*7 Though many biographers have noted this, only a recent one (with little sympathy for Che) has emphasized it: “I am surprised and disconcerted by the political indifference of somebody like Che Guevara at a time like that. It is an incongruous detail in a life marked by congruity.” Roberto Luque Escalona, El mejor de todos: biografia no autorizada del Che Guevara (Miami: Ediciones Universales, 1994), p. 54.
*8 An acquaintance of that time, Ricando Campos, describes him as follows: “He would spend twelve or fourteen hours studying in the library, alone. One would see him only at moments … he would disappear for long periods and then reappear.” Korol, El Che, p. 72.
*9 “Fernando Barral told Che after several years in Cuba: Did you know I was in love with your cousin? And Che replied, I was too.” Carmen Córdova de la Serna, interview with the author, Buenos Aires, August 21, 1996.
*10 For instance: “I would very much like to have news of you from the city. … And now Tita here comes the homework section: I am including the address of a Peruvian doctor … he is interested in Pío del Río Ortega’s classification of the nervous system. I think your friend made a change in it, and I would like you to obtain it; if this is not possible, do the following: call 719925, which is the house number of my great friend Jorge Ferrer, and tell him to look for this classification at home. … If this doesn’t work out, for any reason, you can call my brother Roberto at 722700 and ask him to send the book as soon as possible. … Well Tita, of course I am leavirig unsaid many of the things I would have liked to talk about with you.” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Tita Infante, Lima, May 6, 1952, quoted in Adys Cupull and Froilán González, Cálida presencia: Cartas de Ernesto Guevara de la Serna a Tita Infante (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1995), pp. 27–28.
*11 Dolores Moyano Martin describes how the family’s financial straits had worsened: the little Juan Martín slept in a box instead of a cradle, and on one occasion Ana María Guevara refused to come down to Moyano Martin’s birthday party because she did not have any “presentable” shoes. Dolores Moyano Martín, interview with the author, Washington, D.C, February 26, 1996.
*12 According to some accounts, Ernesto proposed either marriage or cohabitation, and in any case a trip together. Thus, Frederik Hetmann in Yo tengo siete vidas, pp. 24–26, constructs a fairly elaborate set of hypotheses, supposedly based upon letters exchanged by Ernesto and Chichina. In a communication to the author dated June 6, 1995, in Malagueño, Chichina denies both the existence of such letters and any proposals of marriage or cohabitation, as well as a series of allusions to her father made by Hetmann. Hetmann’s source for the letters—the Uruguayan daily El Diario dated September 12, 1969—does not contain any such letters or references.
*13 “It was a comfortable trip, but he wasn’t convinced; only four hours to unload oil on an island, with fifteen days going and fifteen days coming.” Quoted in Celia Serna de Guevara, interview with Julia Constenla, published in Bohemia (Havana), August 28, 1961.
*14 Chichina herself recalls that “when Ernesto left our relationship as novios was still solid, and I found it quite natural that he should leave.” Chichina Ferreyra, letter to the author, March 7, 1996.
Chapter 3
First Blood:
Navigating Is Necessary,
Living Is Not
Che Guevara began his first trip abroad in early January 1952: five countries in almost eight months in the company of his friend from Córdoba, Alberto Granado—an extended spring break, in a way. He discovered a continent still unknown to him, the exoticism he craved, and a certain maturity, all in one sweep. This trip would represent something more than an initiation rite, and something less than a definitive break with his country, family, and profession. The journey was a sort of advance preview: the main feature would screen only a year later, after he kept his promise to Celia, his mother, to return and finish his studies before taking off again.
