At school, Ernesto was a good student but nothing more, one of his teachers recalls; as intelligent as his younger sisters, but not as hardworking. Perhaps the greatest impact of the two schools he attended in Alta Gracia had to do with the fact of receiving a public education during the waning years of an oligarchical Argentina.
According to his teacher Elba Rossi Oviedo Zelaya, Ernesto had two different family links to education: one through Celia, ever present and attentive to her son’s instruction, and the other, much more lax, through his father. In the words of Che’s teacher,
I only knew the mother. She was really very democratic, a lady who didn’t mind picking up any child and taking him home, and helping the school; she had a lovely temperament. … She came every day and to all the parents meetings, with all her kids in the little car and then other kids joining in. The father was a very distinguished man who spent a lot of time at the Sierras Hotel because he came from a distinguished family. I might have seen him once by chance; he didn’t speak with the teachers. I only knew he went a lot to the Sierras because at that time the Sierras was the best hotel in Alta Gracia. With her I talked many times, about school and other things. I never met him at the school, though I might have seen him on some occasion; someone might have said, that’s Sr. Guevara.11
The fact that Ernesto attended public school was typical, yet highly significant. Although Argentine society was still relatively homogeneous, its growing diversity was already coming into conflict with the standardizing pressures of public, lay, compulsory education. When his asthma kept Ernesto at home, his mother actually received notices from the truant officer, inquiring as to the reasons for his absence; the compulsory character of primary education was not just a matter of principle but a strictly enforced reality. The two schools Che attended in Alta Gracia received pupils from the destitute homes on the city outskirts, poor infants from el campo, or else urban morochos—either way, children from modest families, for whom this was the first generation going to school. The enormous difference between Argentina and the rest of Latin America in those years (with the exception of Uruguay and possibly Chile), lay precisely in the existence of public education. Established before universal suffrage, it was, together with military conscription, the equalizing institution par excellence. The immense gap between the adult Che and many of his companions from Cuba and the rest of Latin America, in his relations with different classes, races, ethnic groups, and educational levels, stemmed from this early experience of equality. Che’s experience was not at all typical in a continent whose elites rarely encounter people different from themselves.
However, to strive for equality is not the same as achieving it. The brutal emergence in the thirties of new working classes—including second-generation immigrants and laborers from the old agricultural sector of gauchos and cattle ranches—did not spare any level of Argentine society. Ernesto’s schools were attended by poor children of Italian, Spanish, and rural origins; thanks to his teachers and the exceptional cultural heritage he received from Celia, Che was blessed with unique and obvious opportunities for confronting the contours of equality. But these schools also bestowed upon him, paradoxically, the distinction of being a precocious primus inter pares. The culture and (relative) prosperity of his parents, as well as the self-confidence generated by a stable if not peaceful home, provided Ernesto with the privilege of standing out from a very young age. He was a ringleader at school and among his friends. The early vocation for leadership that many of Che’s admirers have traced back to his childhood may indeed have stemmed from innate talents—but it also involved his privileged social position.*8
Last but not least, these languid years in Alta Gracia also saw Ernesto’s incipient politicization. The Spanish Civil War had a major impact on him, as it did on millions of young people and adults throughout the world. His interest in the triumphs and tragedies of Madrid, Teruel, and Guernica did not center on the conflict’s ideological, international, or even political aspects. Rather, as befitted a boy between the ages of eight and eleven, he was inspired by its military and heroic aspects. In 1937, he hung a map of Spain on the wall of his room, using it to follow the movements of the Republican and Francoist forces. He also built a miniature battlefield in the garden, complete with trenches and mountains.12
In 1937, Ernesto’s uncle, the poet Cayetano Córdova Itúrburu, left for Spain. A journalist and committed member of Argentina’s Communist Party, Córdova was hired as a foreign correspondent. Aunt Carmen and the two children went to live at the Guevara home in Alta Gracia during his absence. So all the dispatches, notes, and articles that Córdova Itúrburu sent from the front passed through the villa in Alta Gracia. The arrival of news from overseas was a major event. The poet-turned-reporter occasionally sent Spanish books and magazines. This continual stream of detailed information flowed straight into the imagination of the boy, where it would remain.
