Collapsed in an armchair, Caamaño tries to sleep. He takes sedatives, his usual dose and more, but nothing works. Insomnia, teeth-grinding, nail-biting: Trujillo’s legacy to him from the time when he was an officer in the dictator’s army and performed, or saw performed, dark, sometimes atrocious deeds. Tonight it’s worse than ever. He no sooner closes his eyes than he starts to dream. Dreaming, he is honest with himself; awakening he trembles, weeps, rages with shame for his fear.
Morning comes and his exile ends: It has lasted just one night. Colonel Caamaño wets his face and leaves the embassy. He walks staring at the ground, through the smoke of the fires, thick smoke that casts a shadow, and emerges into the shimmering light of day to return to his post at the head of the rebellion.
(223)
1965: Santo Domingo
The Invasion
Not by air, not by land, not by sea. General Wessin y Wessin’s planes and General Imbert’s tanks cannot still the free-for-all in the burning city any more than the ships that fire on the Government Palace, occupied by Caamaño, but kill housewives.
The United States embassy, which calls the rebels Communist scum and a gang of thugs, reports that there is no way to stop the disturbance and requests urgent aid from Washington. The Marines land.
Next day, the first invader dies: a boy from the mountains of northern New York State, shot from a roof, in a narrow street of this city whose name he had never heard in all his life. The first Dominican victim is a child of five. He dies on a balcony from a grenade explosion. The invaders had mistaken him for a sniper.
President Lyndon Johnson warns that he will not tolerate another Cuba in the Caribbean. More troops land. And more. Twenty thousand, thirty-five thousand, forty-two thousand. As U.S. soldiers tear up Dominicans, North American volunteers stitch them together in hospitals. Johnson exhorts his allies to join this Western Crusade. The military dictatorship of Brazil, the military dictatorship of Paraguay, the military dictatorship of Honduras, and the military dictatorship of Nicaragua all send troops to the Dominican Republic to save the democracy threatened by its people.
Trapped between river and sea, in the old barrio of Santo Domingo, its people resist.
José Mora Otero, secretary general of the Organization of American States, meets privately with Colonel Caamaño. He offers him six million dollars to leave the country, and is told to go to hell.
(62, 269, and 421)
1965: Santo Domingo
One Hundred Thirty-Two Nights
and this war of sticks and knives and carbines against mortars and machineguns still goes on. The city smells of gunpowder, garbage, and death.
Unable to force a surrender, the invaders, all-powerful as they are, have no alternative but agreement. The nobodies, the nothings have not let themselves be beaten. They have fought fierce battles by night, every night, house to house, body to body, yard by yard, until the moment the sun raised his flaming flag from the bottom of the sea, when they lowered themselves into darkness until the next night. And after so many nights of horror and glory, the invading troops do not succeed in installing General Imbert in power, nor General Wessin y Wessin, nor any other general.
(269 and 421)
1965: Havana
This Multiplier of Revolutions,
Spartan guerrillero, sets out for other lands. Fidel makes public Che Guevara’s letter of farewell. “Now nothing legal ties me to Cuba,” says Che, “only the bonds that cannot be broken.”
Che also writes to his parents and to his children. He asks his children to be able to feel in their deepest hearts any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world.
Here in Cuba, asthma and all, Che has been the first to arrive and the last to go, in war and in peace, without the slightest weakening.
Everyone has fallen in love with him—the women, the men, the children, the dogs, and the plants.
(213)
Che Guevara Bids Farewell to His Parents
Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante: I return to the road with shield on arm …
Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am; only of a different type—of those who risk their hides to demonstrate their truths. This may be the decisive one. I do not seek it but it is within the logical estimate of probabilities. If that’s how it is, this is my last embrace.
I have loved you a lot, only haven’t known how to express my affection; I am extremely rigid in my actions and I think you sometimes didn’t understand me. It wasn’t easy to understand me, but just believe me today.
Now the will that I have polished with the delight of an artist will sustain this flabby pair of legs and these weary lungs. I will do it. Think once in a while about this little twentieth-century condottiere.
(213)
1966: Patiocemento
“We know that hunger is mortal,”
said the priest Camilo Torres. “And if we know that, does it make sense to waste time arguing whether the soul is immortal?”
Camilo believed in Christianity as the practice of loving one’s neighbor, and wanted that love to be effective. He had an obsession about effective love. That obsession made him take up arms, and because of it, he has died, in an unknown corner of Colombia, fighting with the guerrillas.
(448)
1967: Llallagua
The Feast of San Juan
Bolivian miners are sons of the Virgin and nephews of the Devil, but neither can save them from early death. They are buried in the bowels of the earth, an implacable rain of mine dust annihilating them: In just a moment, a few short years, their lungs turn to stone and their tracheas close. Even before the lungs forget to breathe, the nose forgets smells and the tongue forgets tastes, the legs become like lead and the mouth discharges nothing but insult and vengefulness.
When they emerge from the pit, the miners look for a party. While their short life lasts and their legs still move, they need to eat spicy stews and swallow strong drink and sing and dance by the light of the bonfires that warm the barren plain.
