So much so, it’s said, that when Batista fled into exile he took an estimated $300 million with him. Dollars, not pesos.
The war was no different. The war was business. It provided a steady flow of money, much of it from the United States. The Eisenhower administration poured millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and support into Batista’s coffers. And if the war ended, so did the cash. So when his generals insisted on chasing the rebels into the mountains, Batista said no. Batista didn’t pursue the rebels in Cuba because it was against his economic interests to crush the rebellion.
His military vastly outnumbered the rebels and was much better armed. And still the rebels won. Batista put the money in his pocket and handed Fidel Castro the war.
El Che thought that guerrilla guns beat Batista. He didn’t account for Batista’s greed. And, filled with Marxist passion and flush with victory, he wanted to carry the revolution around the world.
Che was a true believer. He thought Communism would set people free. In truth, Guevara didn’t seek power for power’s sake. And he openly condemned those he thought did. He even famously criticized the Soviets, calling them just as much imperialists as the Americans. No, El Che was an obsessive extremist about his ideology and thought nothing of killing its foes. But he wasn’t a faker like Fidel. Both Guevara and Castro eliminated their enemies. But there was a difference between them. While Fidel was an opportunist intent on holding onto power indefinitely, Che put an end to his opponents because of his convictions.
No one can deny his spirit of sacrifice, his personal valor, or his dedication to the doctrine of helping the poor. He renounced the benefits of power to live a life of penury and suffering to achieve his goal of ending social injustice. He was convinced that he had a historic destiny to fulfill.
And he was sure that the guerrilla warfare model was the way to do it. But when he took it to Africa, he failed.
He blamed the Africans. In his diary, he called them incompetent, incapable, undisciplined. They were corrupt and unwilling to fight. It wasn’t because he was Tarzan. It wasn’t because he couldn’t even understand their tongues. They had lost his war.
So, doubled over with dysentery and gasping from asthma, he fled. He spent the next six months recovering in Tanzania and, later, Prague. Then he headed for Bolivia, arriving in disguise in November 1966.
His problems began almost immediately. As Bolivia’s Communist Party leader had warned him, the Bolivians he had come to “liberate” proved to be totally unreceptive. As a top-secret internal CIA review of his diary later described it, “the peasant support considered essential to the revolutionary thesis was entirely lacking. It was, in fact, the hostility and suspicion of the Bolivian peasants that forced the band to continue its endless flight through the jungles.”
Bolivia may have been full of poor people, but it had a proud sense of self, insular traditions, and a historically understandable wariness of outsiders. While I was there, U.S. Peace Corps volunteers had begun outreach programs aimed at reducing poverty in the country. Poorer families, they noted, typically had six, seven, or eight kids. So the Peace Corps came in and tried to teach the women about contraception. The Catholic Church had a fit. Soon enough, so did the women. It wasn’t so much about religion, it was about tradition. And outsiders.
As Che himself would note in his diary, more than five months after arriving, “Not one person has joined up with us …”
There was already dissension in the rebel ranks. On March 22, 1967, El Che wrote that he had had a blowout with one of the guerrillas, a man named Marcos, over “a certain lack of respect on the part of Marcos; I exploded and told Marcos and if this were so, he would be expelled from the guerrillas …”
A planned ambush that day didn’t go off. “The explorers returned at night and I received them with a severe going over,” Che wrote.
They were also low on food.
Then, on March 23, they had their first encounter with the Bolivian army, and their first taste of victory. The rebels killed seven soldiers, took eighteen prisoners, and captured a haul of weapons that included mortars, Mausers, and two army radios. “The major and the captain taken prisoners talked like parrots,” Guevara crowed.
On April 10, they clashed again with Bolivian forces and won again, although they suffered their first casualties. It was, the CIA would later remark, a “turning point that caused Guevara to view the guerrillas’ chances very critically.” The original band of fifty fighters was down to twenty-two. Che was so sick that he sometimes couldn’t even carry his own knapsack. Food shortages continued.
By the end of August, Guevara wrote of “gray” days and “black” ones, and some when “everything went wrong.” Morale and discipline plummeted. Then things got worse.
Che expected the Bolivians to send their elite Rangers after them. He hadn’t anticipated fighting the CIA, too. Or, if he had, he underestimated what that would mean. The tide turned before August came to an end.
“After a series of defeats at the hands of the guerrillas, the Bolivian armed forces on August 30 finally scored their first victory—and it seems to have been a big one,” a secret White House memo to President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed. “An army unit caught up with the rear-guard of the guerrillas and killed ten and captured one, as against one soldier killed.”
On September 26, Che’s entry began, “Defeat.”
Dwindling food supplies had taken their toll. The rebels began suffering “fainting spells.” They were constantly on the run. Che knew they were being corralled, their chances increasingly bleak.
The hunt for Che brought together the Bolivian Army’s elite Second Ranger Battalion unit, the CIA, and, it was alleged much later, Klaus Barbie, the infamous Nazi “Butcher of Lyon,” known for personally torturing men, women, and children as Hitler’s ranking Gestapo chief in the French town. “The Che claim came from several sources,” according to Kevin McDonald, who wrote and directed a feature-length examination of Barbie’s activities after World War II, including his time in Bolivia.
