Chasing Che

by Patrick Symmes

  “I trained with Che,” Néstor began, and then launched into his story. As he talked he turned over a sheet of paper—the syllabus of the economics course he now taught at a local college—and drew an outline of South America with a ballpoint pen. He sketched the rough borders of Peru and then drew a scraggly oval that represented Cuba.

  “We believed that the Cuban revolution was the only way forward,” Nestor explained, and drew an arrow arcing north toward the Caribbean. Néstor was a student in 1959 when Fidel Castro had driven into Havana. By 1960, Havana was filled with young men from all over the hemisphere, eager to drink at the revolutionary wellspring itself. Che, the regime’s designated internationalist, assumed leadership of these like-minded recruits. The talk was of freedom and justice, and there was as yet little evidence of how things would go.

  “We were young,” Néstor said. “We believed in the mystical Cuban revolution, the mystical Che, the mystical Fidel Castro. We thought the experience could be repeated in other places. For me—pardon me, but for me, Che was a saint.”

  He spent six months training under Guevara in western Cuba, an activity he described as “hiking in the mountains.” I asked him if this was really all they had been doing. Weren’t they trained in arms? Guerrilla tactics? Ambush and recon? “A little,” he said dismissively, “but it was more a romantic thing,” mostly physical conditioning and endless discussions about socialism.

  This idyll was interrupted by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 (“CRISIS OCTUBRE,” he now wrote). The foreigners were sent home. Néstor said this was done to protect them in case of a Yankee invasion, although it might also have been part of a larger retreat from the embarrassing international commitments that had brought on the crisis in the first place.

  “The Guatemalans left for Guatemala,” Néstor said, “the Ecuadoreans for Ecuador, the Peruvians for Peru.” At each of these phrases, he drew an arrow out of Cuba to the appropriate destination on the page. The map was starting to fill up, but Nestor kept drawing, adding in the Argentines, Brazilians, Venezuelans, Dominicans, as they all flowed homeward with Che’s doctrines in their pockets. There were some Colombians, for example, who had gone home to form a guerrilla group called ELN, which exists to this day. Their commander cultivates a thin Che beard and likes to pose for photographers in a beret with his eyes cast upward, a precise and deliberate reenactment of the most famous image of Che. The ELN mostly lives off ransom money from kidnappings now.

  Once home in Peru, Néstor joined a new guerrilla force called the MIR. There were forty-one fighters, and the group was quickly wiped out. His best friend was killed, but Néstor escaped, hid in Bolivia, and then enlisted in a second group, also called the ELN, in Ayacucho. In 1965 he “fell in battle,” he said. I looked up from my notes. The phrase meant the opposite in Spanish and English. To fall in battle in Spanish meant to fall prisoner. Disgrace was worse than death.

  His huge, bony hands hovered over the paper throughout this account, filling in each detail. He wrote the Spanish initials of various groups over the body of Latin America—ELN, MIR, PCB, UMSM, MNR, COB, JPC, MTR, URJE—and then the places—Bolivia, Peru, Puerto Maldonado, Catavi, Nankawasi, Ayacucho, Concepción, Cuzco, “Battle of Puente Uceda”—and then the years—’56, ’59, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’64, ’65, ’68, ’71, ’72. There were notations on the losses in battle (“41 – 7 = 34” or “80 percent”). He wrote in “HB” and drew hash marks over Hugo Blanco’s theaters of operation. From Colombia to Chile, from Lima to Rio, all of South America had come alive with dynamite and groups competing for some new combination of the words national, army, liberation, united, revolution, and party.

  In early 1966 Néstor was released from prison and fled to Bolivia. Tens of thousands of tin miners were in revolutionary ferment in Bolivia, organizing strikes and forming militias and issuing demands. Nestor sought out the most militant miner groups and tried to help them organize. “The revolution was coming,” Néstor said. “There was a lot of theory, but it was …” His thought trailed off.

