This new focus of the government also impelled it toward greater rigidity and desperation. The personality cult of Perón and his dead wife became more exacerbated. The regime tried to retain the support it had originally gained by making real, though now pallid, changes through mere propaganda. After the Korean War, the economy no longer generated the resources needed to bankroll the social generosity of the Argentine state. The society Che left behind in 1953 was as disheartened as he by the lack of options: there was nothing to be done, either against Perón (because of what he had accomplished) or with him (because of what he had become).
The first stopover for Ernesto Guevara and Calica Ferrer was Bolivia. It was not chosen as a result of any inherent interest or social or political considerations, but simply because it was the cheapest way to reach Venezuela by rail. After an eternity in a train packed with “people of very humble condition … laborers from northern Argentina or Bolivia who were going home after earning a few pesos in Buenos Aires” and a violent asthma attack during the ascent up the mountain range,44 the new pair of travelers finally arrived in La Paz on July 11, 1953. The Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) led by Víctor Paz Estenssoro had taken power just a year earlier, and the country was still in the midst of an effervescent period of reform.
They spent five weeks in Bolivia. Biographies and analyses of Che’s life would later focus on this visit in great detail, as still another formative moment, particularly from a political standpoint. This is how Calica Ferrer saw the time spent in Bolivia with Che. Having known Ernesto since Alta Gracia, having seen him often in Buenos Aires after his trip with Granado, Ferrer believes today that his friend’s political coming of age occurred in Bolivia, together with the development of a powerful anti-American anger. The latter stemmed especially from a visit they undertook to a mine in the mountains outside La Paz, where they witnessed the abuses committed by U.S. supervisors against the local workers.45 However, Che’s stay in Bolivia can hardly have contained all the meetings, analyses, and events that have been mentioned ever since.*6 There are huge numbers of people with Che anecdotes from Bolivia. Even the president in 1996, Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada, remembers meeting him at a social gathering in Cochabamba. And Mario Monje, former leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, describes how Che visited the tin mines during his stay:
Che Guevara gets a job in a mine called Bolsa Negra, near La Paz, a rather cold place. Of course the miners’ group is small, but to be its leader one had to spend time there, and it was best to work inside the mine, not as a doctor. He is a doctor, his link is only circumstantial. That is how, I would say, he arrives in Bolivia—like a kind of orchid seed, looking for a place to settle.46
Che was rapidly and somewhat naively captivated by the Bolivian revolution, though he was irritated soon enough by its obvious shortcomings. In his letters, he initially emphasized its positive aspects: the revolutionary government’s creation of armed militias, the agrarian reform, the nationalization of the tin and antimony mines. Thus, on July 24—barely ten days after his arrival in the capital city—he wrote to his father that the country “is living a particularly interesting moment” and that he had seen “incredible marches of people armed with Mausers and noisemakers.”47 In a letter to Tita Infante dated in Lima in early September, he noted:
Bolivia is a country which has given a really important example to America. … Here revolutions are not done as they are in Buenos Aires … the government is supported by the armed people so there is no possibility of its being overthrown by an armed movement from abroad; it can only succumb to its own internal struggles.48
Che’s disenchantment with the MNR’s revolution stemmed mainly from one incident. In the now consecrated version, the two travelers seek a meeting with Ñuflo Chaflés, the minister of campesino affairs. In his waiting room there are throngs of Indian campesinos. They have come for the land promised by the regime’s agrarian reform. As they wait to be received, a ministry employee passes among them, spraying them with insecticide. Ernesto and Calica are understandably horrified at the humiliation inflicted on the authors of the revolution. As Ernesto writes,
I wonder what the future of this revolution will be. The people in power fumigate the Indians with DDT to rid them temporarily of the fleas they carry, but do not resolve the essential problem of the insects’ proliferation.49
