†8 “Raquel Hevia was delightful. She was extremely attractive and Ernesto was enchanted by her.” Betty Feigín, interview with the author, Córdoba, February 18, 1995.
‡2 María del Carmen (“Chichina”) Ferreyra, interview with the author, Córdoba, February 18, 1995. Dolores Moyano Martín confirms that Chichina told her about Ernesto’s reaction years earlier. Dolores Moyano Martín, interview with the author, Washington, D.C., February 26, 1996.
*14 Feigín, interview. Che’s father alludes to these “marital disagreements” in the following way: “The world press … threw itself into the fray with lies and inventions. Some ‘commentators’ have even asserted that my wife and I sat down to meals in our home with revolvers at our waists in order to settle any discussion with gunfire. But they have said nothing about how directly complementary we were to each other in everything concerning the struggle for political and social ideals.” Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo, p. 105.
†9 Thus, in The Black Beret: The Life and Meaning of Che Guevara (New York: Ballantine, 1969), p. 27, Martin Resnick asserts: “In 1945, while Ernesto was still in high school, the Guevaras finally separated. Señor Guevara moved into a separate residence, but saw his wife and children daily.” In contrast, Daniel James writes in Che Guevara: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1969) that the separation took place when the family moved to Buenos Aires in 1947. Martin Ebon agrees, in Che: The Making of a Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 15: the separation occurred in Buenos Aires in 1947. Lastly, Carlos María Gutiérrez, the best-informed of Che’s abortive biographers—though his manuscript has never been published in its entirety—states that the separation occurred in 1950 (Luis Bruschstein and Carlos María Gutiérrez, Los Hombres: Che Guevara, Página 12 (Buenos Aires, n.d.), p. 1. Needless to say, neither Che’s father nor any official or unofficial source in Cuba mentions the couple’s conflicts and distances. Apparently they wish to preserve the immaculateness, at all imaginable levels, of Ernesto Guevara’s childhood—even his most tender years.
*15 In a personal communication, Jorge Ferrer disagrees emphatically with the interpretation expressed to the author by Dolores Moyano Martín. “In none of our conversations did Ernesto ever mention or say anything about feeling pressured by Celia in any sense, or overwhelmed by the family’s Financial straits. Knowing Celia, I am convinced that she would never, under any circumstance, have burdened any of her children with her problems, much less with financial problems.” It is worth recalling that the years mentioned by Moyano correspond to the Córdoba period, while Ferrer was closer to Che in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, she refers more to unconscious, less literal impulses. Ferrer seeks an explicitness that might never have existed, but whose absence does not invalidate Moyano Martín’s more sophisticated analysis.
*16 We know, thanks to the reproduction of several pages from his philosophy notebooks or “Philosophical Dictionary,” that he began reading Marx and Engels in 1945, at age seventeen—at least the Anti-Dühring, the Communist Manifesto, and The Civil War in France. However, his annotations reveal that his reading was more philosophically oriented than political, though it doubtless also had a political dimension.
†10 Thus, the barman at the Sierras Hotel, which Ernesto senior and then his son and friends used to frequent, remembers that he never asked for Coca-Cola. If offered any, he would reject it vehemently and “become very upset.” The precision of the barman’s memory, however, leaves something to be desired. Francisco Fernández, interview with the author, Alta Gracia, February 17, 1995.
Chapter 2
Years of Love and Indifference in
Buenos Aires: Medical School,
Perón, and Chichina
The Buenos Aires period was both formative in itself and a prelude to what awaited Che as a young man. It encompassed Che’s first loves, travels, and the making of his failed profession, as well as a further glimmer of political awakening. And it took place in an exceptional context: the profound transformation of Argentina began in 1946, with the inauguration of Juan Domingo Peron as president of the Republic.
Three explanations are frequently given for Ernesto Guevara’s decision to enroll at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. The first was the death of his grandmother Ana Lynch. Because her passing coincided with Ernesto’s decision to become a physician, when he was already registered at the School of Engineering, this interpretation has many advocates.*1 Ernesto, grieving at the loss of his only living grandmother, with whom he had had a close and loving relationship, reacted like the impulsive and willful youth he had now become. To prevent others from dying of the same illness, he decided to seek a cure for what killed her (a stroke, according to Che’s sister).*2 And the only way to do this was to study medicine.
