The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  9/21/67: Camba said that Benigno had allowed peasants to see him and had let the peasants leave the area. This seemed unlikely, but Che asked Benigno about it anyway.

  Benigno admitted that it was true, and began to cry.

  Che struck him across the face. Poor Benigno! “This is treason,” Che wheezed.

  Benigno continued to sob throughout the night.

  9/22/67: Camba came up to me on the march today, as we clambered up one of the ravines that line the hillsides. He whispered in my ear, “She put his genitals right where his nose was. In the middle of his face. And then led him around by the nose.”

  “Whose?” I asked. “What?”

  “No one’s,” Camba said. “Everyone’s.” He looked disappointed in me for not understanding and then walked away, to the side of us. Of course I had understood.

  From Coco’s Journal

  9/23/67: Alto Seco. At five in the morning, when the early risers went about their business, they found us already occupying their town. I asked one of the peasants on the way to his fields where the phones were, and was directed to the magistrate’s adobe house. (We took the peasant with us, since Che says no one is to leave the area.)

  I walked in on the magistrate’s breakfast, and cut the line.

  The magistrate, a short man of about forty, smiled at us from his wooden table. “It hasn’t worked for weeks.”

  A little later Che arrived with the center guard. He rode down the dirt track of the little village on our new pack mule. He can hardly walk anymore, and Marcos had to help him dismount.

  Che had us set up sentry posts around the town. The place has about ten small adobe houses with red tile roofs. The peasants, most of them mestizos, looked out from the openings of their houses.

  The center guard set up at the edge of town in a half-destroyed house—it had no roof—near the watering place.

  The mayor, one of the peasants told us, had left last night, for Vallegrande, the army staging area, to inform on us. Inti and I went to the mayor’s two-room house, which had a little wooden counter in the front room with cigarettes, candy, tins of mentholated vaseline, candles, etc. I stuffed all the merchandise into my knapsack as a reprisal for the mayor’s treason.

  His wife, Sara, cried when I loaded up the things. “In the name of God,” she said, “you must pay for those things. That is how we earn our living. You can’t take those things from us! Our children will starve!”

  I told her that her husband was an informer, and that he and his whole damn family should rot in hell with all those who have betrayed Bolivia.

  Inti, calmer than me as always, said, “Your husband is mayor. You are the town’s richest family. Apparently your husband cares more for the government than for the people of his town. So let the government pay him.”

  “Let President Barrientos pay him,” I said. “Let the Pope pay him,” I said, nonsensical from anger.

  The woman wailed, but we would not relent.

  Elsewhere in town we had acquired some pork and a few eggs. These we paid for, of course. Ricardo tried to pay in U.S. dollars, but the shrewd townspeople weren’t having any of this invaluable hard currency and insisted on our own worthless pesos. We took our booty back to the abandoned house and spent the rest of the morning cooking. We have moved really very high up into the mountains, though the Andes still tower above us on every side, covered with snow. Water, Ponco pointed out to me, boils very quickly.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/23/67: After a fine breakfast we went back into the town. The peasants greeted us with a mixture of fear, awe, and their new curiosity, which seems strong enough to overcome their timidity. They go so far as to touch our arms, and want to examine our hands, perhaps for magic rings, perhaps for blood.

  I talked with some of the townspeople, and a few children. There is a school here for the first- and second-graders of the area. One of the older boys, a bright-eyed lad of about fifteen, told me that the schoolmaster was a terrible fox, and not to be trusted. I said that I would keep an eye on him. The boy helps his family work their land on the mountainside, and sometimes joins the labor gangs that go into the valleys. His family’s land is very rough—all stones he said—and they don’t have enough to eat. I told him about socialism as we have made it in Cuba. There everyone shares tools so that the most advanced methods can be used. And the work, too, is shared by everyone, so no one does all the work for others, the way it is in Bolivia.

  “Do the Heroes work?” he asked.