On this night of San Juan, as the greatest of all fiestas is in progress, the army crouches in the mountains. Almost nothing is known here about the guerrillas of the distant Ñancahuazú River, although the story goes that they are fighting for a revolution so beautiful that, like the ocean, it has never been seen. But General Barrientos believes that a sly terrorist is lurking within every miner.
Before dawn, just as the Feast of San Juan is ending, a hurricane of bullets slashes through the town of Llallagua.
(16, 17, and 458)
1967: Catavi
The Day After
The light of the new day is like a glitter of bones. Then the sun hides behind clouds as the outcasts of the earth count their dead and carry them off in little carts. The miners march down a narrow muddy road in Llallagua. The procession crosses the river, dirty saliva flowing among stones of ash, and threads onto the vast pampa heading toward Catavi cemetery.
The sky, immense roof of tin, has no sun, and the earth no bonfires to warm it. Never was this steppe so frozen.
Many graves have to be dug. Bodies of every size are lined up, stretched out, waiting.
From the top of the cemetery wall, a woman screams.
(458)
1967: Catavi
Domitila
cries out against the murderers from the top of the wall.
She lives in two rooms without latrine or running water with her miner husband and seven children. The eighth child is eager to be born. Every day Domitila cooks, washes, sweeps, weaves, sews, teaches what she knows, cures what she can, prepares a hundred meat pies, and roams the streets looking for buyers.
For insulting the Bolivian army, they arrest her. A soldier spits in her face.
(458)
The Interrogation of Domitila
He spat in my face. Then he kicked me. I wouldn’t take it and I slapped him. He punched me again. I scratched his face. And he was hitting me, hitting me … He put his knee here on my bel
ly. He squeezed my neck and I almost choked. It seemed like he wanted to make my belly burst. He tightened his hold more and more … Then, with my two hands, with all my two hands, with all my strength I pulled his hands down. And I don’t remember how, but I had grabbed him with my fist and was biting him, biting … I was horribly disgusted tasting his blood in my mouth … Then, with all my fury— tchá—I spat his blood all over his face. A tremendous howling started. He grabbed me, kicked me, hollered at me … He called the soldiers and had me seized by four or more of them …
When I woke up as if from a dream, I’d been swallowing a piece of my tooth. I felt it here in my throat. Then I noticed that this monster had broken six of my teeth. The blood was pouring over me and I couldn’t open my eyes or my nose …
Then, as if fate ordained it, I began to give birth. I started to feel pains, pains and pains, and sometimes the baby that was coming seemed too much for me … I couldn’t stand it any more. And I went to kneel down in a corner. I supported myself and covered my face, because I couldn’t muster even a bit of strength. My face felt as if it was going to burst. And in one of those moments it came. I saw that the baby’s head was already out … And right there I fainted.
How long afterward I don’t know: “Where am I? Where am I?”
I was completely wet. The blood and the liquid that comes when you give birth had soaked me all over. Then I made an effort and somehow I got hold of the baby’s cord. And pulling up the cord, at the end of the cord I found my little baby, cold, frozen, there on the floor.
(458)
1967: Catavi
The God in the Stone
After the gale of bullets, a gale of wind sweeps through the mining town of Llallagua removing all the roofs. In the neighboring parish of Catavi, the same wind topples and breaks the statue of the Virgin. Its stone pedestal, however, remains intact. The priest comes to pick off the floor the pieces of the Immaculate One.
Look, father, say the workers, and they show him how the pedestal has shrugged off the burdensome Virgin.
Inside this pedestal the conquered ancient gods still sleep, dream, breathe, care for petitioners, and remind the mine workers that the great day will come: Our day, the one we’re waiting for.
From the day it was originally found and worshipped by the workers the priest had condemned the miracle-working stone. He had shut it up in a cement cage so that the workers couldn’t parade it in processions; then he put the Virgin on top of it. The mason who caged the stone at the priest’s order has been shaking with fever and squinting ever since that fateful day.
(268)
1967: On the Ñancahuazú River Banks
Seventeen Men March to Annihilation
Cardinal Maurer arrives in Bolivia. From Rome he brings the Pope’s blessings and word that God unequivocally backs General Barrientos against the guerrillas.
Meanwhile, hungry and disoriented, the guerrillas twist and turn through the Ñancahuazú River scrub. There are few campesinos in these immense solitudes; and not one, not a single one, has joined the little troop of Che Guevara. His forces dwindle from ambush to ambush. Che does not weaken, won’t let himself weaken, although he feels that his body is a stone among stones, a heavy stone he drags along at the head of the others; nor does he let himself be tempted by the idea of saving the group by abandoning the wounded. By Che’s order they all move at the pace of those least able to move: Together they will all be saved or lost.
Lost. Eighteen hundred soldiers, led by U.S. Rangers, are treading on their shadow. A ring is drawing tighter and tighter. Finally, a couple of campesino informers and the radar of the U.S. National Security Agency reveal their exact location.
(212 and 455)
1967: Yuro Ravine
The Fall of Che
Machinegun bullets break his legs. Sitting, he fights until the rifle is blown from his hands.
