The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  CASTRO: We will untie all who will be untied!

  [The others start to nod, and then their gestures of agreement halt, grow confused. Marcos’s hands, extended with palms up and fingers open, are suddenly palsied. Felipe’s arm is half raised in a clenched fist. He looks up at it, realizes it is the wrong arm, and slowly withdraws it]

  CASTRO [senses the confusion in their gestures, the hesitations and secret thoughts they express by the movements of their bodies, the looks on their faces, the unspoken words of their hands, and gives it voice, resolving that jangle]: I goofed! We will unite all who will be united!

  RICARDO [looking towards the floor]: Sounds like “spoon” to me.

  Something nagged at me. “Resolving that jangle”! Were those my collaborator’s words or my own? Had Walter sneaked into my room?

  Before I could ask him, Walter pointed towards that part of the page, and smiled. “I’m making fun of myself,” he said.

  Of himself? It was the part he had written for me yesterday!

  “Read on!”

  And, imagining that might solve these mysteries, I did:

  Scene Two: Same room, many plates of spaghetti later. Two men lie on the floor snoring, one man has his head on the other’s chest. One man is passed out across his arms on the table. Castro is dictating more instructions to Ricardo, who now takes them down, with great difficulty, on some paper.

  Raul Castro enters, with Che Guevara, a young unkempt doctor, his pants held up by a rope, his leather jacket in shreds.

  Ernesto looks about himself warily. He trusts no one. He takes in the room, and stares at the men eating spaghetti and talking.

  GUEVARA: I feel like I’m in a play.

  TRAVIS TULIO’S VOICE [from off stage]: You are!

  “Do you think that’s corny?” the real voice of Travis Tulio asked from behind me.

  “Yes,” I said. I found I was indifferent to Walter’s feelings, the “Travis.” “It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible. It’s stupid. It serves no purpose.” Not, frankly, that I could see the purpose of the rest.

  “I’ll cut it,” he said decisively, apparently unhurt and steeled to the awful act. He reached over and drew a thick pencil line through that section.

  [Raul Castro enters with Ernesto Guevara. Castro stares long and meaningfully at Guevara.]

  CASTRO: Come. Sit by me. Have a plate of spaghetti. I have been waiting a long time for you! [There is a note of mystery to Castro’s voice; fortunes told. He sounds like Che’s mother.]

  GUEVARA [as if mesmerized, walks towards the table]: You have?

  CASTRO: Yes. Since I first heard of you, I had the feeling that we would have a lot to say to each other, a lot to do with each other, a lot to accomplish. You understand?

  GUEVARA [clearly baffled]: No. I don’t think so.

  CASTRO: Have a plate of spaghetti. [Guevara, still mesmerized, sits by Castro.] Good. I heard about your argument with Paz Estenssoro, the MNR leader. You were right! He is a traitor to his people. You were entirely correct in telling him off. A man who has the courage to do that is someone I could work with!

  GUEVARA [increasingly baffled, and looking as if the perplexity is causing him some pain]: You did? He is? I am?

  CASTRO: Yes. Sartre thought very highly of what you said.

  GUEVARA: He did?

  CASTRO [examining Guevara quizzically, as if he were a store dummy]: Are you all right? Of course he didn’t. I don’t know Sartre! [Castro smiles broadly.] Let me say this from the beginning. [His face becomes serious, and he leans towards Guevara.] I have nothing to offer you but constant struggle, unending struggle. We will keep the spirit of the Moncada burning with an armed struggle. It will raise up the Cuban masses. It will show them that a real struggle is possible now. Propaganda of the deed. There will be a revolution in Cuba from top to bottom. Is that your cup of tea?

  GUEVARA [His body stiffens; he snaps his fingers in front of his eyes, ending his period of hypnosis.]: And the North Americans?

  CASTRO: Don’t worry about that. I am all the names of rebellion in history. I am Mussolini, Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Napoleon, Julius Caesar. I am one with the world-historical process. I am married only to the Revolution.

  GUEVARA [no longer baffled, and growing increasingly angry]: And the North Americans?!

