During the debacle, Che did not help defend the regime, arms in hand. He had no way to do so. Accounts of his frantic attempts to organize a militia in Guatemala City are simply false.*18 In several interviews attributed to her after Che’s death, Hilda Gadea asserts that he did participate in anti-aircraft defense groups and in transporting weapons from one side of the city to the other,84 but in her book she describes only his frustrated intentions. In an interview in the Sierra Maestra, Che was indulging in poetic license when he stated, “I tried to organize a group of young men like myself to confront the adventurers of United Fruit. In Guatemala, it was necessary that we fight and almost nobody fought. It was urgent that we resist but almost nobody wanted to do so.”85 The official Cuban biographers (or “chronologists,” as they sometimes call themselves) took up this idea of Che transporting weapons and his “attempt” to organize young men for combat, but without providing any sources or proof.86 The most Che himself ever says in his letters—and he surely would have mentioned it to one of his many correspondents if he had done anything else—is that he enrolled at an emergency medical ward and “registered with the youth brigades to receive military instruction and do whatever. I don’t think this will come to anything.”87 This was a week before the coup which toppled Arbenz.
A few days after the president’s resignation, Ernesto requested asylum at the Argentine Embassy, after a friend who worked there warned him that he was in danger. Though the actual risk was relative,†8 there are indications that his activities had been detected. David Atlee Phillips, the CIA station chief in Guatemala during those days in June, recalls in his memoirs:
A company analyst gave me a sheet of paper a few days after the coup. It contained biographical information about an Argentinian doctor, age 25, who had requested asylum at the Mexican Embassy [sic]. … “I suppose we had better open a file,” I said. Though his name meant little to me at the time, the file on Ernesto Guevara … would one day be one of the thickest in the CIA.*19
His status at the Embassy was more that of a guest than a political refugee, which allowed him to enter and exit quite frequently.†9 He spent approximately a month there, along with many other Argentines, but also radical youths from other countries and Guatemala itself. These included the future founder and leader of the Guatemalan Army of the Poor (EGP), Rolando Morán; Tula Alvarenga, already the companion of the secretary-general of El Salvador’s Communist Party, Salvador Cayetano Carpio (later the legendary Marcial of the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional, or FMLN). Che refused to return home in an airplane sent by Perón to repatriate the Argentine exiles. Instead, he decided to travel to Mexico as soon as the danger subsided. In the meantime, he helped his colleagues sheltered at the Embassy, and established friendships that would last for years. He particularly treasured the sympathy and camaraderie he had built with the Cuban exiles and the admiration they inspired in him:
When I heard the Cubans make their grandiloquent statements with absolute serenity I felt tiny. I can make a speech ten times more objective and without commonplaces, I can read it better and I can convince a public that I am telling the truth, but I don’t convince myself and the Cubans do. Ñico would leave his soul in the microphone and thanks to that could fill even skeptics like me with enthusiasm.88
Ñico López, his first real friend from Cuba, had participated in the assault on the Bayamo barracks, aimed at preventing reinforcements from reaching Santiago de Cuba and the Moncada headquarters in the 1953 uprising. He not only told Che the details of the operation, but also described the virtues of its leader, Fidel Castro. Che first met Ñico, Mario Dalmau, and Darío López in cafés and social meetings during the intense months leading up to the fall of Arbenz and then at the Argentine Embassy. There, he provided them some medical care, read his texts on Guatemala, and put them in contact with his family in Buenos Aires when they left on the Constellation sent by Perón. The Cubans recalled three of Che’s traits in particular: his solidarity with them, whenever he could help; his eternal financial difficulties; and his conversation and writings (now lost), in which he expounded his anti-imperialist views and arguments for the armed defense of the capital.89 In his luggage he carried one last souvenir of Guatemala: the nickname “Che,” bestowed upon him by his Cuban friends because of his Argentine nationality and his countrymen’s habit of endlessly repeating this expression.
