Companero
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In November 1995, the New York Times ran a page-long article based on the statements of a retired Bolivian army general, Mario Vargas Salinas. Vargas, the architect of the ambush at Vado del Yeso, reiterated to the Times what he had stated previously, and what other Bolivian officers—such as Luis Reque Terán of the Fourth Division, in his memoirs—had been repeating for some time: contrary to the generally held belief that Che’s body had been cremated by the military, it had in fact been buried beneath the airstrip at Vallegrande. But because on this occasion it was the New York Times that published the story, it became hard news and the Bolivian government was forced to launch a search for the remains. Argentine forensic experts were flown in; later, Cuban experts descended upon the old town in the hills of southeast Bolivia. Some twenty months later, in July 1997, several bodies were discovered near the airfield at Vallegrande; one of them was officially proclaimed to be Che’s by the Cuban government, with the acquiescence of the Argentine experts, though some actors in the original drama, like Felix Rodríguez, remained skeptical.
Although it took three decades to dispel the myth that Guevara had been cremated,*9 there were always sound reasons for suspecting that he had actually been buried.†5 There is no tradition of cremation in a highly Catholic country like Bolivia; it would not have been a simple matter to carry the procedure out secretly. The funeral pyre necessary to incinerate a corpse completely is not small; in a town like Vallegrande, it would have been sighted for miles around that night of October 9, when, after having been viewed by countless correspondents, curious locals, and other spectators, Che’s body vanished. Secondly, while burial would require only a couple of strong men, lighting, fanning, and sustaining the fire necessary for cremation would have involved many more participants, one or more of whom would inevitably have come forward in the course of thirty years. No one has.
Gustavo Villoldo was absent from La Higuera on the day of Che’s execution. On the other hand, he was the leading U.S. official in Vallegrande during the two days when these events took place, and was, he firmly avers, directly responsible for the interment of the body:
I buried Che Guevara. He was never cremated; I didn’t allow it, in the same manner I strongly opposed the mutilation of his body. At dawn the following morning I hauled his body away, together with the corpses of the two other guerrillas, in a pickup truck. A Bolivian driver and a Lieutenant Barrientos, if I am not mistaken, accompanied me. We drove to the airstrip and buried the bodies there. I would recognize the site immediately. They will find his body if they keep looking. They will recognize it because of the surgically removed hands; he was not mutilated.
There is still no electricity in La Higuera; the small town is as miserable and lost in the wilderness as when Che Guevara died there thirty years ago. In this sense, his sacrifice was in vain; his impact on the lives of the forsaken and destitute peasants of southeastern Bolivia was slight and ephemeral. For its part, the Cuban Revolution, despite a brief fling with his ideas soon after his death and through the summer of 1968, quickly left Che behind; Havana’s alignment with the Soviet Union came full circle as the Prague spring came to an end. By 1970, when Fidel Castro transformed the foolhardy goal of harvesting ten million tons of sugar into a national crusade, the economic and social ideals that Che fought for were relegated to Stalinist oblivion. Finally, although Cuba’s internationalist adventures lasted through the nineties, and met with far greater success later in the century than during Che’s time, they all ended indifferently or ignominiously. So where is Che’s legacy, and what difference did he make?
While the distinctive qualities of the sixties generation endured, their link with Che Guevara enclosed an almost magical symbiosis of symbol and Zeitgeist, based upon a real affinity. That unique combination of determination and change, omnipotence and altruism, arrogance and detachment, reflected the stance of broad sectors in various rejuvenated societies and of an individual. If the masses and the movements were all so similar, then their symbols had to be too. The clue to Che’s ubiquity lies perhaps in the virtually universal nature of the protests and protesters of 1968; he came to embody the aspirations and beliefs of ’68ers in Berkeley and Prague, Mexico City and Paris, Córdoba and Berlin. There were differences, to be sure, within the varying dimensions of that homogeneity. The French students were a vanguard sector which also represented a vast, bored, and discontented middle class. In contrast, the massacred Mexican youths belonged to an exceptional, enlightened minority which was irreparably elitist and out of place in a deeply divided society. Nonetheless, it was Guevara’s idée-mère of change and the omnipotence of desire, together with the spectacular growth of public-university enrollment across the world that generated a new universality: the many in rich nations and the few in poor ones.