I don’t know if Barbie was involved in Che’s capture. I know he was there in Bolivia at the time. I met him, at the German Club in La Paz. A friend introduced us. He said his name was Klaus Altman. After that, we had beers on several occasions. Eventually he told me his real name, and he told me his version of his time in Lyon.
He didn’t mention torture, but he did admit to sending several prisoners to their deaths. He said the French Resistance was killing German soldiers in the city. He wanted to stop them. When people were brought in for questioning, he offered them a choice—talk or die. They either gave him information, or were executed. He said there were always plenty of people willing to throw their principles out the window, to save their lives.
That was his version of events. After Nazi hunters found him in Bolivia, he was accused of sending as many as 14,000 people to their deaths, convicted of war crimes, and sentenced to life in prison.
I didn’t know any of that when we talked. But he told me a lot about gathering intelligence, and learning enemy secrets. He gave me a bit of advice I never forgot. “The best way to get results,” he said, “is to infiltrate the enemy’s ranks.”
Che Guevara made his last journal entry on October 7, a day spent “without complications, even bucolically … until an old woman shepherding her goats came into the canyon and it was necessary to apprehend her.”
They questioned her, then turned her loose, and gave her fifty pesos “with the request that she not say a word, but with little hope that she would keep her promises.”
Guevara’s premonitions came true. The following day, one thousand eight hundred Bolivian special forces members surrounded the rebels in the ravine where they were camped. The guerrillas were down to seventeen men.
Guevara fought anyway, until his gun malfunctioned. Then, one of the soldiers later said, he threw up his arms and shouted, “Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara, and I am worth more to you alive than dead.”
The Americans wanted him kept alive, so they could take him to Panama for questioning. It didn’t happen.
The Bolivian army held a press conference two days later to announce that El Che had fallen into a coma when captured and died of his battle wounds shortly thereafter. It wasn’t true. He was dead, but that’s not how it happened.
El Che was bound and taken to a schoolhouse in a nearby village, where his wounds were bandaged and Bolivian officers attempted to question him.
A CIA special activities division operative, a Cuban exile named Félix Rodríguez, had accompanied the Bolivian Army’s Second Ranger Battalion on the hunt. He was one of the last people to speak with El Che, on the morning of October 9.
They talked about Cuba, and Castro, and the Congo; about Camilo Cienfuegos and the Bay of Pigs; about the treatment of guerrilla prisoners on the island; and about the future of the guerrilla movement there.
Then the order came from Bolivian Armed Forces Headquarters to execute El Che. Rodríguez was the one to receive it. He knew that the United States had helicopters and airplanes on standby to take Che to Panama for interrogation. However, he said later, he decided “to let history take its course.”
According to a memo addressed to key U.S. government officials—including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, CIA Director Richard Helms, and President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for national security affairs—this is what happened next: “At 1150 hours on 9 October the Second Ranger Battalion received direct orders from Bolivian Army Headquarters in La Paz to kill Guevara. These orders were carried out at 1315 hours the same day with a burst of fire from an M–2 automatic rifle.”
BEFORE HE DIED, Che asked Rodríguez to deliver a message: “Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will again rise in the Americas.”
To the trembling young Bolivian sergeant who’d been ordered to kill him, he said, “Shoot, you are only going to kill a man.”
The order to kill the legendary revolutionary had come from the highest levels of the Bolivian government. Bolivia’s president, top military commander, and minister of the interior held a private vote. All three gave the thumbs down.
But Che was right. They killed the man, and gave birth to a legend.
It started with the photograph.
The day after his execution, the military put El Che’s corpse on exhibition for the press to prove that he had, in fact, been killed. Photographer Freddy Alborta’s image shows the shirtless, shoeless Che laid on a hospital litter, surrounded by armed soldiers and some journalists. His eyes are frozen open, his features soft. He appears heavy-lidded, as if he’s just waking, or drifting off to sleep. He appears, in a word, at peace. A Bolivian officer in full dress military uniform appears to be gently patting El Che’s head. Army Colonel Andrés Selich, similarly uniformed, touches a single finger to Guevara’s bare chest.
Alborta titled the image “The passion of the Che.”
It fits. He looks like Jesus Christ just taken down from the cross.
The soon-to-be iconic photo had such an impact. To see this man, the way he looked. You couldn’t help but feel sorry.
The myth of El Che began precisely because of the photograph. I couldn’t believe the government had permitted it to be taken and, worse, allowed its publication.
The people already doubted the version of the story the military had put out initially, that El Che had been killed in combat. Once they saw the picture, they were convinced.
Sometime after the photograph was taken, Che’s hands were severed for purposes of identification and the body disposed of, buried in a secret location in an unmarked grave, so his final resting place could not become a shrine.
These events had all happened almost a half year before I got to Bolivia. United States security officials put a bold face on the death of Che, but they completely misread what would come. After carefully studying El Che’s diary, the CIA concluded, “Guevara, his lessons, and his legend were perhaps simultaneously stifled. Though Castro and other revolutionaries may insist that the struggle endlessly continue in his name they must now be having serious doubts about their prospects.”
