, but perhaps their orders never reached the Cuban-born CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, in charge of supervising the operation. Che was executed the next day. To make it appear that their captive had been killed in battle, the executioner fired at his arms and legs. Then, as Che was writhing on the ground, “apparently biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out,” one last bullet entered his chest and filled his lungs with blood. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande, where it lay on view for a couple of days, observed by officials, journalists, and townspeople. Selich and other officers stood at the head, posing for the photographer, before having the corpse “disappear” into a secret grave near the Vallegrande airstrip. The photographs of the dead Che, with their inevitable echo of the dead Christ (the half-naked lean body, the bearded, suffering face), became one of the essential icons of my generation, a generation that was barely ten years old when the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959.

The news of the death of Che Guevara reached me towards the end of my first and only year of university in Buenos Aires. It was a warm October (summer had started early in 1967), and my friends and I were making plans to travel south and camp in the Patagonian Andes. It was an area we knew well. We had trekked in Patagonia most summers throughout high school, led by enthusiastic left-wing monitors whose political credos ran from conservatist Stalinism to free-thinking anarchism, from melancholic Trotskyism to the Argentinean-style socialism of Alfredo Palacios, and whose book bags, which we rifled as we sat around the campfire, included the poems of Mao Tse-tung (in the old-fashioned spelling), of Blas de Otero and Pablo Neruda, the stories of Saki and Juan Rulfo, the novels of Alejo Carpentier and Robert Louis Stevenson. A story by Julio Cortázar that had as its epigraph a line from Che’s diaries led us to discuss the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. We sang songs from the Spanish Civil War and the Italian Resistance, the rousing “Dirge of the Volga Boatmen” and the scabrous rumba “My Puchunguita Has Ample Thighs,” various tangos, and numerous Argentinean zambas. We were nothing if not eclectic.

Camping down south was not just an exercise in tourism. Our Patagonia was not Bruce Chatwin’s. With youthful fervor, our monitors wanted to show us the hidden side of Argentinean society—a side that we, from our comfortable Buenos Aires homes, never got to see. We had a vague idea of the slums that surrounded our prosperous neighborhoods — villas miseria as we called them, or “misery villages” — but we knew nothing of the slavelike conditions, such as those described by Che to Selich, that still existed for many of the peasants on our country’s vast estates, nor of the systematic genocide of the native people that had been officially conducted by the military until well into the thirties. With more or less earnest intentions, our monitors wanted us to see “the real Argentina.”

One afternoon, near the town of Esquel, our monitors led us into a high and rocky canyon. We walked in single file, wondering where this dusty, unappealing stone corridor would lead us, when up in the canyon’s walls we began to see openings, like the entrances to caves, and in the openings the gaunt, sickly faces of men, women, and children. The monitors walked us through the canyon and back, never saying a word, but when we set up camp for the night they told us something of the lives of the people we had seen, who made their home in the rocks like animals, eking out a living as occasional farmhands, and whose children rarely lived beyond the age of seven. Next morning, two of my classmates asked their monitor how they could join the Communist Party. Others took a less sedate path. Several became fighters in the seventies war against the military dictatorship; one, Mario Firmenich, became the bloodthirsty capo of the Montoneros guerrilla movement and for years held the dubious celebrity of heading the military’s most-wanted list.

The news of Che’s death felt colossal and yet almost expected. For my generation, Che had incarnated the heroic social being most of us knew we could never become. The curious mix of resoluteness and recklessness that appealed so strongly to my generation, and even to the one that followed, found in Che the perfect incarnation. In our eyes he was in life already a legendary figure, whose heroism we were certain would somehow survive beyond the grave. It did not surprise us to learn that after Che’s death, Rodríguez, the treacherous CIA agent, suddenly began to suffer from asthma, as if he had inherited the dead man’s malady.

Che had seen what we had seen, he had felt, as we had felt, outrage at the fundamental injustices of “the human condition,” but unlike us, he had done something about it. That his methods were dubious, his political philosophy superficial, his morality ruthless, his ultimate success impossible seemed (perhaps still seems) less important than the fact that he had taken upon himself to fight against what he believed was wrong even though he was never quite certain what in its stead would be right.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (to give him his full name before fame reduced it to a simple “Che”) was born in the city of Rosario, in Argentina, on 14 May 1928, though the birth certificate stated “June” to hide the reason for his parents’ hasty marriage. His father, whose ancestors first arrived in Argentina with the conquistadores, owned a plantation in the subtropical province of Misiones. Because of Ernesto’s asthma, which plagued him throughout his life, the family moved to the more salubrious climate of Córdoba and later, in 1947, to Buenos Aires. There Ernesto studied at the faculty of medicine and, armed with a doctor’s title, set off to explore the Latin American continent “in all its terrible wonder.” He was enthralled by what he saw and found it hard to give up the wandering life: from Ecuador he wrote to his mother announcing that he had become “a 100 percent adventurer.”

Among the many people he met on this Grand Tour, one in particular seemed to haunt him: an old Marxist refugee from Stalin’s pogroms whom Ernesto came across in Guatemala. “You will die with the fist clenched and the jaw tense,” said this far-flung Tiresias, “in perfect demonstration of hate and of combat, because you are not a symbol, you are an authentic member of a society that is crumbling: the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your actions; you are as useful as I, but you don’t know the usefulness of the help you give to the society that sacrifices you.” Ernesto could not have known that the old man had given him his epitaph.