In Ferrer’s later account, he merely notes more impersonally that “when the coyas [Indians] go into town to present a request to the authorities, the government employees quite openly disinfect them with DDT.”50 Ricardo Rojo, a young lawyer and political refugee from Argentina who had become friends with Che in La Paz and accompanied him to the minister’s office, provides the most complete account of Che Guevara’s misadventure with the Bolivian fleas. His book narrates the incident in a more complete and abstract manner. The two Argentines witness the Indians’ fumigation and then complain to the minister about this degrading practice. The official answers that it is indeed unfortunate, but necessary. Indians are not familiar with soap and it will take years for the new educational policy to change their habits. The focus of the story is Che’s emblematic reaction:
This revolution will fail unless it succeeds in breaking through the Indians’ spiritual isolation, touching them to the core, shaking them to their very bones, giving them back their stature as human beings. Otherwise, what good is it?51
An iconoclastic comment indeed, but one that does not necessarily imply a political position. Guevara’s stance is still fundamentally ethical, devoid of political depth. He is appalled by these successive signs of the Indians’ humiliation; he is upset at the hardship visited upon cultures, ethnic groups, and individuals that he admires more and more. He cannot separate the coyas waiting outside the government offices in La Paz, with their millenarian patience, from the splendor of the ruins at Tiahuanaco, at the top of the world. His sense of justice is outraged at the contempt and arrogance implicit in society’s attitude toward the supposed beneficiaries of the 1952 revolution: “So-called decent, cultivated people are amazed at the course of events and curse the importance given the Indians and cholos. …”52
Che’s moral musings are doubtless welcome and indispensable in understanding a continent torn by inequality. To give the eternally oppressed a fraction of the pride and respect they have lacked for centuries is one of the highest goals and potential accomplishments of any political undertaking in Latin America—and especially of any revolution worthy of the name. Guevara does not yet see this idea in strictly political terms. His intuitive, momentary reaction is still inscribed within a context of relative confusion concerning the MNR’s merits and defects. But he is beginning to develop a different political approach. In this sense, his passage through Bolivia was much more than just ground time.
Ernesto Guevara did not work in the tin or antimony mines of Bolivia, though he visited the mining basins of Oruro and Cataví.*7 Nor did he see all the valleys and peaks of the country which would bury him fourteen years later, though he did explore the semitropical region of Los Yungas. He did talk at great length with the thinkers and politicians involved in the vast reform movement led by Paz Estenssoro. He devoted long hours to conversation, discussion, and learning in the bars and cafés of Avenida 16 de Julio and the Sucre Palace Hotel. This was his first genuine experience of the complex and contradictory world of politics, whether traditional or revolutionary. His insightful intuitions concerning indigenous and social problems led to serious disagreements with many of his interlocutors. Because of them, and his emotional reaction to the ignominy he witnessed every day in the city streets and countryside, he grew increasingly skeptical and intransigent. This eventually blinded him to the limited, but real, successes of the 1952 revolution.
This blind spot, this reservation—doubtless justified, but still extreme due to his scant political training—would be stored in Guevara’s widening political memory. Thirteen years later he would retrieve it, only to have it wreak havoc on his
perception of the historical moment in Bolivia. It would lead him to underestimate the miners’ combativeness and to disregard the campesinos appreciation of an agrarian reform which, however thwarted, distributed land to thousands of rural dwellers:
It was a picturesque but hardly virile demonstration. The weary pace and lack of enthusiasm among all of them drained it of vital energy; the determined faces of the miners were missing. …53
The same distortion led him to misjudge the scope of the negotiations between the new regime in La Paz represented by Paz, Juan Lechín, and Hernán Siles Suazo on the one hand, and U.S. envoy Milton Eisenhower on the other, when the brother of Normandy’s hero visited Bolivia in mid-July 1953. The agreement they reached, just as Che was passing through Bolivia, was successful against all odds. It avoided a confrontation with the United States, while preserving a significant proportion of the regime’s conquests and reforms. It bestowed self-confidence on Bolivia’s army and political class as well as a willingness to ask for external help, in a combination rare among the ruling classes of Latin America. Fourteen years later, Che Guevara would confront—and die at the hands of—the army’s blend of nationalism—limited but deeply rooted—and its close ties with the U.S. armed forces, suffering the consequences of his perceptive, but finally erroneous, reading of Bolivian history.
