It was not out of malice, but there were things that irritated me. I remember one time in Miramar, I was very irritated when we went to the casino. I don’t know how they arranged it, but Granado was very well dressed, and Ernesto was more or less dressed, I think. In the beginning it didn’t bother me, but this time it did. A friend, or I myself, lent him a dress jacket, and then I think there was an admission fee, and he did something so as not to pay, to get the three of us in without paying, and that led to us being insulted. Then we went to various places where he didn’t get along with people, and when groups of people don’t get along it’s terrible. Our group in Miramar was not very chic or sophisticated, they were normal, ordinary people from the Buenos Aires bourgeoisie, and he hated that kind of people.40
Che’s messy, slovenly appearance would prove permanent. The man whose personal charm, smile, and gestures captivated millions never cared about the way he dressed. His unpressed clothing, untied shoes, and uncombed hair were a trademark from his early youth, and would be notorious until his death. Later, of course, they became a mere habit; but in the elegant circles frequented by Chichina and himself, they implied a certain defiance. Moreover, his provocations were not limited to his clothes. José González Aguilar recalls a scene characteristic not because of the topic at hand (Winston Churchill’s attitude toward socialized medicine shortly after his return to power in 1950) but because of Che’s attitude. In the course of an argument with Che during dinner at Malagueño, Chichina’s father, Don Horacio Ferreyra, stood up from the table exclaiming, “I cannot tolerate this any longer!” Ernesto sat silently in his seat. Even his friend was outraged: “I looked at Ernesto thinking that we were the ones who should leave, but he simply grinned like a naughty child and started eating a lemon with deliberate little bites, peel and all.”41
Che’s eccentricity was destructive in other ways. The chasm separating him from Chichina, which so fascinated him, also doomed him to withdraw and eventually flee. To maintain and develop the relationship Che would have had to reconcile opposites, negotiate the families’ hostility, and smooth over many rough edges.*12 The courtship would founder on the shoals of Che’s travels; much the same would occur with his two marriages.
In early 1949, Guevara had already traveled through the northern part of his country on a sort of motorized bicycle that he himself had designed and built. His itinerary included the San Francisco de Chañar leper colony, where he had what was probably his first encounter with extreme suffering. He passed through Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, and Salta, where his glimpse of the bountiful, exuberant tropics fascinated him—as the exotic always would, throughout his life. The trip also allowed him to break with orthodox forms of tourism. He developed what we would now call the backpacker’s approach to travel:
I do not cultivate the same tastes as tourists … the Altar of the Fatherland, the cathedral … the gem of a pulpit and the miraculous little virgin … the Hall of the Revolution. … This is no way to learn about a people, its manner of living or interpretation of life; that is a luxurious cover-up; its soul is reflected in the hospital-bound sick, the prison inmates, the anxious pedestrian one talks with, watching the Rio Grande’s turbulent flow at one’s feet.42
He returned to Buenos Aires at the end of the summer holidays to continue his medical studies, but became restless again by the end of the year. He undertook a new voyage, this time for work. With the hyperbole he would never relinquish, he noted in his travel journal how he was changing: “I realize now that something in me has flowered some time ago: a hatred of civilization.”43 Beginning in December 1950, he enrolled as a nurse for the Ministry of Public Health in Argentina’s merchant marine. His trips on cargo ships and oil tankers would take him to Brazil, Trinidad, and Venezuela, and more often to Comodoro Rivadavia and southern Argentina. He did not enjoy it very much: in a letter to his mother he complained that too much time was spent on board, while there was not enough to visit the ports of call.*13 But these voyages opened new horizons for him, confirming his taste for everything new and foreign, as well as his boredom with the familiar. As he wrote to his aunt Beatriz, first from Porto Alegre and then Trinidad:
From this land of fair and passionate women I send you a loving, compassionate hug to Buenos Aires, which seems more and more boring to me. … After overcoming a thousand hardships, combating typhoons, fires, sirens with their melodious songs (here they are brown sirens), I am taking away as a souvenir of this marvelous island … a heart saturated with “beauties.”44
Chichina had already had time to lament these repeated departures, added to Che’s unavoidable absences due to his studies in Buenos Aires. Just weeks after they formally became novios, Ernesto announced to his beloved that “My trip is a fact and I will probably leave in the first days of the month, so we will see each other again when I return.” As was to be expected, Chichina did not take to the idea of her new fiance’s leaving at the first opportunity: “You can imagine how sad I was after this.”45
The faraway gleam of other realities was irresistible for Che. He adored Chichina because he was a misfit in her milieu, and because she clashed with his fantasies. But he was also fascinated by the tropics with their mulatto and black exoticism, so starkly different from his white, middle-class Buenos Aires. He was slowly becoming immersed in the vicissitudes of human suffering, in contrast to his life of ease as an aristocratic university student. Once again, he would take flight.