Another important factor in Che’s growing politicization was the subsequent arrival in Córdoba and then Alta Gracia of several refugee families fleeing from Spain. The one closest to the Guevaras was that of the physician Juan González Aguilar, who had previously dispatched his wife and children to Buenos Aires and then Alta Gracia. Paco, Juan, and Pepe, the three sons of the González Aguilar family, enrolled at the same school in Córdoba that Che began attending while still living in Alta Gracia. For a year, they often traveled together the thirty-five kilometers to school. As the Republican front collapsed, González Aguilar fled to Argentina, joining his family in Alta Gracia.
The friendship between the two families would last for decades. The stories told by the González Aguilars and other refugees like General Jurado and the composer Manuel de Falla would help inspire in Ernesto a deep sympathy toward the Republican cause. The Spanish Civil War—perhaps the last civil conflict until the Cuban Revolution to be broadly, almost unanimously, perceived as a battle between good and evil—was the decisive political event in Che’s childhood and adolescence. Nothing else in those years would mark him as profoundly as the Loyalist struggle and defeat: not the French Popular Front or Mexico’s oil expropriation, not Roosevelt’s New Deal or the Argentine coup of 1943, nor even the rise of Perón on October 17, 1945, would have such an impact on the young Guevara.
Ernesto’s parents also transmitted their own political views to him. After the Republican defeat in Spain, the father of the eleven-year-old boy founded a local section of Acción Argentina and enrolled him in its youth section. A typical antifascist organization, Acción Argentina did a bit of everything during those years. It organized meetings, collected funds for the Allies, opposed Nazi penetration in Argentina, uncovered cases of infiltration by former crew members of the German battleship Graf Spee (sunk in Montevideo Bay in 1940), and disseminated information about Allied advances during the war. As Guevara Lynch recalls, “every time an event was organized by Acción Argentina or we had a serious investigation to do, Ernesto went with me.”13
The Spanish war coincided with the emergence in Argentina of a nationalistic, Catholic, and virtually fascist right. The nation’s intellectuals— especially those with radical, socialist, or communist sympathies and aristocratic, Italian, or Spanish roots—rallied against it, denouncing all forms of xenophobia and conservatism. They were particularly opposed to the views expressed by writers like Leopoldo Lugones, or publications like Crisol (Crucible), La Bandera Argentina (The Argentine Flag), and La Voz Nacionalista (The Nationalist Voice), as well as to their political expression among mid-level army officers. Argentine nationalism during the thirties embraced anti-Semitism, racism and eugenics, fascism, and Nazism. It quite naturally sided with Franco when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. Xenophobia was especially dear to it, given the emergence of a new working class from the interior made up of “blacks” or “redskins.”*9 That this nationalism also had its “social” and “anti-imperialist” aspects, its “developmentalist” components, did not prevent the traditional Argentine left from r
egarding it with dread—and justifiably so.
The final outcome of these trends confounded all expectations. The advent of Perón in 1945 would leave the nationalists unsatisfied, and the left disoriented and bereft of popular support. The growth of that conservative, Catholic nationalism provides an at least partial, and tentative, answer to the riddle of Argentina’s left and Che’s attitude toward the chief political event of his youth: Perón’s rise to power. As we shall see, Ernesto followed in his parents’ footsteps. To the extent that he cared at all, his youthful anti-Peronism was as visceral as his family’s, as wholehearted as that of his fellow university students, and as unrealistic as that of the left in general. Che would complete the circle only twenty years later, when he became friends with Perón’s representatives in Havana, especially John William Cooke.†5 He even served as Perón’s contact with Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, requesting his help to arrange a meeting between Perón and Gamal Abdel Nasser.14
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On the eve of the Guevaras’ departure for Córdoba in 1943, the patterns of Che’s family life were set. The house was always open. There was an endless procession of children, visitors, friends, and travelers, all within a great disorder governed only by two rules: hospitality for guests and freedom for the children. Bicycles and tricycles circulated indoors, meals were served at all times, and there were scores of guests. Money was always short. The couple’s financial problems, the father’s chronic absenteeism, and the mother’s indifference to household matters doubtless helped perpetuate the chaos. The children’s enormous freedom had as its counterpart a certain lack of structure. When the Guevaras’ marriage began to show strains, the disorder became even more apparent.