  Bolivia was never Che’s preferred destination. He had left Havana in secret, still loyal to Castro but fed up with the unheroic life of meetings, speeches, and Soviet-style bureaucracy. He tried to prop up a guerrilla army in the Congo but found the Africans unwilling to fight and interested mostly in scholarships to Cuba. Castro put off questions about Che’s whereabouts for almost a year (“You will find Major Guevara where he can be of service to the revolution,” he said) but then suddenly broke his silence. In late 1965 Castro read to the nation a letter addressed to “Fidel” in which Che resigned his position of leadership in the party, his ministerial rank, and his army commission. He wrote that other nations called for his “modest efforts,” and the letter ended with a maudlin promise: “If my final hour finds me under other skies, my last thought will be of this people and especially you.”

  In the Congo, Che flew into a rage when he learned that Castro had read the letter aloud. After announcing his own martyrdom—the letter was obviously intended to be read only upon his death—Che could hardly return to Havana alive and defeated in Africa. He was trapped: unlike his careful cover story on the motorcycle trip of heading “only” as far as Chile, he had left himself no wiggle room this time. After five months in Africa he returned to Cuba in secret. Committed by his own hand to pursuing revolution elsewhere, to leaving rather than arriving, he now needed an elsewhere. Thus a fatal chain of events began to get under way.

  The first step was to choose a battleground. Néstor recalled a glancing conversation in Cuba when Che asked him two questions, one about Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian guerrilla, and then this: “How does Bolivia seem to you?” Unlike so many who had told me about Che but never known him, Néstor’s eyes did not glow with excitement as he recalled this moment. He did not leap from his seat or gesture wildly—in fact, other than inking his outline of guerrilla history, Néstor made no gestures at all. He didn’t even look at me as we talked.

  “Poverty,” Néstor had answered. This was all that he had told Che. Even to a Peruvian the poverty of Bolivia was shocking. People lived in Stone Age conditions in many parts of the country, still enacting the ordered cycles of life, planting communally with foot plows just as they had done under the Incas half a millennium before.

  Néstor did not then know how close he was to the course of history. He went back to Bolivia in 1967 to organize the tin miners—an arrow arced south again—and while there he began to hear rumors of a guerrilla cell operating in the south of the country. Eventually, there were reports—which Néstor believed—that the guerrillas were led by the famous internationalist Che Guevara.

  “I told them, ‘Che is here,’ but he was received with—” Néstor searched for the words—“a bit of indifference. The peasants did not respond.”

  There was no coffee left in my cup. I stared at the grounds, uncomprehending. According to Che’s own Marxist analysis, Bolivia was a tinderbox awaiting a spark. I asked Néstor how it was possible that the tin miners—a ripe socialist force, organized for action and fueled by the “objective conditions” of poverty—had been indifferent to the arrival of the world’s most famous revolutionary.

  He searched again, uncomfortable, for something to say. Finally, quietly, in tones of disgust, he said, “The miners had never heard of him.” He repeated himself, slowly and precisely: “The miners had never heard of him.”

  Never heard of Che Guevara? By 1967 Che was in the crosshairs of history. He was condemned by both superpowers, labeled the man “most feared” in Washington, and denounced as an “infantile adventurer” by the Soviets. He was the founder and keynote speaker at the Tricontinental Congress, an attempt to unify all the revolutionary governments of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He’d appeared on Face the Nation and conducted secret negotiations with John F. Kennedy. He was venerated in speeches that compared him to San Martín, the South American liberator; he was imitated and worshipped by young rebels the length of the Americ
as; he was even celebrated in a poem (“Thus, Guevara, strong-voiced gaucho, moved to assure/his guerrilla blood to Fidel”) by Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban poet laureate.

  But the Bolivian tin miners had still never heard of him. “Remember,” Néstor explained, “this was an area where never had come a single publication, not one magazine or newspaper. Nothing. Che was known only by university types.”

  The page was now littered with half-forgotten acronyms and arcing lines of retreat, with dates and names and places that had dropped into the rearview mirror of life. The outline of South America was obscured by the crowded field of events; Peru itself had disappeared beneath repetitive circles of insurgency, zones of operations drawn and drawn again, dots of blue ink where graves now lay. History was merciless with the mistaken, cruelly indifferent to our illusions, more ruthless in its verdict than even the dialectical Marxists had assumed.

  “Now all those heroes are being replaced,” Néstor said, scanning the list of names on his clouded map. “Poverty continues in Peru. Misery still exists.” He said nothing for a while, and I took his map, folded it in half, and pocketed it. He watched the paper disappear and still said nothing, but his hand was furiously rapping the ballpoint pen against the linoleum tabletop, a drumbeat of disillusion, death, and disaster.

