Latin America Diaries

by Ernesto Che Guevara

  Nothing new to write, except that another year is over. As usual, Hilda got angry because I didn’t want to go with her to a party; I spent New Year’s Eve on watch at the OAS building. Nothing new to relate. The Agencia Latina hasn’t paid me, perhaps they won’t pay for a while, because the dough comes, or rather doesn’t, all the way from Buenos Aires.

  Today I feel like the good old grandfather who deals out sensible advice; El Patojo went off to Guatemala with his “jerk” of a brother. This was the result of a conversation in which I said he was running away from something, and not fighting, as he was claiming in a letter to his mother that he read to me; the next day he decided to leave, and a little bit later his brother went off to join him.

  Besides the cash he’d lent me earlier, I gave him 150 pesos more, which Piaza lent me. My situation is strange because I’m counting on the salary of the Agencia Latina and they keep stringing me along with very vague promises. In the scientific field, I have great hopes, but nothing has yet materialized. I started studying how to do electrophoresis with filter paper, and I hope to start working on it in a week or two. I’m writing home very little so I don’t know much of what’s happening there.

  I now have my first month’s pay and have already spent it, apart from what I haven’t paid for but still owe. I’m not too worried because alongside Dr. Cortés, I have a patient who pays 20 pesos per consult, which happens every four days, meaning I’ll have enough to eat until the next payment from the Agencia Latina. I’m on good terms with the agency, despite the fact that Dr. Pérez has taped up my mouth. I’m trying to persuade him (as a joke) to send me to see [President] José Figueres in Costa Rica. No news from El Patojo, or from home, just a Peruvian student who wrote asking for my opinion on the fall of Guatemala. The scientific work has been held up because of my unstable situation; I have to leave the house and don’t know where to go.

  The housing problem is still unresolved, and in every sense I’m pretty much living on air. My homemade electrophoresis machine works slowly, while the other work is virtually at a standstill. Dr. Cortés and I are looking after a patient who I believe should improve rapidly; I charge her 20 pesos a consult. I hope the coming week will be eventful […].

  My patient’s condition worsened. I did some further tests and she is sensitive to various foods, so I have taken her off them. Despite everything I still have no money, and there’s no way of making ends meet […]. The Agencia Latina doesn’t pay on time, which really pisses me off. As for the big projects, no news. Tomorrow I’ll finish the article on Guatemala they asked for, then dedicate the week to writing letters, as I’m very behind with correspondence.

  Everything is up in the air—these are days of uncertainty. I was paid for January and have already spent it (we’re now at the end of February). Now that the Pan-American Games91 are approaching, I’ll have to work like a slave and put hospital work to the side. My patient is stable, exactly where I left her. I think I have broken with Hilda for good after a melodramatic scene. I fancy a girl who’s a chemist: she’s not particularly intelligent and fairly ignorant, but she has an appealing freshness and fantastic eyes. I’ll present a paper at the Allergy Congress in April on cutaneous tests with food digestion.

  More than a month has passed since my last entry. Much has happened, or not that much, depending on your perspective. The Pan-American Games were a shitload of work, and just when it seemed there would be no compensation a promise came through that I would get some. Almost simultaneously the inexplicable news came that the Agencia Latina was folding with the inevitable anguish about money. Now it seems they will pay me the two months they owe, plus three months’ redundancy, and 2,000 pesos for the photos. This will be something like 5,000 pesos in all, which would come in handy and allow me to pay off some debts, travel around Mexico and then get the hell out of here.

  The work was not pleasant, but I did make two good friends: Fernando Margolles and Severino Rossell, “El Guajiro.”92 I’m living in a new place and, as usual, I’m having trouble paying the rent. […]

  Scientifically, I’ve promised to finish a paper for the Allergy Congress, which I think I can do. They have invited me to Nuevo Laredo, near the border with the gringos, but it would be for two years’ work and I’m not up for it. My plans are simpler: Until March I’ll do the allergy work and present the paper; in May, June and July I’ll travel around Mexico from north to south and east to west; in July-August I’ll go to Veracruz and wait for a ship to Cuba or Europe; if that’s not possible, I’ll be in Caracas by December. We’ll see how it all works out.