In 1942, a year before moving to the city, Ernesto’s parents enrolled him at the Colegio Nacional Deán Funes of Córdoba, an excellent public secondary school belonging to the Ministry of Education. It was not precisely intended for poor students, but was less exclusive than the Colegio Montserrat; the latter was the institution usually attended by Córdoban members of the regional elite—to which Ernesto belonged as a matter of course—while those from the emerging middle classes tended to enroll at Deán Funes. The parents’ choice was a fortunate one. Ernesto spent five years among young people of different social and professional origins.
One should not, however, exaggerate their diversity. In the forties, Córdoba was still a fairly homogeneous, white, bureaucratic center within a prosperous agricultural province. The social differences that did exist were increasingly concealed by geographical segregation. Things were changing, however. The population skyrocketed, surging from 250,000 inhabitants in 1930 to 386,000 in 1947. Lower-income residents, recently arrived from the countryside and working in the services sector, began settling in the city’s outskirts. In some areas, slums appeared directly alongside “fashionable” neighborhoods. With the arrival of the automobile industry in the late forties, industrialization was just around the corner.
A new phase had begun for Ernesto, in school and in his eternal struggle against asthma. He began to compete in team sports, especially rugby. Both rough and cerebral, it was the favorite sport of Anglophile Argentina. Many of the matches took place at Córdoba’s Lawn Tennis Club, where Ernesto also swam and played tennis or golf. There and then the secondary-school student became friends with two brothers, Tomás and Alberto Granado, the former his own age, the latter six years older. Tomás was the closest friend of his adolescent years; Alberto, of his youth, travels, and first forays into the world. They attended the same high school, suffered through their first loves side by side, and witnessed together the political ferment that shook Argentina beginning on October 17, 1945, when Perón, borne by a tidal wave of both cabecitas negras and Catholic, conservative, and authoritarian elites, erupted into the life of his country.
Rugby had two implications for the young asthma patient, already marked by the disease’s classically deformed chest. First of all, it entailed an exceptional challenge. It was already known then (and even more so now) that strenuous exercise is the single most frequent trigger for asthma attacks.*10 Overcoming the crises and controlling them through willpower, an inhaler, and even epinephrine injections, soon became a routine that Guevara would endure until the end of his life.
Secondly, rugby assigns players different roles and functions, some more strenuous than others. The position of half-scrum held for Ernesto the great advantage of being more static and strategic, less mobile and tactical.†6 It benefited him in two ways, offering him an opportunity to develop his skills as a leader and strategist, and allowing him to play without running from one end of the field to the other throughout a match, thus preventing him from tiring too early. But he was not entirely spared; the attacks came on during the game sometimes, driving him off the field and to the bleachers, where he would inject himself with adrenaline right through his clothes, perhaps in some cases to call attention to himself.15 The challenge was enormous, but manageable under certain conditions—a combination which would persist throughout Guevara’s life, as did the asthma. For Ernesto’s ailment was not totally typical: unlike many cases of childhood asthma, it did not disappear with age.
Psychoanalytic views on the origins of asthma are in general no longer viewed favorably by physicians‡1; the widely accepted etiology is hereditary. Interpretations based upon a patient’s anxiety, his incapacity to externalize it and to cope with the ambivalence triggering that anxiety, are perhaps better suited to explain the disorder’s lasting nature in cases like Che’s than its origin. They are particularly suggestive given his obvious difficulty in facing and accepting conflicting emotions or desires—whether in his family, at school, in love, or, years later, in politics. In this view, asthma was Ernesto’s response to a primary, recurring anxiety which caused him to suffocate. This anxiety was in turn exacerbated by his frequent exposure to ambivalence, intolerable to him precisely because of the anxiety it generated. The only possible cure was to avoid ambivalence—through distance, travel, and death.
