Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  Che repeatedly complained about not being able to visit Petén and Tikal; he only traveled to the villages of the Guatemalan highlands near Lake Atitlán.*10 He had to renounce his dream of exploring the Mayan culture of the jungle for several reasons: his interminable political discussions, the ravaging effect of Guatemala City’s climate on his illness, and his increasing intimacy with Hilda Gadea. Only a couple of years later, during a sort of honeymoon with Hilda, was he able to visit the archaeological sites of Palenque and the Yucatán Peninsula, in southern Mexico. Moreover, Guatemala’s political and conspiratorial ferment certainly merited long hours of intense debate with revolutionaries and curious observers from many places: Rojo and the Argentines, the recently arrived Cubans, leftist or undefined academic figures from the United States (Harold White of Utah or Robert Alexander of New Jersey), and quasi-Communist Central American sociologists like Edelberto Torres and his daughter Myrna.

  He met Myrna, and many other friends in Guatemala and later in Mexico, thanks to Hilda Gadea. Hilda was a decisive figure in his life, but their ties remained devoid of intensity; the bond was more fraternal and ideological than romantic or erotic. Che’s illness and his fascination with the alien nature of her Indian features and background help explain the initial attraction. Fixed up on a blind date with Ernesto by friends, she found him in the midst of one of his asthmatic episodes, broke, bedridden, cold, and hungry. He asked for help; she gave it. Finding him in these desperate straits, Hilda immediately vouched for his rent in a pension, obtained medicines and books for him, and in a few short days reorganized his life. Aside from her generosity and support, she possessed other charms: she had marked Indian traits, and was three and a half years older than Che. Their short-lived marriage would produce one daughter who, when asked years later in Havana for a token or memento of her father’s attraction to her mother, answered with one word full of sadness and pride: “Myself.”62

  Che first mentioned Hilda in a letter to his mother dated April 1954. He spoke of her in an affectionate tone, reflecting the tenor of their relationship: “She has a heart of platinum, to say the least. I feel her support in all the actions of my daily life (beginning with the rent).”63 The two stormers of winter palaces forged a link based upon their ideological affinities and her medical, financial, and spiritual support for the undocumented Argentine. Like many Peruvians, Hilda had strong Chinese and indigenous traces in her genetic configuration. According to several friends and photographs, she was rather short and plump.*11

  Obviously, Ernesto’s enchantment with the experienced APRA militant†4 was not based upon any orthodox ideal of beauty. It had more to do with her archetypical Indian traits and the way in which she took charge of many facets of Che’s life, including his asthma, his employment concerns, his ideological development. She also helped him to broaden his circle of friends. The couple would marry a year later in Mexico, where their daughter was born. By then, the course of the relationship would be clear in terms of its intensity, meaning, and future. Hilda was different enough from Che to seduce him. But she was too different from Chichina, almost her polar opposite, to awaken in him the passion he had felt in Malagueño.

  Hilda recalls that Ernesto declared his love and proposed marriage to her at a party. She suggested they wait, more for political than for emotional reasons.64 Much of Ernesto’s life in Guatemala revolved around her: she took care of him, introduced him to friends, lent him books, and talked endlessly with him about psychoanalysis, the Soviet Union, the Bolivian revolution, and, of course, daily events in the country. The relative importance in their relationship of love, his attraction to difference, camaraderie, and ideological affinity is difficult to establish. What is certain is that Hilda had a powerful influence on the young revolutionary, and that his long-lasting respect and affection derived in large part from his feeling of indebtedness.

  Everything, including Hilda’s own memoirs, suggests that the romance was platonic for a long time. It was consummated only in mid-May, a year later, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, when the couple spent a weekend in Malcolm Lowry’s adopted hometown.*12 They had already decided to marry, but had been unable to do so because of the Mexican authorities’ bureaucratic and immigration requirements.65 In Hilda’s account, it was Che who made the decision. He insisted on marriage, while she accepted his demands in fulfillment of earlier promises. Indeed, the tone in her book points to a certain reluctance on her part. More mature than he, she sensed that the relationship would be difficult if not impossible in the long term, and that Ernesto would not withstand the rigors and obligations of a “bourgeois” marriage.