Though he hurt Chichina by casually insinuating that his trip through Latin America with Granado would be one “with no return,” at the same time he promised to come back. His letters and the travel journal he kept from the beach resort of Miramar, where he said good-bye to Chichina, to Venezuela, suggest that distance, in his mind at least, did not cancel his bond with her. Just as he thought he would return to finish his studies, he imagined a future life with Chichina—with some skepticism and reservations, but without entirely rejecting the possibility. He named the puppy he gave her when he left Miramar Comeback (in English), indicating clearly enough under what flag he would sail in the months ahead. His return was not impossible, after all.*14
As would happen so frequently in the years to come, his own thoughts about his destiny and future clashed with the wishes and decisions of others. Chichina finally broke off their formal relationship as novios; and, in a sense, his link with his country of origin was also sundered. Just one month after his departure from Miramar, Chichina made a heart-wrenching decision—under pressure from her mother, but her own nonetheless: “I had to write Ernestito a letter, practically forced by my mother. I remember shutting myself into the library at Chacabuco and crying my eyes out as I wrote it.”46 In the letter, she ended their relationship. Ernesto received her announcement, on the faraway lakes of Bariloche, as a wound to the heart: “I read and reread the incredible letter. Just like that, all the dreams of my return, linked to those eyes that saw me leave Miramar, were crumbling without any apparent reason … it was useless to insist.”47 Forty-five years later, Alberto Granado confided to Chichina that he had never seen Che so upset and consternated as when he received the fateful letter.48 In his reply (the next-to-the-last letter he would ever write her), he verbalized a “reason” which he doubtless already knew, at least unconsciously. The pilgrim Ernesto Guevara described that unique moment in their lives as
the present in which we both live: one fluctuating between a superficial admiration and deeper links binding her to other worlds, the other caught between an affection which he believes profound and a thirst for adventure, for new knowledge, which invalidates that love.49
Thus did Che embark upon his long cycle of separations and farewells. From now on, his life would be a series of emotional, geographic, and political fractures. They explain his perpetual flight, first manifested on the beach at Miramar and then in the classrooms of Buenos Aires. Our man not only flees contradiction; his is a role in search of a tragedy.
*1 The first is Ernesto’s father, who
directly associates Che’s decision to study medicine with the death of his grandmother: “I remember what he said to me: ‘Old man, I am changing professions. I will not continue with engineering and will devote myself to medicine.’” Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo el Che (Madrid: Editorial Planeta, 1981), pp. 226, 247. Che’s sister Celia also shares this opinion: “He saw that he could do nothing for her, because she was dying, and so he thought he should study medicine. … That is why he switched from engineering to medicine.” Celia Guevara de la Serna, quoted in Adys Cupull and Froilán González, Ernestito: Vivo y presente: Iconografia testimoniada de la infancia y la juventud de Ernesto Che Guevara, 1928–1953 (Havana: Editora Politica, 1989), p. 111. Other biographers who emphasize this connection include J. C. Cernadas Lamadrid and Ricardo Halac, who state: “The Guevara family had barely arrived in Buenos Aires when grandmother Lynch fell ill. Ernesto … was with her every day until her death. This experience seems to have been decisive: soon afterward, he decided to stay in the capital and begin studying medicine.” J. C. Cernadas Lamadrid and Ricardo Halac, Yo fui testigo: El “Che” Guevara (Buenos Aires: Editorial Perfil, 1986), p. 20. Two Argentine admirers, Esteban Morales and Fabián Ríos, in their “Comandante Che Guevara” (Cuadernos de América Latina, October 1, 1968, p. 5), also attribute his switch to medicine to “a particular event: the death of the paternal grandmother.”
