The Soviet parties, born in the thirties and taking their cues from Moscow like a conditioned reflex, had since 1965 chosen a nonviolent line of working within the political processes. The line matched the Soviets' interest, in the second half of the twentieth century, in respectability, diplomatic relations, and trade treaties with Latin governments. For the Cubans this was anathema. Out to "revolutionize" Latin America, they were convinced it could be done only through violent overthrow of the present states.
As they sat there under the waning sun, as the year was about to turn so fatally, Monje laid down his demands. The Communist Party would take part if: (1) Bolivian Communists who followed the Peking line were not allowed to participate; (2) the military and political direction was in the hands of the Soviet-line party; and (3) Che solicited the help of all the Communist parties of Latin America.
Che was furious. Why had Monje come at all? He was particularly enraged by party leadership demands. Che would never give up direction of the movement, never!
Before he left, never to return, Monje then met privately for two hours with the fifteen Bolivians fighting with the movement and told them what Che had said. Camba told me, as this tale spun itself out, "Che warned Monje that if the Communists would not enter the movement, they would accept other non-Communists. Monje could not accept that either. We thought he should enter under the guerrilla movement in order to seize the directorate later. But Monje said that even if they took part, they wouldn't be given political leadership. He always stressed the political must dominate the military. Che thought the other way."
Why had the Bolivians, most of them Communist Party members, stuck it out?
"Bueno ..." Camba said. "Well ... we wanted the revolution the fastest possible way. We didn't want to die for the old ideas but for something more radical. Now we realize the party was right. You can't get thirty men to fight in the front lines unless it's for political reasons."
These may seem esoteric arguments -- theology debates -- but they were crucially important: It was this bitter division that sealed Che's fate in Bolivia and sealed, in effect, Cuba's attempt to "revolutionize" a Latin America that was not so ripe or rotten a fruit after all.
In real terms it meant that without anyone in the cities to provide information, support, and supplies, the movement became isolated and lost in the vast green forests and mountains of Bolivia. At the end they literally lost each other among the trees in a strange and lethal minuet of the blind. The guerrillas had no representatives anywhere. A press release on their activities took more than a month to reach nearby Cochabamba. At one point Che wrote in his diary, "I receive everything [from Havana] by radio, but it is useless if you don't communicate simultaneously with La Paz." He had to communicate with La Paz through Havana!
This information I put together through Paco and Camba and Debray, as well as other sources elsewhere, but I also learned of the sense of hopelessness of the entire venture from someone else - - Ciro Bustos, the Argentine Communist artist also captured with and held with Debray. As it happened, I was in the casino the second day interviewing the Bolivians when Bustos walked out of his room. He was a tall, sad-eyed, balding man who always wore a slightly desperate air about him. The Bolivians, kind as always, were letting him make extra money by allowing townspeople in for Bustos to draw their caricatures. I immediately asked permission for my caricature to be done, and permission was duly granted.
All of my interviews had been with the accompaniment of either an American Special Forces officer, or, if in Spanish, a Bolivian officer. This was my one chance to be totally alone -- for long periods of time -- with one of the principals. The first day Bustos worked on my caricature, which I still have, for two and a half hours. Every once in a while one of the officers came and looked in the window, smiling.
At that moment, of course, we were there unspeaking, I on a high stool, Bustos working assiduously behind the easel.' All of the rest of the time ... we talked feverishly.
At the end of the first day Bustos feigned artistic temperament, threw up his hands in the presence of the officer who had come to get me, gazed with darkened brows on his work, and crumpled it up in front of all of us.
"What are you doing?" I cried, like a benighted heroine of old, almost on cue.
"It is awful, awful," he cried out in answer. "We must do it over again." That meant three more hours of talk the next day.
As I sat there the next day on the high stool and he stood there wrinkling his brow and swiping at the paper with a piece of chalk, he talked freely. "Che did everything wrong," he began. "I myself couldn't understand it. After one attack, we stayed twelve days in the base camp, instead of moving. Twelve days! And then we returned to the place of the ambush." He paused and shook his head, as if in physical pain.
