The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  The miners’ blood has set the stage for your arrival, for the appearance of the guerrilla. Once again your theses will be proven correct!

  Onward to Final Victory!

  Danton

  Ramon:

  Despite Danton’s doubts I strongly suggest the ranch be in the southeast. It will be easy to construct storage caves. The ranch land itself has plenty of water. The vegetation of the region is thick. If we move north we can travel to Vallegrande, through a mountainous and heavily wooded area. Difficult for the army to follow. From there on the woods become sparser. If we move south to Argentina the terrain is similar. The farm is in a canyon between the Serranias de las Pirirendas and the Serranias Incahuasi. “Ask me my name and I will respond with geography.” (You see: Ricardo, too, has learned some poetry! Please pass that on to Walter.) The ranges join up farther south and become the Salta range in Argentina.

  Ricardo

  Ramon:

  Tania has told Monje that we will only establish a base here in the southeast, and then move into Argentina. Monje is suddenly very protective of his sphere of control, the time isn’t ready for rebellion, the Party must have more complete control of the Bolivian operation … etc. He is a coward.

  But I once again strongly suggest that Bolivia be our first goal. Monje’s original report to Fidel—that the conditions are ripe here—is accurate. And from here we can coordinate with Brizola in Brazil, and Bustos and the others in Argentina, Lobaton and Gadea in Peru. Monje has already assured Fidel of his support for a guerrilla movement—and this is before he could know that you will be the leader. Surely that will keep him from turning tail!

  A farm has been purchased, against my advice, in the southeast.

  Advantages: close to Argentina

  easier to survive in the initial stages

  defensible positions, jungle, rivers, etc.,

  as described in Ricardo’s report.

  But it is far from populated zones, and the region itself is sparsely populated. We will have to bring in everything ourselves.

  But if we succeed in supplying ourselves we could stay here forever. It will be very difficult for the army to discover us, or attack.

  But it will also be difficult here to sink roots into the peasantry.

  Conclusion: this could be, if you O.K. it, a kind of base camp, and the group could move out from here for operations elsewhere, then return to this area, where virtually impregnable camps could be built.

  Danton

  Buenos Aires,

  April 1965

  My Dearest One:

  Sometimes I think we can no longer confide in each other directly? Or could it be that we never did! Perhaps we have always spoken with such maddening indirectness and irony? Perhaps we have always misunderstood one another.

  But that’s how it is now isn’t it? So I have to decipher your letters as if they were a document for one of our family meetings over the newspaper! What is their true story? Who did what to whom? We speak through masks!

  But I can’t talk that way anymore. I don’t have time. I have to get right to the point.

  It’s madness, just complete utter lunacy, that when there are so few people on the island of Cuba on the continent on the planet earth who have our knack for planning that we should all go cut cane for months. I’m sure there are lots and lots of fine cane-cutters people who are very happy doing that kind of thing. You should be organizing their labor, not doing it yourself. Is that why you dropped from sight? As you said? To cut cane? I can’t believe it?

  And then you write about serving as manager of a factory for five years! There are many people who can manage factories Tete. (Excuse me, but I named you first, before the crowds did. I am your mother after all, so you must excuse me?)

  It’s crazy for you to cut cane for months, but it is absolute total lunacy for you to go manage a factory for five years [For that is what I had said I was going to do. To confuse those who monitored my movements. To obscure the nature of my dispute with Fidel.]

  When your trip abroad went on and on, I asked, Will Ernesto still be minister? Who has decided in this struggle—for I could smell that there was a struggle—that led to your foolish plan?

  Well, you’re no longer minister, you’re going to manage a factory! That is a waste of your enormous ability! This is not your mother speaking! It’s an old woman, a sick woman, a woman who has dedicated her whole life to the triumph of rationality, of socialism [I remember, sadly, that I laughed at this point, certain that she could not be very sick if so much of her old paint box were available to her.] And this old woman wants to see the triumph of reason, the triumph of socialism!

  If you manage a factory will you be doing the most you can for that cause, for my cause?