  CASTRO: The North Americans! The North Americans! You’re just like Raul! You both talk of nothing else! You’re obsessed with the big whale, the North Americans! Listen: We will unite all who will be united to make the revolution! Now is the hour of the furnaces and only light should be seen!

  GUEVARA [shouting]: And the North Americans?

  CASTRO: All right, damn you. If they won’t cooperate, I’ll throw them off the island! There! Is that all right with you? You have my word!

  GUEVARA [extending his hand]: They won’t cooperate! I will join you!

  CASTRO: Good! Have a cigar! They’re helpful for asthma.

  [He hands a cigar to Guevara, who is unfamiliar with the object and holds it at a meter’s length. He watches Castro, to see how it is disarmed, and duplicates his movements. Both men light up.]

  Curtain for Act One of

  AN HISTORIC MEETING,

  A Play by Travis Tulio

  [A placard appears in front of the curtain: LUKEWARM ORANGE DRINKS WILL BE SERVED DURING INTERMISSION.]

  Ponco leaned forward, his head right over my shoulder. “Well?”

  Was he serious? Did he really want my (or anyone’s) opinion of this nonsense? Then I remembered his light last night; he had not slept in order to produce this pastiche. I might offend him. (One is, I had learned, strangely sensitive about such matters.)

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” I said.

  “Of course not.” Ponco busied himself at the stove, lit the charcoal, started some water to boil for coffee. “This isn’t a story where things simply are as they were. This is …”

  “Art,” I said, smiling, hoping to deflect his annoyance, and any further discussion of his work. “First time tragedy, second time farce. Karl Marx said that.” But why, I wondered, did Walter want to make us all ridiculous?

  “Karl Marx,” Ponco said, from the stove. “The theater critic?” He measured some coffee grounds for the water. “So? What was it like?” He didn’t sound angry, merely curious.

  I thought.

  Ponco came over with his coffee in a blue pottery mug.

  “We talked,” I said. “He did introduce me to smoking cigars, by the way. How did you know that? He said they were good for asthma. Mexico City has an air drought. I wheezed throughout our first meeting.”

  “Fidel thinks cigars are good for everything. If you had had leprosy, he would have told you that cigar smoke was good for that. What did you talk about?”

  “We talked about everything. Our ideas of revolution, of socialism, of the need for sacrifice, personal and national, to form the New Man of our continent. We talked about the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu. I said the United States would never allow the elections mandated by the Geneva Accords. I had the feeling he agreed with me. But you know, Walter, I’m not sure that he said so!”

  I looked over at Walter, and realized we were both shaking our heads, in rueful unison. We smiled.

  “I had never met a man so curious, so utterly given over to conversation. He loved ideas. And yet his abstractions seemed very palpable to him, like characters in a book. I could feel them. He always looked for the practical within the metaphysical. He wanted to know what might advance his work, and he would search anywhere for that, plunder all culture for insights, military tactics, metaphors, rhetorical tricks. We didn’t agree on everything. But he seemed to me someone of tenacity and modesty. He was the best element, I thought, of the national bourgeoisie. Nothing more than that. His inclinations were socialist, but he was not yet a thoroughgoing Marxist. He wouldn’t be able to carry the revolution through. There would be a further struggle, with Raul and myself on the Left. Other leaders might have to supplant
him, to carry the revolution forward.”

  Ponco pointed to me. “Now,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” I said, but it wasn’t something I wanted to think about. The small nickel pistol raised from the breakfast plate. “And his plan! His plan was mad, Walter!”

  Ponco held the cup before him, with both hands around it, and smiled and nodded. I knew what he thought: one madman speaks of another. A loony-bin Napoleon, confiding to the doctor that so-and-so is crazy to think that she’s Joan of Are, here in nineteenth-century France.

  “It was mad. To land on the coast of a heavily defended island and spark a rising with a group of eighty men! And he announced the time of our landing in advance! To show the people he could be trusted! That’s madness! But I was schizophrenic in his presence. I knew his plan was crazy. I knew that his class viewpoint was limited. But I also felt something very different. I felt a limitless possibility. Hadn’t the Vietnamese defeated the French? Impossible event! And I felt that I could no longer avoid declaring myself. The struggle would be a stage, however limited, in the fight against imperialism, against the Yanquis who had destroyed the Guatemalan Revolution. It was like the cigars,” I said, and, as if in delicious illustration, I took one from my shirt pocket and lit it. “They’re no good for asthma. I knew that. But I smoked them anyway.”