*2 Celia Guevara de la Serna, interview in Granma (Havana), October 16, 1967. The father also gives the cause of death as a stroke, and not the cancer that several biographers have mentioned. Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo, p. 247.
†1 Advocates of this thesis include Andrew Sinclair: “His grandmother’s death from cancer and his mother’s struggle against the same disease influenced Che to become a doctor. He wanted to try to find a cure for this disease.” Andrew Sinclair, Che Guevara (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 3. Several other biographers, whose works were published before Guevara Lynch’s book Mi hijo el Che, mention the mother’s illness as a factor in his decision to study medicine. Cf. Marvin Resnick, The Black Beret: The Life and Meaning of Che Guevara (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969); Daniel James, Che Guevara: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1969); Martin Ebon, Che: The Making of a Legend (New York: Universe Books, 1969). A German biographer whose text contains numerous mistakes and several outright fantasies (see footnote, page 41) but also several interesting truths, links the mother’s illness with Che’s efforts to find a cure for cancer in a small home laboratory, using guinea pigs—but not with his decision to study medicine: “When his mother had to undergo an operation due to a cancerous lump in her breast, he set up an amateur laboratory and began doing experiments on guinea pigs, in the fond hope of unlocking the secret of this disease.” Frederik Hetmann, Yo tengo siete vidas (Madrid: Lóguez Ediciones, 1977), p. 23.
‡1 These facts were provided to the author by Roberto Guevara in the course of a conversation on August 22,1996, in Buenos Aires. At his suggestion, several physicians directly involved in Celia’s surgery were consulted. The researcher who helped the author on this matter was able to corroborate some of the facts with Che’s surviving sister, Celia Guevara.
*3 “My wife Celia was treated with radiotherapy to eradicate a malignant tumor. One day she told me she had detected a lump in her breast. … The doctors decided to operate immediately. … Ernesto … was already in the second year [of medicine]… [and] when he found out that his mother was being taken into the operating room and that the results were uncertain, he lost his calm. Ernesto followed his mother’s treatment step by step.” Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo, p. 247.
†2 Jorge Ferrer, a close friend of Ernesto’s during those years, disputes this explanation. He states in a written communication that “When Celia’s tumor was detected, Ernesto was already in his second year of medicine.” Jorge Ferrer, letter to the author, March 11, 1996. The confusion may arise from the likelihood that Celia’s illness was largely kept a secret. Dolores Moyano Martín, for instance, believed that her repeated retreats to her bedroom were due to depression, not cancer. Dolores Moyano Martín, interview with the author, Washington, D.C., February 26, 1996.
‡2 The mother’s illness is not mentioned in any of the Cuban works devoted to this subject: neither the Atlas biográfico; nor Adys Cupull and Froilán González in their two works Un hombre bravo (Havana: Editorial Capitán San Luis, 1994) and Ernestito; nor Haroldo Martínez U. and Hugo Martínez U. in their Che: Antecedentes biográficos del Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara (Santiago, 1968: this is a Chilean work based on Cuban sources); nor a more recent work published with the support of Cuban sources, Jean Cormier with Alberto Granado and Hilda Guevara, Che Guevara (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995).