Finally, when things quieted down at the end of August, he left the diplomatic mission, mainly to see Hilda, who was still in Guatemala and had been briefly detained. They made plans to meet soon in Mexico. While awaiting his visa, Che left for Atitlán with his sleeping bag, spending a few days hiking and contemplating one of the most beautiful lakesites in the world; there really was nothing else to do. By mid-September he arrived in Mexico City, the world capital of corruption, as he wrote his aunt Beatriz.90
The first months in Mexico, in late 1954, were not easy. Guevara had no money, work, or friends. He carried only the address of several of his father’s acquaintances; one of them, a screenwriter named Ulises Petit de Murat, received him warmly. He bought a camera and, together with a friend he had met on the train from Guatemala, started to make his living taking pictures of U.S. tourists on the streets of Mexico City. He also got a poorly paid job as an allergy researcher at the General Hospital under Dr. Mario Salazar Mallén, but admitted, “I am doing nothing new.”*20 He also mentioned that he had begun to put his life in order: “I cook for myself, and bathe every day, [but] do my laundry rarely and badly.” He intended to spend about six months in Mexico before leaving for the United States, Europe, and then the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He thought of applying for a scholarship to do postgraduate studies in some European university, based upon his scientific publications and his experience as a researcher under Dr. Pisani in Buenos Aires.
His first impressions of Mexico were far from pleasant:
Mexico is entirely given over to the Yankees. … The press says nothing at all. … The economic situation is terrible, prices are going up at an alarming rate, and the disintegration is such that all the labor leaders have been bought off and sign unfair contracts with the Yankee companies, in return for suppressing strikes. … There is no independent industry, much less any free trade.91
In March 1955, an Argentine news agency hired him as a photographer to cover the Pan-American Games. In his free time, he wrote scientific research papers on allergies and attended a congress in Veracruz. Thanks to these activities, he finally got a grant from the General Hospital, which made life easier. He went on exotic expeditions that were madness for an asthma sufferer, such as climbing the Popocatépetl and the Pico de Orizaba:
I took the Popo by assault, but despite much heroism, I was unable to reach the top. I was ready to die for it, but my Cuban climbing companion scared me because two of his toes froze. … We spent six hours fighting the snow that buried us to our waist, and with our feet totally drenched since we lacked the proper equipment. The guide got lost in the fog skirting a crevass, and we were all exhausted from the soft and unending snow. The Cubans won’t climb again, but as for me, as soon as I have some money, I will challenge the Popo again, and the Orizaba in September.92
He also explored the outskirts of Mexico City, but in those months he did not undertake any of the journeys that would normally have attracted him, as they do so many other foreigners. His dispiritedness was such that he ignored the dazzling beauties of a country that has bewitched so many travelers, dwelling only on its defects—indisputable, but trivial for a person as sophisticated as he now was.
In November 1954, Che had started seeing Hilda again. Thanks to her, he began making contact with militants and politicians from other countries, including Laura de Albizu Campos, the wife of the Puerto Rican nationalist jailed by the U.S. government. Che’s courtship of Hilda was complex and ambivalent, as already noted: his affection and loyalty for the Peruvian exile were balanced by a certain aloofness. Hilda was
not part of his plans; she did not appear in his projected travels, adventures, or occupations. Ernesto Guevara was at that time essentially a tramp, a wandering photographer, an underpaid medical researcher, a permanent exile, and an insignificant husband—a weekend adventurer.93
Then one day he ran into Ñico López at the hospital. The Cuban was now a refugee in Mexico, after a long journey in exile, and had come to the hospital for treatment. In the midst of this languid, drifting though expectant existence came the chance encounter that would make the difference between epic and simple tedium. Fortune alone does not explain it: there also had to be a willingness to seize the opportunity. In June, Ñico Lopez introduced the wandering Argentine doctor to Raúl Castro, a Cuban student leader recently released from a Havana jail. A few days later, Raúl’s brother arrived in Mexico, and Raúl took Che to speak with him. And so, in the summer of 1955, Ernesto Guevara met Fidel Castro and discovered the path that would lead him to glory and death.