The second explanation is Celia Guevara de la Serna’s breast cancer.†1 According to the information made available to the author by Roberto Guevara, Che’s younger brother, and by Roberto Nicholson, a cousin of the surgeon who operated on Celia, she underwent surgery the first time on September 12, 1945.‡1 A large portion of one breast was resected; it had been invaded by a malignant and “highly invasive” tumor. The operation was a success, and for the moment was devoid of any further consequences. The surgery took place, then, two years before Che’s choice of medicine as a career, and was undoubtedly a decisive consideration. In October 1949 Che’s mother complained of discomfort near the scars of the previous operation; in early 1950 she was operated on again; this time her entire breast and her reproductive organs were removed: a highly aggressive, terribly traumatic procedure. Celia took much longer to recover from this surgery; she would die of cancer seventeen years later, possibly as a sequel to the initial tumor. One can guess the shattering impact on a boy so attached to his mother to learn that she had cancer, even if physicians described her condition as curable.*3 If Ernesto studied medicine to prevent others from dying like his grandmother, it is even more likely that he would do so to “avert” a relapse in his mother’s health.†2
In addition to the repression of information about Che’s parents’ estrangement, the official silence on Celia’s sickness is the first of myriad attempts by the Cuban government and its partisans to rewrite the story of the hero’s life. None of the official Cuban sources even mentions Celia’s illness, much less its effects on her son’s life, studies, or personality.‡2 It would appear that revolutionary heroes cannot have embarrassing or painful episodes in their biographies. Perhaps one day it will become clear why Stalinism, in either its polar or its tropical version, acknowledges the existence only of villains or saints. It seems to have no room for ordinary human beings who go on to become extraordinary figures owing to the confluence of their talents and their historical context.
Lastly, there is the thesis that Ernesto studied medicine basically in quest of relief for his own respiratory ailment. Aside from the weight of the testimony supporting this interpretation, it is intrinsically convincing.**1 Che’s medical specialization was precisely in allergies, as was his research, under Dr. Salvador Pisani at the Faculty of Medicine.*4 Even during the couple of years he spent in Mexico before embarking on the expedition to Cuba, Che’s scant medical research focused on problems in allergology and dermatology.†3
Thus, the young Che probably registered at the Faculty of Medicine for a wide variety of reasons, but all of them had to do with external circumstances rather than with any inherent interest. Ernesto chose medicine as a means to an end—to help people, to help his mother, to help himself—not because of any innate passion or early vocation. One should certainly not seek any ideological motivation. As Che would acknowledge years later:
When I started out to be a doctor, when I began to study medicine, most of the ideas I now have as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals. I wanted to succeed, like everybody; I dreamed of being a famous researcher … but at that time it was a personal victory.1
His rapid disenchantment with medicine was not unrelated t
o this tangle of external, indirect, and somewhat confusing reasons.†4 In contrast with the official story circulated years later—and consecrated by Che himself in an account dating from his time in the Sierra Maestra—he lost interest in medicine long before his first exposure to enemy fire.**2 In this version, the still beardless guerrilla fighter made his choice between medicine and revolution during the first combat after the Granma’s landing in Alegría de Pío. Forced to decide between carrying a box of munitions and a first-aid kit, he opted for the munitions. But already in 1952, after four years of medical studies but before completing his degree, he was writing to his girlfriend, Chichina Ferreyra, that he had no intention of being “trapped in the ridiculous medical profession.”*5 And his friends recall that as a medical student, he did not really achieve good grades. He liked some subjects better than others, and he studied more for them, but rarely worked hard on any courses except research, “which he had a feeling for.”2
Indeed, Che would never be a practicing physician in the way one is, for instance, a courtroom lawyer. Almost from the beginning of his university studies, he leaned toward clinical research. In Mexico, the only country in which he even sporadically practiced his profession, he also focused on allergies. His grades in the different areas of study reflect this inclination: the few “with distinction” marks he received (in four out of thirty subjects), along with eight “good” marks and eighteen “passing” ones,3 and his failing grades, acknowledged without much shame to Chichina, in neurology and surgical technique.4 As a fellow student would later comment, “I don’t think he attended regularly; rather, he presented many free subjects” (that is, he did not attend classes but instead passed exams at the end of each term).†5
Certainly, Guevara reflected upon various aspects of the medical profession, ranging from the treatment of stigmatized patients—lepers in Argentina and then Peru—to socialized medicine. Alberto Granado relates a visit to the San Francisco del Chañar leper colony, during which Che repeatedly insisted on the need for a more humane approach to patients, and especially “on the importance for the lepers’ psyches of the friendly way in which we treated them.”5 Granado also describes how, shortly before they left on their trip through South America, they went to the fashionable beach resort at Miramar. A heated discussion arose among the friends of Chichina Ferreyra, Ernesto, and Granado regarding the measures adopted by the British Labour government of Clement Attlee, particularly the socialization of medicine. The arrogant and abrasive young Ernesto took the floor for almost an hour, defending the abolition of commercial medicine and arguing against inequality in the distribution of doctors between cities and countryside, and the isolation of rural practitioners. Needless to say, he shocked most of his interlocutors.6
During these university years in Buenos Aires, Ernesto’s life and personality continued to be as multifaceted as ever. Whereas his studies had previously been combined with sports, reading, and his illness, now he spread his time even more thinly. He added new pastimes, girlfriends, and trips, a more diligent study of philosophy, and his job. He hitchhiked constantly back to Córdoba—a seventy-two-hour trek—to visit his novia (fiancée) and friends. He also continued to play rugby at the Atalaya Rugby Club of San Isidro and, if we believe his acquaintances, a great deal of golf. He began working as an employee in the supplies section of the city government, where he continued to take notes for a projected philosophical dictionary or notebook he had begun earlier. Finally, he was at least somewhat involved in the turbulent political events which shook Argentina during that period.