Neither Che nor his friends of the time left any available record of their views on the agreement between the revolutionary regime and the Eisenhower administration. As in the case of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in 1938—and in contrast to Cuba in 1959–60 and then Chile in 1970–73—the MNR revolution was able to wrest from the U.S. government a reluctant but resigned acceptance of its agrarian reform and expropriation of mostly locally owned natural resources. Obviously, there was a price: other aspects of the reform process were sacrificed, nationalized companies had to be compensated, and the regime was forced to submit to a rigid ideological alliance with a foreign country. Whatever the final assessment, it is surprising that one of the most idiosyncratic features of the 1952 revolution in Bolivia should not have evoked any reaction in young Ernesto. Either his political curiosity was still immature, or else he was prey to a more profound underestimation of the importance of external influence in a revolutionary process like that of Bolivia. A change in his thinking—or maturity—would soon appear. Guatemala would be the next stop on Guevara’s journey.
There was no reason to dawdle in Bolivia, no matter how interesting the political panorama. Che and Calica left in mid-August and, upon the former’s insistence, retraced his earlier steps with Alberto Granado. The newly graduated physician returned to Cuzco, Machu Picchu, and then Lima to meet again with Zoraida Boluarte and Dr. Pesci. There they were joined by Ricardo Rojo and, after a couple of weeks in the Peruvian capital, left for Guayaquil, a tropical and infernal hothouse if there ever was one. Marooned in the banana port for almost three weeks, along with other friends from Argentina, Guevara suffered constant, wrenching distress, both financially and healthwise. Finally, the ragged and destitute vagabonds secured free passage to Panama on a White Fleet ship of the United Fruit Company. By then Che had learned that if the altitude of high plateaus was physically harmful to him, the heat and damp of the tropics were devastating.
In the stifling, sweltering heat of Guayaquil, Ricardo Rojo and the others led Che to make a decision that would prove pivotal. He abandoned his plans to meet with Granado in Venezuela and opted instead to travel to Guatemala with his companions.*8 The call of the exotic and new reasserted its priority. In Guatemala, an unfamiliar, indigenous country, Guevara sought and found a reform process similar to that in Bolivia—but perhaps more radical and, in any case, fresher and more defiant toward the United States. The trip to Guatemala proved arduous, though. Ernesto’s asthma, the ramblers’ lack of funds, and the constant changes in their group—Calica Ferrer stayed in Quito, later heading for Venezuela—made the journey longer and more difficult. It took them two full months to reach Guatemala City after a series of more or less planned stops, mainly in San José, Costa Rica, and Panama, where Che was published for the first time.†3 He toured the canal and noted the contrast, greater then than now, between Panamanian neighborhoods and the Canal Zone. The latter was tidy, clean, and prosperous, Anglo-Saxon and white—a classic colonial enclave in a supposedly free country. During those months, Guevara also saw the immense plantations of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, which evoked from him a caustic comment, almost caricatural in its rhetoric:
I had the opportunity of traveling through the domains of United Fruit, confirming once again the terrible nature of these capitalist octopuses. I have sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin [who had died nine months earlier] that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.54
In San José, Guevara had his first and perhaps last politically neutral encounter with the newly born social democracy of Latin America. He met several times with Rómulo Betancourt, who would later be president of Venezuela precisely when Ernesto Guevara, by then a Cuban minister, was conspiring with Venezuelan guerrilla forces. He also encountered his first Latin American Communist leader, Manuel Mora Valverde. The contrast between his accounts of the two meetings points unmistakably to the direction Che was to follow:
We met with Manuel Mora Valverde. He is a quiet man, very serene. He gave us a splendid explanation of current politics in Costa Rica. Our meeting with Rómulo Betancourt did not resemble the history lesson taught us by Mora. Betancourt gave us the impression of a politician with a few solid social ideas in his head and the rest wavering and easily shifting whichever way the wind blows.55
He had a spat with Betancourt, suggestive of his emerging political inclinations and the path he would travel for the next nine years, until his experience with the U.S.S.R. finally disabused him. While discussing the presence of the United States throughout Latin America, Ernesto asked the Venezuelan outright, “In case of war between the United States and the U.S.S.R., whose side would you take?” Betancourt replied he would support Washington—enough for Guevara to brand him a traitor on the spot.56
Che also recognized both the potential and the limitations of the government of José Figueres, who since 1948 had tried to build an extensive, anti-Communist welfare state in Costa Rica. But his brief stay in San José mainly served another crucial purpose. It was there that he had his first contact with Cubans, meeting two exiled survivors of the so-called Moncada assault that took place in the eastern city of Santiago on July 26, 1953. Calixto García and Severino Rossel were the first to tell him the incredible story of Fidel Castro’s attempt to overthrow the regime of Fulgencio Batista by storming the military garrison of Cuba’s second largest city. Guevara was initially skeptical.57 But gradually the Cubans’ natural charm, the greatness and tragedy of their epic, and their contrast with the moderation of Costa Rican politics persuaded him. The friendship begun in San José was reinforced in Guatemala, where he met other Moncada veterans. Among them was Ñico López, who arrived in the Guatemalan capital at around the same time as Ernesto, bringing more and fresher news from the island.
