Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  In dozens of letters to his parents beginning with his first trip in early 1952 and until 1955, when he expresses his reaction to the fall of Perón; in the diary covering his travels through South America; and in accounts collected by Cuban or Argentine researchers from friends, family, and fellow university students, there is no comment of any sort regarding these moments in history.9 There are no negative or positive views either concerning current events—the Peronist reforms, women’s suffrage, the rise of Evita, the general’s reelection, the death of Evita—or more abstract political processes. Only several years later, in a letter sent his mother from Mexico in 1955, does he ask for information: “Send me all the news you can, as we are completely misinformed here since newspapers cover only Perón’s problems with the clergy and we know nothing about the real situation.”10

  As his sister Ana María said, in relation to Peronism: “He did not take sides one way or the other. He sort of stayed on the sidelines.”11 His membership in the University Federation of Buenos Aires (FUBA) was more administrative than political. Che was not a student activist: “Ernesto’s political participation was circumstantial; he was not a militant, though he shared the FUBA’s ideology.”12 And the same applies to his exchanges with friends, girlfriends, and others. Politics in general, and Peronism in particular, were simply not topics of conversation for him: “At least with me, he never talked politics.”13

  This attitude is completely at odds with the image often provided of Che Guevara’s youth, stemming from an effort to “salvage” him for Peronism. The rescue operation has relied mainly on a letter Che wrote from Mexico in 1955, when a military coup toppled Perón and sent him into exile for almost twenty years., Che’s father himself indulges in this rewriting of history, claiming that his son was no anti-Peronist militant. When he was a boy, the father argues, he adopted the stance as a game, but when he was twenty-six and had acquired greater political maturity, Guevara Lynch claims that his son did not hesitate to support the Peronist working masses against the “military” coup.14

  Indeed, by the time Che was in Mexico, ten years after the rise of Perón and long after Perón’s moments of greatest strength and popularity, his moderate distaste for the regime had evolved into a more politicized rejection of the coup d’état that ended the supposed idyll of the descamisados. In a 1955 letter to Tita Infante, a friend from the Faculty of Medicine, Guevara outlines his contradictory reflections on the fall of Perón:

  With all due respect to Arbenz [the reformist president of Guatemala, recently overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup], who was totally different from Perón from an ideological viewpoint, the fall of the Argentine government is following in the footsteps of Guatemala in a strangely faithful way, and you will see how the complete handing over of the country, and [making a] political and diplomatic break with the popular democracies, will be a sad but familiar corollary.15

  A convoluted and contradictory commentary, to say the least. It posits both a parallelism between Perón and Arbenz and an ideological and personal contrast. As became clear in later years, the Guatemalan phase of Che’s political and ideological thinking was the beginning of his anti-imperialism (which would be permanent), and of his “pure” Communist phase (which would last until his first travels through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the early sixties). The importance Che attributes to this “break” with the “popular democracies” already points to the direction his growing politicization would take.

  This brief comment on the overthrow of Perón reveals neither a marked interest in nor a particularly profound analysis of events. There are few significant similarities between the military pronunciamientos that respectively toppled Arbenz and Perón. The latter’s nationalist period had already come to an end. And if the Guatemalan masses did not defend the Arbenz government because nobody gave them the weapons to do so (a view questioned by some, but ultimately adopted by Che), the Argentine people did not even try to fight for a regime that had already abandoned them. Finally, Che’s allusion to a “strange” parallelism between both covertly organized coups, based upon a supposed United States involvement, poses several problems. Though Washington’s participation in the overthrow of Arbenz has been amply documented, the same cannot be said of Argentina’s “Liberating Revolution” of 1955.