Perhaps the first time Che’s path crossed that of Perón was when he turned eighteen, in 1946, and had to register for compulsory military service. His asthma should have been enough to exempt him from the draft; in any case, rather than spending two years in the army, both for academic and ideological reasons the young man was quite happy to be deferred until he concluded his studies.
The army was the Peronist stronghold par excellence. The workers had not yet achieved their great conquests, nor had the spectacular—though corporativist—strengthening of the labor movement yet occurred, as it would in the golden age of Peronism. For a young man from an anti-Peronist family, as well as for an intellectually alert university student, the very idea of military service was anathema. Perhaps the best way to approach the crucial topic of Che Guevara’s “a-Peronism” (as it might be called) during his youth, and the convoluted debate over his anti- or pro-Peronism, is to quote the strange account that Perón himself provided, twenty-five years later, about Ernesto’s failure to fulfill his military service:
They say that Che was among those who opposed us. This is not true. Che was a man close to our positions. His story is quite simple: he had broken the military-service law. If he fell into the hands of the police, he would be pressed into service for four years in the Navy or two years in the Army. When they were about to catch him, we ourselves tipped him off. He bought a motorcycle and went to Chile. Che was a revolutionary, like us. The one who was not with us was the mother. The mother was the one responsible for everything that happened to the poor guy. Che did not leave the country because we were after him.*6
The general was obviously not the only person who has attempted to attribute a posthumous Peronism to Che Guevara in his youth; so have his father and several Cuban compilers of anecdotes and chronologies. All these efforts, however, come up against the same inescapable obstacle. There are no traces of any position or even interest on Che’s part regarding political and social events in his country at that time.†6
In fact, Che was neither pro- nor anti-Peronist. Rather, the entire subject seemed to be a matter of indifference to him. In the letters which survived Chichina’s enraged burning of most of their correspondence, there are few references to Perón, and comments on current events are notoriously absent. Che mentions him once, saying only, “A narrow margin of victory is not convincing to me; in this I am like Perón.”†7 Another time, shortly after the romance between the two aristocratic offspring began, he mentions to her, in reference to a canceled trip together to Paris, that he “prefers Peronists to monks.”7 The general’s biographers would probably dispute the first statement: there is no evidence that Perón moved only when he was certain of the outcome, or that his margins of victory were as broad as was assumed by the demanding, but apparently frustrated, suitor.
Che’s parents were viscerally anti-Peronist. Ernesto himself, like most students, was strongly opposed to the ideological, academic, and authoritarian stances of the new regime. Even before the advent of Perón, the students had adopted a class-oriented slogan: “Yes to books, no to alpargatas [rope-soled shoes worn by the lower classes]!” For many members of the intelligentsia, the victory of the general with oily hair on February 12, 1946, recalled the rise of Hitler or Mussolini. The entire Argentine left united to support Perón’s principal opponent, the Democratic Union candidate José P. Tamborini. The latter also received support from the United States Embassy and a large part of the Argentine oligarchy.
The university, especially, became a stronghold for anti-Peronism, mainly due to the regime’s growing authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism. The left was devastated by Peronism: never again would the Socialist and Communist parties regain the working-class base—small, but real—that they had consolidated before and during the Depression. Certainly, the emergence of working and previously marginalized masses was not the only factor that alienated intellectuals and the traditional middle class. The main reason was that they identified their opposition to rightist nationalism with the struggle against Franco, the Nazis, fascism, and local authoritarianism.
Conversely, Peronism inspired great sympathy among workers and large parts of the industrial business sector owing to its promotion of social demands on the one hand, and its economic nationalism on the other. This led to a severe polarization of public opinion. The regime had the strong support of nationalists, encouraged by the expropriation of the British-owned ra
ilroads, and of Evita Perón’s descamisados (“shirtless ones”), organized in the General Confederation of Workers. Thanks to reforms that were both symbolic and substantive—minimum wage, pensions system, women’s suffrage, social security, paid holidays—the government was highly popular with workers. Thus its strength and the lasting, often implausible memories it left in millions of Argentines.
As long as the postwar export boom continued to generate revenue, most social demands could be satisfied without lashing out at all power groups at once. The virtual schism between the country’s intelligentsia and the industrial working class, between the left and its supposed mass base, between the middle class and the neediest sectors of society, would govern the fate of Argentina for the next half-century. The surprising thing about Ernesto Guevara’s passage through this period is not his presumed anti-Peronism. Everything impelled him in that direction. Nor would historians be disconcerted if he had reacted against his family, opting for Peronism simply out of rebelliousness, or because of his empathy for the poor. This would have coincided with his character and growing sensitivity. What is striking is his apparent lack of interest, either for or against Peronism, in the most exciting events of his country’s modern history.*7
As a critical biographer has aptly stated:
An exhaustive search of all the assorted records of groups active at that time has not turned up Guevara’s name as a member of any student organization, nor of the official center [i.e., the Medical Students Center, which hewed to official guidelines from the time of its infiltration by the military regime during the thirties].8
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