  The wedding took place on August 18, 1955, in the colonial town of Tepotzotlán, barely a few days after she discovered she was pregnant. The causal connection is suggested by Hilda herself. She attributes to Ernesto the following statement, when he learned of her pregnancy: “Now we must hurry and have a legal ceremony and inform our parents.”66 One of Che’s biographers states that they were “forced” to marry.67 Oleg Daroussenkov, a Soviet official who eventually forged a close friendship with Guevara, recalls a conversation with him in Murmansk in the early sixties. After downing a few vodkas to offset the Arctic cold, Che confessed that he had wed because Hilda was expecting a child68; he had had too many tequilas one night and made a foolish attempt at chivalry.

  Regardless of the version one subscribes to, Che’s encounter with Hilda derives its meaning from later consequences in Mexico, from her intellectual and political impact on Guevara’s evolution, and from the fraternal affection they shared in Guatemala, Mexico, and then Cuba (though under different circumstances). Its significance does not stem from any great emotional intensity inherent in the rapport.

  Che’s stay in the Mayan nation was not a period of passionate sentiments, but of political awakening. Indeed, Guatemala marked a crucial time in Che’s life and in the history of the entire region, inaugurating the Cold War in Latin America. It became a stereotypical example of flagrant, heavy-handed aggression by a hegemonic power, in the vernacular of the time. The caricature of a banana republic, Guatemala had, for perhaps the only moment in its history, an honest, well-intentioned regime, though it was also weak, divided, and mediocre.

  The whole episode began in 1950 when, for only the second time since its independence a century and a half earlier, Guatemala held democratic presidential elections. The winner was Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who took office on March 15, 1951. Upon assuming the presidency, Arbenz promoted a series of social and economic reforms in a country where 2 percent of the population held 70 percent of the land. The new government launched an ambitious public-works program, including a port on the Atlantic coast, a highway to the coast, and a hydroelectric plant. These projects interfered with monopolies owned by the United Fruit Company, which also controlled most of the land and politicians in the country. On June 27, 1952, Arbenz signed into law an agrarian reform which included the expropriation of uncultivated latifundia (large landed estates), with compensation on the basis of their declared value. Quite logically, this did not please the banana company. The decree also established an income tax—for the first time in the nation’s history—and consolidated a series of workers’ rights, including collective bargaining, the right to strike, and a minimum wage.

  Washington launched a policy of harassment against the Arbenz regime, for both economic reasons—the interests of United Fruit—and ideological ones—the increasingly active participation in government and the reform process of the Communist Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT). Despite its small size, the PGT wielded a disproportionate influence, thanks to the competence and dedication of its cadres. In addition, Arbenz had begun to draw closer to the Socialist bloc. So, in 1954, Washington launched an explicit campaign to overthrow the government, if possible with inter-American support. Thus an Organization of American States conference was convened in Caracas in March 1954, at which the U.S. delegation, led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, openly demanded a condemnation of
the Arbenz government. The motion was supported by every regime in Latin America save those of Mexico and Argentina, which led Che to revise some of his previous opinions about Perón.*13 The combination of external pressures, disenchantment within the ranks of Arbenz supporters, dissension within the army, and the president’s indecisiveness climaxed in a coup in June 1954. A column commanded by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, directed and financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, entered Guatemala from Honduras. Using a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it forced Arbenz to resign even though the military balance of power was not conclusively unfavorable to him.†5

