PATRICK SYMMES
CHASING CHE
Patrick Symmes writes about Latin American politics, globalization, and Third World travel for a number of magazines, including Harper’s (where he is a contributing editor), Outside, Wired, and GQ. This is his first book. He lives in New York City.
A VINTAGE DEPARTURES ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2000
FIRST EDITION
Copyright © 2000 by Patrick Symmes
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were originally published
in Talk and Harper’s magazines.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Bronx Flash Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “Big in Japan” by Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd, and Frank Mertens. Reprinted by permission of Rolf Budde Musikverlag GmbH. All rights in the United States and Canada exclusively controlled by Bronx Flash Music, Inc. • New Directions Publishing Corporation and Souvenir Press Ltd.: Poem “A New Love Song to Stalingrad” from Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda, copyright © 1973 by Pablo Neruda and Donald D. Walsh. Rights in the United Kingdom administered by Souvenir Press Ltd., London. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Souvenir Press Ltd. • Verso: Excerpt from The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright (London/New York: Verso, 1995). Reprinted by permission of Verso.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Symmes, Patrick.
Chasing Che : a motorcycle journey in search of the Guevara legend /
by Patrick Symmes.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80121-0
1. Symmes, Patrick, 1964– —Journeys—South America. 2. South
America—Description and travel. 3. Guevara, Ernesto, 1928–1967.
I. Title.
F2225.S96 2000
918.04′39—dc21 99-39127
Map by David Lindroth, Inc.
Author photograph © Stephen Lewis
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
for gusanos everywhere
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to my mother, who actually said, “You’re going to do it on a motorcycle, aren’t you?” Also to Clara Jeffery, Ben Metcalf, and Lewis Lapham, to Dawn Davis and Marty Asher, to Richard Parks, and to Annie Dillard.
Regular thanks to Mr. Rojo and the pineapple people, to Isabel, Pascal, and Julie of Moquegua, Tito, and whoever it was that pulled me out of that ditch.
Much of this manuscript was written while on a Harper’s-McLaughlin teaching fellowship at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; I am also indebted to the Eight Oaks Foundation for the support which made this project possible.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Map
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
THE SILVER RIVER
CHAPTER TWO
FELLOW TRAVELERS
CHAPTER THREE
BIG IN JAPAN
CHAPTER FOUR
MYTOPIA
CHAPTER FIVE
CHE AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE
CHAPTER SIX
THE MIRACLE
CHAPTER SEVEN
JUBILATION
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RED BLAZE
CHAPTER NINE
THE ROAD TO ROME
CHAPTER TEN
HOLY WEEK
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF CHE GUEVARA
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TEN THOUSAND REVOLUTIONS
EPILOGUE
FINAL VICTORY
Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger, and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by continual hunger and punishment.… And I began to realize that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming a famous scientist or making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people.
—Ernesto “Che” Guevara, 1960
INTRODUCTION
You can still see the bullet holes from that day, scattered across the façade of the hotel they now call the Free Santa Clara. It was December 28, 1958, when a column of scruffy, bearded guerrillas with mismatched uniforms and outdated weapons entered this city in the flatlands of central Cuba. There was a sharp firefight with some military snipers hiding in the upper stories of the hotel; the guerrillas had more enthusiasm than skill and shot up the place pretty badly.
In the midst of the battle, the guerrilla commander, to confront a fearsome armored troop train bristling with weapons and loaded with government reinforcements, grabbed eighteen of his men and rushed to the outskirts of the city. The guerrillas commandeered a D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer, ripped up the train tracks, and hid on rooftops, behind trees, and on a small hill overlooking the site. It was a classic enfilade ambush: the train ground to a halt and the guerrillas opened fire from all directions. Pinned and disoriented, the government troops cowered where they could, unwilling to die for a regime they themselves despised. It was over in a few hours. With only one platoon of men, the commander—an enigmatic Argentine doctor known as Che—had captured 408 government soldiers and shattered the last resistance. Within days, Cuba’s military dictator, Fulgencio Batista, had fled to Florida with a million dollars in his suitcase. The government collapsed, and Fidel Castro rode into Havana and the history books with a rosary around his neck and his handsome young Argentine commander at his side.
When I first came to Santa Clara in 1991 as a freelance magazine journalist, I was searching for Cuba’s curiously powerful grip on the axis of history. And it was here, at the place that marked the apogee of Che Guevara’s life, that I first glimpsed the true dimensions of his myth and the power and meaning it holds for millions of Latin Americans. I had already been exposed to the official version of Che’s life: according to the museums in Havana and the books on sale everywhere, he was born Ernesto Guevara in Argentina; became a doctor and then a revolutionary; came to Cuba and won the battle of Santa Clara; then died fighting to emancipate the poor in Bolivia in 1967. The details were like shadows that did not bear scrutiny in the tropical brightness of Cuban orthodoxy.
