The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “Can’t you do something about that sound? You’re wheezing like a broken machine.”

  “What sort of machine?” Benitez asked innocently. Older than the rest of us, a veteran of Spain, he was also the most convivial. He loved conversation.

  “A toilet, Benitez, you stupid Spanish shit. What the fuck does it matter what kind of machine?”

  This morning I counted our resources: two canteens, the rifles and pistols. Two packs, mine and Almeida’s, but no food. Marcos has only one shoe. I counted the men over to myself, as if their names formed a poem. There was joy in looking at them. Blood covered Ricardo’s sleeve—my blood; and blood mixed with dirt dried on my chest and fell away in big flakes. Suarez’s hand looked already infected. Almeida had ripped his shirt sleeves to bandage wounds, and the tatters hung from his arms, making him a scarecrow. In the distance, somewhere else in the woods, I heard the crack of a few shots. “Army patrols,” Ricardo said, “shooting stragglers.” He sounded as if the image gave him pleasure. (After all, he wasn’t among them.) Benitez advised against marching during the day, to avoid the patrols, and so I might rest from my attack. So we remained in the wood, and I made these notes.

  “Good,” Ricardo has just said. He has come over to my resting place, where I lean against the rough bark of a tree. He is six feet, half a foot taller than I am. From his shirt pocket he takes his new pair of metal-rimmed spectacles, and holds them over me. “Write more,” he says. “Blind the world!” It was while learning to read that Ricardo acknowledged his need for glasses. He thinks that the little letters, so difficult to decipher and make yield their names, have robbed him of his once-perfect vision. He’s squatted down next to me while I write, and cleared the leaves away. With a small stick he’s drawn the alphabet in the dirt; an obscure mockery of my writing. Hearing the scratching, Suarez woke up screaming, and Almeida put his hand over his mouth.

  I see now that, giddy with my returned life, I’ve made the battle sound funnier than it was (it wasn’t funny at all). From survivors’ stories the business of war finds new recruits.

  As we wait for nightfall the army might come upon us; if we move through the woods we might run into one of the patrols. The men sit rigidly, their heads down, immobilized by anxiety. Or they lie on the ground, in corpse position, not even twitching in their sleep. If I could look into their minds—how I wish I could!—I would find them equally still in their dreams, afraid that if they reached out a hand for that lovely glass of water it would shatter, and the army would discover us. Our once-new olive uniforms are covered with dirt and excrement. I cannot take my eyes off this raggedy army, their chests moving in and out in small spasms. I find I can hear the music most intensely when I watch them. We’re alive.

  12/8/56: I led the men out of the woods last night, and towards (I hope) the Sierras. Perhaps the others will follow Fidel’s plan (though he might have another plan by now), and find their way to the mountains. If there are others.

  For food, we took handfuls of grass and chewed on them. I stuck a few holes in a can of condensed milk. Each man got a little of that, measured out in the end of a vitamin capsule, and a few sips of water.

  “Castro’s dead,” Benitez said, licking his lips, as if he’d just finished a greasy meal.

  “Shut up,” Ricardo said. He was furious. Benitez had spoken the worst blasphemy, the only desecration that Ricardo recognized. Once he had been the first to curse Fidel, but now he could not bear the thought of Castro’s death. So many sacrifices had made Fidel holy. What did Fidel matter, I wondered? This business was over. And yet he did matter. It couldn’t be over. It mattered more now that he be alive than it had when one could almost sensibly have had faith in him, love for him, loyalty to him. Fidel had to be somewhere in the mountains, ready to lead us into new disasters. We all felt it, even the atheist Ricardo. By the deaths of so many comrades Fidel had taken all our soul stuff, all our brains and courage, into his keeping. We thought we might be, felt we had to be, stumbling towards him, our mouths stuffed with bitter grass. Who could really believe that if this discredited leader were still alive the Revolution might move forward?

  And yet we did believe that.

  12/10/56: “I’m never taking my boots off again,” Marcos said.

  We walked through thick scrub, tearing at it with our hands, to get to the ocean. (My plan is to keep the ocean in sight, on our right hand, to make sure we are moving towards the Sierras.) There was too much moonlight—the army might spot us. There wasn’t enough moonlight—we kept stumbling, and falling on our faces over the roots and rocks in the field.

