Companero

by Jorge G. Castaneda

  †19 In a postmortem assessment of the Bolivian insurgency dated May 1968, the CIA estimated that the Cubans allocated less than $500,000 to the entire enterprise; needless to say, the agency analysts considered that “the number of men as well as Cuban financing and planning were totally inadequate for the scope and aims of the Cuban operation.” Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Cuban Subversive Policy and the Bolivian Guerrilla Episode (Secret), Intelligence Report, p. 40.

  *40 Benigno, interview with the author, Paris, November 18, 1995. Impeccably informed sources inside the CIA at the time have told the author that in their view, Monje was a KGB asset, not simply an ally or friend of the Soviet Union.

  †20 Benigno concludes that during his stay in Moscow, “Monje revealed the entire plan to the Soviets, who then pressured Fidel, and that is how we lost contact; Che was told nothing, he was abandoned.” Benigno, Vie et mort, p. 170.

  ‡7 This view is held by several Latin American old Communist leaders who know Monje and were interviewed by the author. They include the Mexican Arnoldo Martinez Verdugo and the Chilean Volodia Teitelboim. Nonetheless, Oleg Daroussenkov, then stationed in Moscow and in charge of Latin American affairs for the Party, does not recall Monje’s passage through Moscow, much less having spoken with him about Che. Oleg Daroussenkov, telephone conversation with the author, Mexico, December 19, 1996.

  *41 This is the opinion held by a low-level former official in charge of Latin America at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR: “We were sure it would notwork, but we did not meddle; there was no attempt on our part to convince the PCB not to help.” Konstantin Obidin, interview with the author, Moscow, October 31, 1995.

  †21 The CIA’s assertion that Cuba informed Moscow of Che’s intentions as early as “the fall” of 1966 seems to validate this supposition. The CIA stated in an October 1967 memo that “In 1966 Brezhnev strongly criticized the dispatch of Ernesto Che Guevara to Bolivia. … In the fall of 1966 Castro informed Brezhnev that Ernesto Che Guevara with men and materiel furnished by Cuba had gone to Bolivia.”

  ‡8 In addition to being mentioned in the memo from Rostow to Johnson quoted above (see note 94), and in the CIA intelligence cable quoted above, the existence and the substance of the letter from Moscow to Havana have been corroborated by Oleg Daroussenkov, the highest-level official in Moscow working for the Central Committee in charge of Latin America, in a telephone conversation with the author, Mexico City, December 19, 1996.

  *42 At the August Conference of the Organization of Latin Americas Solidarity in Havana, the Cubans tabled a resolution restating Castro’s speech condemning aid and trade policies of the socialist countries vis-à-vis Latin America. Despite Soviet threats and intense lobbying, the resolution was passed, 15 to 3 with 12 abstentions, though the text was never made public. See Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, The Latin American Solidarity Organization Conference and Its Aftermath, Intelligence Memorandum, September 20, 1967 (Secret), Declassified Documents Catalog, Research Publications (Woodbridge, Conn.), file series no. 0649, vol. 21, March–April 1995.

  *43 Benigno, interview with the author, Paris, November 18, 1996. The Cubans tapped for the mission included several veterans of the 1958 “invasion,” who had not been accepted for the Bolivia expedition. A few of their names are known: Enrique Acevedo (a brother of Rogelio, one of the heroes of Santa Clara), the Tamayito brothers (from Vaquerito’s suicide battalion), and Harold Ferrer.

  *44 In the last chapter of a fictionalized and unfinished account of Che’s life, his childhood friend Pepe Aguilar stated that Fidel Castro asked Che to leave Bolivia when it became clear that the struggle was in vain. Aguilar repeats a conversation he held with Castro during the first days after Che’s death was announced: “Ernesto’s mistake was not to have come back when you asked him to.” If true, this version would confirm that Fidel Castro was fully aware of how desperate Che’s situation in Bolivia was. José Aguilar, unpublished manuscript, “The Final Chapter,” p. 11, obtained by the author.

  *45 Jose Aguilar, unpublished manuscript, “The Final Chapter,” pp. 10–11, obtained by the author; and Carlos Franqui, interview with the author, San Juan, August 24, 1996.

