The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  The only certainty is that I am dead.

  Fidel Castro, Premier of Cuba, is silent, neither confirming or denying.

  Fidel is silent. The afternoon of our talk, after the ride from the airport in which we each shouted and punched the air, ended in silence, that to some uncanny silence of his, when he joins the world of mineral things, when the most talkative of men, whose life is a stream, river, torrent vapor cloud stream, etc., of words, shuts up; when his gestures, too, his hand reaching out and upward to punctuate a point, to squeeze a shoulder, come to an end. His hands lie open by his sides.

  We sat facing each other, neither of us speaking, on the crow’s-nest platform he had built in the middle of his room. (To reach it we walked up a circular metal stairway that winds about a thick metal pole. The pole supports the wooden platform.) Fidel sat in a rounded wooden desk chair on rollers (a triumph for someone to have gotten up that ladder), and I made myself comfortable in a small straight-backed wooden chair. We were eight feet off the ground, talking, smoking; not talking. I looked down at his room. His single bed was neatly made, the blue and red blanket tucked tight. (He rarely sleeps here. Uneasy in Havana, he travels all over the island, wandering, in a caravan of jeeps. And in Havana he prefers others’ beds.) Iron weights were scattered on the floor, dumbbells, a rowing machine, baseball bats, baseball and boxing gloves, the wide white cross-weave of a trampoline. Fidel does not want to get fat; or old; or die. The trampoline was useless for exercise, though; books were piled all over it. Books were everywhere, books on farming, on soil science, on cattle raising, books on crop hybridization, books half read, books stacked on the seat of the rowing machine, with red ribbon place-markers sticking out from their pages. Books on the red reclining chair and on the wobbly leopard-skin footrest, books opened and spread face down on the floor, their spines cracking. Scattered about among the wilderness of books were the musical instruments he has tried to play from time to time—a guitar, a bright new brass trumpet, an accordion. (A one-man mariachi band!) For a bad moment I looked about, at the scattered books on agriculture, and the musical instruments he had abandoned (each time he gave up on the project before he had learned to play even a simple tune. Not enough time, not enough patience. There is only one instrument for him: the crowded plaza, his orchestra); and I thought of the factories—my ministry’s responsibility—many of them idle or half used, hobbled for lack of raw materials or trained workers, or spare parts. The Revolution was an old engraving I saw once, as a child: a pensive bearded man, a broken god, with a ruined city in the background, a collection of useless instruments around him, a magic square whose impotent charm means nothing beyond itself, a pile of books under his elbow on the spectral unproductive science of alchemy, that promises so much and accomplishes nothing; only one tool: a reaper, instrument of some dubious harvest.

  I looked back at Fidel. His eyes were distant, tired. He’d been up the night before, perhaps discussing my arrival, perhaps with a woman. His hands lay on his lap (he’d moved them when I looked away. It made me smile; he didn’t respond). He was still now. Immobile. Mineral.

  I was exhausted by my plane trip, and would usually have been fretful. I had a clammy smell. But I knew my thoughts. I stretched my legs out and looked at my boots. I put my hands in my lap. I sat.

  This silence of his was tactical. (All of Fidel’s actions, all his gestures are—or by his genius could later be gathered up into—a tactic.) It was a rare tactic, but not unfamiliar. Occasionally, in committee meetings, in planning sessions (earlier ones, when consent was still often at issue) he would do this immobility business, as if his motor (“the little motor that sets the big motor—the masses—in motion”) had run down, finally, for good and all. His hands, which had been busy curling and uncurling the thick hair of his sideburns, fell, as if he’d died, to his sides. His mouth fell open a bit, almost doltishly, if it hadn’t been for the intelligence of his eyes, which looked as if they were seeing something puzzling, distasteful. The others chattered on for a bit, until they saw him; then, one by one, they too grew quiet; waited.

  His silence was another manner of argument (silence is argument carried on by other means). When he had said all he could think to say (and that meant hours), when he had run out of rhetoric, examples, dialectical twists, and you—a broad, bearded comrade from the mountains, a too-open man—were still obstinate, obdurate, unconvinced, then he would sit like this. You thought the Revolution had promised land to the peasants, land they would own, land they would work themselves. Now Fidel was talking of reserving land for state farms, cooperative enterprises. You glared at those around the table. You were in uniform; some of them wore suit jackets. They weren’t comrades; they were shit. No one looked back at you. Fidel’s silence meant, “examine your motives”; it meant, “I do not know why you are so obstinate, it’s something dark in you that you won’t admit to us, perhaps because you haven’t admitted it to yourself; some desire for personal power, some petit-bourgeois prejudice; some mulish pride that keeps you attached to your mistake. But I am more obdurate than you. We’ll sit here until you discover your error. Or, if you fail, I will end this meeting in silence.”