**1 The great popularizer of Che’s works in the United States, John Gerassi, mentions this explanation: “But Che decided to become an allergist, in part because he wanted to understand and cure his own allergy.” John Gerassi, Introduction, in Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara (New York: Clarion Books, 1968), p. 6. This is also the opinion of one of Che’s closest college friends, Carlos (“Calica”) Ferrer, with whom he would undertake his final departure from Argentina, in 1953: “I think that what most drove Che to study medicine was his own asthma.” Carlos Ferrer, telephone interview with the author, Buenos Aires, August 23, 1996. And his friend and classmate Jorge Ferrer offers further corroboration: “Ernesto focused his interest and efforts on allergic diseases … working and doing research on asthma.” Jorge Ferrer, written communication to the author, March 11, 1996.
*4 Che’s only research project published in those years, written in collaboration with Dr. Pisani, “Sensibilizatión de cobayos a pólenes por inyección de extracto de naranjo” (Sensitization to Pollen in Guinea Pigs via Injections of Orange Extract), appeared in the journal Allergy. Cited in Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo, p. 253.
†3 See, for instance, his only medical publication outside of Argentina, which appeared in the Revista Interamericana de Alergología (Mexico City), vol. 2, no. 4, May 1955. It is a study of the dietary origins of certain allergic reactions. Cf. Marta Rojas, “Ernesto, Médico en México,” in Testimonios sobre el Che (Havana: Editorial Pablo de la Torriente, 1990), p. 111.
†4 The nature of higher education in Argentina may also have played a role. As Jorge Ferrer points out, “Ernesto was fed up with the encyclopedic and often even irrational teaching of medicine in Buenos Aires.” Jorge Ferrer, communication to the author.
**2 This text was “originally” immortalized in the deplorable film Che starring Omar Sharif and Jack Palance, but it is still quoted by researchers of all sorts: “This was perhaps the first time I had to face in practical terms the dilemma of my dedication to medicine or my duty as a revolutionary soldier. I had before me a bag full of medicines and a box of bullets; they were too heavy to carry both. I took the box of bullets, leaving the bag. …” Ernesto Che Guevara, “Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria,” in Escritos y discursos, vol. 2, (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977), p. 11.
*5 Letter from Ernesto Guevara de la Serna to Chichina Ferreyra, February 11, 1952, dated from Bariloche. The letters from Che that she did not burn in an attack of amorous rage were given to her cousin, Dolores Moyano Martín, in 1968, to be used but not quoted, in her previously cited New York Times Magazine article (“A Memoir of the Young Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary,” August 18, 1968). Moyano Martín subsequently made them available to me, and Chichina Ferreyra authorized their use and citation. They are typed (transcribed by Chichina from almost illegible originals) with her annotated explanations, and are as yet unpublished. I will quote from them extensively.
†5 Ricardo Campos, quoted in Claudia Korol, El Che y los argentinos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Dialéctica, 1988), p. 70. Or in the words of Che’s cousin, Fernando Córdova Itúrburu, “He went to the university just to pass his courses. He did so just barely.” Fernando Córdova Itúrburu, interview with the author, Buenos Aires, August 23, 1996.
*6
Quoted in Tomás Eloy Martínez, Las Memorias del General (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 1996), p 53. Martínez makes the following comment on this bizarre statement by Perón: “In a questionnaire which I sent Perón in 1970. I asked him to clarify this point, How could he, as President of the Republic and as a General, have protected a deserter from military service? It seemed odd to me and I pointed it out in my letter. Perón did not answer the question. Using ink, he crossed out from the Memorias draft the reference to Che. The account survived on tape, however, and his words were transcribed from there.” Needless to say, Perón’s statement has neither head nor tail: the dates do not coincide, and the sequence of events is completely distorted.
†6 In recent times, interviews and testimony have appeared in Argentina to the effect that the young Ernesto attended the founding moment of Peronism, the monster demonstration of October 17, 1945, that propelled the general to power. Roberto Guevara has categorically stated to a researcher assisting the author that his brother was in Córdoba that day, a day not easy to forget for an anti-Peronist family like Che’s.
†7 Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Chichina Ferreyra, December 5, 1951. Ernesto refers to his possible reaction to “our first copulation,” which has evidently not been consummated, and his wish that Chichina’s commitment were greater. The narrowness of his victory refers to Chichina’s unwillingness to carry their relationship further.
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