  Chapter 11

  Death and Resurrection

  Che Guevara’s death gave meaning to his life. Without his execution at the hands of Lieutenant Mario Terán in the dark, damp, and dilapidated schoolroom at La Higuera, he would still have achieved epic feats and lived a glorious life, but his face would not appear on millions of T-shirts decades later. He doubtless would have rendered far greater service to the causes he espoused had he been spared by the Bolivian government, or saved by the CIA, but the saga of revolution and self-sacrifice he came to symbolize would never have swelled as it did. Death for Che was not only an expected, and perhaps welcome, event; it also marked an inevitable, predictable beginning of a new road to travel, not the end of a career, of a path, of a life. Every feature of that death contributed to its transcending the tragic but after all common occurrence that befalls everyone; it gave birth to a myth that would endure through the end of the century. It was, as Che had always imagined, quite a death: in cold blood, heroic and stoical, beautiful and tranquil—as his face showed in the posthumous photographs this story began with—in a word, emblematic.

  But just as the specific circumstances of Che’s passing are inseparable from the legend they begot, the timing is also uniquely relevant to the aura of fame that levitated from the clear- and open-eyed corpse of Vallegrande. Had Guevara perished in the Congo two years earlier, or in Argentina sometime later, the singular harmony between the man and the epoch might not have come about. Che died on the eve of a crucial year in the second half of the twentieth century, 1968, when for the last time everything seemed possible, and for the first time the youth of a large slice of the world engaged in short-lived but far-reaching revolts that Che, more than anyone else, would come to personify. Weeks after his death, North Vietnamese troops and the Vietcong unleashed the Tet offensive that inspired rebellion across the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America. Even before then, the first effigies of Alberto Korda’s portrait appeared in the angry autumn of Turin; then, students led the irreverent sit-ins at Columbia University in New York and the mass demonstrations in the Latin Quarter in Paris; less than a year after Che’s capture at the Yuro Ravine, the ubiquitous blood-red posters would vainly attempt to exorcise Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague. Almost a year later to the day, hundreds marching beneath his banner would be shot by the Mexican army in the colonial and pre-Columbian square of Tlatelolco. The synchronicity is striking, and beguiling: it was Che’s death at that particular time that allowed him to voice the desires and dreams of the millions who bore his image, but it was his life that created the bond between his fallen figure and the dreams of a generation born out of the havoc and grief of World War II.

  The affinities are countless. They include the ideological consonance within families belonging to the “movement,” as described by alternative sociologists in the United States.1 Guevara shared his mother’s political views until her death. But the analogies also comprise his very life story. Prominent figures of the so-called “new left” in Europe and the United States were almost all a product of the white, educated middle classes that emerged from the postwar baby boom. Such was the family formed in Córdoba by Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna during the Argentine demographic bubble before the Depression. Even in death there were similarities: millions of teenagers in the fifties and students in the sixties would experience intellectual or political epiphanies over the early, tragic death of their precocious heroes. The death that cancels a life’s promise before its time would become a leitmotif of that era, and no one symbolized it as vigorously as Che Guevara. All of these parallels helped create that crucial identification between myth and context. Another life would never have captured the spirit of its time; another
historical moment would never have found itself reflected as it did in him.

  More than impatience or arrogance, the youth of that time found its distinctive mark in a blend of idealism and felt omnipotence which only turned to action in 1968, but had been building for years. The slogans “La plage sous les pavés,” “We want the world and we want it now,” “We must be realistic and demand the impossible”; the exuberance, the narcissistic determination to have and achieve everything hic et nunc announced the advent of the empire of the will, where Che lived and died. The objects of desire were also changing drastically: instead of money, freedom; instead of power, revolution; instead of comfort, generosity; instead of profit and ambition, the rhythms of rock. To stop violence and war, distribute wealth, preach the liberation of passion and desire, live strong and unexplored sensations without risk or cost: these were the values of the generation Guevara came to represent, especially after his death.