He departed from Córdoba, stopping briefly at Miramar at the peak of the summer high season to take his leave from Chichina. The week at the beach was idyllic, if we believe the lovelorn traveler’s journal, the first of many he would write:
It was all a continual honeymoon with that slightly bitter taste of an impending departure, stretching out day after day until reaching eight days. Every day I like or love my other half even more. Our leavetaking was long, as it lasted two days and was close to ideal.*1
Che’s initial intention was to carry out the entire trip on a Norton motorcycle baptized La poderosa II (the Powerful One II), a feat similar—though more ambitious—to the one he had accomplished in the northern provinces of Argentina. The itinerary involved crossing over into Chile through the southern part of the Andes, via the lakes region and San Carlos Bariloche, then Temuco and finally Santiago. Things did not go quite as planned. From the first approach to the mountain range, the Norton showed unmistakable signs of fatigue and a reluctance to push forward. After repeated mishaps and repairs, it had to be hauled onto a truck in the southern Chilean village of Los Angeles, and was finally abandoned in Santiago. So the trip on motorbike, immortalized in the Motorcycle Diary, did not really happen. Only a small part of the journey was done on the Norton.†1
Thanks to the journal Che kept throughout his odyssey and the countless descriptions published by Granado, there is a wealth of accounts, memories, and notes from the two young explorers. Their adventures, ranging from Che’s alcohol-induced attempt to seduce the wife of a Chilean mechanic in Lautaro, to the argonauts’ brave defense against bandits, “tigers,” and assorted evildoers roaming the Andean heights, tell a story of initiation and commencement, of awakening and freedom. The tales of adventure and tribulation that fill the pages of their diaries contain a central element of the later Guevara myth: the fulfillment of fantasy. The two young men did virtually everything they set out to do. They visited the ruins of Machu Picchu and the leper colonies of Peru. They watched the sun set on the banks of Lake Titicaca, rafted down the Amazon, crossed the Atacama desert at night, gazed upon the eternal snows of the Peruvian highlands. They talked with Communist miners in Chuquicamata and with ageless and enigmatic Indians on buses crawling along the Andean crests. Such a trip was the stuff of dreams for the youth of Che’s world: the postwar, middle-class, college-educated Americas. It was a world of distances and adventure, and nearly half a century later it hasn’t changed that much. It is no coincidence that Che’s most popular works, thirty years after his death, are the two journals describing his travels in South America and Bolivia.1 Somewhere in the psyche of the sixties and the nineties, Guevara’s saga became a road book, or road movie: Jack Kerouac in the Amazon, Easy Rider on the Andes.
Che’s text was transcribed from his notes “more than a year” after the actual experience.2 He would follow this pattern until Bolivia, writing everything twice: a first draft during the actual event being described, and then a later revision. He would do the same in the Sierra Maestra, with “Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria,” and in the Congo, where he drafted a journal, still lost, which served as the basis for another text. Thus the anecdotes and reflections recorded by Che on his trip are neither spontaneous notes nor accurate memories. As documents, they are priceless. As sources, they must be scrutinized to correct for the stylistic care of an author fascinated by writing, the descriptive reelaborations of a potentially great narrator, and the shifts of emphasis onto other events or memories as they reappear. They are useful, but only if one does not lose their thread.
To judge by these accounts, Che’s politicization had grown by leaps and bounds, but it fell far short of that of an aspiring revolutionary. The essential quality of Che’s first political awakening in Buenos Aires persisted: he still had a moral (one might say youthful) vision of politics. His sensitivity to poverty, injustice, and arbitrariness weighed far more than culture or abstract knowledge. His approach remained naive and incomplete: indignation and common sense made up for serious deficiencies in analysis. The wrenching de
scription he gives of an old asthmatic woman he met in a Valparaiso tavern says as much about him as it does about Latin America’s ancestral plight:
There, in those last moments of people whose furthest horizon has always been tomorrow, is where we can capture the profound tragedy in the life of the proletariat around the world; there is in those dying eyes a humble begging for forgiveness and also, very often, a desperate appeal for consolation which is lost in the void, just as their bodies will soon be lost in the magnitude of the mystery surrounding us. How long this order of things, based on an absurd sense of caste, will endure is not something I can answer, but it is time for the government to spend less time propagating its bounties as a regime and more money, much more money, on works that are socially useful.3
Che clearly wishes to help others (usually patients) and concurrently sketches a broader vision of “the order of things.” He is appalled by the poverty and desperation stemming from the inequality and helplessness of the poor, but has reached a level of sophistication where he establishes a causal link between the deplorable destiny of “the proletariat around the world” and an “absurd sense of caste”—that is, the economic, social, and political status quo. Yet the remedy he proposes is still quite limited. It is a typically middle-class lamentation, within the most simplistic commonsense approach. Governments must stop spending on their own exaltation (like Perón), and pay more attention to the poor. Little is said of why governments act as they do, or what can be done beyond the ritual incantation that they should stop acting as they habitually do. Che’s appeal is moral, not really political, arising from an individual, ethical stance against the way things are. With time, his political acumen would become more focused and complex, as befits a leader. But it would never entirely lose that original innocence, springing from the young medical student’s encounter with pain and suffering, and strangely but also lastingly, from a certain distance, a deliberately assumed marginal position.