*1 Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Mi hijo el Che (Madrid: Ediciones Planeta, 1981), p. 280. Che’s father quotes verbatim from his son’s diary, reconstructed from notebooks found in the family home. Years later, Che’s widow, Aleida March, transcribed the diaries and published them as Notas de viaje. For some reason, the passage quoted here (about that week in Miramar) does not appear in the version published by Aleida March. Either Che himself did not include it in his rewritten journal, or else his widow decided to discard it. Chichina recalls that José Aguilar, who lived for many years in Cuba after having known Che as a child, told her how annoyed Aleida was over Ernesto’s comments in his diary regarding his Argentine sweetheart. Chichina Ferreyra, letter to the author, August 22, 1996.
†1 The motorcycle’s breakdown was actually a blessing in disguise, as Alberto Granado noted: “There is no doubt that the trip would not have been as useful and beneficial as it was, as a personal experience, if the motorcycle had held out. … This gave us a chance to become familiar with the people. We worked, took on jobs to make money and continue traveling. Thus we hauled merchandise, carried sacks, worked as sailors, cops and doctors, busboys.” Alberto Granado, interview with Aldo Medrón del Valle, Granma (Havana), October 16, 1967, p. 7.
*2 Che’s recent biographer, French journalist Jean Cormier, doubtless under the influence of Alberto Granado, attaches great importance to this visit to the mine. He virtually makes it into a key moment of Che Guevara’s political awakening: “It is in Chuquicamata, between the 13th and 16th of March, 1952, that Ernesto Guevara starts to become Che … after Chuquicamata, he is in a state of revolutionary incubation.” Jean Cormier, Che Guevara (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995), pp. 37, 50. Perhaps, but nothing in Che’s own words reflects this transmutation, either then or even a bit later.
*3 “According to them [we were a couple of demigods] coming from Argentina, the wonderful country of Perón and his wife, Evita, where the poor have the same things the rich do and the rich are not exploited.” Ernesto Che Guevara, Mi primer gran viaje: de la Argentina a Venezuela en motocicleta (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994), p. 107.
†2 “Lima is the perfect representative of a Peru which has not yet surpassed the feudal condition of a colony: it still awaits the blood of a truly liberating revolution.” Ibid., p. 167.
*4 According to a Cuban researcher, Zoraida “does not like to speak of Ernesto’s passage through her home because she believes it was a very insignificant and fortuitous event in the life of Comandante Guevara.” Marta Rojas, Granma (Havana), June 9, 1988.
*5 Letter from Isaías Nougués to the author, Buenos Aires, March 29, 1996. On questioning, Carlos Ferrer did not deny this factor, but attached less importance to it: “I suppose it did affect him, particularly since the parents’ relationship had worsened in recent times, but somehow I don’t think it was important.” Carlos Ferrer, phone interview with the author, Buenos Aires/Gualeguachu, August 25, 1996.
*6 Thus a Peruvian biographer describes how Che “drafted press releases at the presidential information office, and it is said he even stood guard at the Quemado Palace.” Carlos J. Villar Borda, Che Guevara: Su vida y su muerte (Lima: Editorial Gráfica Pacific Press, 1968), p. 66. And a Cuban who met Che in Guatemala recalls how “Dr. Guevara then met Juan Lechín, the legendary tin mine union leader.” Mario Mencia, “Así empezó la historia del guerrillero heróico,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (Havana), May–August 1987, p. 48.
*7 “I almost went to work in a mine but was not willing to stay more than a month and I was offered three as a minimum, so I decided against it.” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Celia de la Serna de Guevara, August 22, 1953, quoted in Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Aquí va un soldado de América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana/Planeta, 1987), p. 19.