The figures are worth recalling. An expansion of the generations actually did take place. In 1960, there were only 16 million individuals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four in the United States; by 1970, the number had reached 25 million, a 50 percent increase in ten years.17 In France, university rolls jumped from 201,000 in 1961 to 514,000 in 1968.18 In Japan the number of universities soared from only 47 just after the war to 236 by 1960.19 The growth rate was just as high in the United States. In 1960, there were 3 million students enrolled in higher education. By August 1964 that figure had reached 4 million; it passed 5 million in 1965, and was twice that many by 1973.20 Before World War II, only 14 percent of U.S. high-school graduates attended college; by 1961 the rate grew to 38 percent and by 1971, to over 50 percent.21 In Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, three Latin American countries which saw large student uprisings during the sixties, student body expansion rates reached figures of 200 to 400 percent for the decade.22
To paraphrase the Beatles, the road was indeed a long and winding one from the early sixties, before Che’s death, to the final dismemberment of all of the movements and their drift into nostalgia and a deeper impact, long after his passing. It began with baby-boom demographics in the West and led to the explosion of public higher education around the world. It proceeded from the massing of education, demonstrations, and rebellion against in loco parentis regulations at Berkeley, Columbia, and Nanterre, to marches for civil rights in Mississippi, against the war in Vietnam, and against authoritarian rule in Mexico and Eastern Europe. It then moved on to shrill student politicization on the Boul’ Mich, proletarian general strikes in Billancourt and Milan, radical stridency on the campus, and existential revolt and “cultural” rejection of the status quo in the communes. It finally ranged from the endless debates at the Odéon in 1968 in Paris to rock, drugs, and sex at Woodstock. The passage from the political to the cultural stranded many and disappointed others, but transformed societies which otherwise might well have remained stagnant and closed.
But before leaving their more lasting cultural imprint on the world, the sixties also traced a political trail, though not necessarily the one most of the actors expected. The hubris of those deluded, exuberant young people manning the barricades was built upon an essential foundation that even today gives meaning and relevance to the era. In a sense, those arrogant partisans of a willed, radical transformation of the world were almost right. For the last occasion this century—and doubtless for a long time to come—it seemed reasonable to seek to change the order of things according to a pre-established plan, different from anything already in existence. That occasion would be followed by more successful attempts at other types of transformation: the destruction of the socialist world and the establishment of a capitalist order or the overthrow of the welfare state and the Keynesian economy. But never again would broad sectors from different societies propose to change the world starting not from a status quo ante or even other existing realities, but from a Utopian ideal: to build a world that had simply never existed before, anywhere.
In Czechoslovakia, 1968 truly did represent a last chance to change the course—and the soul—of barracks socialism. The Soviet invasion in August canceled
any possibility of reform in the Eastern bloc, in a foreclosure whose cost would become apparent twenty years later. Perhaps the Stalinist regimes were not reformable; but at that time the reformers’ hopes seemed both plausible and heroic. Similarly, the vast student and labor movements of those years in France and Italy signaled the last time that a profound transmutation of industrial society seemed at all feasible. And the fleeting hope combining optimism, joy, and social solidarity which culminated in Robert Kennedy’s presidential bid in the spring of 1968 reflected a final effort to build a more equitable and noble America. Along with Martin Luther King’s attempt to unite the civil rights movement with economic and social justice and opposition to the Vietnam war, it was perhaps the last chance for social-democracy in the United States.
The revolution imagined by the militants of the Latin Quarter did not take place, nor could it have. But the opportunities for profound change were genuine, even if they were ultimately unrealized. In the perceptive words of Eric Hobsbawm:
And if there was a single moment in the golden years after 1945 which corresponds to the simultaneous upheaval of which the revolutionaries had dreamed after 1917, it was surely 1968, when students rebelled from the USA and Mexico in the West to socialist Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, largely stimulated by the extraordinary outbreak of May 1968 in Paris, epicentre of a Continent-wide student uprising.23
But since it did not happen, the thrust of the sixties was defeated, as Che was in the barren hills of Bolivia. And so it was nearly unavoidable that if those years and their icon were to leave lasting footprints for the future, they would have to be of another nature: not political or ideological For Che and his protesting pallbearers to have constructed a political legacy, they would have had to win, somewhere, sometime, somehow. They did not—as unfair as this judgment may seem, or however uneven the playing field may have been. Even in 1968, victory was dragged out of their reach: in Bolivia and throughout Latin America, by coups and counterinsurgency strategies; in France and Italy, by significant social reform and conservative backlash; in Czechoslovakia by Brezhnev’s bayonets and doctrines; and in the United States by assassinations, excesses, and the ultimate pragmatism of an American establishment that preferred to cut its losses and acknowledge defeat in Vietnam.
So Che Guevara did not end up in a mausoleum or pharaonic square but on T-shirts, Swatches, and beer mugs. The sixties, of which he was so emblematic, did not alter the fundamental economic and political structures of the societies the young revolted against, but had their impact relegated to the more intangible confines of power and society. Given their druthers, Che and the movements he came to symbolize would have undoubtedly preferred the former course: to achieve the political revolution they fought for, one way or the other. But in the end, perhaps the true and lasting relevance of the epoch Che personified lies precisely in the other sphere: less spectacular, less immediate, less romantic; more profound and broader, just as meaningful, if not more so. Che Guevara is a cultural icon today largely because the era he typified left cultural tracks much more than political ones.
In the sixties, politics and culture converged, but culture lasted, and politics did not—which is why a European definition, after Michel Foucault, is probably more precise. The sixties mainly affected the sphere of power and powers: those infinite, meandering channels of power beyond the state that circumscribe, order, classify, and delineate human lives in modern societies. What the sixties wrought everywhere was, first, an acknowledgment of the existence of power in society outside politics, economics, and the state; and second, the need to resist these latter powers, erode their prerogatives, question their legitimacy, deny their permanence. This is the lasting legacy of that decade, and what bestows on it the singular importance it still bears and the surprising nostalgia it evokes. It is also what made Che the perfect fit, the supreme emblem of that cultural revolt—a man whose politics were conventional but whose attitude toward power and politics attained epic and unique dimensions.