There are several known triggers for asthmatic episodes: viral infections, exercise, dust or other allergies, and climate changes. Attacks can also be brought on by emotional catalysts: a sense of imminent or expected danger, or highly conflictive situations with no apparent way out, and for which any alternative entails an exorbitant cost. The known connection between the dilation of contracted bronchia and a surge of adrenaline implies that situations devoid of ambivalence—such as combat, for instance—produce an endogenous discharge of adrenaline and thus can deter asthmatic attacks. Conversely, other situations—for example, those requiring long deliberations and tortuous decisions—can actually provoke them, precisely owing to the absence of endogenous discharges of adrenaline.*11 If this interpretation is correct, it may explain Che’s subsequent incapacity to accept the simultaneous presence of opposites: his parents’ problems and equivocal estrangement, the intrinsic contradictions of Peronism, the ambiguities of his relationship with Chichina Ferreyra, and later, the need to reconcile the pragmatic imperatives of the Cuban Revolution’s survival with his own formidable social and humanistic values.†7
What with his asthma and problems at home, Ernesto was, as his report cards indicate, only an average student, with occasional high marks in the humanities. Thus, in 1945, in his fourth year of middle school, he received excellent grades in literature and philosophy; barely passing marks in mathematics, history, and chemistry; and truly disastrous ones in music and physics.16 His complete tone-deafness became legendary: he simply could not distinguish among rhythms or melodies, never learning to dance or play any musical instrument. As Alberto Granado would recount years later,
We had agreed that I would give him a kick every time there was a dance he could do; the only dance he had learned was the tango, which is the only thing you can dance if you don’t have any ear. The day of his birthday he made a fantastic speech, which proved to me that the boy was not crazy, that there was something to him. H
e was dancing with an Indian girl, a nurse from the leper colony in the Amazon region. Suddenly the band played “Delicado,” a baión that was very much in fashion, a favorite of the girlfriend he had left in Córdoba. When I gave him a little kick to remind him, he started dancing the tango. He was the only one doing it. I couldn’t stop laughing; when he realized what was happening he got terribly angry.17
Che’s English was also appalling: he achieved an average of 3 out of 10 in his fourth year.18 In contrast, his French, learned at home with Celia, eventually became cultivated and fluent to some extent. And his general level of culture and education was higher than that of his peers, according to his classmates. He bought and read the books of all the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and held intensive discussions with his history and literature professors. As his friends recall, he was much more knowledgeable than they in many subjects they didn’t even approach.19 His barely adequate performance in school*12 was perhaps due to his many extracurricular activities: sports, chess (always a favorite pastime, in which he acquired a certain mastery), his first job with the provincial highway department (initially in Córdoba and then, after he completed high school, at Villa María, halfway between Córdoba and Rosario). All in all, as his father said, “he was a wizard in his use of time.”20
An anecdote from this period reveals Ernesto’s stubborn and generous efforts to bridge the gap separating him from the poorer sectors of Córdoba society, and to oppose blatant cases of oppression and injustice. The Guevaras’ street, Calle Chile, bordered on one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. There, as in all Latin America, marginalized and dispossessed immigrants from the countryside lived in houses made of cardboard and zinc. This was also the territory of a Dantesque personage known as the Man of the Dogs: a legless cripple who hauled himself along on a little cart pulled by a brace of dogs, upon which he vented all his rage at his hapless fate. Every morning as he dragged himself out of the hole in the ground that was his home, he would whip the dogs as they struggled to pull him onto the pavement. The dogs’ whimpers always preceded his appearance—a major event in the neighborhood. One day, the local children started taunting the Man of the Dogs and throwing stones at him. Ernesto and his friends witnessed this spectacle and tried to stop it, Ernesto pleading with the children. But instead of thanking him the Man of the Dogs mocked him, his icy stare filled with an ageless, irreparable class hatred. In the words of Dolores Moyano Martín, a friend of young Ernesto’s and Chichina’s cousin, who tells the story, the tramp illustrated an important distinction: his enemies were not the poor children throwing stones at him but the rich children trying to defend him*13 —a lesson that Ernesto would learn only in part.
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