  A lot of water has passed under my bridge. […] I’m now an intern at the hospital. It happened like this: I went to León, Guanajuato, and presented my paper, “Cutaneous Investigations with Semi-Digested Food Antigens.”93 The paper was a minor success, and Salazar Mallén, head of Mexican allergy research, commented on it. It will now be published in the journal Alergia. Salazar Mallén promised me some financial help for research work and a position as an intern at the General Hospital, but that remains to be seen.

  Nothing definite on the payment from the Agencia Latina. Other news worth noting is that I’ve got myself on the Mexican electoral role, thanks to the total lack of controls here. You just show up, give a name and address, and that’s it. That’s elections for you.

  In Guanajuato I saw the famous short farces based on Cervantes, performed by local amateur players, against the backdrop of a church. Most of the actors lacked class, but the scenery was so real that it didn’t matter.

  After many adventures I am now established at the General Hospital and working fairly hard, although without much structure. The food is not great: if I eat it I get asthma, if I don’t I go hungry. Salazar Mallén pays me 150 pesos […]. The Agencia Latina says it will pay up, meaning around 5,000 pesos—we’ll see if it’s true. Together with Hilda, I spend my time getting to know the area around Mexico City. We’ve been to see some magnificent Rivera frescoes at an agricultural school, and also visited Puebla.

  Both good and bad things have been happening. I still don’t know what the future will bring. The Agencia Latina paid, but not all of it, leaving me only 2,000 pesos to pay some bills and buy some presents. I was invited to the Youth Festival but would have had to pay my own way; and as I was still counting on the money I announced far and wide that I was planning to go to Spain on July 8. Now it’s all come to nothing and I’m going ahead with my plan to travel around Mexico after September 1. As a sporting event, I should mention the ascent of Popocatépetl’s lower slopes by an ad hoc group of valiant Andinistas (including myself). It’s wonderful and I’d like to make a habit of it. Pascual Lozano, the Venezuelan, fell behind a little before the end, even though we helped him along for the final stage. Another event has been the revolution in Argentina, which fills me with unease because my brother is in the marine corps.

  A comic event was my invitation to take Hilda and a Peruvian friend to a football match. The game began smoothly with flares and ended with buckets of shit, and all three of us took hits […].

  One political event was a meeting with Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, an intelligent, young fellow who is very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well.94

  A sporting event was our failed attempt to climb “Popo.” We stopped a few meters from the top because Margolles’s feet were frozen and he was afraid to continue.

  A tourist event was Margolles’s departure for the United States.

  A scientific event was the appearance of my first medical paper as sole author, in the journal Alergia: “Cutaneous Investigations with Semi-Digested Food Antigens”; passable.

  In physiology, I have become a cat surgeon.

  Months have now passed. I’m happily married to Hilda; we’ve moved house and everything points toward some pleasant months contemplating the future.95

  Politically, Perón’s fall—almost inglorious—is important to note, and the seizure of power by a mi
litary clique with ties to the clergy and the centrist parties. I’m a little more focused on my studies: reading only on allergies and studying a bit of English and algebra. I’m researching only three matters, with another one maybe in the future: histamines in the blood, histamines in tubercular lung tissue and progesterone in relation to histamines. I am thinking of doing some serum electrophoresis. On another topic, I’ve bought a camera to replace the one that was stolen, and I’m learning to touch-type. I still don’t know whether I’ll get work at the United Nations; the idea repels me but the money is attractive.

  Not a lot to add except that finally I made it to the top of “Popo.” It was an easy climb, almost without a hitch, and we reached the lower slope by 6:30 a.m. (we didn’t climb any higher). But I couldn’t get any decent photos because of the thick fog. I want to get to the Yucatán soon to explore the whole Mayan region. No political news, except for my family’s incendiary letters that get stuck into me for supporting Perón against the liberators.96

  I went to a meeting to discuss Perón’s fall where the reporter was a Sr. Orfila; I later learned that much of his fury against Perón was due to squabbles Perón had had with the Fondo de Cultura Económica (of which Orfila was director).97 Things were going well until late in the meeting, when he laid into the compañeros and I jumped up to give the gentleman a piece of my mind. But I was quite angry and couldn’t get my words out; in the end I proposed that any congratulatory note should wait until the government had achieved something concrete, like democracy for the trade unions and within the economy. Orfila asserted that they couldn’t pay attention to “secondary matters such as exchange controls.” The socialists are headed for the shit heap.