  “I worked in the fields sometimes,” I said.

  He was disappointed, and looked away from me.

  “But they thought I was better working with my head. We will make a world where everyone works at what he is really best at, no matter where he is born. Even in a little village like this. And where everyone takes what he needs to live, but no more than that. All will offer their work to the Giant each day, to the Nation, so that it might live and be strong and watch over all of us who live within it.”

  From My Journal

  9/23/67: At eight-thirty, as the last light fled to the mountaintops for safety, we organized a meeting in the school, a two-room building, as usual collecting the townspeople by showing our guns, so that they wouldn’t be implicated. But they seemed willing, even eager to come with us.

  About forty peasants sat on the dirt floor, most of them wearing the long caps of the region, with ear flaps that make them look like cartoon characters to me. Some of the older peasants had come with loads on their backs in large white blankets that were tied around their foreheads; maybe they expected to do some trading after the meeting. These traders took off their rubber sandals when they entered the mud shack, though the floor must have been very cold.

  Inti spoke first. “You must think we are mad to fight like this. The army says that we are bandits. But they are the bandits. We fight for you, the ones who work and earn little, while the soldiers who hunt us, who slaughter the miners, get high wages from their Yanqui masters. You work for them, and what have they ever done for you? Nothing.

  “Today my brother cut the telephone lines to keep the soldiers away, and the magistrate said, ‘It doesn’t work anyway.’

  “Here you don’t have a doctor. You don’t have a decent school. You don’t have electric lights. You have been completely abandoned, like all Bolivians. That is why we fight. We ask you to join us, for we cannot succeed without your help. We ask you to join us to free our country, to fight with us for the final overthrow of Barrientos and the generals who work for the Yanquis.”

  Inti spoke in a slow sad unmodulated voice, hopeless for recruiting, but even he felt that the ending of a speech required some special rhetorical emphasis. So he lifted his rifle up over his head. This was greeted by a gasp from the audience, who may have thought that despite his reassuring words we intended to shoot some of them.

  Then Che spoke. He, too, had interpreted their gasp. “We want you to come, to join yourself to the body of the Giant and live within his immortal life. But it must be of your own free will, not by force, or the Giant will not have you.”

  The teacher, a mestizo pleased with his own intelligence, smiled at Che. He kept his hands in the pockets of a worn black jacket without buttons and wore no hat. “But what if we are not ready to die for you, Professor?”

  His challenge provoked a deeper gasp than Inti’s rifle had. The others looked angrily at the young man, but I couldn’t tell if it was fear that we might punish all of them for his outrage, or because he had frustrated their curiosity. How dare he interrupt this priceless lesson?

  “You know,” Che said, “that I am not asking you to die for me. I am asking you to find the courage to live as men, to fight for a world where the soldiers will not have the power of life and death over you. They can kill you any time, when you disobey them. And every one of you has heard of people to whom this has happened. I am saying that you can join us and become heroes, instead of slaves. If you join yourself to the life of the G
iant you will share in his immortality and power. For now he slumbers—as the land sleeps in winter—but he always rises again, for he is immortal.

  “The army says that it has killed our comrade Joaquin, and our comrade Tania, and many others in their ambushes.

  “But it is a lie. They show corpses at the army laundry shed in Vallegrande. But those are just corpses that they have dug up from their own cemeteries, desecrating the graves, for nothing is sacred to them, not even their own dead. They haven’t killed guerrillas. This I can assure you, because only a couple of days ago I was in communication with Joaquin.”

  This time I gasped. Such was my faith in Che and in the golden valor of his word that I believed him, and wondered at first why he hadn’t told us before, and which of the peasants had brought him the message. But then I realized the truth. Che had lied.

  “You do not die,” the candid young teacher said, “because you have magic that protects you.”