*8 He did not break his promise to Granado; the idea, according to Calica Ferrer, “was for Che to go to Guatemala and he to Venezuela, where he would contact Granado; they would all three travel somewhere else together.” Carlos Ferrer, interview.
†3 The previously quoted essay on Machu Picchu was published then.
*9 “My plan for the next few years: stay at least six months in Guatemala, unless I get a well-paid job that would allow me to stay for two years … then go work in another country for one year … Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, the United States … after a short visit, Haiti and Santo Domingo, Western Europe, probably with mother.” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Beatriz Guevara Lynch, February 12, 1954, quoted in Guevara Lynch, Aquí va, p. 38.
*10 Hugo Gambini maintains that Che did fulfill his dream of visiting Petén, but does not provide any source or information to support his statement. Hugo Gambini, El Che Guevara (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós, 1968), p. 91.
*11 The terms used by some to describe her raise a number of questions. According to Rojo, Hilda was “a young woman of exotic traits.” Ricardo Rojo, Mi amigo el Che (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa, 1985; first edition, 1968), p. 67. In whose eyes was she “exotic”? And in what way? Other adjectives, mentioned even in highly favorable biographies, are just as vague and unfortunate in Spanish. According to Hugo Gambini, among a group of APRA militants living in the same pension as Che “there was a stocky girl with almond eyes, but ugly, quite ugly. …” Gambini, El Che, p. 89.
†4 Peru’s APRA (People’s Revolutionary American Alliance) was founded in 1924 by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. It was a classic Latin American nationalist-popular movement, whose members shared an unbounded devotion for their leader and a broad scope of ideological positions ranging from a virulent anti-Communist nationalism to a Latin American version of Marxism-Leninism, which was especially popular among its student members. Hilda Gadea clearly belonged to this latter school of thought.
*12 “We had set aside a weekend to go to Cuernavaca … so we decided to be united in fact. … And we were.” Hilda Gadea, Che Guevara, Años decisivos (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1972), p. 116.
*13 A year later, Ernesto would write to his father: “Argentina is the oasis of America, we must support Perón as much as possible. …” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Ernesto Guevara Lynch, quoted in Guevara Lynch, Aquí va, p. 89.
†5 The CIA’s role in the coup led by Castillo Armas has been widely documented in recent years. The most important books in this respect are Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Doubleday, 1982), and Piero Gleijeses, The United States and the Guatemalan Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). The CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence has promised to declassify all of its files on Guatemala in 1954; at this writing it had not yet done so.
*14 “[The Communists] are the only political group asking the government to fulfill a program in which personal interests don’t count (though there might be a demagogue or two among their leaders).” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Tita Infante, March 1954, 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), p. 53.
*15 Gadea, Años decisivos, p. 74. It is a bit difficult to see how Che could have known, at that time, which mountainous areas were “suitable” and which were not.
†6 According to Hilda Gadea’s memoir, a year later her husband criticized José Manuel Fortuny, secretary-general of the Communist Party, for not having fought. In his memoirs, Fortuny does not mention this meeting, which one might consider worth remembering. Marco Antonio Flores, Fortuny: Un comunista guatemalteco, Memorias (Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1994).
*16 According to a Guatemalan leader who established a long and close friendship with Guevara at the Argentine Embassy during that year, Che stated: “Too much freedom was given, there was even freedom for the conspirators and agents of imperialism to destroy that democracy.” Rolando Morán, unpublished interview with Francis Pisani, provided to the author by Pisani, Mexico, November 18, 1985.
*17 “I have adopted a firm position alongside the Guatemalan government and, within it, the Communist PGT. I have also made contact with intellectuals of that tendency who edit a magazine here, and am working as a doctor in the labor unions.” Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, letter to Beatriz Guevara Lynch, February 12, 1954, quoted in Guevara Lynch, Aquí va, p. 38.
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