by Rich Cohen
Arbenz went on the radio to explain the nature of the struggle. It’s not about ideology, he said, it’s about money. It’s not about the United States, it’s about El Gringo, the Banana Man. “In whose name have they carried out these barbaric acts?” he asked. “What is their banner? We know very well. They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company.”
Castillo Armas, having mustered his army on a U.F. banana plantation in Honduras, marched across the border into Guatemala. His soldiers and weapons were carried on U.F. trains and U.F. boats. He met little resistance. It was less a war than a walk in the country, afternoons of daisy picking, a parade in the mountains. Guatemala 1954 would be the last of the easy overthrows. Because the peasants did not want war, because the government believed it could not win, because Arbenz was willing to go farther than anyone had gone but was still not willing to go all the way.
Arbenz aged ten years in the last five days. Retreating to the presidential palace, he spent these hours in a drunken stupor, wandering the halls, muttering about gringos. He was disheveled and could not sleep. Now and then, he went on the radio. “Our enemies are led by the arch-traitor Armas,” who is leading a “heterogeneous Fruit Company expeditionary force” against the country, he said, his words obscured by the static of CIA jamming. “Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company.”
He was buffeted by news, some of it real, some of it fake. He could no longer tell the difference. The cord that ran from his soul to his brain, which had always been taut as a guitar string, snapped with a twang. He was not sure if he should surrender, or retreat to the hills, or take his own life. He was not sure anyone would notice or care. That was the beauty of psychological warfare—it devoured the enemy from within. He ordered the army to open the arsenals and give the guns to the peasants. The leaders of the army, aristocrats who feared the gringo less than they feared the mob, refused. When the officers stopped responding to Arbenz’s orders, he knew it was time to go. On June 27, 1954, he addressed his people for the last time. “For fifteen days a cruel war against Guatemala has been under way,” he said on the radio. “The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us.”
He resigned as soon as he got off the air, turned control of the government over to General Carlos Díaz, crossed the street to the Mexican embassy, and asked for asylum. By that time, Castillo Armas was on the outskirts of Guatemala City.
John Foster Dulles spoke to the American people a few days later. He said he wanted to explain the news from the isthmus, but he seemed less concerned with the progress of the war than with disassociating the Eisenhower administration from the United Fruit Company. Arbenz had clearly hit a nerve. “The Guatemalan government and Communist agents throughout the world have persistently attempted to obscure the real issue … by claiming that the United States is only interested in protecting American business,” said Dulles. “We regret that there have been disputes between the Guatemalan government and the United Fruit Company.… But this issue is relatively unimportant.”
John Foster Dulles called John Peurifoy.
Here is what he said: “Magnificent job!”
According to E. Howard Hunt, Operation Success marked “the first time, since the Spanish Civil War, [that] a Communist government had been overthrown.”
* * *
When Arbenz arrived at the airport the next morning, he was an emotional wreck, a physical ruin. He flinched when trucks backfired, blinked timidly in the blue terminal light. Before being allowed to board a plane for Mexico, he was stripped to his underwear and marched before a crowd of reporters: the flashbulbs went POP, POP, POP! It was a final humiliation, the psychological warriors saying goodbye, a pointless bit of cruelty that set the tone for the rest of a desultory life. The wanderings of Jacobo Arbenz, his life in exile, symbolize the fate of the isthmus, squeezed between the ideologues and the banana men.
He landed in Mexico with his wife and children. His daughter Arabella was his favorite. She gave him comfort. Whatever he suffered, he told himself he was suffering it for her. Life was unpleasant for him in the country. Mexico was an ally of the United States—no one wanted him there. After less than a year, he set off again, this time for Switzerland. He lived in one of those mountain towns that have long served as refuges for deposed royalty. The Swiss authorities said he could stay only if he renounced his Guatemalan citizenship. He refused and continued on to Paris, where he lived on the Right Bank, went for walks, and drank heavily in cafés, another exile muttering to himself. He was shadowed by the police. Arabella loved Paris, but her father could not live with the constant surveillance. He continued on to Czechoslovakia, where he believed he would be welcomed as a martyr. The Czechs did not want him, either. It was clear from his first days in Prague. It was said the Czechs were afraid he would demand a refund for their faulty weapons. He went to Russia, where he lived in Moscow while his children attended a school for foreigners four hundred miles away. Here, too, he was followed. In the West, he was the revolution. In the East, he was the man who could not be controlled, the fool who had taken the rhetoric seriously. That’s why I call him a symbol: he was like the isthmus itself, a small territory overhung and underhung by huge continents, fought over, then abandoned.