What, I probed, did Debray really think? "Debray agrees," he answered. "When I was in prison at the time of the death of Che and heard him saying that that wouldn't stop the revolution, I was bewildered. To me, it was the end. I was in total disagreement. Then I realized he was saying that for political reasons. There were many errors in everything. It was almost unbelievable. There were no political ties with the city. I said something to Che once about the political liaison, and he said ironically, 'Yes, we have three people.' He didn't seem to want it. There was no support at all."
But the biggest problem he outlined was the one I had already seen in my interview with Debray. "Because of Che's vision of the revolution as continental, because of this, he didn't see the weak nesses of choosing Bolivia," he said. "He underestimated Bolivia -- the army, the will, the nationalism. He simply didn't expect them to resist the way they did. He didn't expect the army to fight the way it did. And then there were the Cubans. They were a draw back." He shook his head. "Too many Cubans." A lot of people in the world would come to echo those words.
***
Two days later I moved on, over the mountains by small plane to Santa Cruz, a bustling "new city" on the Bolivian edge of the vast flat Chaco that spreads out to Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina. From Santa Cruz I moved up, by car, to my last stop, the mountain town of Vallegrande, where Che's body had been brought and laid out after he had been killed in the small town of La Higuera.
Vallegrande is no typical Indian town, with small plain buildings and colorfully dressed people. Nor is it a mestizo or cholo town, of mixed blood. Vallegrande is an almost pure Spanish town, with women with black shawls over their heads and a sad, desolate air about it. All pitted whitewash and restless dark shadows, Valle grande seems to be a town in perpetual mourning.
I checked into one of the hotels, a simple little place with a large, flowery patio. The room was tiny and we washed at the fountain in the patio. I soon discovered that the "legend of Che" had quite taken over this strange, anomalous backwater, fed by its dark Spanish curiosity and superstition. Picture postcards of Che in death, his eyes open, his bearded, handsome face closely resembling a drawing of Christ, were in every store window. I bought as many as I could find. The townspeople, with their dark Spanish heritage, perhaps understood much more than the rest of the world what had brought Che Guevara to Bolivia.
One night, for instance, I sat in the pleasant dining room of my little hotel with the wife of the owner. She wore her black shawl, with its echoes of Moorish times, around her head and shoulders. Why, I asked her -- and myself, for the thousandth time -- had Che come to Bolivia?
She fixed her dark olive eyes upon me. "They came looking for death," she said, unsmiling, unemotionally. "They killed many, and they found it."
The chill of those words remained with me as I went my rounds, talking to everyone from soldiers who had captured him to towns people, to the doctor who had examined him. In trying to put together the story, I, too, had become obsessed with death.
At the end, without shoes (they were not even that well prepared) and in two groups totally out of contact with each other, Che's band, including an East German agent, Tania, with whom he was having a
love affair, wandered aimlessly through the forest. The peasants, whom he himself had written must support any guerrilla movement or it would fail, had reacted only with empty stares and cryptic answers. Then, when the strange band, as strange with their beards as the Spanish Conquistadores had been to the Aztecs and Incas, had passed, the Indians informed their (Bolivian) army of the passing of the New Conquistadores.
"They are impenetrable as rocks," Che wrote finally in his diary. "When you talk to them it seems that, in the depths of their eyes, they are mocking you." Finally, too, he dropped all pretense of "inspiring" or "liberating" people, as do all totalitarians when they cannot have everything precisely their own way. By the end he was writing in his diary, "Until now, the peasants have not been mobilized, but through terrorism and intimidation, we will win them." That, I was to learn in Bolivia and many other places, is what revolution and "love of the masses" so often comes down to.
It all grew so desperate that when a peasant tried to enlist toward the end in a village of Alto Seco, Che told him bitterly, "Don't be crazy. Can't you see we're finished? We don't even know how to get out of the forest!"