  I have done that trip around the south-east of Mexico I was always going on about, managing to cover the Mayan region, at least superficially. We went to Veracruz by train, a thoroughly uninteresting trip. Veracruz is a small and fairly lifeless port, with all the characteristics of a little town of Spanish descent. The beaches are small, dirty and flat; the sea is lukewarm.

  We came across an Argentine ship, El Granadero, and I managed to get a few kilos of mate out of them. Boca del Río is a small fishing town some 10 kilometers south of Veracruz, where I went to watch a day’s fishing on La Tonina, Rosendo Rosado’s boat. The lives and problems facing the fishing community are very interesting.

  After five days in Veracruz, we went south by bus. We spent the first night at Lake Catemaco, but it was raining so we couldn’t visit the lake itself. Then we proceeded on and spent a night at Coatzacoalcos, a fairly important seaport on a river of the same name.

  I arrived with asthma. The next day we crossed the river. On the far side is Allende, and from there we took a train to Palenque, arriving at the station by night and taking a jeep to the hotel.

  The ruins of Palenque are magnificent. The center of the city is on a hillside, from which it spreads out over four to six kilometers into the middle of the forest. It is still unexplored, although the extent of the site that is surrounded by thick vegetation is clear.

  They have been almost totally neglected by the authorities. It took them almost four years to clean up the main tomb, one of the archaeological jewels of all the Americas. With the proper equipment and personnel they could have done it in three months. The main buildings are the Palace, with its collection of galleries and patios, their stone engravings and stucco arrises, of high artistic quality, and the Temple of the Inscriptions, also known as the Tomb, so called because its main feature is a burial place, the only one of its kind in Latin America. It is entered from the top of the pyramid, descending through a long tunnel with a trapezoidal roof, leading into a wide chamber where there is a monolithic tombstone 3.8 meters long, 2.2 meters wide and some 27 centimeters thick, adorned with hieroglyphs representing the sun, the moon and the planet Venus. Beneath the tombstone is a catafalque, a single piece cut from a stone block, which contained the body of someone important.

  There are ornaments of different sizes, all worked in jade. Palenque is known for the beauty and delicacy of its bas-reliefs and stuccowork, which were achieved with a technique that was lost with the later advance of the Third Empire in which the Toltec influence was beginning to appear (with the work becoming more monumental and less sculptural).

  The sculptural motifs of Palenque are more human than those of the Aztecs or Toltecs and generally depict full human figures engaged in historic events or rituals together with the main gods of their Olympus: the sun, the moon, Venus, water, etc.

  According to the US archaeologist Morley’s classification, Palenque is a category-two population center in the Mayan realm. (He gave category one status only to Copán, Tikal, Uxmal and Chichén-Itzá.) Archaeological research reveals that Palenque raised monuments in the first quarter of the baktún 9 (AD 435-534), more or less contemporaneous with Piedras Negras, the other artistic center of the empire. Both flourished during the First Empire. There are 19 category-two cities in Morley’s classification, although recent research is lending more significance to Palenque. Whether this city is category one or not, it’s undeniable that this is the city where Mayan stuccowork achieved the greatest development in terms of its technique and artistic quality.

  We left Palenque at night and took a train south-east to the small port of Campeche, where we spent a day. There’s not a lot to see, just the ruins of some fortresses built as a defense against pirates. Two hours on a bus took us to Mérida, a fairly large town for its kind but with a very provincial feeling. Mérida is not a seaport, and it seems like a town 500 kilometers (not just 30) from the sea. It gets quite cool at night considering the heat during the day. The museum is badly presented and resourced, but it does have some interesting things. Mérida’s principal attractions are the ruined Mayan cities in the vicinity, of which we visited two of the most important: Uxmal and Chichén-Itzá.