By being in Russia, he seemed to confirm what he would always deny: that he was a Communist and had been playing a game, that all the talk of the fruit company was nothing but a tactic. In fact, he was in Russia only because no other country would have him. He hated the climate there; he was always cold. He longed for the eucalyptus and the tropical shower, the colors of the Caribbean. He appealed to the leader of every nation in Latin America and was finally accepted in Uruguay, on the condition that he neither lecture, publish, teach, nor work. He lived in Montevideo from 1957 to 1960.
When Castro triumphed in Cuba in 1959, it seemed that the wandering of Jacobo Arbenz was finally over. These were, after all, the same Cubans whom Arbenz had sheltered in Guatemala City; the same Cubans who once regarded Arbenz as a hero. Though he was indeed greeted by a throng in Havana, life in Cuba was not as he expected. Arbenz was portrayed less as a hero or a precursor than as a cautionary tale, a failure: because he resigned when he should have stayed and fought, because he was scared and confused at the end, because he turned to the bottle when he should have gone into the hills. In Cuba, Arbenz was considered a perfect example of how not to behave.
When he told his family they were moving to Cuba, Arabella refused. She was tired of wandering from city to city, of living in backwaters without culture. There was a terrible fight. When the family left for Havana, she went by herself to Paris instead. She would become a model, an actress, a movie star. She was twenty, a really beautiful girl. She appeared in just one film, Un Alma Pura, as the title character, Claudia. She fell in love with Jaime Bravo, the most famous matador in the world. A master with the cape, a man of close passes. Bravo was known for having affairs with starlets. His romance with Arabella Arbenz was legendary, stormy, filled with threats and scenes. The couple was a tabloid sensation.
In September 1965, Arabella, twenty-five years old, followed Bravo to Colombia, where he was performing in the corridas. The couple got into a fight in a restaurant in Bogotá. Arabella stormed out and came back with a gun. She pointed it at Bravo, who put up his hands, saying, “No, Arabella.” She then put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.
She was buried in Mexico City. Jacobo Arbenz was given special permission to attend the funeral. He was devastated, threadbare, wire and bone. He leaned over the coffin as it was lowered into the ground and whispered, “Hasta pronto, mi hijita.” He moved back to Mexico City in 1971, where he could walk the holy ground where his daughter was buried. He was drunk all the time, wasted on pills, tortured by regret. On January 27, 1971, he was
found drowned in the bathtub of his hotel room in Mexico City, fifty-eight years old, a bottle of whiskey at his side.
* * *
Castillo Armas fulfilled his part of the bargain soon after he secured power. His soldiers tracked down and arrested or killed the military officers and politicians who championed the Guatemalan Revolution. He rounded up or chased away the ideological vagabonds who streamed into the country in the days of delirium that followed Decree 900. He had soon established a police state, imposing the sort of lockdown that would make the rise of another Arbenz impossible. He abolished political parties and trade unions, closed newspapers and banned books he considered dangerous, including the collected works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. He took care of the fruit company, stripping U.F. workers of their right to bargain collectively and shuttering the Banana Workers Federation. Seven of the labor organizers who had been attempting to unionize the banana field hands—there were scores of them; they gave the plantation managers fits—were found dead in Guatemala City. By 1955, the hundreds of thousands of acres seized from the company had been returned.