  When Marcos spoke I realized that for five days I had been carrying Nico’s boot in my pack, that I’d taken it from his hand in the field, as he’d coughed, vomited I mean, his life up.

  Another theological moment:

  “Here,” I said, handing the boot on.

  “A miracle!” Benitez exclaimed, as if I’d just now materialized the shoe.

  “Try it on first,” Ricardo said, ever the doubter. It fit.

  “A miracle,” Benitez repeated, this time triumphantly.

  “It’s not the kind of world,” I said, remembering a friend, another casualty of the struggle against imperialism, “where a person can take his boots off.”

  “More of Guevara’s Marxism,” Raul Suarez said. He was feverish now, and rarely spoke. I think he felt that as a doctor I had failed him, that if I had looked at him instead of reciting poems I might have saved him.

  “Not more of his Marxism,” Ricardo said disgustedly. “More of his poetry.”

  “I don’t care,” Marcos said. “I think Che’s right. I’m not taking off my boots again until Jesus comes back.”

  No one asked why I hadn’t given him the boot before.

  12/11/56: I asked Marcos what the Sierras were like.

  “It’s like the movies,” he said. And then he added, nonsensically, or making all the sense in the world, “I’m hungry.” He is a big man, and the hunger seems hardest for him. But I cannot allow another adventure like yesterday’s. We had come near a palm-wood house on the shore. There was music playing inside. If this was a celebration, I thought, it would be best not to show ourselves. The peasants would announce our presence all over the area, simply for the joy of gossiping. But the others wanted to eat. I went with Benitez towards the house. The music stopped, and a man said, “And now let’s drink to our comrades in arms, whose brilliant and courageous exploits …” We ran back to the brush. The men complain often, but I can’t risk another sortie. Yesterday has made the world ominous to me, the trees might betray us.

  “Yanqui movies,” Marcos said, remembering his subject. “About the Wild West. The Sierra Maestra is large estates run by foremen. The foreman’s job is to keep the peasants from planting little plots of coffee trees on the unused land. If he sees a peasant’s house he burns it. Sometimes the countrypeople can’t take it anymore, and they wait for the foreman and shoot him in the head. The Rural Guard come for the peasants. They make examples of them. They tie people to trees and flay their skin off. Then they take the peasants’ land.”

  “The countrypeople don’t make examples,” Ricardo said, smiling—a very disagreeable sight. “We don’t expect the shits to learn.” We were very lucky to have Ricardo with us—if only he wouldn’t smile!—as he is the only member of the Movement from a peasant background.

  “Benitez,” I said, “give me the can of milk.” It was time for the day’s ration. But Benitez had turned the can upside down in his pocket, and the milk had dribbled onto his shirt.

  Ricardo raised his hand beside Benitez, as if he were going to strike him on the head. But he stopped his arm in mid-motion and turned away. He knew that Benitez could bear denunciation or a blow, but it would be torture to him not to be spoken to. Ricardo has an instinct for a man’s weakness, his fear, how to punish him.

  No one spoke to Benitez for the rest of the day.

  12/14/56: At night, land crabs scuttled abou
t our feet, among the red dirt and saw-toothed rocks near the shore. We stomped them. “A massacre,” Marcos said proudly, holding up one of the slain by a claw.

  “The first great rebel …” Suarez said.

  …“victory,” Ricardo said, finishing the thought for him. Suarez’s head lolled to one side, and he had difficulty remembering the end of his sentences. Ricardo had to hold him up on the march.

  Suarez was wrong, though. It turned into another defeat: wide-winged observation planes fly over the shoreline; a fire was out of the question. So we ate the gelatinous parts of the carcass raw, and it made our thirst monstrous. The canteens are utterly empty.

  I took the tiny pump from my vaporizer and sucked up rainwater from the declivities in the rocks. This yielded four or five drops for each of us, shared out in the eyepiece of the fieldglasses. There is a foul taste in my mouth. I feel like my tongue is rotting.

  So I allowed a further folly: Benitez and I approached another shack. As we neared the door we saw a uniformed man, clearly outlined in the light from behind, a silhouette in the window, with an Ml rifle.

  Benitez thinks the army has scattered patrols among the peasant families, expecting that we’ll look to them for food. So there’s no possibility of help from that direction. To enter one of their houses would be like playing Russian roulette.