The conquering soldiers fall to blows over his watch, his canteen, his belt, his pipe. Several officers interrogate him, one after another. Che keeps quiet as his blood flows. Vice Admiral U garteche, daring land-wolf, head of the navy in a country without an ocean, insults and threatens him. Che spits in his face.
From La Paz comes the order to finish off the prisoner. A burst of gunfire. Che dies from a treacherous bullet shortly before his fortieth birthday, the age at which Zapata and Sandino died, also from treacherous bullets.
In the little town of Higueras, General Barrientos exhibits his trophy to journalists. Che lies on a laundry sink. They shoot him a final time, with flashbulbs. This last face has accusing eyes and a melancholy smile.
(212 and 455)
1967: Higueras
Bells Toll for Him
Did he die in 1967 in Bolivia because he guessed wrong about the when and the where and the how? Or did he not die at all, not anywhere, because he wasn’t wrong about what really matters despite all the whens and wheres and hows?
He believed that one must defend oneself from the traps of greed without ever letting down one’s guard. When he was president of the National Bank of Cuba, he signed the banknotes “Che,” in mockery of money. For love of people, he scorned things. Sick is the world, he thought, in which to have and to be mean the same thing. He never kept anything for himself, nor ever asked for anything.
Living is giving oneself, he thought; and he gave himself.
1967: La Paz
Portrait of a Supermacho
On the shoulders of Nene, his giant bodyguard, General Barrientos crosses the city of La Paz. From Nene’s shoulders he greets those who applaud him. He enters the government palace. Seated at his desk, with Nene behind him, he signs decrees that sell at bargain prices the sky, the soil, and the subsoil of Bolivia.
Ten years ago, Barrientos was putting in time in a Washington, D.C., psychiatric clinic when the idea of being president of Bolivia entered his head. He’d already made a career for himself as an athlete. Disguising himself as a North American aviator, he laid siege to power; and now he exercises it, machinegunning workers and pulling down libraries and wages.
The killer of Che is a cock with a loud crow, a man with three balls, a hundred women, and a thousand children. No Bolivian has flown so high, made so many speeches, or stolen so much.
In Miami, the Cuban exiles elect him Man of the Year.
(16, 17, 337, and 474)
1967: Estoril
Society Notes
Pinned to the hostess’s gleaming coiffure are some of the world’s largest diamonds. The cross on her granddaughter’s necklace displays one of the world’s largest emeralds. The Patiños, inheritors of one of the world’s largest fortunes, throw one of the world’s largest parties.
To make a thousand people happy night and day for a week, the Patiños collect all the elegant flowers and fine drinks buyable in Portugal. The invitations have gone out well ahead, so that the fashion-designers and society reporters could do their jobs properly. Several times a day the ladies change their dresses, all exclusive designs, and when two similar gowns appear in one salon, someone observes that she will fry Yves Saint-Laurent in oil. The orchestras come by charter from New York. The guests come in yachts or private planes.
Europe’s nobility is out in force. The late lamented Simón Patiño, the anthropophagous Bolivian, devourer of miners, bought top-quality alliances. He married his daughters to a count and a marquis, and his son to a king’s first cousin.
(34)
1967: Houston
Ali
They called him Cassius Clay: He chooses to call himself Muhammad Ali.
They made him a Christian: He chooses to make himself a Muslim.
They made him defend himself: No one punches like Ali, so fierce and fast, light tank, bulldozing feather, indestructible possessor of the world crown.
They told him that a good boxer confines his fighting to the ring: He says the real ring is something else, where a triumphant black fights for defeated blacks, for those who eat leftovers in the kitchen.
&n
bsp; They advised discretion: From then on he yells.
They tapped his phone: From then on he yells on the phone, too.
They put a uniform on him to send him to Vietnam: He pulls it off and yells that he isn’t going, because he has nothing against the Vietnamese, who have done no harm to him or to any other black American.
They took away his world title, they stopped him from boxing, they sentenced him to jail and a fine: He yells his thanks for these compliments to his human dignity.
(14 and 149)
1968: Memphis
Portrait of a Dangerous Man
The Reverend Martin Luther King preaches against the Vietnam War. He protests that twice as many blacks as whites are dying there, cannon fodder for an imperial adventure comparable to the Nazi crimes. The poisoning of water and land, the destruction of people and harvests are part of a plan of extermination. Of the million Vietnamese dead, says the preacher, the majority are children. The United States, he claims, is suffering from an infection of the soul; and any autopsy would show that the name of that infection is Vietnam.
Six years ago the FBI put this man in Section A of the Reserved List, among those dangerous individuals who must be watched and jailed in case of emergency. Since then the police hound him, spying on him day and night, threatening and provoking him.
Martin Luther King collapses on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. A bullet full in the face puts an end to this nuisance.
(254)
1968: San Jose, California
The Chicanos
Judge Gerald Chargin passes sentence on a lad accused of incest, and while he’s at it, advises the young man to commit suicide and tells him, “You Chicanos are worse than animals, miserable, lousy, rotten people …”
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 90