Then, with the suddenness of one of the jungle storms, it was all over. The day of his capture, October 9, 1967, which was also his last day on earth, Che and seventeen guerrillas met Bolivian rangers at 1:30 p.m. in a narrow valley one mile from the remote village of La Higuera. Just before 3:00 p.m., Captain Gary Prado, tall, hawk- nosed leader of ninety rangers, suddenly found himself face to face with the "legendary" Che. Through interviews I was able to reconstruct the day:
"I am Che Guevara," the guerrilla said simply. By now he was wounded in the leg and barely able to walk.
"Show me your left hand," Captain Prado commanded, for Che had an identifying scar from the days in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. It was there.
"We did not know the rangers were going to be here," Che said, his voice wandering. "Everywhere we go, there are soldiers." Then, to Prado, "Don't worry, Captain, it's all over." Later Che recouped and said, "Don't be naive, my friend, the revolution does not have a chief. But very soon, Captain, these same soldiers that you now command are going to shoot against you."
This was more than Prado could stand. "We have a democratic army here," he told him. "We have had our own revolution. When I go out on the street at night, I go with my soldiers. They are my best friends. Why didn't you go to your own country, to Argentina. You need a revolution there."
"Maybe you're right," Che answered reflectively. The enigmatic, bittersweet smile again.
Meanwhile a Bolivian guerrilla named Willy muttered despondently, "We're just pieces of meat. They throw us here, they throw us there. Of what importance are we to anybody?" Like a Greek chorus.
Meanwhile Prado got into radio contact with the command in nearby Vallegrande. "Hello, hello," he kept repeating. "We have papa, we have papa."
"I'm papa?" Che asked, amused. "You call me papa?" For a moment the two adversaries smiled at each other.
But it was the last time he was to smile, because, unbeknownst to him, his friend, the "revolutionary" Régis Debray, was in actuality the one who had sealed Che's fate. First, when he was captured, it was he who had told the Bolivians that Che was there. Second, it was his trial, made into a worldwide spectacle for the Left, that had set the Bolivians, who after all had been invaded by these "strangers," wondering what they would do when they caught Che, whose trial could bring forth almost anything. It was decided that Bolivia could not risk bringing Che to trial -- Che would be killed when captured. And he was.
The first story was that he was killed when captured, but there were too many observers for that story to last. The second story was that he was shot in the schoolhouse at La Higuera. But I heard a third story, which I believe to be true.
One of the many people I went to see in Vallegrande was the doctor who had examined Che when he was brought on a litter to Vallegrande and who had pronounced him dead. A slight, dark-haired, serious young man, he invited me to come to his house to see "something peculiar." It was one of those truly fortuitous moments that one comes across as a journalist.
One dark night in Vallegrande I went to his house on a side street. He lived upstairs in a barely furnished room: as austere as everything else in this strange "Spanish" world. Finally he brought out a rumpled shirt, a bloody shirt. "This was Che's shirt," he told me quietly. "I took it off of him." He spread it out on the floor. "Look at these rips." There were bullet holes, yes, but there were also long slashes. He stared at me in the candlelight. I couldn't figure it out. "Che was not killed by bullets," he told me flatly, "he was killed by a bayonet to the back and by a machete." If true, it shed a grim light over the death of this obsessed man. Was it true?
I came to believe it was. First of all the doctor had nothing at all to gain from telling me this. I offered to buy the shirt -- at an exorbitant sum -- but he said he would never sell it for any amount. You could tell by the blood around some of the jagged rips and not around the others which gunshots and knife wounds had been made before death and after. But it was something I never could actually "prove."
Still curious, I began to make my own investigations into the deeper psychological "whys" of the whole Che adventure.
Most important -- absolutely crucial to the entire thing -- was the peculiar mental state of Che. It was a suicidal state, which I sensed from the moment I read about his death so far away in Russia. People who deify revolutionaries -- and this includes many journalists -- miss these things because they see every motive as clean and pure and ideological.
