by Ciro Bustos
A few days later an envelope arrived containing a literary review heralding the imminent appearance of several biographies of Che, including those of Anderson, Taibo II and Castañeda, all very serious and impeccable in intent. However, the accompanying letter – and I have it here in front of me – showed Castañeda’s bad faith. By a ‘slip of the finger’ it starts: ‘Ambigo Bustos’. Two days later he called a second time, but I still refused: I cannot talk about a crucial period of my life down a piece of wire with a stranger at the other end. He said he had no option but to be guided by Debray’s version of events which blamed me for everything. I replied that a good biography investigates the truth; it does not parrot abusive versions. With his material already at the printers, Castañeda never called back, although in his book he insists that he tried to contact me for a whole year: swine of a feather end up together. When he became Mexican foreign minister, I sent him a letter suggesting he use his influence to get nearer the truth. I addressed it to ‘Señor Minestro’, but he must not have received it.
The weakest of the biographers, Pierre Kalfon, does nothing but parrot infamies, and does not even bother to stop and check dates. His sensitivity has also been contaminated by the bad air of Buenos Aires, where he lived for some years breathing in the complex atmosphere of the Argentine Left, which was sidelined by history and devoted itself to selling T-shirts. A letter of mine to ‘Kalfon Quitado’ circled the world for nearly a year without anyone being willing to publish it, until Cholo managed to get it published by Diogenes, a cultural journal in Mendoza.
Another biography, by Paco Taibo II, is much ‘cleaner’, although it does have some imprecise and fictitious moments. In the first Spanish edition, he mentions an anecdote told to him by Juan Gelman about a certain Lieutenant Laureano who asked him to take a report to Che who, caught off guard by this poet that he admired, accepts it saying ‘Let’s suppose a Lieutenant Laureano who is sending me this report exists …’. In Taibo’s book, the one closest to the Cuban version of events, the hand of that great weaver of tales Barbaroja Piñeiro emerges. Hence, Cuba organized everything in Bolivia, before and after Salta, as part of its strategic plan for the continent, to give us (the EGP) cover, using the same Communist Party people later mobilized (for Che): the Peredo brothers, Loyola Guzmán, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. Apart from the schoolteacher in La Paz and Don Benito in the finca, only Loro Vázquez Viaña and Rodolfo Saldaña helped us. Even Fidel himself declared ‘it was his operation’ (Che’s, that is), ‘which he planned to join at the second stage’. Taibo’s version of events is the Cuban official version: it does not include all those who took part and includes some who did not. I make an appearance only in its thirty-fifth edition in Spanish (it was a huge commercial success), six years after Anderson’s book had taken the lid off the pot.
But the efforts of the Cubans in the Americas Department to Peronize our experience do not stop there, despite testimonies to the contrary. For over a year, I replied by fax to the questions of a ‘historian’ who reached me by phone ‘on behalf of’ my compañeros in the EGP. He solemnly swore that it was time to write the truth and pay tribute to those who had died in that utopian adventure. Technology is a chilly but irrefutable witness. I have kept all his faxes, in his handwriting, and all my frank and detailed answers in which I recount the secret history of the EGP. In response to particular questions, I stressed that we worked exclusively with young people disenchanted with the Communist Party and groups that had split off from the party. Che gave express orders that no Peronists were to be accepted. Before the author of the book The Lost Origins of the Argentine Guerrillas wiped my name from the list of participants in the Salta operation, he used part of my written statements to describe Masetti’s confrontation with the Communist Party, but only up to the point where they began to contradict Barbaroja’s version: that moment when the guerrillas were miraculously supported by grass-roots Peronism and financed by Cooke’s group, while Masetti had an attack of anti-semitism and began shooting Jews just for being Jews – a fallacy I had specifically rejected in my dealings with the book’s author, Señor Gabriel Roth.
There is another more recent biography by the Argentine writer Pacho O’Donnell, who rang me twice from Buenos Aires. I used the same arguments with him but agreed to answer some concrete questions. I haven’t got his book but I don’t think he could have said much with so little. Of course, there must be hundreds of biographical essays that I don’t know about. I’m sure they all claim to tell the truth but they probably all do the opposite by accepting as valid the strategic manipulations of ‘revolutionaries’ or the deformations the enemy uses to further its own interests.
Sometimes they commit infantile errors, as in the case of a quite serious and respected Italian, Roberto Massari, who made a fool of himself when, as an example of the moral decline of Che’s guerrillas, he wrote that one compañero beat another to death with a rifle butt in a quarrel over food. The ‘person’ in question was actually Lolo, the deer the guerrillas had adopted as a pet, as Che notes in his diary on 30 April: ‘Lolo died, a victim of Urbano’s impulsiveness when he threw a rifle at its head.’ No mention of food.
These tales are all a continuation of the distortion that began in Camiri, encouraged by official Cuban silence, furthered by others who wanted to show off, and those whose tongues loosened as the general line of deception took shape. It made it possible for Comandante Jorge Papito Serguera, our Cuban support in Czechoslovakia and Algeria, to invent in his memoirs the story that he had gone to Argentina on Che’s orders to save Masetti, and had then searched for his body for two months with the help of ‘two Catholic nuns who travelled round the area’, but found no trace of him. At a time when Che summoned me to Havana and told me to carry on with our work, and when he had two first-class Cuban officers like Papi and Furry who knew the region as well as I did, it was unlikely Che would introduce somebody new to the area, an ex-diplomat in combat zones in Africa.
It was even harder to believe that he would use Serguera as an intermediary with Perón, to try and convince the general that it would be a good idea for him to live in Cuba, as he claims. The abundance of fantasies of this kind are no more than politically expedient lies that change the letter and spirit of the slogan: lying (the truth) is revolutionary.