  “We failed,” he said at last. Rap rap rap. “He sent us, and we failed.” Rap rap rap.

  “We were young,” Néstor said.

  Early in the morning the gravel road ran up the altiplano with the mountains pushing farther and farther away to east and west. Dust dropped through the airless void like powered lead. After a few hours I grew feverish and my hands trembled on the throttle. By noon I was vomiting in a cheap hotel in a town daubed with Shining Path graffiti. I spent the afternoon and evening imprisoned in my bed by a catastrophic fever. As I twisted with agony and soaked through my sheets, Peru’s worst rock band rehearsed right outside the window, playing through a set list of classic rock at deafening volumes for five hours straight. The mattress became a puddle.

  At one point two children broke into my bungalow through the bathroom window. When they came out of the bathroom and saw me lying in bed, so racked with muscle spasms that I could neither sit up nor speak but merely stared at them with wall-eyed fury, they turned and ran for it.

  The morning after that the road rolled up the plain and topped, at a gentle rise, 14,176 feet. Herds of llamas broke and ran at the sound of my engine. The air was too clear at this altitude. You could see Lake Titicaca in the distance, blue and cold down at 12,000 feet. Beyond that were all the great towering peaks of Bolivia, some of them 20,000 feet tall. The light bent with the curve of the atmosphere, and you could see all the way to where the world fell away from itself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE WIT AND WISDOM

  OF CHE GUEVARA

  The plateau shattered and died at last. After crossing the border at a wretched little post, I floated across the narrowest part of Lake Titicaca on the last barge of the day. The ferryman asked me if it was true there was salt in the ocean, and why.

  Driving across the last miles of the altiplano, I bought gas that an attendant swore was 71 octane—lower than anything I’d ever heard of. Then the earth died and fell off the map. There was nothing much to warn you, just a scattering of brown adobe houses and some stores like in any little village, and then the road became a divided highway and abruptly fell over the edge.

  La Paz was at the bottom. The city was built into the side of a crater, shielded from the cold wind of the altiplano a thousand feet above. It looked like a child’s invention, tiny and fragile. I took a big highway down, an elevator-drop ride that made my ears pop and delivered me into the heart of the city at an inadvisable speed, and quickly I found an enterprising hotel full of Israelis that allowed me to ride La Cucaracha up the front steps and into the lobby.

  I set off for a walk down the steep streets, past the hanging carcasses of the butcher shops and the old women in bowler hats everywhere, and soon I came down onto the flat floor of the city. The main avenue changed names every dozen blocks or so, but was mostly called the Prado. It ran like a vein down the central arm of the city, slowly dropping as the city moved away from the altiplano and becoming more and more modern with younger buildings. I began at the top of the avenue, near the Basilica of San Francisco, a lovely old stone church and monastery dating from 1549, just a few years into the conquest. The façade of the church was a brilliant mestizo pastiche in which the usual baroque vines of European styling were adorned with the Andean touches of carved fruits, plants, birds, and little animals. The plaza was full of interesting faces, but I moved on because there was shopping to do.

  La Paz is a city of vendors, and walking steadily downhill I began with a set of batteries at one stand and a newspaper a block later. Down a few more blocks I found a blue stall selling flag pins, and I was reaching for Bolivia’s little red, yellow, and green tricolor when my hand passed over him. There he was: tiny, pressed into tin, the same iconic face as always. The pin was well made for something small, capturing all the necessary elements: his eyes burning up into the distance, his hair in disheveled rebellion, the little star clearly visible on the beret. The background was red enamel, of course. It was a reduction of an impression of a memory of a photograph, not the image of the young Ernesto but that of a fiery Cuban major on the cusp of middle age, a legend in his own time. I bought two pins. A block later I found a stall selling a crummier version, where his face was slightly melted and the star had been blunted into a dot. But it was still him, no matter how badly they pressed it.

