The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  At first the army was amazed—how could we strike at them from so many different places? They couldn’t imagine that we had separated into two groups. But the division made us weak, and it trapped Tania, our contact with the city. Watching Joaquin and Che talk together in the field of tall grass, I had thought that this was a minor tactical decision, leaving the sick with Joaquin, giving them a chance to rest so we could make a rapid foray towards Iripita and drop off Debray. But look at what he wrote: “I couldn’t wait to put some distance between us and the other sick ones.

  “And now to get Debray out, away, gone.”

  He was a sick one himself—weak-chested, he could hardly breathe most of the time! That’s why he separated us from Joaquin, that’s why he couldn’t stand the other sick ones. He wanted to put some distance between himself and them! He wasn’t like them! He wasn’t weak! He was a doctor who hated sick people! (And, now that I think of it, that has been true of almost every doctor I’ve ever known.)

  Drawing the lines; he was always drawing the lines with that sharp mind of his. The line between him and weakness, between him and dirty compromises. To make himself pure he had to put more and more things on the other side of the line, weak things, hypocritical things, things that weren’t like him. And Debray? Why the rush to get rid of him? Did Che have to say that Regis was not like him? After all Che’s years of battle and sacrifice? Impossible!

  But why did he leave them with Joaquin—Joaquin, who had the look. Joaquin’s face when he told us about Masetti—Che wasn’t the only one moved by Joaquin’s speech. I was terrified by him. I couldn’t take my eyes off his Adam’s apple, the only thing moving in that huge slab of a face. Joaquin’s eyes looked straight at NOTHING. And then Che and Joaquin standing in that field, that damnable, open field. (No field is an open field if you yourself are standing in it, you yourself with your desire to die.) “He looked past me as I spoke, his eyes glazed, his mouth open. The sun, I thought. It makes him look vacant, distant. He didn’t even nod in agreement.”

  The liar—he knew it wasn’t the sun that did that to Joaquin’s face. He knew what it meant. Surviving your friends can be like a disease, an acid blackness inside your mind, and you push back against it as long as you can, pretending that nothing is wrong, though you are more and more tired each day, and it spreads inside your limbs, your throat, your eyes, and whispers and whispers and WHISPERS a suggestion to you that you should take yourself off this planet as rapidly as possible. His friend Nico had that look, telling his story of the Moncada in Hilda’s parlor in Guatemala City. The symptoms of the condition: the limbs won’t move, the face inert, the Adam’s apple grown big, and the spit so heavy that it won’t go down without a major effort. The slow march in the voice, taking Joaquin away, taking us away. The need to have someone else’s eyes to receive your confession, until the case is so advanced that you can’t even look at anyone’s eyes. Che knew that Joaquin had a bad case. Why did he leave him in charge, turning the rear guard’s march into a funeral procession?

  Did he have to draw the line between himself and Joaquin—show that he wasn’t like him, that that wasn’t his problem, he didn’t feel guilty?

  When Che had first begun discussing his plan with Fidel, his plan for the continental revolution, many Vietnams to save Vietnam, Fidel said that Che had sent many people to prove his theory of guerrilla warfare, his theory that the time was transformed by beginning the struggle, and they had died, and Che felt troubled. He couldn’t stand to live when they were dead on his account. (On his account: they were down in the shopkeeper’s books, under Che’s name: he owed them.) Che had to prove his theories were good, that the others had died from their own mistakes. Or Che had to die himself, to appease his guilt. Maybe, Fidel had said, Che wanted to die.

  —I’m having trouble with my spit. It feels like liquid metal. It doesn’t want to go down. There are things that Fidel can say about him that I can I even write. (Or Fidel could say them. Not now, not anymore, not during The Year of the Heroic Guerrilla.)

  I had thought, as Che had said, that this “analysis” by Fidel was crazy talk, perhaps an evasion on Fidel’s part. He didn’t want to offend the Soviets by supporting Che. But now I don’t know. Now I want to see Che’s face, his neck. Did he show signs? Nico, Joaquin, Che: survivors.