As the stories of the “Glamorous Guerrilla” continued to grow, however, the agency’s perception changed. The situation was fast approaching crisis when I got to La Paz. The problem, I felt, stemmed from the fact that people didn’t know the truth.
In truth, El Che’s diary was a chronicle of failure. The world just had to see it for themselves. But they had to believe that what they were reading were really Che’s own words—uncut and unchanged.
Bishop and I agreed that they only way that would happen was if the diary was published by the Cuban government itself. The problem was getting it to Castro.
We knew that the heads of the Bolivian military were already trying to cash in by the selling the diary to a publisher. I heard they were asking for $1 million. Fortunately for us, the business negotiations were taking time, since a lot of money was at stake. I needed to beat the Bolivian generals to the punch—to somehow get my hands on the original diary, and get it into Castro’s hands.
Quite honestly, I had no idea of how to do that. But then fate took care of it for me.
Cuba published the diary.
The impact reverberated across Bolivia, including within the country’s government. Everyone wanted to know how Castro got his hands on it.
In the midst of that chaos, the story turned bizarre. First, the minister of the interior vanished. Then, when he turned up—spending a week in a London safe house laying out the story—he took credit for delivering the diary to Fidel.
A confidential National Security Council memorandum to President Johnson later explained what had happened:
[Bolivian] President [Rene] Barrientos is facing the most serious political crisis of his two years in office. It stems from the publication of the “Che” Guevara diary, a copy of which was surreptitiously furnished to Fidel Castro by someone in Bolivia.
Since the diary was kept under lock and key by the Army, the finger pointed there, bringing into question the loyalty and discipline of the Armed Forces. This produced a political chain reaction of protest by opposition groups, a police crackdown, threats of strikes and student disturbances, unrest in the Armed Forces, and finally, replacement of the civilian cabinet with a mediocre military one.
In the midst of all this, Barrientos’ Interior Minister Antonio Arguedas took off for Chile where he announced that he had been the one that passed the Guevara diary to Castro. The circumstances of his “fleeing” Bolivia, his public statements, and his desire to come to the United States rather than go to Cuba which has been desperately trying to get him, all cast serious doubt on the bona fides of the Arguedas story. It sounds to me as though he agreed to be the scapegoat for his old friend Barrientos in order to take the heat off the restive Armed Forces.
I spoke to one of Arguedas’s close advisers, Julio Gabriel García, to see if he knew what had happened. He told me he was the one who convinced Arguedas to send it to Cuba. Arguedas, who admired Castro, sent along another gift, García said: Che’s hands. Apparently, Arguedas admired El Che’s bravery. He thought he would honor him—one soldier to another—by sending them to be buried in Cuba.
There may have been another explanation.
Arguedas announced that he had been a CIA operative, furthering the intelligence interests of the United States, while he was minister. He had even, supposedly, encouraged the CIA to lend him some of its Cuban operatives “to put some professionalism” into the ministry’s intelligence efforts. Julio Gabriel García was one of them, he said.
It’s possible, then, that I wasn’t the only one working with the CIA to get El Che’s diary to Cuba. Bishop, and others, may have entrusted more than one person with the task to multiply the chances for success.
Whether it had the desired effect is a matter of opinion. Che Guevara remains one of the most enduring, and controversia
l, revolutionary figures. I’m sure that over the years many have read his diaries and found inspiration. Others, like me, see confirmation of his failure.
He even said so himself, in the preface to the Congo Diary. It began: “This is the history of a failure.”
The Bolivia diary, I am convinced, is, too.
But for many people, there is romance even in failure, if the fight is for a noble cause. And for generations of young leftists around the world, nothing is more noble than the legend of Che Guevara, the selfless son of privilege who gave his life for the revolution.
With the publication of Che’s diaries, Bishop pressed me to focus more on what had been my other primary assignment in Bolivia: get close to the generals. Especially General Alfredo Ovando, the military commander-in-chief.
Bolivia had been under military rule since 1964, when Ovando and President Barrientos had jointly assumed power. At the time, Barrientos was the head of the Air Force. They ruled together for a time, then Ovando stepped aside and let Barrientos hold the title alone.
Now Barrientos was under increasing pressure. It wasn’t just the consequences of the capture and killing of Che Guevara. His efforts to increase revenues by raising taxes had turned the poor against him. Trying to reduce costs by slashing miners’ pay and cutting the mining workforce further undermined his support.
Meanwhile, the economy continued to stagnate. As I arrived in 1968, Bolivia was expected to have a $10 million deficit by the end of the fiscal year, on top of the $7 million deficit it had already had the year before.
News of U.S. involvement in the capture and killing of Che Guevara further eroded support for Barrientos. And when the president’s close friend, Interior Minister Arguedas, suddenly announced that he’d been working for the CIA, the public outrage was explosive. The country seemed ripe for a coup, and I’m sure Bishop figured Ovando would be most likely to lead it.
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