  If for some reason you cannot work in Cuba anymore, then there’s Algeria, where Mr. Ben Bella would be happy to have your advice in organizing the economy. There’s Ghana, where Mr. Nkrumah would welcome your help. Vietnam, where you would be warmly welcomed I’m sure by Mr. Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. Yes. You will always, like me, be a foreigner, a stranger in every land. That’s your fate

  And then, typed after the last paragraph:

  Dear Ernesto (I will never be comfortable with that slang name, son): Your mother died yesterday evening at five o’clock, May 1. She has been complaining of fatigue for months, and I had been anxious for her to see a doctor. But she had refused, as she always has, saying that it was nothing to be concerned about. I think that, ever since the operation twenty years ago, she has been living as if in expectation of this event, suspected then that it had come, and didn’t want to know about it herself, or have us worry. When she began to lose weight I insisted on her going to Stapler’s Sanitorium. Three days after admission she was asked to leave by the management! The owner told us that the presence of the mother of a famous Communist leader could well ruin their reputation! I think this event gave her some of the most profound joy of her last days. We found another place for her, also in Buenos Aires.

  The pleasure of cursing the manager at Stapler’s was to be her last. She came out of her final coma only long enough to smoke a cigarette. I took the cigarette from her fingers, still burning. As you can see, she didn’t finish this letter.

  When she first went into the hospital I tried to reach you in Havana, but you had apparently left strict orders that you were not to be contacted under any circumstances. Your friend Soto says it is a tactic of yours when you are having a dispute with Castro. By your silence, apparently, you usually get him to come around. Soto, by the way, has been very useful, and very kind during the weeks of your mother’s hospitalization. And he has agreed to take these letters to Cuba, and to see that they reach you, wherever you are.

  You can see from your mother’s letter how very much your work meant to her. She was always very proud of you. Your ways are not mine, admittedly. I am not sure that one does not do more good for the world, as your cousin Alvarados said to me, a little at a time. But you have done what you thought best, and perhaps you are right. Your mother, certainly, thought so.

  Love, son,

  your father,

  Ernesto

  JULY 25

  My inclination now is to organize the Cuban nucleus, and begin a sort of training operation (for us and for the native forces) in either the Congo or Vietnam. Meanwhile, arrangements can proceed in Bolivia. But I will have to see what the situation looks like from Havana.

  I was packing up the manuscripts this morning when Ponco came into the room. I had laid them out on the unfinished board, like a subject for dissection. They made several neat piles.

  “What shall I do with them?” I wondered aloud as he came in.

  “You could give them to Fidel,” Ponco said. But that idea seemed to make him sad. “For a book.”

  “No,” I said, responding, I thought, to his sadness. “They’re too incomplete.” I had lost all interest in these things. I had resumed my position within the large costume of my fame. My
name. I wanted to begin operating the levers, making the feet move, working the machinery for the voice. My mind was already in Bolivia, and the many steps that must be taken. My anxiety had fallen from me, my waiting was over, my work beginning. I had no more interest in myself as a subject for reflection, the subject of—the hero of—a book.

  “I’ll take care of them,” Ponco said, quickly, a gravel slide. I thought I detected a suppressed greed in his voice. He picked up the piles, and placed them neatly one upon the other.

  “You’ll be my archivist.”

  “What?” His mind seemed to be on ordering the manuscripts. “I’ll see that they find a safe place.”

  “That’s what I mean. Archivist. He’s the man who minds the records.”

  “Ah. Yes. They’re in good hands,” he said. “A safe place. I’ll be your archivist.”

  But as he said it the word suddenly sounded a little ominous.

  JULY 26

  We spent the afternoon by the radio, the last day here, listening to Fidel’s speech. There was a comfort to being so much in the provinces, so far from the platform. I could leave the room to take a piss, I could make myself a cup of mate. The speech went on till evening, and the only light in the room was the green glow of the old radio on the scarred wooden table.

  Fidel read my farewell letter to the Cuban people. “Other lands claim the help of my modest efforts. I can do what you cannot because of your responsibilities at the helm of Cuba. The time has come for us to separate.”