  Guatemala’s impact on the life of Che Guevara can be measured along two vectors: his analysis of events and his actual participation in them. Ernesto was initially enthusiastic about the reform process launched by Arbenz. He wrote, “There is no country in all America as democratic” as Guatemala.69 He also perceived the intrinsic weaknesses in the process (“there are arbitrary abuses of power and thefts”) and the contradictions in the military’s policy (“the newspapers run by United Fruit are such that if I were Arbenz, I’d shut them down in five minutes”). He soon understood the dilemmas faced by the regime. On the one hand, it needed the PGT’s support to implement urgently needed reforms, beginning with land distribution*14; on the other, it had to protect itself from U.S. attacks, all based on a supposed Communist and Soviet conspiracy in Guatemala. Che realized that the PGT was at once the staunchest and most dangerous of all Arbenz’s allies, due to the effects it was generating abroad. At first he considered that the risks to the regime were very real, but only in the medium term (“I believe the most difficult moment for Guatemala will be in three years, when it has to elect a new president”70—this, three months before the overthrow of Arbenz). He did detect the seriousness of the threat looming over the beleaguered government, though in April 1954 he still misjudged the reasons for it:

  The fruit company is howling with rage, and of course Dulles and Co. want to intervene in Guatemala for the terrible crime it has committed in buying arms wherever it can, as the United States hasn’t sold a single cartridge in a long time.71

  In his letters to Buenos Aires, Che revealed great lucidity as to the nature of the imminent aggression, but overestimated the forces available to deter it. On June 20—just a week before Arbenz’s resignation and on the very day of the pseudo-invasion from Honduras led by Castillo Armas—Che wrote to his mother that “the danger is not in the total number of troops currently entering [Guatemalan] territory, as it is quite small, nor in the airplanes which are only bombing civilian homes and machine-gunning a few people; the danger lies in how the gringos are running their stooges at the United Nations.”72 Which was true, as our apprentice field strategist perceived.

  At the same time, however, he assured his mother that “Colonel Arbenz is very brave, without a doubt, and is willing to die at his post if necessary. … If things reach the extreme of having to fight the modern planes and troops sent by the fruit company or the United States, people will fight.”73 He could not have been more mistaken. A week later, Arbenz would be forced to resign by the combined pressures of the United States, the “invading” column approaching the capital, and the demands of his colleagues in the army. Though historians and witnesses are still arguing over what might have happened if the PGT’s worker and campesino militias had been given arms and Arbenz had led the struggle from the countryside, the fact is that “the people” did not really defend “their” government. Che grasped this perfectly two weeks later, when he wrote to his mother that “Arbenz did not know how to rise to the occasion … treason continues to be the vocation of the army, and once again we see confirmed that saying which dictates the elimination of the army as the true beginning of democracy (if the saying does not exist, I have now invented it).”74

  Finally, Guevara bitterly concluded that “We are like the Spanish Republic, betrayed from within and without, but we did not fall with the same dignity.”75 Ricardo Rojo relates that Che mistrusted the nationalist and reformist potential of the regime; in Guevara’s view, the government should have formed people’s militias to defend the capital, thus preventing the debacle.76 According to Hilda Gadea, in an article Che wrote entitled “I Saw the Fall of Jacobo Arbenz,” which was lost when he left Guatemala, he argued that the regime would have survived if the people had been armed.77 Gadea states:

  He was certain that if the people were told the truth and given arms, the revolution could be saved. Even if the capital had fallen, the struggle could have continued in the countryside; in Guatemala there are suitable mountainous areas.*15

  Perhaps Che still believed, in this youthful, radical, and still relatively innocent stage, that one could have everything: first, an army promoting reform, and then a military institution which would suddenly become revolutionary and give up its monopoly on weapons, handing rifles to workers and farmers.†6 He was obviously inspired in this by the example of Bolivia’s popular militias, which had very much impressed him just a few months earlier.