  And perhaps you would discover your blindness; or perhaps his silence was (in so many ways) too terrifying to be abided—as if you thought he (or someone) was dying. He, the principle of Revolution, was being absorbed into the nonhuman world. You would do what you must to bring him back, to save him (or someone). You would indeed (and why not call your motive concern, loyalty, love for him whether he was right or wrong?). For perhaps there was, you felt, a glacial change going on within that silence, a change that would be irreversible; a mountain was being gouged from the land by the slow progress of a huge silent mass of ice. You were falling away from him, you were falling down that mountain, out of his confidence. He might smile suddenly and end the meeting. We would get up and leave the high-ceilinged room; and it would be far too late. You would find yourself at a distance from him, in a province, in exile, in jail, dead. His silence prefigured an abandonment, an absence, a death. Maybe yours.

  But to revive him now, to bring him back up the chain of being from rock to man, required a lot of talk from you. You could not anymore simply acquiesce in his plan. You must indicate thoroughly your hidden motive, now discovered, for disagreement. You must show that you had apprehended the flaw in your character, and so seen your theoretical mistake. You must display your understanding of his idea: economies of scale, creation of a new man, destruction of the petit-bourgeois element. You must elaborate for a while on why you now agreed—hard to do, for he had exhausted most of the means of elaboration himself. Perhaps you could use anecdotes from the war: when we had redistributed expropriated cattle to the peasants they had immediately slaughtered and eaten them, afraid the cows would be taken away again. Only state cooperatives could prevent this. I had seen you, a courageous man, drag a wounded comrade from a field strafed by gunfire, but sweat covered your body now as you showed yourself before your comrades. I could smell it: an acrid unpleasant odor. You clasped your fingers together with strain, in prayer, as I had seen you do when you first tried to learn to read. Again, words were failing to come to you. Comrades stared at the light from the high windows, or the discolored rectangles on the wall where the portraits of Cuba’s betrayers had hung. (I, however, watched you perform. You caught my eye and I smiled and nodded. You hated me ever after.) You went on till he spoke, for his silence was a waste of snow you might have to wander in till your heart froze in confusion and terror.

  And often, as the holdout heard himself talk, he found that he now agreed with Fidel, not simply for show, but deeply. (Or was this pride’s ruse to save one’s dignity?) Even as you nervously spoke (I have been told) you found that something recalcitrant in you had melted. Fidel was right. Of course he was right. Who better could interpret that exacting god, the Revolution? You turned about before our eyes; he had turned you; you wanted even to thank him; you saw things freshly.
You didn’t feel you had abandoned your position exactly (something you would never have done in a battle, when the enemy was clearly uniformed, when you thought you had known what you were fighting for); rather you simply couldn’t find your old position from your new perspective.

  But such silence was an extreme tactic for Fidel. He preferred interpretation and reinterpretation, a reworking of everyone’s arguments that found opposition to be not opposition at all, but an unsuspected fundamental agreement with him (for the moment), that made you feel that your point was subsumed in his, and that the later working-out of things would join you both (till death do you part).

  Or, alas, later some other solution would be found.

  Fidel’s silence is so powerful because all vitality is in his voice. Once there was. No, this should have a fairy-tale beginning. Once upon a time there was a CIA plot to damage the Revolution by putting lysergic acid in one of Fidel’s cigars. (What appears to them to be a broom is a creature with ears; they have their informed sources, we have ours.) He would smoke the funny cigar before making an important speech to the nation, and become psychotic during the speech, talk all crazy out of his head. This would demoralize the masses.

  And there was a dreamlike truth to their idea. Fidel’s voice is the Cuban Revolution. Not his presence, but his voice. It is as if the island were a narrative of his, a continual improvisation by a master storyteller. He is making them up as we go along; creating characters (was there a proletariat in the way that the revolution required it before he named it, made it know its responsibilities, its power?); and yet one feels at each turn that the story could not be other than it is. He has done this by listening: to hear Fidel speak is to hear a man responding, always; he hears a murmur in the crowd; it becomes a voice inside him; he speaks it; he gives the mass the words it wished but did not know, did not even know that it wished except as an uncertainty, a painful anxiety. The Revolution is the long delirium of Fidel’s speeches. Every citizen is a sentence in that story, as he covers the country with words, makes it out of words, crossing and revising and crisscrossing the island as if it were a giant piece of paper. Fidel gone mad would be the Revolution become farce. They would build big factories to make cookies in the shape of obscene body parts; they would declare war on the Eskimos and load their guns with potatoes and soap; they would dig up sugar cane and plant transistors, waiting patiently for their harvest of radios. And they would become strange to each other, having lost the common term, the common hero, the common language that he is for them. There is no life in Cuba outside the Revolution, outside of his voice.