  “You became Che,” Ponco said, nodding slowly. “For real.”

  And though I didn’t fully fathom his remark, it seemed right to me; I nodded in agreement. “When I spoke to Fidel my guilt fell away. Or rather, I discovered something about myself harder to acknowledge than guilt: that I didn’t feel any remorse, really. About killing that man. That confused me. But it was undeniable. I had killed a man, the unthinkable thing for the doctor and the doctor’s son—the so-called Gandhian! I had been a fatal disease to him, as my father’s voice had said to me, and I didn’t regret it. I didn’t think anything about it, at least not while I spoke with Fidel. Fidel was amplitude, Fidel was sweep, Fidel was permission, Walter, you were right about that. He spoke of a grand historical movement, of necessity, of wrong turnings that were needed for the march to find its way. And it all seemed far more than the personal, than petty morality. Killing a man was a mild indiscretion in the larger wave of history. It all seemed a huge staircase, and one’s ascent was inevitable.”

  Ponco made a sweeping motion with his hand. He had very graceful hands. They looked like the wings of a circling bird, rising, rising, rising. And then I thought of his little playlet. No staircase there. Just a game of chutes and ladders. What if all sense to history was arbitrary; just farce?

  “I was mixed up by it all. Thinking I felt guilty had been an anchor to my personality, a touch of home. There had been confusion for me in killing that man. But there was a deeper confusion in realizing that it didn’t matter, provided I went on with my new business. So I held on to what I knew a little while longer and I joined the expedition as a doctor.”

  “Permission!” Ponco said gleefully. “I knew it! Read on.” He picked up some more pages from the table and handed them to me.

  ACT TWO OF

  AN HISTORIC MEETING

  A PLAY BY

  Travis Tulio

  Act Two: Che Kills a Man

  [A shadow is seen in the window behind Castro. “Che” Guevara rises from his seat, takes a pistol from the table. He fires through the window. Glass shatters. A man screams. A body falls.]

  CASTRO [looking at Guevara as if he were mad]: What was that? You’ve shot the gardener!

  CHE: NO. It was somebody sent to assassinate you.

  CASTRO: NO! Really? How did you know?

  CHE: I could see him fooling with the safety on the gun, pushing the flange back and forth, back and forth. He couldn’t decide whether or not to kill you.

  [Castro gestures, and Marcos and Almeida, without further words, go outside to examine. They come back dragging the body of a fat man in a blue business suit. They drop him on the floor and stand by the corpse.

  Marcos squats down by the corpse and takes the fat man’s wallet from his jacket pocket He looks through it]

  MARCOS: It’s true. Che’s right. He’s one of Batista’s agents. [He takes some bills from the wallet and puts them in his back pocket.] For printing expenses. [Marcos and Almeida hoist the body up again and bring it to the kitchen table. They put it in a chair next to Che.]

  CASTRO [to the corpse]: Have some spaghetti. I’ve been waiting a long time for you.

  [Everyone gives a macabre laugh.]

  THE CORPSE [in a toneless voice at first, but with growing petulance]: No, thank you. The dead don’t eat … spaghetti.

  NICO [to Che, with evident admiration]: You didn’t think! You acted instinctively! You’re one of us!

  [The others look at Nico, critically. What right does he have? He ran away! But they look with acceptance on their new comrade, slapping his back, etc.]

  “That’s true, in a way,” I said, though I didn’t know why I should offer Walter satisfaction. (He was staring at me when I looked up, reading my face as I read his words.) “I felt that I couldn’t go back after killing that mercenary and watching Chaco die. Back anywhere. I couldn’t return to Argentina. I couldn’t return to practicing medicine. The world had vomited me up. So these people—most of them had killed, too—these people became my new family, my group, my world, others who had acted with only their own sanction, others who couldn’t go back.”