  The kinship between Ernesto Guevara and the youth of his time has elicited many metaphors, but Julio Cortázar’s is perhaps the most eloquent: “The Argentine students who took over their dormitory in the University City of Paris called it Che Guevara, for the same simple reason that leads thirst to water and man to woman.”2 Che was no longer young when he became the symbol of youthful insurrection atop the Paris barricades, but something in his premature death rejuvenated him, completing his assimilation by the generation that followed his own. A young man on the verge of middle age is executed in Bolivia; not just a revolutionary, but a martyr: one who was “pure.” Or perhaps the murder victim becomes a mirror-like object of recognition for youth precisely because of the way he died.

  A 1968 survey of American university students found that the historical figure they most identified with was Che, more than any of the U.S. presidential candidates that year, and more than any of the other personalities proposed by the study.3 Moreover, 80 percent of American college students in 1969 identified with “my generation”: a sense of belonging and self-definition that would not repeat itself soon.4 The outstanding features of that generation would not last forever, of course; the aging process would finally bring back to the fold the majority of demonstrators, militants, and heroes of that rebellious era. In the meantime, though, the need to establish links between the “here” and “there,” present and future, political position and lifestyle, would permeate the thinking of the generation of 1968, and of Che Guevara.

  The young people of Paris and Berkeley wanted both revolution in their own countries and neighborhoods, and solidarity with Vietnam and Cuba. Che proposed to forge a new man in Cuba, while also fighting for the liberation of the former Belgian Congo. The students sought to change life itself—not just the political sphere: to overthrow customs, manners, tastes, and taboos—without waiting for the glorious new dawn or the “building of socialism.” Guevara, through his volunteer work, personal asceticism, and international solidarity, tried to link the individual efforts of today with the social and political Utopia he envisaged for the future. And his strangely apolitical stance as a university student would extend into his stature as a nonpolitical politician. If a generation that was both highly politicized and disgusted with its parents’ politics came to see itself in him, it was because of that paradox. Che was never, strictly speaking, a politician.

  Similarly, the other guiding principle in Che’s life—his eternal avoidance of ambivalence, which would pursue him like a shadow from his childhood asthma to Ñancahuazú—coincided with the attitudes of an era. The sixties rejected life’s contradictions: theirs was a perpetual fuite en avant of much of that first postwar generation, that repeatedly fled contradictory feelings, desires, or political goals. The attitudes and sentiments of the protesters of the sixties could hardly tolerate shades of gray, nuances, realism, and coexisting opposites; the times and the nature of the struggles—against segregation in the American South, against the Vietnam war or barracks-style mass education in France and Italy, against Soviet-style socialism in Czechoslovakia, and benign or not-so-nice dictatorships in Latin America—that gave birth to their protests were largely incompatible with moderate, reasonable, “on the one hand this, but on the other hand that” views of the world. Yet Che, like the young of the sixties, possessed a hidden reservoir of tolerance flowing from another well: a fascination with things and people different, that would translate into acceptance and respect for otherness.

  Doubtless, within some dark conceptual corner there lurked a monumental tangle of contradictions between Guevara’s authentic self and the persona crafted by his standard-bearers. The exorbitant demands he exacted upon himself could not be transferred onto others without a brutal imposition of authority. The new man embodied by him had no place in the world of that time, nor perhaps in any world conceivable to his contemporaries. But during the sixties, that contradiction was not perceived by the demonstrators who bore his likeness along streets throughout the world. He was seen only as a symbol of subversion, in a decade that sanctified and cultivated it.

  As several Cuban authors have noted,*1 the lasting impact of Che Guevara derives also from his identification with the subversive significance of the time. In that era of revolt, he became the emblem of three different types of subversion. The first, and most evident, was directly linked to the Cuban Revolution: it sought to overthrow the global hierarchy which would later be couched in North-South terms. It encompassed an effort, ultimately unsuccessful but plausible at the time, to invert the relationship between rich, powerful, dominant countries and small, poor, dominated ones like the Caribbean island. For the young protesting against French colonialism in Algeria in the early sixties or the U.S. bombing of Vietnam in the middle or end of the decade, the task of transforming an unjust and evil geopolitical status quo was no minor matter.