  Inti, too; but he is probably dead already. He had one task left to do that would allow him to delay his having to die. He had to return to Honorato Ispaca’s house and kill Ispaca for betraying Joaquin’s group to the army. Inti had that look at the end. He had survived Che, he had survived his brother, Coco. He turned back from the border, the bobbing piece of flesh caught in his neck making its difficult way up and down, poisoned knowledge that he couldn’t swallow, couldn’t spit out.

  And me? I wish there were a mirror on this island so I could see what I look like. I’m glad there isn’t. But how can I escape the shadow forming inside my body, like a second black body, growing more solid every day, until it will demand that I be split open so that it can walk about?

  Can I escape by telling his story? That was Che’s first thought, coming here—wait a moment, I have to consult his manuscript—that he would write his way free, “rewrite himself instead of sacrificing himself and his comrades.” But I’m not rewriting myself, sacrificing myself, I’m writing him, his story. I’m sacrificing my life, though, to writing it. Maybe I can pay off my debt to him by telling his story. What debt? I don’t owe him anything!

  My weight remains the same, at about a hundred.

  MAY 16

  Can I change things? Can I add things? I feel now as I did after the first battle: that I know what people were thinking, what they would have said if they had spoken.

  I want to mix my labor with his, not just record things, but write them. (Do I have the right?)

  Bolivia, 1967

  From Guevara’s Journal

  5/8/67: Benigno came on the run from the ambush, his long legs flying down the path, to report the unexpected arrival of our first journalist. He had come riding past the ambush on the dirt road to Muyupampa, ten kilometers from our camp, his mule led by a peasant guide. Marcos had detained him. The journalist had said he was looking for us. Marcos awaited my instructions.

  The men worried that this meant that the army, too, was close to discovering us. But journalists, I told them, are far more persistent and perspicacious than the soldiers will be. (“Sure,” Ricardo said. “We don’t shoot at them.”) In the middle of the Cuban war, when we were fierce implacable ghosts to the army, eluding them, striking as we wished, Jorge Masetti, working for an Argentine newspaper, had found me, his compatriot, for purposes of an interview. And a writer from The New York Times came to the Sierras to see Fidel. Raul marched twenty men—we had only about thirty then altogether—down a grassy hill in front of the reporter and Fidel, but far enough away so that the visitor couldn’t make out any faces. Then the men scurried about behind the scenes, climbed to a different hilltop, and Raul marched them down again. Each time they came into view Fidel made up the name of a different column of the Rebel Army, and the newspaperman scribbled it down in his spiral notebook. The notebook contained a battalion’s worth of spectral guerrillas. (“How many in a battalion?” Coco asked, afraid that important instruction was passing him by. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “A lot.”) When the notebook became a newspaper story we seemed to the world to be a substantial presence, a possible victor over Batista. Men came to join us. We became a substantial presence, a possible victor over Batista.

  I sent word that this reporter might come ahead. Soon El Chino emerged through the thick overhanging leaves, leading him down the thread of a path that the men had cut. The journalist, still on his mule, sat erect under a white pith helmet, with a black camera strapped around his neck, batting at the long leaves with a regular motion, as if he were a prince waving at a crowd. He had an imperious face, with a long straight nose (his mother, he told us later, was English, his father Chilean). His larg
e brown eyes moved about rapidly, though he didn’t turn his face. His straight upper body swayed slightly—from inscribing a circle of fear on the air.

  The peasant boy walked behind, smiling, patting the mule’s rump. He had on a wide palm-frond hat that reminded me of young Walter’s headgear when he had arrived on the back of Ossario’s mule. Ponco stared intently at the boy, as I have seen him doing often these last weeks at captured soldiers. He smiled tenderly (perhaps a little narcissistically).

  El Chino, too, was smiling, somewhat abstractedly, for his concentration was fixed on the slim path ahead of him, which he could barely make out. Chino carried a sub-machine gun, and wore a brown policeman’s cap with his uniform. He had admirably even white teeth, which he takes very good care of, an example to us all. With his thin eyes inside their slight folds of flesh his expression had menace to it.