  “Yes,” Che said, and the world shook in front of me. “We have a power that comes from my vision of the people of Latin America. I see our people working the land together, free of the Imperialists, free of disease. Sometimes I and my men have failed because we have not been true to that vision. Sometimes we have been led by our own ambitions, and forgotten our vision, not keeping it constantly in mind. Then those whom we trusted, those who were close to us, have betrayed us. But the people have never betrayed us.

  “If you want to share in my power, my power that is the power of the Giants of Latin America, of the Bolivian Nation, then you must share in my vision. And you will have the power I have, and that you have heard about.

  “And it is a terrible and great power. Perhaps some of you know what it is like for me. Perhaps you saw me ride into your town this morning on a mule. You can see I have trouble standing, and you can hear that I have trouble speaking.”

  We had found three lanterns for this meeting and placed them about the room. Che, at the front, in his torn fatigues, with his wasted body, looked indeed like the shadow of a shadow.

  “You can see that I am not a strong man. It is hard for me to breathe. Like the miners of Bolivia I have very weak lungs. Do you know how weak a hand is that cannot make a fist?”

  Che held up his hand. His hand terrified the townspeople, for they shrank back.

  He showed his long fingers struggling to come together. “That is how hard it is for me to squeeze the air in and out of my body. But you have all heard of me. I have come far in my life, and accomplished much.”

  He held up his hand again, open this time, and this was even worse for the audience. They could lean no farther back, so they shrank inside their bodies.

  “I am a bloody man,” Che said. “I have a bloody hand. And I will have revenge for all the wrongs that the people of Latin America have suffered. I see that some of you have come into my presence bearing a heavy load and barefoot. I know that you do this because you think I am a king. I am not. But I am a hero, part of the Giant, and so I am someone powerful and feared by the army. If you share in my vision then you too will be heroes. The weakest of you is as strong as I am. The weakest of you has the power to rebel against what is being done to you.”

  Afterward a few of the peasants gathered outside the school. It was a clear cold night with many stars. The peaks of the Andes were visible, as if they had some source of light of their own, as if they were beacons. Coco and Che and I spoke with two men about the best routes through the area, and what they had heard about the army’s positions.

  Near the schoolhouse door the young boy who had spoken with Che this afternoon approached Marcos, who was staring emptily up at the stars.

  “Can I join you?” he said quietly. “I want to be a Hero. I want to fight for my nation.”

  Marcos shouted, “Don’t be a fool!” He hit the boy on the shoulders with both his arms, and the boy simply bowed his head and accepted it. “Don’t be crazy,” Marcos said, and began to sob. “Can’t you see that we’ve all had it? We don’t even know how to get out of here! We’re trapped! In a few days we’ll be dead. Are you a fool? Do you want to die?”

  Everyone up and down the little road could hear Marcos. The boy looked over at Che, then down at the ground. No one said anything. Coco had the townspeople sketch out a map for us.

  When Che and Coco were done, the boy still waited for us. He came up to Che, made bold by his disappointment.

  “So everything you said was a lie?”

  “No,” Che said. “All that I told you was true. But it is also true that we are in difficulties now. We have to run from the army even though our cause is just and my vision true and powerful, because I misinterpreted what a peasant told me. I have attacked at the wrong time. I was mistaken, though the people tried to warn me. But our cause is just and you will have another chance to fight for it. The Giant will awaken again.”

  On the march out of town that night a man approached me at the rear of the center guard. “We will sacrifice many of our guinea pigs for you,” he whispered, “so you will be victorious.”

  I would have been shocked, I suppose, but Che’s own speeches had exhausted my capacity for shock. I tried to think of what Che would do.

  “Thank you,” I said. “The more the better.”

  9/24/67: I spoke to Che this morning. “But they misunderstood you,” I said. “You must know that they misunderstand everything you say.”

  He walked beside the mule as we went up the mountainside, through some tall grass. “We must submit,” he said.

  “Submit?” It was an odd word, like “chaste,” or “reign,” or “forlorn.”