Left-dependency syndrome
The institutionalized lie produced a sequence of secondary effects that disempowered the Argentine intellectual Left, incapable of overcoming the vertical functioning of a party that had conditioned their reflexes and even their respiratory system all their lives. Arguably, they denied and eradicated the significance of the attempt to establish a guerrilla base, planned and led by the only Argentine to have taken part in an exemplary revolutionary triumph, as the Cuba of Fidel and his barbudos undoubtedly was. It not only disappeared from the analyses of national politics, but also from the chronologies of social and political events in the last half of the century. The EGP had turned the needle to the magnetic pole of armed action, fighting imperialism and abandoning the electoral discourses and doctrinal adjustments of the Central Committee, yet they were deleted from history as if none of them had ever existed, as if there had been no real people among the dead, the prisoners or the survivors.
The ridiculous eulogies or criticisms ranged from memories of scouts at weekend camp to the agonies of a generation that bathed a transitional period of world history in their blood, providing the pretext for a savage genocide organized by the traditional power elite, and which achieved nothing but their own disappearance. Yet the experience of the EGP is not even acknowledged as having been at the heart of that tremendous mess. On the contrary, it is ignored or mentioned in passing as a crazy petty-bourgeois adventure, born in the cafés of Corrientes Avenue, where the sacrificial lambs gathered with their backpacks and boots and incipient beards, according to the Communist Party’s shameful version.
I am not making it up. One night in a Stockholm taxi going out with fri
ends to eat gnocchi, I silenced a refugee from the Argentine Communist Party who was trying to mock the EGP enterprise (apropos of what exactly I don’t remember), without knowing me or that I had been there.
In a country with a passion for investigating, analyzing, dissecting, reconstructing and, in the worst case scenario, carrying out autopsies on political events in order to apportion blame, no one, not participants, researchers or writers, took the trouble to examine the sacrifice behind the utopia sought by a group of young idealists united by Che’s aura. A collective amnesia (except for compañeros and poets) accepted the black hole decreed in Havana for the Salta events as a non-existent or hard to prove phenomenon which it was better to keep quiet about until all the martyrs had been given their last rites.
For thirty years, the official historians of the Left remembered the events as purely marginal, referring only to military errors and executions, and the futility of voluntarism outside the norms of the labour movement (norms always interpreted correctly by the lucid Left). The ‘serious’ militants and intellectuals of the united Left abandoned their critical faculties and adopted the two faces of the same fallacy. First, that criticism should only be done internally – something that can never be done without finding the critic’s bones in the dungeons, so it is not done. Second, that you must not give succour to the enemy by airing internal mistakes. So that, compañeros, is that!
It was terrifying to watch the pathetic spectacle of old, honest, fiery communists after the collapse of the socialist camp, and the morphing of the Soviet Union Communist Party secretariat into gangsters taking over the reins of the Russian economy: nothing has happened; it is merely a cybernetic illusion; the cause and the party will be reborn and, opportunely, bring order to the chaos of the capitalist catastrophe.
Until the day my brother Avelino died (just before we were to meet again), he yearned for the unstoppable offensive of the Red Army that once liberated the world from Nazism, and the iron hand that guided our brothers-in-arms to victory (with 25 million dead of their own). For him, the fact that although Cubans live in shared poverty, they can all read in the waiting rooms of free hospitals, was the only tangible victory of the long-suffering human race.
Acknowledgements
To Richard Gott, who said I did not need anyone’s help in writing this book.
To the poet Juan Gelman, who on reading the first few chapters dissipated my fears and gave me enormous encouragement, as well as the pleasure of seeing him again after thirty years.
To the writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, who praised those same chapters and supported me by writing an article even though he did not know me.
To Lidia Balta and Claudio Verdugo in Chile, for thirty years of unwavering friendship.
To Eric Gandini and Tarik Saleh, who made the idea of this book possible.
To Isaac Marchevsky, El Cholo, reader-in-chief and friend, who has supported me politically and morally the whole time from New York, analysing the book’s progress every step of the way.
To René Borda, my ‘cybernetic’ friend, a member of my Bolivian family here in Malmö, in charge of my computer, which (as everybody knows) makes everything disappear, including René, at the slightest lapse in concentration.
To Juan Carlos Peirone, Jonás, artist and architect of the largest group of Argentine friends in Lund, ‘Córdoban capital’.
To all those who have been loyal friends, whether readers of these pages as they evolved or not. To Magali Calderón and family, Jaime Padilla, Jorge Varas, María Udriot, María Dahl and her family, Nina Olsson-Borda, Beto Carbonari and Graciela Ratti who always offered their warm hospitality. To Diana Mulinari, who printed copies of the original when it was ready; and to La Negra Amanda Peralta, who made pertinent observations when the original manuscript was about to become a book.
To Alberto Szpunberg and the compañeros.
To my beloved dog, Gema, who did not see the book completed.
Copyright
This English-language edition published by Verso 2013
Translation © Ann Wright 2013
First published as El Che Quiere Verte
© Javier Vergara 2007
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-096-4
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bustos, Ciro Roberto.
[Che quiere verte. English]
Che wants to see you : the untold story of Che in Bolivia / Ciro Bustos; Translated by Ann Wright; With an Introduction by Jon Lee Anderson.
pages cm
“This English-language edition published by Verso 2013. First published as El Che Quiere Verte.”
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-781-68336-1 (e-book)
1. Guevara, Che, 1928-1967. 2. Guerrillas–Bolivia–History–20th century. 3. Bolivia–History–1938-1982. I. Title.
F2849.22.G85B8713 2013
980.03’5092–dc23
2013005819
Typeset in Fournier by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Vail