  “Hello, gentlemen!” the reporter cried out when he discerned us through the trees. His tremulous voice was full of false heartiness, for he knew the guerrilla’s character from army propaganda, from Marcos’s peremptoriness in seizing him on the path, from Chino’s toothy grin—if we suspected he was a spy we would kill him and leave his body for the vultures. As it turned out, Wolfe (our reporter’s name) had no political commitment—his party was that of sorrow, those who weep for the sad, inevitable fate of humanity. Greed and curiosity had made him intrepid at the start of his adventure. But now he saw the unspeakable face to face, and peeked out bravely (but for his slight swaying motion) from behind walls of anxiety.

  “Hello!” Coco shouted back, naturally gregarious. Coco wants to be a part of all our encounters with the peasantry, too. Despite their lies, and their past evasive nonsense, he always has an appetite for new conversations. He was pleased to have a visitor. So were we all. Wolfe was contact with the outside, however tenuous, and he signified that we were news, a big story, the sort worth risking your life to get. We all smiled welcomingly at him, with what must have seemed to Wolfe the frightening cordiality of cartoon cannibals saying hello to dinner. Many of the men wore dirty green camouflage suits, and long leather boots that we’d stripped off the Rangers—reminders to Wolfe of our darker thoughts. Reminding him, too, that the army might come upon our camp as he sat and talked to us. In the middle of that battle he might be slaughtered indifferently with the rest of us, unable to establish his press credentials.

  Wolfe brought his camera to his eye. That showed courage, I thought. Or perhaps he did it to make a reassuringly familiar gesture; to hide himself, or to show that he had power, too—he could take our image. He tensed his knees against the mule’s sweaty flanks. I looked as if through his long lens at my men sitting in the little clearing, leaning against trees. They were skinny, clearly hungry and weak. Some men’s cheeks were hollowing, and Benjamin, the former medical student from La Paz, looked positively cadaverous. I shook my head no, broadly, so El Chino might make it out. Ponco shook his head, relaying the message. Ricardo echoed Ponco’s motion at closer range. El Chino saw that and jerked the reins, making the mule shift about and shake Wolfe. Through his viewfinder Wolfe must have seen the guerrilla camp suddenly disapproving of him. “No pictures,” El Chino said. “Please. And you should get down from your mule.”

  “Are you hungry?” Ponco asked the boy.

  “Yes, starved,” Wolfe himself replied nervously. “We’re both starved.”

  “Who the fuck asked you?” Ricardo shouted. He, too, was nervous.

  “Shut up, Ricardo,” Ponco said. “These people are our guests.”

  “I’ve been traveling with the army for the last few weeks,” Wolfe said, looking away from Ricardo. “There are troops now in Gutierrez.” He wanted to show how cooperative he could be, but he wasn’t sure whom precisely to address his remarks to. So he offered his information and his good will to the air in front of him. “I’ve been looking for you people for ages.” He told the assembly his name then, and that, as we would see on his credentials, he was a reporter for Time-Life.

  Chino held the papers against his nose and nodded to me.

  Traveling with the army, the Time-Life reporter said, had been terrible. They drank polluted water with insects in it, and ate cold C-rations. The soldiers were irritable (strange word, I thought; it made them sound like cranky children), ready to leap at each other’s throats. (Not like our happy family, we all smiled back at him.) “They’re terrified of you. There’s fear in all their faces.”

  Flattering, and probably true. They didn’t know that we were momentarily divided in half, or that our radio transmitter was broken and our city liaison trapped with us. They didn’t know of our difficulties making peasant recruits. All they knew was that we killed soldiers when they didn’t expect it.

  Wolfe laughed—perhaps because we looked pathetic considering our reputation, perhaps (after all, we did have guns) to hide his own fear.

  “Why do you laugh?” Ricardo asked. “Don’t you think that the soldiers should be scared of us?” Ricardo laughed himself. That disagreeable sound was the worst test Wolfe would face with us.

  “Of course they should!” Wolfe said, taking a step backward from Ricardo’s hilarity and into his mule. “War is a dangerous business.” The mule snorted.

  Wolfe changed the subject. Our food was very much more delicious than the sickening C-rations that the North Americans provided for the soldiers. He spooned up some of the disgusting lukewarm lard-flavored water—mixed with a few handfuls of beans—that Ponco had fetched for them.

