The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. “You’re twelve.”

  “What does it matter? I know what I think.”

  I looked at the green-and-brown mountains, my new home. I thought of the young boy outside Fernando’s cell, ready to go into the streets if only he had a pistol. “So what do you think?” I asked fondly.

  “I think Fidel was sent by God, to free Cuba.”

  Again, he listened to my explanation. Then he spat on his own hand, wiped it on his pants, and began to tell me about his time working as a baker.

  1/18/57: We continued our march into the more inaccessible zones of the Sierras. A grim and contrary army came forward to meet us: the peasants were moving down towards the coast, with their household things, chairs, pots, pans, strapped to their backs with leather cords and hemp. I stopped a young man carrying a table. “Table Man,” I said, “what’s this about?” But he didn’t want to talk. I wouldn’t let him go, and he was terrified, kept trying to look at the sky, to peer up around the edges of his table. “Planes are coming,” he said finally. “If you keep us here we’ll all die.” An army corporal and a foreman had told the peasants to leave the zone; the Air Force knew the rebels were in the zone, and were going to bomb it. The man had told the soldiers that there were no rebels here. But if you questioned the corporal the foreman hit you with the machete handle and said you were a liar and a rebel sympathizer.

  I told him that the soldiers were deceiving him, that no one knew of our presence in this zone. It was a way to get them off their land, so the foreman could take it.

  Yes, the people had thought that at first, and hadn’t left their homes. But the attack at La Plata had come just after the corporal’s visit, and they had all heard about it. We had killed fifty soldiers and burned their barracks. So there were rebels in the area, and the army knew about it. The bombing story was true.

  There was no point in arguing with him. I let him go, reminding him that anyone who cooperated with the army would be killed. At that he put down the table, by bending backward till its feet were on the ground. He asked me to undo the thongs on his chest. “I’m sick of carrying it,” he said. It belonged to his father. The boy’s name is Rolando, and he wants to join us.

  Fidel made another recruit: Moro, who had a whole houseful of goods on his broad back. He will be a powerful addition. “Between them and you,” he said frankly, “things can’t get any worse.”

  The Sierras,

  May, 1957

  Dear Fernando:

  I’m sending you some pages from my journal, so you can see how things are with me, how things have changed—and yet how little I, and what I have been looking for, have altered. It is only that I see now that it was in all that I forbade myself—in the violence that is within me, the violence that every day makes and marks our world—that all that you and I sought has been found and fulfilled. Yes, our people must become a great people, single in purpose, treasuring their dignity more than possessions, more than life itself. But it is not, I see now, passive suffering that will accomplish this transformation but active suffering, the violence of armed struggle. The will calls to the will, arouses it; an action will make our men and women rub their eyes in wonder, and follow it. But that action cannot be the leader’s martyrdom, his taking more suffering on himself like Saint Sebastian or Saint Gandhi. It must be like the action of the leader of the Cuban people, Fidel Castro. The leader must himself begin the armed struggle, the violence of revolutionary war.

  Before the coming of the violence the peasant cannot imagine a change in his life. His world is infrangible. The Rural Guard is a fact to the countrypeople, like the weather, or a large stone in his field. He knows that the foreman and the soldiers will take what they want, his chickens, his house, his land, a part of his crops each year. There is no point in pleading with the soldiers. They have no more mercy than the rock. So the countryman has turned his violence inward, turned his will against himself (as I did, in my way, with Gandhi and his austerities). Perhaps if the right words are said to the Black Virgin, perhaps if the right penance is offered, crawling the steps of the cathedral on one’s knees, then the weather will relent. The Guard never will.

  But the War begins! At first the peasants cannot believe that we will win. They flee from us, a band of poorly dressed, badly armed rebels. But we win victories. We overrun the army’s barracks. We come like fate, we appear as lightning appears, too terrible too sudden! And the countrypeople’s disbelief and fear turn to admiration and a desire to help us, to join us, to-participate in the work of liberation, the violent overthrow of the dictator. Fernando, there is nothing more beautiful than this transformation, when a man weighted down by the repeated miseries of his life, taught by endlessly recurrent humiliations that no change is possible, that he is worthless, a mere object without power, something to be worked and then when no longer useful (and how soon that is) thrown aside like shit—when such a man finds that with a rifle, with Fidel’s leadership, he can strike a blow at the oppressor, and for the first time feel himself powerful, a member of the march of humanity. And if the peasant cannot join us directly, then he becomes part of the bloodlines of our support. He stops the slaughter of his animals, saving them for our bad times. He becomes used to bombardment, to machine-gunning, and he builds shelters for himself and his family. When the army arrives, he packs his household goods on his back and flees from the zone with his cattle, leaving only his shack. And the soldiers—enraged at their impotence against us—burn the shack to the ground. When the army leaves, he returns. He rebuilds. His hatred against the army grows concentrated, pure; he has a will to conquer. How terrible that is, and how necessary! I am glad that our enemy is powerful, that our struggle will not be the meaningless musical chairs of a coup d’état. For it is through long struggle and sacrifice that men are transformed.