  In the previously quoted letter to Celia, Ernesto does indeed take a clearer position with regard to the recently toppled regime. He reiterates several arguments from the letter to Tita, though more forcefully—perhaps because he is addressing his mother. He mentions to her, with some indignation, that he followed “the fate of the Peronist government with some anxiety, naturally,”16 and that “the fall of Perón embittered me profoundly, not for his sake but because of its meaning for all of Latin America.”17 He writes pointedly to his mother, an impassioned anti-Peronist, “you must be glad … you’ll be able to say whatever you please, with the absolute impunity granted you as a member of the ruling class.”18 In contrast, he confesses almost timidly to his aunt Beatriz, “I don’t really know what will happen, but I was somewhat affected by the fall of Perón.”19

  Che’s later comments about Perón and his misadventures cannot anachronistically be projected into the past. Furthermore, they are not particularly clear opinions; and they have strong emotional overtones. They certainly do not contradict the indisputable fact that the young university student was politically indifferent during Perón’s stellar years in power.

  We can only speculate as to Guevara’s “a-Peronism” during his youth. Obviously, his bond with his parents—especially Celia, whose animosity toward the populist regime was far more pronounced than that of her husband—played a crucial role. It is possible that his reluctance or incapacity to coexist with conflicting emotions or viewpoints was also critical in Che’s aloofness from university politics.

  For a youth whose social awareness was growing exponentially, to side with the white, oligarchical Catholic elites against the uprisings of the disadvantaged morocho multitudes would have been an aberration. To find himself on the same side of the barricades as his ranch-owning cousins and uncles, as “people like you who are hoping for the dawn of a new day” (as he reproached his mother at the height of the pronunciamiento),20 would have been a terrible blow to his ego, his cult of eccentricity, and his passion for social justice. Someone like Che—intent on knowing his country in all its vastness, in daily contact with the poverty and marginalization evident in public health and medicine, at once affronted and fascinated by the opulence and rank aristocracy of Chichina’s family and friends—could not help but see the obvious: “the social revolution that was Peronism.”21 In the words of the fiercely anti-Peronist historian Tulio Halperin Donghi, “Under the aegis of the Peronist regime, relations among social groups were suddenly redefined and to see this, it sufficed merely to walk the streets or take the tram.”22 Che was, precisely, a person who walked the streets and took the tram.

  But breaking with Celia and the entire family in the midst of a highly polarized situation was equally unacceptable. Even more so when his mother was laboring under an uncertain prognosis, estranged from Guevara Lynch, and burdened by the financial hardship of raising four children, without any great inclination for the task. A quarrel with her was inconceivable for Che. But any hint of sympathy for Peronism would have implied a break: his mother’s passionate opinions, and the conflicts smoldering within society, allowed for no compromise solutions. The only way to reconcile Che’s love for his mother with his social and political sensibilities was to take refuge in his studies*8 and, increasingly, to travel. The only exit was flight, whether in unexpected, banal, or heroic ways, now and for the rest of his life.

  The recurrent trips he began at such an early age were largely motivated by his insatiable curiosity about and fascination with anything that was different, strange, alien, and mysterious. The webs of contradictions that enveloped him also contributed—chiefly, his mother’s uncertain health and his parents’ on-again,
off-again marriage. The father spent nights more frequently at his study on Paraguay Street, but would return often, sometimes daily, to the family home at Araoz for lunch with the children. Only later did he meet his second wife, Ana María Erra, a teacher who performed secretarial tasks for the architect. During this period in Buenos Aires, Che could easily have referred to the ambiguity and irresolution of his parents’ bond in the same way he would describe his relationship with Fidel Castro fifteen years later: “neither marriage nor divorce.” A brief text of his that remained unpublished until 1992, “Anguish,” reflects the young man’s state of mind in those difficult years. It was part of one of his first travel journals, written as he steamed through the Caribbean; the habit of writing them would accompany him to his death:

  But this time the sea is my salvation as the hours and days go by; anguish bites me, takes me by the throat, by the chest, strikes my stomach, grips my gut. I no longer like the dawn, I don’t want to know where the wind blows from, nor the height of the waves; my nerves rattle, my sight clouds over, my disposition sours.23