  Thus the anxiety when he shuts up. In the first year of the Revolution, when we still had to make gestures to the national bourgeoisie, and to the North Americans, we made Judge Urrutia the President. He was an old courageous man, a judge under Batista who had voted freedom for the captured men of the Granma. But he would not go along with the First Agrarian Reform Law, mild though it was. He accused Communists—myself among them—of subverting the government, misleading Fidel. (For Fidel had made shadows, allowed the national bourgeoisie to believe what it liked about him.) Fidel resigned. The Cabinet tried to meet in his absence; but nothing could be done without him. Urrutia telephoned Castro and his call was refused. Castro was silent. The Cabinet met again to deal with this crisis; but again they could not agree, they could not calculate his silence, they could not improvise an action. The ministers left the Presidential Palace. Rumors spread. Fidel was silent, neither confirming nor denying. The sugar workers, a union we controlled, called for Urrutia’s resignation, that Fidel might be returned to them. The people waited. Was the Revolution at an end? Would Fidel, indefatigable rebel, take arms against the government? That night Fidel spoke on television. He enumerated Urrutia’s faults, his mistaken appointments, his too-large house, his too-large salary. “Personally,” Fidel said, “I neither have nor want anything. Disinterest is a garment I wear everywhere.” What did he need money for if he trusted the people to provide for him? Urrutia was making up the idea of a Communist plot to provoke aggression from the United States. Urrutia planned to flee Cuba, return after the invasion, and run the country for the North Americans. Urrutia made it impossible for him to work, made him impotent, defenseless, exhausted by Urrutia’s hysterical anti-Communist declarations that caused international embarrassment and conflict with the good people in the United States. Urrutia made him silent That was what was intolerable. Cuba had found its hero, its epic, this man who spoke in rhythmic cadenced sentences of audacious plans, of future gaiety, of sublime and necessary cruelty, and this gray-haired old man had shut him up, denied them Fidel’s voice. Crowds gathered around the Presidential Palace demanding the judge’s life. Urrutia fled out the back door. We placed him under house arrest, then let him flee ignominiously to Venezuela. From that time on we ruled Cuba.

  I have seen him use his silence as a military tactic too. He would have us wait in ambush, in terrain that we controlled, and watch, watch as the soldiers entered our territory, strung out in a line across a field of tall grass, watch as their bold steps became more hesitant. They had known they were entering our zone, they had steeled themselves for the battle, they had taken the step, the leap, to face the danger, the firing, their death; why hadn’t the firing begun? they couldn’t believe they were safe; how much longer before it began; how much longer would they have to wait? it is terrible to feel in yourself a longing for an attack to begin, a longing for the sight of friends falling around you, perhaps for your own death; so divided, it is difficult to hold your resolve, to hold yourself ready; the line bunched near the front (we always shot the man on point first, so that soon no man would be willing to enter our zone first); you could see the sweat on their faces, under their arms, the terror in their eyes. The silence demoralized them. Then we killed them.

  JUNE 16

  Notes for statement on Vietnam

  We cannot remain silent towards Vietnam. We cannot treat the struggles of the Vietnamese people as if they were theater, a show we are audience at, a spectacle, a tragedy to provoke our pity, our tears. We have cried and applauded, but we have done nothing.

  We must not abandon Vietnam.

  Vietnam, like Cuba, should have been made, irrevocably, and no matter what the cost, a part of the Socialist world, to be defended by the missiles of the Socialist world, even—if the imperialists forced it—to the point of nuclear holocaust. This was not done. She was abandoned to fight alone.

  Vietnam is the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism. We must aid her with our hands.

  Sketch of world situation since WWII.

  Use figure of hands/of fire

  A map on fire

  fire/light destruction/illumination

  A fire in a field on a shirt

  a body on fire

  The hands of a young woman in

  Vietnam (I see dirt under her nails)/

  our hands—the nails bitten down

  with anxiety; source of the

  anxiety? too psychological

  The people of Vietnam must be as

  real to us as our own hands.

  JUNE 17

  This morning I sat at the table in the main room with Walter, keeping him company during breakfast. My asthma has been very bad the last few days, and I can’t make myself eat much. There is a dank smell for me everywhere that takes away my appetite and my strength. I sipped a cup of mate, mostly for the warmth on my hands.

  Walter said, chewing some bread and jam, “Why are we here?”

  “A metaphysical question?” I said. I knew what he meant; it was odd, I thought, that he hadn’t asked before. But often he waits patiently for situations to unfold themselves, to reveal their meanings; he is a watchful man. “I’m here,” I said, “waiting to find out what Fidel will do. He can help my plans; he could damage them greatly. I’m here to write my self-criticism, to make myself sure of my next step. I am writing a message about Vietnam, a call to arms.” Walter looked at me, an
d said nothing. “But I’m not writing.” My last words came in a wheeze; but I couldn’t use the epinephrine, again, yet.

  “What happened?”

  “You’re a poem, Walter. I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Between you and our leader.” He was a poem—it was difficult ever to know if he were ironic.

  “We talked. We fought. We sat silently.”

  “What did he say?”

  “A great deal. At the end he said that perhaps I wanted to sacrifice myself and my closest comrades to appease my guilt. He said that I had sent many people to prove my theories, and they had died; and now I felt troubled. I couldn’t stand to live when they were dead on my account. I had to prove that my theories were good—they were my theories during this conversation—that they had died from mistakes of their own. Or I had to die myself, and appease my guilt. Maybe, he said, I wanted to die.” Talking like this made an anxious flutter in my chest; my lungs ached. “I think it’s nonsense, a way for him to avoid the question facing us. But I must wait for his help.”

  Walter stared at me, as I had at him a few days ago. Do I want him to die? I returned his look. He has large brown watchful eyes. His small face tilts backward from his chin to the brow. The last week he has grown a wispy black mustache. I wheezed more deeply. The outline of his face wavered in the bad air.