Che’s lucid self-analysis helped to center his judgment; it always would, except at moments of feverish or asthmatic delirium in the Congo or Bolivia. The poor, the proletarians, and Communists might be brothers—but they were essentially foreign to him. There was no possible assimilation between him and the workers, the Indians of the high plateaus, the blacks of Caracas. They were, and always would be, different; and in this difference lay both their attraction for him and the limits to his identification with them. This is clear in Che’s description of a Communist couple the travelers encountered in Chuquicamata, the world’s largest open-cut copper mine and a bastion of the Communist Party in Chile. Guevara evokes the cold of the night and the warmth he feels in their company:
The couple, freezing in the desert night, nestling together, were a living representation of the proletariat anywhere in the world. … That was one of the coldest times I’ve ever lived, but also the closest to this strange (to me) human species. … Leaving aside the danger that the “communist worm” might represent, or not, to the healthy life of a group, it had flourished here simply out of a natural desire for something better, as a protest against unceasing hunger, translated into love for that strange doctrine whose essence they might never understand, but whose translation into the words “bread for the poor” was within their reach; indeed, filled their existence.4
Che was disturbed by the chasm between the mine foremen—“the masters, the blond and efficient, insolent administrators … the Yankee masters”—and the miners. He related it to the political battle which even then was raging around the nationalization of Chile’s copper.*2 The approximation to politics shows a perspicacious interest in Chilean issues, but, again, also that certain distance; the entire matter is still fundamentally alien to him. Guevara’s text, then, is not a journalistic report or even a series of political reflections, but rather a travel journal. His summary of the struggle over Chile’s copper mines reflects this attitude:
An economic and political battle is going on in this country between those who support nationalizing the mines, including leftist and nationalist groups, and those who, parting from the ideal of free enterprise, think it better to have a mine that is well-managed (even if it is in foreign hands), rather than subject to a dubious administration by the State. … Whatever the result of the battle, it would be wise not to forget the lesson taught by the miners’ cemeteries, which contain only a few of the enormous quantities of people devoured by cave-ins, silica and the infernal mountain climate.5
The emphasis on people and an apparent indifference to the outcome of the political battle pervade the otherwise rigorous presentation of the issue, which in turn reflects most of the descriptions of Che’s travels through Chile. His approach to social and political processes remains clinical: “The general state of sanitation in Chile leaves much to be desired,” Guevara notes, though he immediately admits, “I learned later that it was much better than in other countries I’ve come to know.”6 The bathrooms are dirty, sanitary awareness is limited; people also have “the habit of throwing used toilet paper outside, on the ground or in boxes, instead of in the latrine.”7 Che peers out at life as a medical student, not necessarily thinking things through politically or socially. The sanitary difference between Argentina and the rest of Latin America in fact does not derive from a lower “social state of the Chilean people,” but from a more general and substantive gap between his country and others. The problem is that most Latin American nations? unlike Argentina? do not have sewage networks; thus the ecologically sound, though unsanitary, practices he describes. Che shows greater lucidity in evaluating the central political dilemma of a country like Chile. Though it has exceptionally abundant resources, it must “get its uncomfortable Yankee friend off its back; and that task is, for the moment at least, herculean, given the amount of dollars they have invested and the ease with which they can exert effective economic pressure the moment their interests are threatened.”8 Salvador Allende would feel the effectiveness of that pressure and the sensitivity of those interests twenty years later.