  His friends of the opposite sex grasped his uneasiness and ill-defined yearning for a different life. In the words of Tita Infante, “Ernesto knew that he would find there [at the university] very little of what he sought.”24 Or, as Chichina expressed it:

  I think he saw me as a person who was going to be a burden in his life. As if I were a obstacle to the life he wanted, the adventurer’s life. He saw himself as trapped, in a way, and probably wanted to free himself from it all. To be free, to leave, and I must have been an obstacle at that moment. I don’t know where he wanted to go. He wanted to travel, explore the world, look around.25

  The same impulses and passions as with his parents and Perón configured his relationships with women. Five years passed between his youth and early adulthood, culminating in his relationship with Chichina Ferreyra, his only known lasting love relationship before his Guatemala meeting with Hilda Gadea, whom he would marry in Mexico. There were plenty of brief romances, however. According to his brother, “he always had a girlfriend around. He was as strong as any of us, but he probably lived his amorous adventures more intensely,”26 and his cousin Fernando Córdova recalls how the doctor-to-be could not keep his hands off the women around him at the time: “he was after the whole world.”27 He was good-looking, sure of himself, and, according to his friends, fairly forward with women. He was “fun, the most fun of the group.”28 There were possibly a few passions between 1947 and 1950; the one supposedly with Carmen Córdova de la Serna, la Negrita, a first cousin on his mother’s side, who had fallen in love with Ernesto during their childhood in Córdoba, never went anywhere, though the affection was mutual.*9 There may also have been a relationship with a fellow student who was in any case a close friend, Tita Infante, a constant correspondent of Che’s until the sixties. She died some time after Che’s execution in Bolivia.

  According to Guevara’s younger sister, Tita Infante was “very much in love with him,”29 though she did not know “the degree of intimacy in their relationship.”30 Neither Che’s father nor Tita Infante’s brother ever dared to say publicly that the bond between them was anything other than friendly, but this may be due to the same kind of puritanical discretion that also surrounded the separation between Che’s parents. What is known is that Tita Infante was a member of the Communist Youth and a fellow student of Che’s at the Faculty of Medicine. They addressed each other with the formal “usted,” at least in their letters. It is also clear from surviving descriptions and photographs that she had a strong, if homely, personality. She was a couple of years older than Che, and when they met in 1948, politics clearly played a central role in their relationship, in contrast to Che’s other liaisons at the time.

  The published correspondence between them contains almost no affectionate words or phrases. Che’s epistolary tone, over and beyond the use of “usted,” contrasts strongly with that of his letters to Chichina Ferreyra. In addition, the fact that Che repeatedly asks Tita to do things for him suggests a bond that, while tender and trustful, has a practical tinge to it.*10 Everything indicates that their connection never went beyond a platonic friendship. Those of Che’s friends who still recall his way of relating the delights and torments of his love affair with Chichina do not remember him ever speaking of Tita Infante in the same terms. Che’s correspondence with his faraway friend represents an invaluable record of the young expatriate’s political journey, but it cannot be read as love letters, revealing the passions or growing pains of a young man whose inner torments are just beginning to take shape.

  Conversely, the importance of Ernesto Guevara’s relationship with María del Carmen Ferreyra is justified not only by the many references to it but also by the fact that his liaison with Chichina is the only one of Che’s love affairs on which his own writings are available today. Ernesto and Chichina had met previously, but their romance did not blossom until a night in early October 1950 in Córdoba, at the wedding of Carmen Aguilar.31 In Chichina’s words, she was “completely enraptured”32:

  I saw him in that house, he was coming down the stairs and I was thunderstruck. He had an impact on me, a tremendous impact, this man was coming down the stairs and then we started talking and we spent the whole night talking about books.33