Che arrived in Guatemala on New Year’s Eve, 1953. He would remain there until he obtained safe conduct to Mexico from the Argentine Embassy, where he had requested asylum after the June 1954 coup against the regime of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. Guatemala was then a country of three million inhabitants, mostly poor, marginalized Indians. The largest and most populous Central American nation, it had—and still has—a typical plantation economy based on coffee, bananas, and cotton, with atrocious social conditions. Almost all its indicators placed it in the third place from the bottom of the Latin American scale in 1950, followed only by Haiti and Bolivia. In that year, Guatemala had the worst (with the exception of Bolivia) rates of urban and rural unemployment and underemployment in all of Latin America.58 Even in 1960, the life expectancy of its population at birth was the lowest in the region.59
Before Guatemala the Ar
gentine’s journey had been important, but only in an emotional and cultural sense. Now Ernesto Che Guevara would experience his true political rite of passage during those troubled months when the futile attempt of a decent Guatemalan officer to improve the dreadful state of his fellow citizens shattered against the inescapable polarity of the Cold War and the intransigence of the banana companies. Doubtless, Guevara had arrived with an already heavy ideological load in his worn knapsack, but he would leave Guatemala with entire trunks full of ideas, affinities, hatreds, and judgments.
He stayed in Guatemala for eight and a half months—a short time chronologically, but forever in ideological terms. His days were filled with various occupations: politics, as he followed closely the outcome of the Guatemalan drama; his unceasing, unsuccessful search for a job as a doctor, nurse, or anything related to his profession; his perennial struggle against illness; and the beginning of his relationship with the Peruvian Hilda Gadea, who would later become his first wife. He planned to stay in Guatemala for a longer stretch, two years if possible, before heading for Mexico, Europe, and China.*9 He intended to make a living in his profession, but was soon frustrated by a contradiction common to most of Latin America. On the one hand, there were not enough doctors, and too many diseases; on the other, the barriers placed before a foreign physician were insurmountable. The best he could obtain was a small salary at a laboratory in the Ministry of Sanitation, after a period of selling encyclopedias.
At first his complaints about his failure to find a job were full of humor: “I went to see the minister of public health and asked him for a post, but I demanded a clear-cut response, either yes or no. … The minister did not disappoint me. He gave me a clear-cut response: no.”60 Soon his good-natured lamentations gave way to bitter frustration: “The sonofabitch who was supposed to hire me made me wait for a month, only to have me informed that he couldn’t.”61 Che confronted many obstacles in his attempt to work as a doctor. One of them, according to a recurring anecdote, was the fact that he was not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (officially called the Guatemalan Labor Party, or PGT by its initials in Spanish). However, in his correspondence Ernesto placed greater emphasis on the “reactionary” medical profession. In any case, his motivations were increasingly financial, and Ernesto was quickly losing whatever interest he still had in medicine as such. Politics and archaeology were rapidly taking its place as his favorite fields of endeavor.
Companero Page 10