  But he had walked ahead of me and was half hidden by the grass.

  It chilled me.

  He is making shadows. He lets them understand as they wish. This is not like him. It can only mean one thing: He is dying. We are dying. He looks on from beyond the grave, having surrendered his will—and for Che that can mean only one thing: he sees himself already dead. I am terrified. But Che seems very calm, newly calm, strangely calm, having given his “life” to them.

  And ours.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  [No date. It must be from around 9/24/67, though I don’t think it was one of his usual entries, but rather part of an essay on “The Hero.” The fragment remaining comes after a ripped-out page. ] … before his time, and so his gestures are absurd—or tragic. So they must be made more absurd so that he can be borne. The hero, at first, takes a comic or exaggerated form. A bloody man with a bloody hand. (Describe the mad fellow, the one with grease all over his chest who danced his mockery at the back of the church. Someone like him must be the hero’s body for a time, someone who keeps his idea alive by mocking his heroism in mad speech, exaggerated stories, magical actions that make no sense, like thunderous farts. But it must be a mockery that mocks itself, and so points back to the hero’s truth.)

  As the people gain courage the hero returns in a form that speaks more directly, without mockery. A store dummy becomes a saint who talks to them in dreams and urges them to rebellion. He will speak the language of the people he appears among, here the purest Quechua. The hero is common property, the stuff of stories. Now they make him into a story in which they can see themselves, though only a small part of themselves at this stage, like in the saint’s small mirror. But no matter how they tell the hero’s story it keeps its meaning; it travels into the heart like the fatal blood-spotted kernel of the conjurer. It is right to rebel. Even the weak can be terrible.

  When the rebellion begins, the hero’s story becomes more real, closer to the tale, one might say, that he himself knew of his life as he lived it. (The staff Aaron threw down became a snake; and the people stood back from it in awe. That is the first stage. But now the snake becomes the image of a rifle, yet they are still afraid to pick up that rifle and join the hero.) The first hesitant actions are on the order of street demonstrations, where they chant the hero’s name. A crowd moves towards the Government Palace, across
the main square in La Paz, in Lima, in Buenos Aires, chanting a name, an empty name, a mirror that any might find himself in. A small boy carries a tall pole—a sign is extended from it on a piece of cloth—the other pole held by his father. They’ve forgotten to put holes in the cloth, so the wind billows it out like a sail, and makes the boy’s hands ache. He shouts at the top of his voice, the name of the hero. The echo comes off the high stone wall of a church, the crowd’s voice almost unrecognizable in its own ears, like the rushing of water, or the high buzzing of a saw. But the hero’s power is only their own power deferred—that is what the echo tries to tell them—and in chanting his name they exalt him and mourn themselves, the death of their power, keeping it present to themselves in a kind of grief.

  But when the rebellion continues, and the violence begins, then the hero’s qualities are parceled out among them—before the hero flickers out. Of the fighters, one might say of another, His lungs are weak, like Che. He has a taste for chess, like Che. One man is a poet—as Che was. Or a doctor. Or has too much pride. Or a certain coldness. Or has to wrap his feet in rags as Che once did. But as the rebellion continues, the fighters become heroes themselves, their self-hatred and cowardice overcome, and the name that was their self-loathing magnified is forgotten. They will chant their own names, or descend upon the cities, like a curse, in silence.

  From My Journal

  9/25/67: Loma Larga. We arrived by climbing a ravine that runs up the side of the mountain, all the way to Alto Seco. The ravine was clogged with thick gray bushes, and ran a long distance, maybe as far as the Rio Grande. Loma Larga, when we emerged, was a small settlement of about ten huts, on a slant so steep that I thought the houses would tip over and start rolling down the bare mountainside. We came into the village at evening, and several men came out immediately to meet us—not to shoo us away, but for greeting. We talked about army emplacements, and food. Che looked particularly unsteady and weak in the afternoon, hardly able to stand.