Rarely does a skirmish end so decisively, with the disputed issues resolved in such a satisfactory fashion. It was the most lopsided victory in the history of United Fruit. Too lopsided. Did Zemurray realize the danger his company faced, not as a result of its losses but as a result of its wins? Which had been too splashy, too much of a good thing. As Guatemala settled back into its prerevolutionary slumber, U.F. found itself in the position of the fisherman who had gone out to catch a trout for dinner but hooked a shark instead.
Sam should have known, must have known. The coup in Guatemala violated a rule he had practiced all his life: do not draw unnecessary attention. In the days that followed the defeat of Arbenz, American newspapermen and government officials seemed to wake from a dream, filled with questions: Just who was Arbenz? Was he an actual threat? Was the Soviet Union really involved? Where’s the proof? Whose interests were served? Those of the taxpayer or those of the United Fruit Company? Some reporters who traveled on junkets with Edward Bernays felt betrayed. According to Thomas McCann, “Our willingness to exaggerate the Communists’ importance and to create incidents—coupled with the willingness of the American press to amplify our cries of wolf throughout the United States—led not only to the collapse of the Arbenz regime, but created such a subsequent environment in the United States that, when a real Communist threat actually did appear three or four years later in Cuba, the American public and some members of the press were unwilling to believe the truth.”
Guatemala was a hinge moment, an event that first appeared a great success for the company—the door swings open—but later proved a terrible misfortune—the door slams shut. At the time of the coup, U.F. led its industry by every measure: in profits, market share, volume (and it wasn’t even close). Within a generation, it would trail Standard Fruit in nearly every category. The overthrow had all the ingredients of irony: meant to prevent the establishment of a Communist beachhead in the hemisphere, it would help create just such a beachhead in Cuba. Meant to make Guatemala friendly for the company, it would engender such hostility that the company was eventually forced to abandon the isthmus altogether.
* * *
Che Guevara volunteered to fight soon after the first plane appeared in the sky over Guatemala City. Turned away by the army, he tried to organize a group of friends to travel to the front. Few would go. Lesson number one: the cowardice of the people is figured in the equation of the Banana Man. “In Guatemala it was necessary to fight,” he wrote, “but hardly anybody fought. It was necessary to resist, but hardly anybody wanted to do that.” According to Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Guevara spent the war patrolling Guatemala City as part of a civilian guard, checking doors, making sure all lights were out during air raids. Shells fell most nights. It was the first time Guevara, who was twenty-six, had come under fire. Lesson number two: he loved it. In a letter to his girlfriend, he said he was “ashamed for having as much fun as a monkey.”
Castillo Armas and his soldiers swept into the capital in June 1954. The streets were chaotic, confused. Guevara, who assumed Arbenz would retreat with his loyalists to the hills—“Without a doubt, Colonel Arbenz is a guy with guts,” he wrote, “and he is ready to die in his post”—was shocked when the president fled to Mexico.
Guevara spent several weeks stumbling from here to there, defeated, depressed, unsure what to do or where to go. He came to despise Arbenz and the members of his generation. There is nothing more pathetic than a hero who has failed. The nature of the Cuban Revolution was, to a degree, determined in these hours. The lessons taken from Guatemala would be remembered in Havana: the danger of weakness; the illusion of compromise; the need to kill the enemy when he is down—destroy the remnants, finish the job. The gringo must believe you’re crazy enough to go all the way, to pull the pillars of the temple down on your own head, which, translated into the language of the cold war, was Castro telling Khrushchev to fire the goddamn nukes! Che Guevara said it was Guatemala that taught him “to go to the roots of the question and decapitate in one stroke those in power and the thugs of those in power.”
“‘Moderation’ is another one of the terms that colonial agents like to use,” he told a group of students. “All those who are afraid, or who are considering some form of treason, they are moderates.”
Guevara was arrested in the last hours of the war. “Marching overland, the troops of Castillo Armas seized control of the capital and captured Arbenz and his followers—including an asthmatic Argentine medical student and Communist camp follower named Ernesto Che Guevara,” wrote E. Howard Hunt. “Among the Guatemalan victors there was much sentiment for dealing summary justice to them all, but a C.I.A. man on the spot dissuaded Castillo from initiating what might well have turned into a nationwide bloodbath. Stripped and searched at the airport, Arbenz, Guevara and their followers were allowed to board planes into exile. Guevara was granted political asylum in Mexico, where he soon joined the partisans of Cuban rabble-rouser Fidel Castro.”