  12/16/56: Small planes fly over the sea to our right, saying unintelligible things through loudspeakers. Almeida and Benitez, veterans of the Moncada, say that the planes are calling for our surrender. But if we surrender we’ll be slaughtered.

  We moved farther inland. Walking on the cliffs would leave us too exposed, so we must pick our way among the rocks, between the high paths and the sea. If the army finds us, we’ll be trapped.

  I look from face to face for reassurance, to hear the song of our survival.

  No one has the strength to walk anymore.

  12/18/56: “I can’t stand it,” Marcos said. “I’m going to drink my own urine.” His puffy face suffused with pain. Tears would have come to his eyes if he’d had the moisture for tears.

  I see no choice but to risk contact with the peasants. There is a shack near the road here (Puercas Gordas, Ricardo says). It’s a tottery wood-frame thing, with a small sagging porch. No windows on the side of the house, and no metal chimneypiece. It looks poor enough. A small child in a dirty white shirt and shorts has run into the house, screaming at the sky. I think she has spotted us in the low gray-and-brown brush where we’re hiding on our bellies. There may be soldiers inside. But I see no other choice. Almost none of the men are willing to go on. We must throw ourselves upon their mercy.

  12/19/56: We’re alive. And they know that Fidel—that was what they call him—is alive too. It won’t be easy to kill him, the father said. Fidel is an honest man. He always did what he said he would do. He said he would come this year, and he had. (Jesus Christ, I thought. He was right!) The radio says Fidel is a bandit (they are very proud to have a radio). But they know there was a family who gave his men some pork, and Fidel paid them for it. The rich lie about Fidel. (Poor Fidel! the mother said. She was a thin woman, with a deeply lined face. I couldn’t have guessed her age. She sounded as if she were speaking of one of her own children.) The man said he and his friends would take us to him. But the highways were heavily guarded, and we must leave our shirts and our weapons behind. He is clearly terrified, and yet, against his better judgment, wants to help Castro. I know the feeling!

  We left the rifles, and Suarez, there. The families in the mountains passed us from hand to hand. Each countryman seemed to know a safe place where we could rest and find some corn and a little meat. The next man took us farther into the mountains.

  12/21/56: Castro was already talking when we got to Cresencio Perez’s small farm in the valley. He came towards us shouting, where were our rifles? where were our fucking rifles? There were eight or nine comrades there, and one new man, Comrade Acuna, a peasant missing his top front teeth. He must be very courageous to have joined us under these circumstances! We are not a prepossessing group! “You stupid sons of bitches,” Fidel went on, by way of greeting. We met in front of Perez’s shack, under some palm trees; a flat dusty yard. At the sound of Fidel’s cursing everyone stopped. No one embraced us. We had abandoned our weapons, Fidel said. That was criminal! We should be punished for that, we hadn’t paid for our error yet. The price we should have paid for abandoning our weapons was our lives. Our arms were our one and only hope of survival if the soldiers had found us. (He looked well, I thought. He had already grown a full brown beard.) We were criminals, he said. Worse than that: we were stupid. Standing around him in the chalky dust, we stared at him dumbfounded, exhausted from our last long march to the farm. The countrypeople—Perez and his son (our lost guides), and several local families—were all there watching our humiliation. We looked at the bare ground, like children. Castro had no right to say such things! He had nearly killed us all! And yet I felt the hot shame rising all over my body.

  He led us into some woods, a distance from the house, where we made camp. He said nothing else throughout the night. The men with me passed out on the ground. But Castro didn’t sleep. I would wake during the night, and I saw that some of the others did also—as if his presence troubled our sleep, made us fitful. And he would be sitting there, watching us, but not looking from face to face. He had led seventy-four of our comrades to their death, and now he sat in judgment on us for hiding our guns! Our guns hadn’t been very useful to us so far! We were defeated, for Christ’s sake! (And then my mind, like my uncomfortable body, would twist about: He was right. We were defeated, but there was no one to accept our surrender. Batista’s army would murder anyone who surrendered. We should have held on to our guns.—But why? So that more of us could be murdered in our sleep, or while eating a last piece of sausage? My mind was trying to accustom itself to the full hopelessness of our situation.)

  As for Fidel, he sat and looked at us.

  In the morning, as the sun rose, and the men tossed this way and that, wanting to sleep some more, Fidel stood up. Suddenly we were all awake. “We are in the Sierras,” he said, lifting his arms high above his head—and, without volition, my eyes looked upwards towards the indifferent sky. (And my nose smelled Fidel’s acrid odor.) “The days of the dictatorship are numbered!”