  The second subversion was rooted in the middle-class youth of the United States and then Western Europe in 1967–68: its target was nothing less than the existing domestic order. As Todd Gitlin5 and the authors of Génération6 have so aptly written, the rebellious youth of industrialized countries, in their desperate and fruitless search for positive values and models, finally found them in the opposite of their own realities. Their personal idols and political archetypes were drawn among the enemies of their enemies: first Patrice Lumumba, the Algerian FLN, and its guerrillas from the Kasbah and the desert; then Ho Chi Minh and the FLN in Vietnam; and, always, the Cuban Revolution and Che himself. Later, as the movement waned, a further retreat toward faraway figures and struggles took place. The fewer Americans, French, or Dutch Provos in the demonstrations, the more portraits of Che and proclamations of solidarity with “the people’s struggle.” The more remote revolution became at home, the more attractive the foreign ersatz—whether Algerian, Vietnamese, or Cuban.

  The third target was existing socialism, the prison gray of Stalinism associated with the crushed Prague spring, but also with the French Communist Party’s betrayal in Paris, and that of the Italian Party in Milan. Granted, Che’s affinity with this struggle was less evident, as Régis Debray has suggested: the students bearing Che posters throughout the parks and avenues of Western or Czech cities and university campuses did not know that their hero had been deeply pro-Soviet in his early revolutionary years. They neglected to see that his libertarian spirit stopped short of challenging the values of military hierarchy and leadership, denoted by his beret and star and olive-green army fatigues. Yet their perception of him was not entirely inaccurate: Che’s spirit, theses, and behavior toward the end of his life constituted a ferocious and well-directed critique of Soviet-bloc socialism and its implantation in Cuba.

  But it was his death itself that counted most in the creation of the myth, and in the construction of the consonance between the man and the time. From early October 1967, when the first news stories of his capture and execution began to filter out of Bolivia, through the summer of 1968, when his campaign diary was surreptitiously removed from that country and subsequently published in Ramp
arts magazine in the United States, by François Maspéro in France and Feltrinelli in Italy, and by Arnaldo Orfila and Siglo XXI in Mexico, every detail, every last minute of Guevara’s life fit into the mold of the myth. It is a death worth reliving.

  Initially, Che did not believe the reports regarding the annihilation of Joaquin’s rearguard patrol at Vado del Yeso. In his journal he noted that the reports could well stem from government propaganda or disinformation, although as more specifics surfaced he gradually seemed to resign himself to the group’s loss. Pombo, one of the three survivors of the Bolivian escapade, has stated on various occasions that Che finally did accept the truth of the elimination of Tania and the rest*2; Benigno, another survivor, is less categorical.†1 What seems indisputable is that Che did not consider the loss of his rearguard as an event that wrought irreparable damage to his campaign. Nor did it induce him to find a way out of Bolivia or the region, rather than persevering in his endeavor. At no point in his diary or in the testimony of the three survivors (Urbano, or Leonel Tamayo, is the third living Cuban member of the group; Inti Peredo also survived, but died two years later in La Paz) does Guevara indicate a desire to wrap matters up and escape from the deathtrap closing around him.

  Through the month of September the small group of guerrillas—now numbering between twenty and twenty-five, depending on the day—beset by illness, fatigue, malnutrition, and dissension, wandered northwest from the Rio Grande toward the villages of Pucará and La Higuera, not far from the larger town of Vallegrande. There the Eighth Division of the Bolivian army had established its headquarters, bent on sealing off any escape route to the southeast, across the river. Together with the Fourth Division from Camiri, they had boxed Che in: the Rio Grande to the southeast, canyons and gorges to the east and west, and Vallegrande and thousands of troops to the north. From Vallegrande also, the Second Ranger Battalion, whipped into shape by Pappy Shelton and the couple of CIA Cuban operatives dispatched from the United States, would soon undertake the pursuit and extermination of the rebel band. The Bolivian Rangers were not quite ready in early September; not till midmonth were they truly able to participate in the hunt, and even then they were probably thrown in prematurely. Fully trained or not, by the end of September more than 1,500 troops were completely devoted to catching Che and his companions; it was just a matter of time.