There are few strictly political passages in this early work. Che is surprised by the admiration his Chilean and Peruvian interlocutors have for Perón and his wife,*3 and expresses some penetrating though abstract thoughts on the “fair” city of Lima (as opposed to the country’s mestizo heritage).†2 It is on the margins of politics, in his encounter and fascination with the indigenous world of Latin America, that one may appreciate the real impact of the trip on Ernesto Guevara. Except for his nautical junkets to the Caribbean and Brazil, Guevara’s ethnic and social horizons had never extended beyond the white middle-class urban centers of Córdoba and Buenos Aires. These were among the most prosperous cities of Latin America. For their inhabitants, the idea of an indigenous population belonged more to epic poems and history books than to daily life. Even a person with the exceptional social awareness of Ernesto, familiar with poverty and marginalization, knew nothing of the great indigenous tragedy of Latin America and that bewitching combination of resignation and mystery that permeates the region’s Indian landscape. Guevara was spellbound by the richness of the ancient Indian cultures, and upset by the poverty in the living and labor conditions of contemporary native communities. If some of his comments and reactions seem “politically incorrect,” they should be evaluated as part of Che’s introduction to hallucinatory exoticism and to its seduction.
Perhaps the most interesting text in this phase of the young writer’s life is an essay on Machu Picchu, which was published in Panama in December 1953. The travelers had already covered most of their itinerary: Chile, Lake Titicaca, the winding paths at fifteen thousand feet above sea level between Cuzco and the border. They had already had their first encounter with “that race of the defeated, who watch us pass along the village streets. Their expressions are tame, almost fearful and completely indifferent to the external world.”9 They had taken the train from Cuzco to the ruins, with its “third class reserved for Indians,” and noted “the Indians’ slightly animal
conception of modesty and hygiene, which makes them relieve themselves on the roadside, the women wiping themselves with their skirts and casually walking on.”10 Che had already personally experienced the paradoxes of discrimination. Caught in a rainstorm between Juliaca and Puno, “their two white majesties” were invited into the cab of a truck to the exclusion of several Indian women, old people, and children. Despite their embarrassed protests, the two Argentines completed the journey sheltered from the storm, while the natives were exposed to the elements.11
From his arrival in Peru, Che was captivated by the architectural and cultural syncretism of colonial architecture, though the term was probably unknown to him. He lamented the sad fate of the mestizo—trapped in “the bitterness of his double existence.”12 He sensed the terrible, magical symbiosis between syncretism and mestization, on the one hand, and the fact of conquest on the other; as Paul Valéry would say, the one is nothing without the other. He developed a Vasconcelos-style mestizo pride, leading him to evoke a fictional homogeneousness: “For my race the spirit shall speak,” proclaimed Mexico’s writer and first postrevolutionary minister of education. As Che lyrically and incorrectly stated in one of his first “public” addresses, on thanking the inhabitants of an Amazonian village for his birthday party, “we constitute a single mestizo race with remarkable ethnographic similarities from Mexico to the Straits of Magellan.”13
Guevara was entranced by the mystery of the hidden city of Machu Picchu, and celebrated its discovery by explorer Hiram Bingham. He also expressed his sadness at the consequences of the find: “All the ruins were completely stripped of anything that fell into the researchers’ hands.”14 He easily distinguished between buildings of different quality, commenting on the “magnificent temples” of the religious area, the “extraordinary artistic value” of the nobles’ residential areas, and “the lack of care in polishing the stone” characteristic of ordinary homes. Che noted that the site had survived thanks to its topographical location and defendability. He summarized the extraordinary circumstances of Machu Picchu—its civilization, its survival on the margins of the Spanish conquest of the New World, and its location:
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