Douglas Hallett, who worked for Charles Colson, Richard Nixon’s special counsel, recalled the following, which he heard from Colson: “When [Hunt] was a C.I.A. agent presiding over the 1954 overthrow of President Arbenz of Guatemala, he had held a group of prisoners on the airstrip just as he was about to leave the country. He decided to show mercy and freed them. A few years later, he learned that one of the prisoners he let go was Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary; he said that had been enough to convince him never to allow himself to become compassionate again.”
Hunt later called freeing Guevara, when he should have put a bullet in his head, the regret of his life.
Both sides took the same lesson from the war: compassion is weakness, mercy a disease. You must be willing to go all the way.
* * *
What happened to Che Guevara?
Well, you know.
He joined up with Fidel Castro in Cuba, fought and won, spoke at the United Nations, walked around New York City, stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, was photographed wearing a beret. This photograph was later silkscreened onto a T-shirt. (Approximately one-third of the people you went to college with purchased this T-shirt.) In 1966, having grown restless, he decided to go to Bolivia to rejoin the universal war. He believed the liberation of South America was at hand. Castro hosted a drunken goodbye dinner. The comrades ate pig and drank beer. At dawn, as the sun was rising over Havana, Guevara got in the back of his car and told his chauffeur, “Drive, dammit!” He traveled in disguise. His passport identified him as Ramón Benítez, a sober man in glasses with heavy frames. In La Paz, he was introduced as Adolfo Mena González, a middle-aged economist from Uruguay. He took a picture of himself, in disguise, in the mirror of his hotel room. He resembles an academic gone to seed, in V-neck sweater and slacks. His cigar glows, wind dances in the hotel curtains.
He hiked into the hills, where he took cha
rge of a small rebel force. He fought battles. He was under fire. Was he as happy as a monkey? Not when he was captured, that’s for sure. He cursed with imagination. He was skinny with a long beard and looked like a mystic or carnival freak. A CIA agent flew in to interrogate the prisoner. Many torturous ideological discussions followed. The Bolivians decided to execute him. “It’s better like this,” said Guevara. “I never should have been captured alive.”
“I no longer hated him,” the American intelligence agent said. “His moment of truth had come, and he was conducting himself like a man. He was facing his death with courage and grace.”
Che Guevara was killed on October, 9, 1967, his last words recorded by the CIA: “Tell Fidel he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America, and tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy.”
* * *
Crucial players in the Guatemala affair had died by then: John Peurifoy, driving his Thunderbird in Thailand, where he’d taken a posting; Castillo Armas on a street in Guatemala City on July 27, 1957. He was walking to dinner with his wife. An assassin shot him seven times. The death of Armas launched an era of civil war that persisted for generations in Guatemala, brutalizing the nation and leaving two hundred thousand dead. In October 1995, as life seemed to return to normal, Arbenz’s body was exhumed and flown to Guatemala City, where it was buried beneath a shrine as a huge crowd looked on.
19
Backlash
As the details of Operation Success became public, the Eisenhower administration faced withering criticism. Reporters began to make connections. Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, Thomas Cabot—all had worked for United Fruit before they worked for the United States. Unless, of course, they never stopped working for United Fruit. Eisenhower promised to investigate. Then, five days after Arbenz abdicated—five days!—the Justice Department filed a massive lawsuit against United Fruit, charging the company with violating the antitrust laws. (Just what Zemurray feared when the State Department pushed him to merge with his biggest competitor.) The White House denied any connection between Operation Success and the legal action, but the point seemed clear: the Eisenhower administration was demonstrating its independence from the banana men. According to Tommy Corcoran, “Dulles began the antitrust suit against UFCo just to prove he wasn’t involved with the company.”