  Another block and his face was peering from book and magazine covers. Two competing vendors took up the challenge of selling me their Che books, but there were more than I cared to read. There was a special on My Son El Che, written by his retroactively adoring father. I picked up a copy of My Friend Che, an exaggerated account by Ricardo Rojo, an Argentine who spent some months traveling with Che in 1954 and had never stopped talking about it. Still, I couldn’t resist seeing what Rojo had to say and began haggling with the two men, each more determined than the next to sell me a copy. Finally I struck a complex but inexpensive deal: the Rojo book and a copy of Che’s Letters of Farewell from the uphill stall, and from the downhill one a cheap paperback called The Diary of Che in Bolivia. This was Che’s battle diary from the 1967 campaign.

  Che had not made it to La Paz on his 1952 trip. He’d kept his promise to return home and finish his medical degree, but in 1954 he was on the road again, searching. Rojo met him in the confines of La Paz and Che warned him that traveling companions had to bear the total absence of money, walk everywhere, and have no concern for clean clothes.

  In a restaurant, I ate potato soup and read. The newspaper was silent about Vallegrande, Che’s resting place, but I saw there had been a ten-day strike at Chuquicamata, back in Chile. From there I turned to the Rojo book. Like Alberto Granado, Rojo had to be taken with a grain of salt, but he knew Che when Che wasn’t cool. When they first met, Che described what had happened to him while traveling South America before. Che referred to the 1952 journey as a “serious trip,” as opposed to previous skylarking adventures, and Rojo believed it was rugged travel that made the man:

  Before he had read any theoretical writings, his own observation and analysis gave him a new perspective: he saw at firsthand the importance of economic events in the history of nations and individuals. His travels through Latin America showed him the social panorama created by economic events. If I had to describe Guevara as he was then, I’d say he was only yet feeling his way toward what he wanted to do with his life; but he was absolutely sure of what he did not want it to be.

  There it was: that lost moment when he knew what he was against but not what he should be for.

  Che’s eventual answer was sitting only a few inches away: The Diary of Che in Bolivia was documental, the cover helpfully declared. Back home I had two copies on better paper, a Cuban version c
alled The Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and an American version called The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara, which included the passages Castro had edited out. All of them told, in one way or another, edited or not, cleaned up for posterity or elaborated with photographs and supporting documents, the sad story of Che’s final days, written in his own hand. From his first diary I had now progressed to his last.

  This was a Che who knew what he was for. The pulper began with a balanced introduction by the editors (“For millions of young people, Guevara is a romantic revolutionary, a martyr in the struggle against oppression. But older people believe he symbolized anarchy …”), passed through the windy and unnecessary “Necessary Introduction by First Minister Fidel Castro,” and then began on November 7, 1966, with Che’s first entry: “A new stage begins today.”

  In fact, the “new stage” had begun almost a year before. The man who once swore in public that “not one rifle” would leave Cuba now directed an enormous, cross-continental logistical effort to export a revolution to Bolivia. The operation had been under way since January 1966, when Castro had met with communist leaders from South America to discuss the establishment of a guerrilla base in South America. In February, Cuban agents in Bolivia began constructing a support network; in March several Bolivians began training at a guerrilla camp in Cuba; in June the Cuban advance team purchased a farm in southern Bolivia, close to Argentina, and began stockpiling arms and food; in July the Bolivian Communist Party leader, Mario Monje, agreed to supply twenty local fighters, and the Cubans made an overture to one leader of Bolivia’s militant miners. There were endless disputes over where to locate the foco, or “focus” of guerrilla action. In his books, Che had outlined a theory of guerrilla warfare in which a small vanguard element could pin down large numbers of conventional troops; by gradually dragging out the war, hitting the enemy wherever he was weakest, the guerrillas would force the government to use repressive measures. This deepening of the contradictions would, in turn, increase popular support for the guerrillas, and eventually the rotten regime would collapse. He hoped to draw the United States into open combat in South America, creating a new Vietnam war. But Bolivia was merely a pawn in this international struggle; Che the Argentine dreamt of using Bolivia as a platform to reach his homeland. The Peruvian recruits wanted to fight in Peru; the Bolivians were willing to sacrifice their lives and country in this cause but were internally divided between the Maoists, who supported Che’s strategy of fighting in some remote place, and the Muscovites, who had ties to the miners and wanted to be close to the urban support networks. The farm in southern Bolivia was originally supposed to be a rear-area camp for training and resupply, but Che issued contradictory orders about locating a new base, and in the end no other camp was set up. A kind of deadly inertia began to take over the mission. Che let the real-estate market partly determine one of his most important decisions.