In Guatemala, Ernesto became acutely aware of political strife and identified for the first time with the revolutionary cause. There, and in Mexico soon afterward, he became acquainted with the Cuban émigrés who were leading the struggle against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose corrupt regime had so fascinated and repelled Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. With a canny nose for troublemakers, the CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, appointed at the time to Central America, opened a file on the young Argentinean doctor—a file that over the years was to become one of the thickest in the CIA’s records. In July 1955 the first meeting between Ernesto Guevara and Fidel Castro took place in Mexico. Castro, who as far back as 1948, as a twenty-one-year-old law student, had begun plotting against Batista’s regime, took an immediate liking to the Argentinean whom the other Cubans had started calling “Che” after the Argentinean colloquial address. “I think there is a mutual sympathy between us,” wrote Che in his diaries. He was right.

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Che sought an ambitious sequel. We do not know whether he would have lent his support, out of loyalty to the revolution, to the tyrannical measures Castro was to take in the years to come in order to protect his regime. Che’s sights were far in the future. After the war in Cuba, Che believed, the revolutionaries would spread to neighboring nations (Bolivia was the first chosen). Here they would wage war against the oligarchy and their imperialist bosses, wars that would finally force the arch-enemy, the United States, to step into the fray. As a result, Latin America would unite against “the foreign invader” and defeat imperialism on the continent. Che’s battle was not against all forms of power, nor was it even against the notion of a tiered society. He was certainly not an anarchist: he believed in the need for organized leadership and he imagined a pan-American state under a strong-handed but moral government. In a small book on the Greek idea of liberty, La Grèce antique à la découverte de la liberté, the French historian Jacqueline de Romilly pointed out that Antigone’s revolt stemmed not from a rejection of authority itself but, on the contrary, from obedience to a moral law rather than to an arbitrary edict. Che too felt compelled to obey such moral laws, and it was for them that he was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone, including, of course, himself. As we know, events never proceeded beyond the Bolivian campaign. Whether Che ever learned what the usefulness of his sacrifice was is a question that remains unanswered.

And yet something of Che’s ideal survives beyond the political defeat, even in these days when greed has almost acquired the quality of a virtue and corporate ambition overrides mere social (let alone socialist) considerations. In part, he has become another colorful Latin American figure, like Emiliano Zapata or Pancho Villa, used to decorate T-shirts and shopping bags: in Bolivia, the National Tourist Board now conducts tours to the site of Che’s final campaign and the hospital where his body was displayed. But that is not all that remains. The face of Che — alive with his starred beret, or dead, staring as if his eyes could see into a point beyond our shoulder — still seems to encompass a vast and heroic view of men and women’s role in the world, a role that may seem to us today utterly beyond our capabilities or our interest.

No doubt he had the physique du rôle. Epic literature requires an iconography. Zorro and Robin Hood (via Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn) lent the live Che their features, and in the popular imagination he was a younger Don Quixote, a Latin American Garibaldi. Dead, as the nuns at the Vallegrande hospital noted when they surreptitiously snipped off locks of his hair to keep inside reliquaries, he resembled the deposed Christ, dark uniformed men surrounding him like Roman soldiers in modern costume. Up to a point, the dead face superseded the live one. A notorious passage in Fernando Solanas’s four-hour documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), which brilliantly chronicles Argentinean history from its earliest days to the death of Che, held the camera for several minutes on that lifeless face, forcing the audience to pay visual homage to the man who carried for us our urge for action in the face of injustice, who bore for us our bothersome agenbite of inwit. We stare at that face and wonder, At what point did he pass from lamenting the sorrows of this world, pitying the fate of the poor, and conversationally condemning the ruthless greed of those in power, to doing something about it, taking action against the unjust tide?

Perhaps it is possible to point to the moment in which the passage took place. On 22 January 1957, Che Guevara killed his first man. Che and his comrades were in the Cuban bush; it was midday. A soldier started shooting at them from a hut barely 70 feet from where they stood. Che fired two shots. At the second shot, the man fell. Until that moment, the earnest indignation at universal injustice had expressed itself in Byronic gestures, bad verse that Che wrote with echoes of nineteenth-century bombast, and the sort of academic prose known in Latin America as revolutionary, littered with the vocabulary of inaugural speeches and purple metaphors. After that first death something changed. Che, the ardent but conventional intellectual, became irrevocably a man of action, a destiny that had perhaps been his all along, even though everything in him seemed to conspire against his fulfilling it. Racked by asthma that made him stumble through long speeches, let alone long marches, conscious of the paradox of having been born into the class that benefited from the unfair system he had set out to challenge, moved suddenly to act rather than to reflect on the precise goals of his actions, Che assumed, with stubborn determination, the role of the romantic fighter-hero and became the figure whom my generation required in order to ease our conscience.

Thoreau declared that “action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.” Che (who, like all Argentinean intellectuals of his time, must have read “Civil Disobedience”) would have agreed with this paraphrase of Matthew 10:34—35.