  It is violent action that forms the New Man. It is violence by which he throws off his despair, his passivity, his sense of inferiority. He becomes a free man by killing his oppressor. Gandhi’s actions were milky work. The Indian masses didn’t strike hard, killing blows against the British. Dread still squats in the Indian heart. They still feel themselves weak things, incapable of resistance, acted upon, suffering their history, not making it. (The untouchable still rings his bell as he boards a bus, lest some Brahman be polluted by the sight of him!) How else but by violence was the New Man ever formed? How did the Incas inscribe their word on the tribes they found? With hardness towards themselves, and with the necessary cruelty and violence. We must become efficient cold selective killing machines.

  And we have! We have struck more blows against the army than I have been able to write to you about, we have overrun outposts at Altos de Espinosa, and the barracks at El Uvero. All of the army’s isolated barracks, their forward positions have been closed, from fear of us. And an army cannot advance without its point men.

  Soon they will mount a counteroffensive. And we look forward to it! For each battle not only strikes wounding blows at the dictatorship, it hardens our forces, and ties us ever more closely to the peasantry. The guerrilla nucleus grows used to the life of the countrypeople, the easily infected bites of the horseflies that drop from the macaw trees (I tell the men not to scratch, but they disobey; dirt gets into the bites, and abscesses form); we grow inured to days without food. In some of the long nights we spent in the mountains, Fernando, I thought that we had gone hungry. But we had no notion of hunger, of having neither food, or the certainty that one would ever have food again. Hunger like that really wearies one. And it is the everyday experience of the countrypeople. (There is no train home from here!) Violent acts cut one off from any return to the cities, to normal life under the dictator. And the people would not trust us if we had not taken that ineradicable step. We live with the people now, as they live; the War forced us to share their lives. We have become part of the peasantry.

  Their lives must change
. They need shoes against parasites, vitamins, decent clothing, machinery to work their land with. This will require industry. But I see now that all that I hated—the “diabolism” of manufactured things—comes not from industry itself, but from the terrible perversion of it by the Imperialists. They starve the great mass of humanity to produce immoral luxuries for themselves. The Imperialists have twisted the people’s achievements, and they have chained up the people’s power, thwarting the world to come. But industry itself is good, it is not the work of the bourgeoisie, but of the great masses themselves. Industrialization is the glory of the workers; it is their will in its ineradicable continual efflorescence. The workers of the world will juggle the instruments of industry and science as so many playthings. They create and destroy in the endless activity of their will, their violence. For it is violence that makes the world, Fernando. There is violence in opening the ground for planting, in building a factory, there is violence in the surgeon’s knife, there is violence in the revolutionary’s gun. Through the activity of the revolution I have been able to overcome my blindness to the beauty of industry, to join myself to its spirit. Through the revolutionary war I have joined myself with the fruitful violence of the world, made myself one with it. Violence is not a demon to be wrestled with. It is the thread that knits us together, that binds flesh and blood into one compact. The guerrillas are bound up with the peasantry through the War—and the peasants and workers are themselves the upsurge, the violence of the world. That upsurge is life. I will not mind if death surprises me on this island, if I know that my funeral dirge will be beaten out in the staccato of machine-gun fire, in new chants of war and victory.

  Our violence is not like theirs. Theirs is demonstrations; they want sacrificial victims, scapegoats: the man chosen at random, killed to terrify others, turn them to stone, make them afraid to come out of their burrows. Their work is not violence, but terrorism, torture, that dirty thing. We want to destroy their terror theater, destroy the enemy utterly, not keep him in a subhuman condition so we might torment him for our amusement. We want to transform the world so that there are no more oppressors and oppressed, overthrow the ruling class, not replace it, do away with rulers and ruled forever.

  I had thought that our suffering, freely accepted, would shame the soldiers, our country’s tormentors. But the soldiers, like the mercenaries in Guatemala, are just instruments of the Imperialists. And the Yanquis cannot be shamed. They drink our pain. They are the stomach of the world. They know only how to eat and vomit and eat again. How I long for a time—not far now, I think—when the soldiery of North America will appear directly on this island, on our continent, when we will be able to strike direct merciless blows against the United States itself.

  I see now, Fernando, what I found in Gandhi: his ideas are the last, most concentrated, most seductive snare of Imperialism. The Imperialists, and their deceitful culture, had succeeded in shaming me. How could I think well of myself? I was a native boy overawed by the moral achievements of Europe. I was not able to live in that resonant edifice. (And Argentina offered only its hideous, deformed masculinity.) So I turned against myself. Gandhi was the form of my self-accusation, my self-hatred. And more: he was my way of outdoing them, of being more saintlike, of making myself shine more purely than the European, taking on more pain than even the most ascetic figures of the Imperial cultures. But their “morality,” I see now, is only the mask of exploitation, the lie told to pacify the oppressed, make him ashamed of his own drives, his own violence.