  For Ernesto it was also love at first sight, if we are to judge by the letter he wrote Chichina a few days later from Buenos Aires. She was then, and remains now, a remarkably attractive and captivating woman: several years younger than he, a teenager really, thin and fair, who very nearly lost control of her aristocratic passion in her encounters with the unkempt but irresistible student. The letter begins with a verse both hesitant and obvious in its intent: “For those green eyes, whose paradoxical light announces to me the danger of losing myself in them.”34 There was indeed danger, but also light and rapture. According to Chichina, Guevara wrote her several times in Malagueño during the ensuing months. Then, “early in the following year, he arrived and proposed that we be novios [a relationship more formal than going steady, but less so than an engagement],” which Chichina tremblingly accepted and which led to the “first fleeting kiss.”35 From then on, through 1951, Ernesto’s pilgrimages to Malagueño became more frequent—not as regular as Chichina would have liked, but with a growing involvement on Che’s part. The courtship was interrupted for a short time due to Ernesto’s stint as a nurse in the Argentine merchant marine; he had originally meant to travel to Europe (“because Europe attracts me enormously”).36

  By the end of that year, the long-distance suitor was forced to acknowledge that he was deeply in love with Chichina, but that love was countered by his thirst for travel and freedom. He would soon take off for the first of his trips abroad, across Latin America with his friend Alberto Granado. It is not entirely clear from the correspondence or Chichina’s memories whether Ernesto left because the relationship did not fulfill his expectations, or if he merely presented the fait accompli of his departure as a consequence of problems in the relationship, while actually undertaking his “voyage with no return”37 for very different, unrelated reasons. Separating the two motives is difficult, not least because Che’s letter of farewell begins with a protest over Chichina’s flirtation with somebody else.

  On the one hand Che admits to his girlfriend,

  I know how I love you and how much I love you, but I cannot sacrifice my inner freedom for you; it means sacrificing myself, and I am the most important thing in the world, as I have already told you.38

  Obviously, the young man already had an elevated conception of himself and the destiny he was embarking on; and he saw his girlfriend as an obstacle on his path. But his grievance was abstract: the separation was due to Che’s own personality, not to the relationship itself. To some extent, we are faced with a Le Cid, Corneille-type dilemma, slightly presumptuous and naively romantic. When fate and love come into conflict, the former must always win; for love will fade if it rests upon indignity or abdication. R
odrigo would not be worthy of Ximena’s love if he did not first avenge her father’s affront to his father’s honor.

  On the other hand, Ernesto immediately proceeded to beleaguer the object of his desire with a radically different set of demands, now passionate and uninhibited, from which the idea of his own destiny has completely disappeared. Indeed, he passed shamelessly from one register to the other:

  Furthermore, a conquest based on my continual presence would eliminate a large part of my attraction to you. You would be the prey captured after a struggle. … Our first copulation would be a triumphal procession in honor of the victor, but there would always be the phantom of our union in and of itself, because it was the right or the “exotic” thing to do.39

  The wide gap separating Che from Chichina might help solve the mystery. The light-mindedness of Chichina’s circle, however cultivated it may have been, was legendary, while Ernesto’s seriousness and devotion to reading and study were increasing with each month. The gaping difference was obviously part of their attraction; the girl’s family was, by Córdoba standards, fabulously wealthy, while Che’s déclassé status and his economic straits were common knowledge in the community. Nothing in the young Guevara’s dress, habits, strut, or friendships could account for the bond between the two young people, unless it was the passionate allure exerted by Chichina’s radical contrasts with Che’s own self-image. Chichina’s love for him would prove short-lived. Little in her later life would rival that early infatuation. In contrast, Che’s attachment was only the beginning of a long journey, from Malagueño to La Higuera: he would always be drawn to the strange and the different.

  Chichina’s description of her boyfriend’s constant provocations reinforces the view that theirs was an attraction of opposites. Che repeatedly alienated his novia’s family and friends, deliberately and even maliciously. Obviously, he did not dress in a sloppy, distasteful way merely to provoke others or call attention to himself. But, lacking the resources*11 to compete with the elegance of Chichina’s other suitors or her friends and cousins, he also made a virtue of necessity and proudly wore clothes that would shame or even enrage his refined and gracious companion. In her words,