  “A divorce,” Ponco said. “How sad.” He brushed imaginary tears from his large eyes.

  “Let it be known that I do so with a mixture of happiness and pain. Here I am leaving my purest hopes as a builder, and the dearest of those who are dear to me … and I am leaving a people who accepted me as a son. This is like a knife cutting my spirit. But to the new battlefields I shall carry the faith you taught me, the feeling that I am fulfilling the most sacred duty: fighting against imperialism wherever it is. That comforts me and heals my wounds.”

  Etc.

  The reading made the culmination of the speech.

  Ponco had his head down, resting on his crossed arms. “Nice job,” he said, as if he’d just woken from a deep sleep. I thought I heard a craftsman’s appreciation buried within his growl.

  Dates

  1966 The Tricontinental Conference meets in Havana, with delegates from Third World countries—and movements in rebellion—on three continents. They inaugurate the Organization for Solidarity of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. (The Third World must share more than its poverty; it must share in liberation or death.) Ernesto Guevara (not present) is “honorary chairman.” In Peru, Guillermo Lobaton and Ricardo Gadea (the brother of Ernesto Guevara’s first wife) gather up the scattered fragments of the guerrilla movements, to continue the war in the mountains. Lobaton is killed by the army. In Ghana, Nkrumah is overthrown by a right-wing army coup. The leadership of the Guatemalan Communist Party is arrested and then shot. Leonel Brizola, governor of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, flees into exile in Uruguay; he prepares a guerrilla front for his country. Douglas Bravo, a leader of the Venezuelan guerrillas, is expelled from the Communist Party. Codovilla, head of the Central Committee, reaffirms that the Party will follow the line of peaceful coexistence. (“After all, history is not our pet. Right now, talk of armed struggle is premature.”) Mario Monje, leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, meets again with Fidel Castro. He reaffirms his intention to cooperate in a plan to establish a guerrilla base in Bolivia. Castro provides another twenty-five thousand dollars for the Bolivian Party to use in promoting the Bolivian Revolution. Fabricio Ojeda, a Venezuelan guerrilla leader, is captured by the army, with many of his men, and then shot. Joaquin, Ponco, and Ricardo—veterans of the Cuban Revolution—go to La Paz, to organize men, supplies, and support networks for the Bolivian guerrillas. Mao Tse-tung encourages Chinese peasants, workers, and students to rebel against Party bureaucrats, revisionists, and all those—however highly placed—who have taken the capitalist road. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution begins. Regis Debray, the French theoretician, returns to Bolivia, to continue his research on the best terrain for a guerrilla base. A huge piece of land is purchased in a canyon in the semitropical southeast of Bolivia. Coco Peredo, a young Communist militant and taxi-driver, rents a warehouse in La Paz. Supplies are bought or smuggled in, taxied to the warehouse, slowly moved to the farm. In Guatemala, Turcios Lima, and most of his men, are killed by the army; Cesar Montes becomes leader of the guerrillas. The United States begins the long intensive bombing of Hanoi, North Vietnam. The people of Hanoi dig holes in the streets to hide in. North Vietnam protests to the world its civilian casualties.

  II

  THE DIARIES OF THE BOLIVIAN CAMPAIGN

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  MAY 1

  My plan:

  1. Separate the papers into neat piles. (My mother said I was incapable of neatness, I would always be a careless slovenly pig. I said she would never stop drinking. She was wrong. I was right.)

  The documents: His journal from the campaign. My journal from the campaign. His journals from before. The notebook he left behind with Hilda. The manuscript of his life that he wrote on this very board. The other men’s diaries. (He told everyone to keep a daily record. He said it was good hygiene. Why? I think it was some idea of Gandhi’s—a vow left over from Che’s adolescence. Anyway, most of the men didn’t write much in their journals, they never got the habit. They would do it only every so often, as a way of imitating him.)

  2. Spread everything out on the board.

  3. Put the piles of paper in order, the papers within each pile to be arranged by date. Get a view of what I have to work with. Look through everyone’s entries for September, etc.