  “Precisely,” Walter said. “My feeling exactly.” For after all, he, too, had made that crossing. “Read on!”

  The growl of command! I read:

  CASTRO: Nico’s right! You will make a great fighter, Guevara! So what do you think of my plan?

  CHE [he holds up one hand, with the cigar in it]: On the one hand, it is hopeless, crazy. [He holds up the other hand.] On the other, I think that the will calls to the will, arouses it. An action like that might make people rub their eyes in wonder, rise up and follow it. [His hands balance and waver in the air, first one going up, then the other.]

  CASTRO: You’ll never make things balance. You have to decide. You have to jump in. The leader acts to free himself first. The leader must act. I like the way you put things, though. Let’s talk metaphysics.

  RICARDO: Metaphysics? What’s that? Not physical?

  THE CORPSE [laughing amiably]: It’s physical, yet not physical anymore. Like me. I’m metaphysical.

  CHE: The will, I think, asserts how little the body or life itself matters. The symbol will arouse the sleeping soul.

  THE CORPSE: Not mine, that’s for damn sure. You’ve put it to sleep beyond the call of symbols. I’ll show you. Give me a lit cigar. [Ricardo puts one in his mouth. Nothing happens. After a time the cigar goes out] See?

  CHE: We must call the people to a great sacrifice. A nation finds itself in acts of collective sacrifice.

  CASTRO: Yes. The leadership by its actions can show how little material things, even life itself, matter. It is national dignity that is essential.

  THE CORPSE: The hell it is! You people don’t know what you’re talking about. Making corpses and being one are very different things. And thing is the operative word here, let me tell you! Life isn’t a material thing that doesn’t matter. It is an immaterial thing! A spiritual thing. Very precious! And all gone in my case, damn your eyes!

  CASTRO [to Che]: We think as one! I knew it. We must call the people to a great sacrifice. In a great sacrifice they will become a great people, single in purpose.

  THE CORPSE: I made a great sacrifice! I’m single in purpose all right. I’m getting nicely stiff.

  CASTRO: YOU shut up! You’re dead!

  THE CORPSE: Not a very kind way to speak to the dead! Don’t the dead have rights?

  CHE: Don’t the living? The revolution is for the living!

  THE CORPSE [truly agreeing]: I see your point. Well, the two of you are really some pair! I think you’ll make many more corpses together!

  [Guevara and Castro laugh, a deep,
lasting, collaborative laughter.]

  Curtain of Act Two of

  AN HISTORIC MEETING

  A PLAY BY

  Travis Tulio

  I was sure from that “collaborative” that Walter had been in my room. “You’ve read my journal.”

  “No. But I’d like to.” He took it, or pretended to, as if I had meant a compliment for his inventive intuition.

  I didn’t say anything more. He’d read my mind, he’d read my journal. What did it matter? That was the feeling Travis’s little effort left me with. What if history was just plain stupid?

  “Hilda must have hated him,” the farceur said. “Taking you away to Cuba. Endangering your life.”

  “What? No. You don’t understand her Walter. She didn’t hate him. She wanted to join him. She wanted to go with us. Not because I was going. But because of him, because of the cause.”

  Walter laughed. At me? At Hilda? At all of us? He laughed alone this time. I wasn’t sure of his laughter anymore.

  Cuba, 1956-57

  From My Journal

  11/26/56: Nico and I stood on the long wooden dock at Tuxpan, in bright sunlight, with most of the men around us in our new olive-green uniforms. We stared at the Granma. My hands pricked with dread, as if they’d been asleep for a week. We had a good long look. “It’s happening again, Che,” Nico said finally, in a choked voice. “He’s gotten us a twenty-two.” His large brown eyes filled with water, and he made no effort to hide his face from the others. “Cover your face,” I said, worried about morale. “No,” Nico said sulkily, a child having a tantrum before bed. Nico is a coward, but I saw his point. The Granma is fifty-two feet long, a white pleasure boat with a sporty prow and guardrails made from shiny chrome. It is a plaything made for eight amiable people, not eighty-five men with arms and supplies.