  What nonsense! The man is insane! We were all going to die. I began to recite poetry again. Fidel went on talking, in a high excited voice, as if he were addressing a crowd of thousands (and perhaps in his imagination, his megalomaniacal imagination, he was), speaking of the help we’d gotten from the Sierra peasants. We must learn their lives. The foremen who hound them, and steal their land, and destroy their shacks. If you can make a heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss/And lose/And lose Nico, and Raul Suarez, and Chaco. But Chaco wasn’t his responsibility. No, he was the North Americans’. And never breathe a word about your loss. That didn’t seem Castro’s style, not breathing a word. He’d breathe a lot of words, explain it away. The loss was really a victory; my mother’s magic; the dialectic. The peasants worked in the plain fifteen days, he was saying, gathered a few pesos, bought salt and a little fat, and then returned to their coffee trees. They will never have enough land of their own to live on. The Agricultural Bank gives only to the rich. When the Rural Guard pass a countryman’s house, they take what they want, a fine chicken perhaps. (I’d like a fine chicken!) The merchants cheat them. There are no doctors in the Sierras, no schools. That will be our life. We will join ourselves to them. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,/Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,/We have entered the Sierras (he said), people had accepted us, buoyed us up. (I saw the silhouette in the peasants’ window, holding a rifle. The army, too, lived with the peasants! The voice drinking the brave comrades’ health—who else had joined him in the toast?) In the rigors of the march, the sacrifices to come (there was a true word, I thought, touching the painful scar ne
ar my neck), we would be made to conform to our new medium, to the life of the countrypeople. Our rough city edges would be worn away. He went on:

  He went on.

  And on.

  He spoke of the time when more peasants would join us, like Comrade Acuna, of the help the countrypeople had given us, of the fear they had already overcome—because they had seen we were willing to keep our word (his actually), to begin the struggle, at the sacrifice of our own lives. (That word again! I looked at his eyes—they stared off over our heads at the foliage beyond. Our own lives, I thought. Or other people’s.) If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools. Why the recitation? Because I didn’t want to believe anymore. (I looked about me: many of us had beards now—like a religious sect.) Had we known, really, how enormous the odds were when we set out from Tuxpan, known that of the eighty-eight men standing on the dock in the sunlight in their brand new uniforms, seventy-two (or -four, or -six) would die? Which of us had the imagination for so much death? Did he? Oh, he did in his way, but for him it was only one moment in some grander airy construction, the bodies sublimed into a stately thing, a snowflake in stone, the heights of Machu Picchu. And that wasn’t real death, at all. And lost and start at your beginning. We would not fail them, he said (I wanted breakfast. My stomach twisted painfully). The Revolution was for the countrypeople.

  He went on. He shouted, he cajoled, he whispered, he kicked the dirt with his boot like an impatient horse. He had tossed us into the air, as if we were inexperienced riders, and most of us had come down broken. This was the man who had led his forces against the Moncada, and one unit had gotten lost in traffic, so the rest had died or been captured and hanged by the neck from the bars of the cell while their families watched. This was the genius who had bought the little boat to bring us to Cuba, a toy boat so small that most of our weapons had been thrown overboard to keep it afloat. Our precious weapons! Whose fault was that? We could not fail them, he repeated. They felt that already. They trusted us. Now we must prepare to strike our first blow at the army. The boat had landed in a swamp, three days late for its rendezvous, twenty miles off course. And then he had led us by night into an ambush. (Perhaps they had followed the long leaves and chewed husks from the cane we’d sucked on. Perhaps a guide—one of the trusting countrypeople—had betrayed us. Perhaps no betrayal was necessary. Our beached white boat made our location obvious. And he had told them we were coming. (“Fidel keeps his word,” the peasant had said. So he was right to tell them? Impossible! I must think of another poem to recite.) Seventy-four(?) men captured and killed. Nico was right, poor bald Nico. Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it. Nico is in it now. Harden ourselves for battle, he said again. Or I wanted to hear it. My heart beat faster with expectation. I hadn’t managed to obscure enough of his words! I saw again the grand circular motion of his hand that evening in Mexico. What did deaths matter? The Movement swept all before it. It was inevitable. It must begin now.