  4. Make one long account of it, covering all the details.

  5. Decide which details matter.

  6. Decide how to tell the story in its final form. For whom am I telling the story? To make them do what? Or some other question? (It’s on the tip of my tongue, it’s in the part of my vocal cords that I don’t have anymore. I can’t put it into words.)

  To make them weep!—that’s one answer. Or to make them vomit—that’s the answer my own body gives me over and over.

  MAY 2

  His room—mine now. His board—mine now, too.

  When I first returned here I slept, as before, in the small room across from the kitchen. I thought he would walk out of his room in the morning, holding a sheaf of papers, the next installment of his less than honest—or more than honest—story of his life for me to read. (What might be on the ghost’s pages?) But the specter never came to the table. And I couldn’t sleep in that room anymore. I can only sleep here, in his room, on his cot, with his brown blanket. At night I play with the blanket edges, running them between my fingertips the way he did even as a man. (The athletes he trained—they were usi) And I work at his board, a piece of wood over two sawhorses, with piles of papers spread out on it, the same scene I would see when I sneaked in here before.

  It’s the board over the two sawhorses where they put his body, outside the laundry shed in Vallegrande. I have a picture of it tacked to the wall, next to the ocean view and the framed unreadable poem. A photographer stands over his corpse, his right hand pointing towards Che’s poor chest. (So there must have been another photographer, not in the picture, taking the picture.) A Bolivian general holds a rag to his face. But he doesn’t look like he’s protecting himself from a bad contagious odor. He doesn’t look like the body really smells. The general just wants to show he finds the business distasteful; he’s gentry, he’s particular. (Jesus, do I think his body didn’t smell?)

  His body there becomes this pile of papers here. And the no-smell from his papery body makes me want to puke.

  I just went out on the porch and threw up on the grass, a yellowish pool of bile from my stomach, and the remains of a few pieces of bread I tried to eat for breakfast. I find it hard t
o swallow food. I take a few bites and gag. I can’t order the food to stay down. Some things, Che, are beyond our will! If I do manage to make myself swallow something, I throw it up half an hour later, decomposed, like a corpse. I don’t digest anything in my stomach, I just bury it there for a few minutes. I thought the difficulty swallowing meant the cancer had come back. (I knew it was cancer eight years ago, though the doctors lied to me about it. And I knew it would come back. Every time I have swallowed for the last seven years, I have felt my spit sliding down around little obstructions that I knew in my heart would grow until I eventually choked to death. That was another bond between Che and me. We both thought we were going to die every second of our lives.) But the doctors last month said no, it wasn’t cancer. I couldn’t eat, they said, because I was “upset.” (But they might be lying to me again?)

  All of the men volunteered to stay at the top of the ravine and cover the withdrawal of the main force towards the river. He had said it would be certain death. And he chose Inti, Urbano, Nato, Benigno, Dario, and me. And we were the ones who survived! After the battle, we waited till night, and broke through the encirclement. The soldiers at the edges of the ravine had grown inattentive, tired. They had already captured Che, taken the prize, the red kerchief. They thought the game was over. Why worry about us? Where was the glory in capturing us?

  We killed four soldiers. After that we walked fifteen days through hardwood forest. The trees protected us from planes. The peasant who sold us food also sold our position to the army. The food was only some handfuls of roasted corn, but I could eat them. The army surrounded us again in the forest, but we got out. The sentinels were careless, talking with each other, not even holding their rifles when we came upon them. They thought the war was over. Inti led us into the Mataral region, to Casas Viejas. (We knew Che had intended to make Inti the leader if we succeeded in establishing a Bolivian center, so he was the leader.) We bought some food there, paying a lot for some scrawny chickens. But I could eat them, too. No problem! In November we went east towards the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway, trying to avoid the army—if they had asked us, we would have told them that the war was over! They caught up with us near La Cabana, and Nato was wounded in the spine. He couldn’t move his legs or control his bowels, and he was in terrible pain. He asked me to shoot him so that the army wouldn’t get him.