The sixties are still with us today for the same reason that Che Guevara’s likeness remains visible across the world: because they brought about an irreversible cultural insurrection in the “modern” part of the globe. Something changed in 1968, and the world would never again be quite the same. The upheaval affected relations between young and old, men and women, between sanity and madness, health and illness; between subjects and objects of power, between teachers and the taught, between black and white, even between rich and poor. Liberation of sexual mores, dress habits, musical and visual tastes; irreverence in the face of authority and, beyond, the recognition of otherness of all persuasions remain today the most outstanding bequests of the sixties. Granted, the extension to all corners of the earth of middle-class propensities in their archetypal American manifestations—jeans and rock ‘n’ roll, homogeneity and equality among those hitherto unequal—is not everyone’s Utopia. But it was better than the status quo ante, and a huge step forward for those banned from the previous tidy and exclusionary arrangements that “modern” societies worshipped.
Che can be found just where he belongs: in the niches reserved for cultural icons, for symbols of social uprisings that filter down deep into the soil of society, that sediment in its most intimate nooks and crannies. Many of us today owe the few attractive and redeeming features of our daily existence to the sixties, and Che Guevara personifies the era, if not the traits, better than anyone. Celia de la Serna’s son might not necessarily have recognized these traits as those he fought and perished for, but then even Comandante Ernesto Guevara was not allowed to write the epitaph he desired. He was only destined, like so few others in his time, to die the death he wished, and to live the life he dreamed.
*1 Two stand out: Juan Antonio Blanco, who generously shared his thoughts with the author during a conversation in Havana in January 1996, and Fernando Martínez, who among other texts on the same subject has published one with similar ideas in Actual (Havana), January 1996, pp. 5–10.
*2 “After we crossed the Rio Grande, Che really convinced himself the news of Joaquín’s death was true.” Harry Villegas, “Pombo,” interview with British journalists, Havana, October, 1995. Transcript made available to author.
†1 Felix Rodríguez, the CIA radio man sent to Bolivia to defeat Che, also recalls that during his couple of hours of conversation with Che after he was captured, Guevara said in relation to the destruction of the rearguard: “Since you are telling me this I believe it, but until now I thought it was a lie. I suspected maybe some of them had died, but that it was government propaganda that all of them had been eliminated.” Felix Rodríguez, interview with the author, Miami, April 24, 1995. It is worth noting that there are some doubts about the accuracy of Rodríguez’s assertions. Gustavo Villoldo, his superior in Bolivia, states for example that “Che was in the little room in the schoolhouse, and Felix was outside photographing the captured materiel. Felix did not talk with Che, and was not there when he was killed.” Gustavo Villoldo, interview with the author, Miami, November 27, 1995.
*3 Edwin Chacón, “Reportaje de Alto Seco,” Presencia (La Paz), October 4, 1967, quoted in AmEmbassy La Paz to Department of State, October 4, 1967 (Unclassified), p. 3. Actually, his physical state had improved over the previous days; according to Benigno, he had been getting better for nearly a fortnight. Benigno, interview with the author, Paris, November 3, 1995.
*4 For some strange reason, the official Cuban version of events rejects the idea that the army ambushed Che’s group; the Cubans insist that what took place was a firefight between two forces. In a sense they are right; the skirmish was not totally unexpected by Che and his men. See Fidel Castro, televised speech to the nation, Havana, October 15, 1967, and Pombo, Benigno, and Urbano, “La Quebrada del Yuro,” Recuerdos de un combate, Tricontinental (Havana), July–October, 1960, p. 113.
†2 The account is based on the Bolivian military’s reports, mainly Gary Prado’s, quoted above; on those of the three survivi
ng guerrillas, referred to in the previous note; and on Fidel Castro’s speech to the nation in Cuba, also referred to in the previous note.
*5 This version was propagated by General Alfredo Ovando, in his initial statements after the battle, whereby he claimed that Che had died in combat. See Carlos Soria Galvarro, ed., El Che en Bolivia, Documentos y Testimonios, vol. 2 (La Paz: Cedoin, 1993), p. 91.
†3 This account was supplied by Antonio Arguedas, Bolivia’s minister of the interior, who would subsequently flee Bolivia and deliver Che’s diary to Fidel Castro in 1968. Arguedas was originally a CIA asset, as confirmed to the author by a source in the CIA at the time, but also close to the Cubans, to whom he went over definitively after Che’s death. See Soria Galvarro, El Che en Bolivia, vol. 2, p. 111.
*6 “I have to rely on memory, but I do not remember any contact with Barrientos (or for that matter any Bolivian—Armed Forces or civilian) on October 8, 1967, nor on any of the succeeding days. My recollection is that no member of the Bolivian Government gave me information about Guevara’s capture and execution. I have ascribed this silence to my strong opposition to the proposed execution of Debray.” Douglas Henderson, letter to the author, December 1, 1995.