  Yet Gandhi served me well. Sometimes, Freud says, one must put an obstacle between oneself and one’s beloved, a wall, a trial, a sword. Against that wall one’s unsatisfied desire grows stronger, passion swells to a flood. Behind Gandhi’s word my own natural powers were pent up, until they were too strong to be enclosed, until, in a street demonstration in Guatemala, they broke out as if against my will. But my act wasn’t against my will—it was my will, my violence grown strong. Fidel and the Revolution have helped me, as they have helped the Cuban people, to acknowledge that violence, to acknowledge my own will.

  I am political officer of the group, and I shall use this letter as the text of my talk tonight. So, you see, you too, old friend, will be participating in our revolution.

  A warm embrace,

  Ernesto “Che” Guevara

  —I’m called Che now. The perfect name: an empty sound that might mean anything, that anyone might fill in as he wishes!

  Chaco is dead. He died very honorably, fighting the Imperialists in Guatemala.

  P.S. Did I mention that I’m married? A fine woman, an activist of APRA, my wife’s name is Hilda Gadea. And I have a daughter, born just before I left for Cuba, also named Hilda.

  From My Journal

  5/23/57: A notable day: I received a canvas hammock. I don’t think that since childhood I’ve been so happy about a gift, felt the same sort of simple warm involvement with a thing. These canvas hammocks usually go to those men who have already made burlap ones for themselves. That’s a precaution against the laziness, the slackness about tasks that is our worst enemy. Then when the city network manages to get some of these beautiful canvas things to us, they are distributed only to those who have already made and used the burlap ones. But the lint from the burlap infuriates my lungs, so I’ve been sleeping on the ground. Since I didn’t have a burlap hammock, I wasn’t entitled to a canvas one. Fidel noticed this vicious circle and himself intervened to award me one of the canvas prizes.

  Today, too, we ate our first horse. The peasants in the group were revolted by this cannibalism. Joaquin, Ricardo, Ponco, Rolando, and Moro all at first refused to eat their ration of meat. This was clearly the greatest crime in their eyes that the guerrilla could have collaborated in, and they treat Manuel, our butcher, as if he were a murderer. He had cut the horse’s throat, and by the time I got there it had fallen over, and was pouring its blood onto the grass. Ricardo had squatted down a few meters away, watching the ceremony.

  “It’s a pity,” Ricardo said, as the blood flowed out, “that you can’t take a bite from an animal, and have him live and grow it back.”

  “What?” I was stunned by the quantity of blood that fell from the horse’s neck, and formed a pool on the ground. And I was surprised that Ricardo’s imagination would run to whimsy—though I suppose it was also a vision of continual cruelty.

  “The way you work a man,” he said.

  “Ah.” He was more poet than I supposed.

  “It’s a badly designed world,” he said, rising. He walked to the grass where the blood had pooled, and put a finger in. He brought the finger to his mouth, as if he meant to suck on it. But then he jumped back from his own hand, and shook the drops off; the horse’s blood was cursed stuff.

  I went to touch the horse’s flank. It gave off a great heat at the end. The heart beat faster and faster, then more and more slowly. Its big eyes looked as if they implored all creation, the palm trees, the grass, the bright sky, and then went glassy.

  Eventually the countrypeople came around, from hunger. It was our first meal in more than a day. Several of them took their dishes off under separate distant trees to eat alone.

  It is a fibrous gamey meat, sweeter than beef.

  Today, too, I wrote the following poem:

  FIDEL IS A HORSE

  for Chaco Francisco

  The mare lies in the long grass; and the thick grass, blown

  by the wind,

  scratches her flanks.

  Her foals lie beside her in the dewy grass.

  Docile mare, big-eyed mare.

  But if the mare forces you against a wall with her flank,

  slams you suddenly with her side,

  or kicks you with her legs, hits you even a glancing blow

  with her hoof,

  then: a tremor like rippling water runs the length of your body

  your heart like a shot strives to break from your chest

  your mind fails your will


  fails your legs are paper & bam! they crumple!

  But if you are hungry in famine time, in slack season

  in the dead months when there is no work at the mill

  She will give up her body to be your meat.

  The hound master sees the mare asleep in the tufted grass.

  The hounds are sent. They bound across the field, they fly at her

  legs, she is rising too slowly! She has not

  been vigilant! They are on her!

  The thick purple lips spread back on sharp teeth, they gnaw at

  her heels,

  She struggles to rise, her colts twist their necks in terror,

  The hounds dart their heads searching out the thin of the leg, the

  bump near her hoof

  They desire to bite down there, break the tendon there, hobble the mare,

  bring her down and fall on her flanks, rip the flesh from her flanks.

  But the bleeding mare rises! The raging mare moves back, rears up &

  down on the heads of the yelping dogs, crushing the hounds’ skulls,

  the thick bones.

  The mare licks her foals clean with her tongue.

  But the hound master waits; the field is not safe,