  “Tell the soldiers about our food when you get back to them,” Ricardo said. “If you get back. Maybe they will join the Revolution for its cuisine.” As he said this last word he turned to Ponco for approval. After all, Ricardo’s vain look said, he, too, read literature.

  Wolfe’s face was a light bulb being switched on and off. When you get back. If you get back.

  Wolfe continued with his story, as if by establishing how he’d gotten here he’d prove that he was who he said he was. He had begun looking for us months ago, in November, at the first rumors. (November? I saw the men look at each other, wondering: What rumors? Who had spoken of us? Monje? Someone here with us now?—I must speak with Tania when we rejoin Joaquin.) He had begun searching north of the Rio Grande. When he had heard on the radio about the first battles, his guide had deserted him. But Paulino, a brave young boy, had led him down the Camiri road. He pointed to Paulino, a boy no more than fifteen years old, who leaned against a tree with Ponco. Paulino looked disconsolately at the soup. He picked out one of the beans with his finger, and wiped the scummy water off on his shirt before eating it.

  “I’ve come a long way,” Wolfe said, “to interview your commander.”

  Wolfe, I suspected, had already recognized me. I was skinnier than my pictures, and the ends of my hair were gray from my old-man’s disguise. But it had mostly grown back, and my brown beard was full again. I was recognizably myself. Yet Wolfe would never dare mention my name—dark magical powers resided in that syllable; I was King of the Cannibals; it was taboo to say it; my men would rend him for the profanation.

  “I am the commander of the guerrillas, Che Guevara,” I said, stepping forward from among the men.

  “But you’re so thin!” Wolfe exclaimed. It was involuntary speech. People come to feel that they know those whose pictures they have so often seen in the newspapers. One becomes like a figure in their dreams, something they are often given to look at, that speaks to them obscurely, though they have no control over it. They come to have a proprietary feeling towards the image—they feel they deserve, at least, a reassuring continuity. So they’re distressed when one changes. Wolfe’s squeak was different from a friend’s concern. It was more intimate.

  “Mr. Wolfe,” I said, “it will be a pleasure to give you an interview. In return I would like you to accompany two other journalists who I’m afraid have preceded you, Mr. Regis Debray of Maspero Publishers in France, and Mr. Bustos of Argentina. I would like you to take them back to Muyu
pampa.” Wolfe was happy to be accepted by us, but deeply sad to think that we had already been discovered by the press.

  “Of course,” he said wanly.

  “I would like a favor: I would like to have a few rolls of your film. I used to be a photographer myself, and it’s very hard for me to get film now. And I would appreciate it if you’d distribute a communique of ours to the Bolivian newspapers. It will be no risk for you.” Of course I had many more vital messages about supplies to get to the city. But Wolfe couldn’t be trusted with the name of a city contact; the army would suspect him for a while, and follow his movements.

  Wolfe agreed to all I asked.

  We left my men to get news from the guide, and Wolfe and I went off a little ways into the forest for our talk. “You needn’t worry for your safety while you’re with us,” I said. “No harm will come to you here, you have my word on that. You can say absolutely anything you like to me. Let’s have a good open honest talk together.” I wanted Wolfe to be someone it was possible to talk with, I wanted to make him a little more courageous.

  But, as it turned out, Wolfe didn’t require my reassurance. Once he took his small tape recorder from his knapsack, and set it whirring, he changed utterly. He became a reporter, a contentious, all-too-knowing man, quite able to hold his own.

  Interview of Che Guevara by Michael Andrew Wolfe

  WOLFE: Mr. Guevara, when you talk in your “Message to the Tricontinental,” of turning this continent into another Vietnam, aren’t you talking of an unparalleled reign of violence for this continent, an unprecedented suffering for its people?

  GUEVARA: They suffer now, Mr. Wolfe, less spectacularly perhaps, but just as inexorably. In this country, where we are now talking, few tin miners live beyond the age of thirty. When they enter the mines as young men they know they will die near that age. If they don’t enter the mines, they have no work and nothing to eat. So they are forced to kill themselves. Each year more children die in Latin America of curable diseases and malnutrition than all who died at Hiroshima. There is already a war going on against my people. Now we are going to fight back. We are going to make the sacrifices necessary so that our children may have a different life.