I took a seat in the central plaza on a bench facing the battle-scarred hotel. At the other end of the bench was a young Cuban man drinking beer. He was short, thickly muscled, and his eyes were red. While we talked about Cuba he nipped at a large plastic jug of home brew—in Cuba you drink home brew or you don’t drink—and complained. His father had gone to East Germany years before, the fellow explained, but now East Germany no longer existed. When his father had refused to come home, preferring the new, unified Germany to the old, isolated Cuba, he had been labeled a gusano, or worm, Castro’s term for anyone who betrays his version of the revolution. The government had now cut off the son’s mail and phone service, he claimed. He waited, hoping that his father would somehow extract him from history. He studied German at night and dreamed of Munich beer halls. The new
world taking shape outside the island was one that this man, like many Cubans, could neither see himself nor imagine. TV carried only speeches by Castro and old cartoons. Russian magazines advocating democracy had been banned. Cuba now soldiered on alone, without a Soviet Union issuing fraternal subsidies. The official rhetoric of sacrifice rang defiantly in the quiet plazas of an economically destitute nation.
My friend looked right and left, and then reached for his wallet. He opened it and picked through the crowded interior until he found a small square of cardboard, faded and wrinkled. He handed it to me. It was a picture of Che, laughing, his beautiful face turned up toward some hopeful thought.
“If he were still alive,” the man on the bench said, “none of this would be happening.”
That line has stuck with me now for many years, a statement of sentimentality and faith that I have been unable to bury or forget. I have encountered one version or another of the young man’s belief in every country I have visited in Latin America. Nor is the devotion he felt toward a cardboard picture of a dead man limited to our hemisphere—Che is an official hero in lands as diverse as Vietnam and Hungary, and an unofficial one in many other places.
Despite the best efforts of biographers to set down a factual account of Che’s life—and the efforts of the Cuban government to curate an alternative, more palatable history—the myth of Che is essentially a living, oral tradition, an amalgam of a thousand fables, some of them true, others invented to suit the needs so clearly expressed on the bench in Santa Clara that day. I have been collecting shards of these stories ever since, writing down the tales passed through the dark of Havana nights—“I met him once,” someone would begin. I have bought up the icons of his face, pure imagery reworked for other ends. Dead for more than thirty years now, Che has become ever more useful. His image has been appropriated for political, economic, and even spiritual purposes. He is the symbol of communist destiny, and yet also beloved of anticommunist rebels; his face is used to sell beer and skis, yet an English church group recently issued posters of Jesus Christ himself recast as Che. The affluent youth of Europe and North America have resurrected Che as an easy emblem of meaningless and unthreatening rebellion, a queer blending of educated violence and disheveled nobility, like Gandhi with a gun or John Lennon singing “Give War a Chance.”
Against a tide of so many competing interpretations, I have found it necessary here to retreat toward something approaching bedrock. Although this story has begun and will end in contemporary Cuba, it is mostly concerned with retracing the journey across South America that Che Guevara made in 1952, before he was famous, before he was known as Che, before he was anyone’s myth except his own. I have followed where his own search for stories took him, and have sought an origin point of the man as he himself understood it.
You can never know where your journey begins, nor where it will take you in the end. That day in Santa Clara I tried to return the picture of Che my new friend had handed to me. He insisted that I keep it, and then we talked for a while more, and finally he asked me to promise him something. “Promise me,” he said before we parted, “that you will tell people how it really is.”
CHAPTER ONE
THE SILVER RIVER
Two hundred and twenty-nine miles due south of Buenos Aires the twin cylinders hesitated once, caught again, hesitated again, and then finally spun down into silence. The motorcycle coasted, ever slower, and came to rest by the side of the long ribbon of shimmery gray asphalt that stretched from one horizon to the next without interruption. The steel in the engine seethed and popped in the quiet of noon on the empty pampas.
I looked around, but there was little to see. The main tank had expired at two hundred and one miles, midway between two dots on the map. I’d reversed the petcock by my left knee while still moving, and steadily consumed another twenty-eight miles on reserve until the tank became, like the world, empty.
The Argentine pampa is a plain of near-mathematical flatness. I had departed Buenos Aires early and left behind its minor suburbs and depressing outreaches within the hour. I rode south on a two-lane tarmac that shrank away from my wheels even as the motorcycle pressed forward. Distant houses floated on lakes of light that evaporated with my rattling, wind-whipped approach. By mid-morning the houses were gone and the land approached two dimensions, a table of grass stretching out beneath a ceiling of depthless blue. This was an absurd landscape, an abstraction of emptiness that welcomed utopian projections and offered a hallucination of perfectibility. No clouds, no buildings, no animals, no traffic, no sound. And now no gasoline.