In the thin, parched air of Bolivia that early spring I heard story after story of Che's will to failure. But it was a supposition that I really knew to be true only when I read Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal's book The Cairo Documents, published in 1971, and then talked to him in Cairo. Egypt's Haykal, Gamal Abdel Nasser's alter ego, had seen Che in the mid-sixties just as he was about to embark upon the first part of his "revolution" adventure in Africa, just before he "disappeared" from the face of the earth. It was, of course, when the African part -- which took him to the Congo, to Brazzaville, and perhaps to other places--failed so miserably that he turned his eyes again to Latin America.
Both Nasser and Haykal were stunned by Che's mood. Well aware that he had failed miserably in Cuba as economic czar in the postrevolution days, when he bought totally useless factories in East Germany and transported them whole to a Cuban economy that had no use for them, Che kept talking about "dying," not as redemption, but, as it seems, a kind of compensation for his failures.
Nasser told him, according to Haykal's book, "If we had only the romance of the revolution without the necessary developments, it would be a catastrophe. If you don't do all those difficult and full tasks, then there will be no revolution."
Haykal writes: "Guevara replied, all his frustration showing, 'But after a revolution it is no longer the revolutionaries who do the job; it is the technocrats and the bureaucrats, and they are anti-revolution.'"
At their last meeting Guevara told Nasser that the only thing he was searching for was "where to go, where to find a place to fight for the world revolution and to accept the challenge of death."
Nasser, Haykal relates, said to him, "Why do you always talk about death? You are a young man. If necessary, we should die for the revolution, but it would be much better if we could live for the revolution."
Che did not want to "live for the revolution." I talked with the elegant, ironic Haykal in his apartment over the Nile during the Cairo Conference of 1977 and he told me that, yes, the entire talk with Che had been along these morbid lines. Che wanted to die for the revolution. Or did he? Did he perhaps want to die for himself?
***
The Cubans -- and one aristocratic Frenchman -- went to Bolivia to prove their new ideas of the "continental revolution" and of the seat of political power within the military guerrilla forces. What they did was to disprove them.
The Cubans did not understand the
ir own revolution. They believed it was waged by only a handful of courageous men in the mountains who mounted the fight against Batista. Indeed, they were the revolution's symbol. But the revolution was really waged in the cities--by the middle classes who came to despise Batista. Nor did the Cubans really care about Bolivia, that funny, beautiful little Indian country where all the tables have three legs. They looked at it in the way that the United States so often has looked upon little throwaway countries -- not as nations of intrinsic value, but strategically, manipulatively.
Bolivia was simply a stepping-stone to new, Bolivarian-Castroite glory. The first domino. Bolivia was a means and not an end to them, just as Vietnam was--at the same time -- to the United States, and both paid a steep price for such dangerous oversights.
All of the Cuban leaders came from well-to-do families, in contrast to the Bolivian army and peasants. All were the kind of déclassé intellectual who fits in so well with the world-view New Left. In all of them revolution began in the cerebrum, not in the stomach, and so the most natural step was to theorize revolution to death -- to be governed by ideas, rather than the more practical tyranny of need.
At the end Che was in a rage against the Bolivians for not obeying him; he was going to "force" them, to kill them for their independence and recalcitrance, even though they were just fulfilling his own death wish. The entire experience only reinforced what was coming to be my basic skepticism of revolutionaries and their motives and their concern for people. Being from the South Side of Chicago, where life was real, the romance of "revolution" and "liberation" never captured me.
In 1970 Castro adopted not only the Soviets' economic overseeing of his disastrous economy but also their ideological concepts. Now he backed their slow road to revolution and, in places like Chile, even warned Allende against moving too fast. The diary got to Cuba and was printed there. Debray eventually was released and faded into obscurity for a while before coming back in 1981 as an adviser to the new French Socialist government. A series of deaths of the Bolivians involved, including President Barrientos in a mysterious helicopter accident, added a last touch of drama to the saga.
Buying the Night Flight Page 16