  According to the legend of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Chichén-Itzá was discovered and populated by the Mayas during their expansion in about the fourth century, although the oldest date that can be read with any certainty corresponds to AD 878. It was a period when the cities of the old empire were being abandoned, and work on Chichén-Itzá began within the framework of the new empire. The Itza [people] had withdrawn from the city in 692 and settled in the Campeche region. Later, the Mayan renaissance, spanning roughly two centuries from 997 to 1194, saw the rise of the Mayapán League and the construction of the monuments we see today, with their Chac-Mool and plumed serpents, although the foundations they were built on belong to the earlier Mayan period. The resurgence was the result of the apparently peaceful Quetzalcoatl invasion from Mexico’s central plains, which brought the eagle and the serpent that are the central emblems of that region. The decline of Chichén-Itzá began when it lost the civil war with Mayapán, these two, plus Uxmal, having made up the governing trio of the Mayan confederation. Mayapán called on Mexican mercenary warriors for support and destroyed the power of its opponents, carrying them off to live in its midst. Then in 1441 any kind of centralized government in the north of Yucatán seems to have collapsed, as civil war broke the hegemony of the Mayapán House of Cocomina.

  So to begin with a description of its temples and other structures: The first is the Sacrificial Cave, situated in the north of the city and today filled with greenish water. On its south side it has a small altar off which the victims were probably thrown, along with ceremonial objects. Despite the quantity already plundered from the waters, the jewelry still safe beneath the water must be fabulous. The cave is 40-60 meters wide, 10 meters high and 20 meters deep. There is another cave on the south side, called Xtoloc, from which drinking water was drawn, but unlike the Sacrificial Cave, in this case the descent is via a gently sloping ramp that reaches the water’s edge. The so-called Castle, the city’s great pyramid, is more than 500 meters to the south, with a main bridge that overlooks the cave; the two are joined by a causeway six meters wide and five meters above the ground. The Castle is possibly t
he oldest of the temples still standing; it has 91 steps on each side, a total of 364, thought to represent the days of the year, with a final step above completing the total. Crowning the structure is a poorly finished temple with few engravings, but in a tomb accessed via a covered stone ramp there are sculptures and jewels of great archaeological significance. At the bottom, a door opens on to an underground stairway, leading to the chamber that contains what Morley considered the greatest archaeological treasure in the Americas (although not in my view): a life-sized red jaguar encrusted with 43 apple-green jade discs supposedly representing the jaguar’s spots. Some 100 meters to the east lies the Temple of the Warriors, the most majestic and evocative of Chichén-Itzá’s structures, crowned with a number of colonnades featuring the plumed serpent and Chac-Mool in prime position; the latter is a reclining figure of great dignity, its feet tucked in close to its buttocks and holding a plate where offerings are placed.

  Next to the Temple of the Warriors are the columns that give the place its name, the Thousand Columns, and then a number of badly damaged structures with two or three ball courts and a steam bath. The main Ball Court, measuring 146 by 36 meters, lies a couple of hundred meters west of the Castle. Two stone hoops are still embedded in the wall through which the solid rubber balls had to be thrown, not with the hands but with elbows or knees. Legend has it that this was so difficult anyone who managed it won the right to remove all the jewelry from those present. On the east side of the Ball Court is the Temple of the Jaguars, with badly deteriorated friezes. Opposite the north face of the Castle is a series of small platforms, known as the Pines, the House of the Eagles and Tzompantli (place of the skulls, where the heads of the sacrificial victims were kept), but these have no great architectural interest. Further to the south, along the present-day road to Mérida, one finds what Morley called the Tomb of the High Priest, and Mexican anthropologists call the Ossuary. It contains a great number of offerings and is one of the few places where pearls have been found (in the new tomb at Palenque there’s one that resembles a tear drop). Today only two large heads of plumed serpents and some rectangular columns remain. Next come a number of minor temples, such as the Temple of the Stag and the Temple of Chac Mool, previously known as the Red House, and eventually one reaches the Caracol or Observatory, one of the principal structures in size and significance. The Caracol is the observatory where the Mayas conducted their astronomical research; its two vast platforms support an important building, now partly destroyed: a tower 12 meters tall that one climbs by a narrow spiral staircase. The rays of the sun and moon and the spring and autumn equinoxes pass through an aperture in the tower. At the southernmost point of Chichén-Itzá lies the Nunnery, a partially ruined structure with pretty border decorations and some remnants of friezes. To the east is an unpretentious structure, Akab’Dzib, which also has some small remnants of friezes.