But in an imperfect world, I have come to believe, there is always some nagging flaw in the absolute. Off in the distance, through quivering air, the road curved gently to the left, and there, at the curve, was a singularity: a thin stand of poplars. Trees here are the work of man, so I stumbled up the road in my new cowboy boots and eventually came to a barbed-wire fence, inside which were the trees, a bay horse, and a listing shack of weathered gray wood. I climbed the wire and clapped twice.
Nothing happened, so I clapped again. The arid space of the pampas has bred a culture of distance, a fetishistic appreciation of personal space. You do not simply walk up and knock on a door here. Sound travels far on this featureless terrain, and you clap twice from a distance to give warning of your approach. It was traditional in older times for a visitor to clap when first entering earshot and then wait long enough for a kettle of water to boil.
A minute went by, and I clapped twice more, and then waited a while. Eventually I shuffled around in the yard and took a sideways peek out back. Just as I had hoped, a rusted Ford Falcon sagged there beneath one of the biggest poplars. I spent another full minute weighing the sin of siphoning some gas, and just as I stepped toward the Falcon the door of the shack opened, tentatively at first and then fully. A wiry gaucho appeared, sleepy in the midday heat, shirtless, and scratching himself. He was wearing the traditional outfit of baggy bombacha pants, a black felt hat turned up at the front, and soft riding boots (horseback is the gaucho’s defining condition). We stood at pistol range. “Buenos días,” I said.
“Encantado,” he replied—“Enchanted.” I smiled and didn’t say anything, eager to follow his lead. Jorge Luis Borges had written a famous story about a city slicker who blunders into a fatal knife fight with a gaucho. All I could remember about the story was that it was called “The South,” and I was in no mood to become a metaphor.
“It’s very hot today,” the gaucho said, scratching his chin.
“Yes,” I answered, “very hot.”
“How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“This is my son,” he said, pointing to a face peering out from behind the door.
“Hello,” I said.
“Enchanted,” the boy said.
I was about to broach the topic of gasoline when the father spoke again: “You are from Buenos Aires.”
This comment had ceased surprising me. I’d heard one version or another several times in the last few years, while hitchhiking in Bolivia or wandering Peru in search of personal revelations and lucrative magazine stories. Although I’d found few of either, my Spanish had become smoothly generic in the process, and the locals were never quite sure what to make of me. Often enough they assumed I was from Buenos Aires. The gaucho’s assessment was less a measure of my voice than of my tangibles—my height, my blue eyes, my pink skin, my unscuffed boots, and my still-clean clothes. These were indelible marks that I came from the Other World, a place where rich, fair-skinned people lived, people with odd habits and the luxury of strangeness. Among the poor of Latin America, class trumps nationality every time. To a gaucho in a wood shack, the Other World could be that vague foreign land to the north where the gringos lived, and that seemed as close as a television set, or it could be cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, which seemed so much more distant than its two hundred and twenty-nine miles. The difference between the two is unimportant when viewed from bel
ow.
“I’m a foreigner,” I told him. “I’m going to—” I paused there, because I really didn’t know how far I was going. Chile? Peru? Bolivia? Somewhere north, or south, of there?
“I’m going to Patagonia,” I told him, since this was not only true but likely. “My motorcycle has run out of nafta.”
The gaucho sympathized and then spent five minutes explaining in archaic tones that while he “would be enchanted” to give me some nafta, the Ford Falcon had not run for three years and the tank was empty. We thanked each other profusely, exchanged opposite hopes for the weather, and separated. I cut through his yard, gave the horse a wide berth, and then entered the stand of poplars, looking for the barbed wire fence. With my eyes raised, I missed what was in front of me and nearly put a boot down in the middle of a dusty dent in the ground. It was a small burrow filled with squirming puppies.
They were newborns, still blind, and at the last second I stutter-stepped and managed to miss crushing them but, nonetheless, their mother burst from the shade beneath the house and arrowed across the yard toward me, a yapping brown blur intent on murder. I went for the fence, and man and beast now engaged in an ancient contest, speed against speed, instinct against instinct. This race ended, improbably, in a tie: I got my left boot over the fence, and she got the right one in her mouth.
The dog held on for life, snarling and ripping at my heel. The boot was made of tough pigskin, and it held, at least for a moment. But the barbed wire fence now imprisoned me. Straddling it, one leg in safety, the other in combat, I was … exposed. With each yank and twist by the dog, one of the barbs was working its way through my denim jeans, tickling my testicles with ever greater urgency. I could feel teeth pressing on the vulnerable tendon of my right foot, while each rip and snarl drove me deeper onto the pointed steel. At some point, jiggling back and forth, the wire singing beneath me, the barb inching upward, I began to wonder just what I was doing there. It wasn’t possible to laugh at a moment like that, although I later did.
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