  Guevara rightly attributed Arbenz’s defeat to disunity among the country’s progressive forces, as well as their lack of leadership and decisiveness, and the duplicity of the armed forces before the U.S. onslaught. In fact, the real cause for the failure of the Guatemalan revolution was to be found in the United States, both in Che’s mind and in reality. The great lesson for the young Argentine revolutionary concerned Washington’s presumed a priori and ruthless opposition to any attempt at social and economic reform in Latin America. One must be prepared to fight U.S. interference, rather than try to avoid or neutralize it. The other moral of the story, in Che’s view, was that Arbenz had erred in giving his enemies too much freedom, especially in the press.*16

  Che would have needed far vaster political experience, a more solid knowledge of history, and doubtless greater maturity to assimilate the hard lessons of Guatemala with greater discernment. He still knew next to nothing about the three largest countries of Latin America. He had never set foot in Mexico; in his passage through Brazil he had mainly focused on the beauty of the mulattas, and his experience of Argentina had been largely apolitical or disdainful. The two countries he knew best were the poorest and least developed on the mainland of the Americas: Bolivia and Guatemala. The rest of America was summed up for him in Machu Picchu and Chuquicamata, the indigenous cultures and the United Fruit Company in Central America. His knowledge of the region’s armies was limited to Arbenz and border troops posted in the Andes and the tropics.

  The very real confrontation between the fruit company and the banana republic becomes a caricature when extrapolated to the rest of the hemisphere, with its complex and multifarious history. The specificity of Guatemala was diluted in Che’s emotional, sometimes brilliant approach: undeniable particulars became questionable generalizations. As long as this transposition involved similar situations—as in the case of Cuba—it produced valid conclusions. But when it was extended to quite dissimilar situations, it led to sweeping truisms and fatal mistakes.

  In Guatemala, Ernesto Guevara was still searching. His attitude toward his parents (“I think you should know that even if I am dying I won’t ask you for any guita [money]”78), his comments after the coup on June 26 (“I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I enjoyed myself immensely those days. That magical sense of invulnerability … made me smack my lips with glee when I saw people running like crazy when they saw the planes. … It was all a lot of fun, what with the shooting, bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in”79), and the explanation given by his mother (“He asks to be allowed to help in the defense. He is told that there will be no defense. He offers to organize it. But who is he? What experience does he have, after all?”80), all point to an increasing politicization. He is still rebelling against his parents, though less than before; and his political persona is becoming more clearly defined.

  At age twenty-six, Che Guevara was an ardent defender and admirer of the So
viet Union. He intended to give his son (if he had one) a Russian name, Vladimir, in honor of the fatherland of socialism.81 His wife Hilda also reports: “Guevara displayed great sympathy for the achievements of the Soviet Revolution; I had some reservations.”82 The young man had an obvious inclination for Communism, for both the Guatemalan party*17 and the general concept, and had decided to join the ranks of the Party (with a capital P) somewhere in the world.†7

  Once the number of asylum seekers and hangers-on in the Argentine Embassy swelled, a Communist contingent was organized. Led by Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, the second most important leader of the PGT, it was soon separated from its companions and locked into the Embassy garage. Che was recruited along with the others, according to Rolando Morán, a Guatemalan guerrilla leader who became friends with him at that time, and logically so: his closest affinity at the Embassy was with the Communists.83 Guevara was a person of insatiable political curiosity, yet persistently lacking in any militant spirit; he held leftist political views, yet had little knowledge of Marxism.‡ He had witnessed a tragic defeat which could have been expected and avoided; he would extrapolate its lessons in the terms in which he lived and suffered them. His convictions about the need for the armed struggle, the implacable hostility of the United States and the impossibility of any negotiation with Washington, his affinity for Communist parties and the Soviet Union, and the imperative need to forestall one’s enemies before they could take advantage of existing liberties all formed a collection of beliefs that would be further consolidated during his early years in Mexico. They would accompany him to the Sierra Maestra and throughout his first period in Havana, tempered only gradually by his exceptional intelligence and realism, and by the ravaging lessons of experience.