by Phil Klay
When I returned, Sofia was sitting, drinking an aromática in our parlor. “Are you going to let me in on your game?” she asked. “Because I’m not sure you’re winning.”
“Wait,” I said.
The books, read properly, would tell a very different story. How after the disaster, Castro reached out to Frank País, leader of the July 26th Movement in Cuba, who sent arms and support to the mountain guerrillas for years. So much for self-sufficiency.
As for the brave guerrilleros inspiring revolutionary fervor, well . . . the country was already rebelling. And not just in the countryside. There was the students’ group, Directorio Revolucionario, attacking the Presidential Palace. There was the Cienfuegos naval uprising. The general strike of 1958. An army officer, Colonel Barquín, launched plots against the regime from within the military. The elected and then overthrown president Carlos Prío financed attack after attack against the regime. He even financed Castro, providing the mountain guerrillas yet another urban tit to suckle.
Castro was late to the revolutionary party, but the Batista regime, concerned with more dangerous enemies than a group of incompetents in the mountains, crushed his true rivals for him. José Antonio Echeverría, gunned down after an attack on the headquarters of Radio Reloj, March 1957. Fructuoso Rodríguez, ambushed by the police and shot to death, April 1957. And then Frank País, captured, brought to the Callejón de Muro and shot in the back of the head, July 1957.
Castro didn’t come to power as the triumphant head of a unified movement sweeping in from the countryside, electrifying the country with communist fervor. He came to power by process of elimination, picking up the pieces of the movements who’d done more to weaken the regime than his men had. Then, once he had power, Castro crushed his rivals more ruthlessly than Batista ever had, and instituted a new history, a founding myth.
At the Museum of the Revolution in Havana you can learn, I am told, of how a small band of guerrilleros inspired the whole country not just to revolution, but to communism. And because Castro held power, and because the excitement of liberation was still in the air, and because Castro was perfectly willing to jail or murder dissenters, the myth became history. And, through Che, it became tactics.
* * *
• • •
But the stack of books sat on her desk, neatly piled and unread. The only thing that changed in her room once she began classes was the appearance of a framed print of Albrecht Dürer’s Praying Hands. Then a tiny two-hundred-peso-coin-size metal icon, imprinted with the image of the Virgin, appeared on the top right corner of her desk.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Neither Che nor General Santander, a devotee of the radical atheist utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, would have approved. Was it evidence of faith? Or placed there the way someone else might place a horseshoe and aloe behind a door?
More troubling was the class she had started. Integral Human Rights. “I’ll get it out of the way,” she told us. And then, a few weeks later, she told us about her professor, who had been attacked and brutally beaten by a criminal group in Norte de Santander during Uribe’s presidency.
“He showed us a photo of him in the hospital,” she told us over dinner, a note of unmistakable admiration in her voice. “He had one eye covered with a bandage, his whole face was bruised, but there were papers all over his bed! He was working!”
When we didn’t respond to that, she added, “They nearly killed him, and he went on working.”
“Yes,” I said. “That is not particularly uncommon in my job.”
Then she told us about the practical component of the class. Internships with the ARN, the reintegration agency that offered benefits to demobilized fighters. Which was fine. The ARN was not a kindness, but a tool of war, designed to leech FARC manpower.
“And for top students, there’s an independent study he’s offering next year where the practical component will be done with a foundation in La Vigia, this little town in Norte de Santander, working with victims of the war.”
That, I didn’t like. Valencia, the daughter of an officer in the special forces, going to a part of the country that was even more infested with the guerrilla than her university’s campus.
“I probably won’t get it,” she said, seeing my expression. “And I don’t even know if I’d want to do it. More human rights . . .”
But she was my daughter. She’d be at the top of her class, I was sure. And she was more invested in this professor and these ideas than she let on.
I reached out to the lawyer from the region who’d worked with my father in the past. An unsavory man, but useful back in the time when intermediaries with regional paramilitary leadership could be necessary. I made a simple request, and asked him what he knew about the town, La Vigia, and who controlled it. “Don’t go out of your way,” I told him. I didn’t mention my daughter, or the nature of my interest. Foolish of me to think it would end there.
A few days later he told me it was controlled by an urabeño called El Alemán, and he told me there were patriots in the region who hated the Urabeños, men who were eager to share any information that could help the army in its inquiries. This led to the Mil Jesúses, which led to the El Alemán raid, which led to the mess I am currently in, in which both narco lawyers and members of the House of Representatives in the Second Commission know my name and feel I owe them something. The things we do for our children.
* * *
• • •
It wasn’t until she finished her first term at Nacional that the books finally moved. The history of Cuba made its way from her desk back to my library. Then the diaries. The CIA report remained on her desk, next to the icon, and though I wanted to press her on it, instead I waited. People must come to their own conclusions.
The report, easily available online these days, is devastating. No more than eight pages long, with telling little chapter headings like “The Failure of the Guerrilla Tactics,” “Ineptitude,” “Morale,” and “The Guerrillas’ Failure with the Peasants,” the writer is clearly having fun with Che’s disaster. He notes smugly, “The guerrilla tactics that Che compiled in his handbook Guerrilla Warfare proved to be empty theoretics.” He goes through the well-known mistakes. How Che arrived in Bolivia with a band of elite guerrilla, almost half of them foreigners. How, unlike Castro, Che’s band rejected the urban, and less radical, Bolivian Communist Party. The report delights in Che’s unwillingness to sully himself with the kind of bargains and power-sharing agreements that were crucial to Castro’s success. It delights in Che’s adherence to his theory, expecting his magnificent and saintly guerrilleros to inspire the people, who in reality were uninterested or hostile. “The peasant base has not yet been developed,” Che wrote in his journal, “though through planned terror we will keep some neutral.”
I love that. “Planned terror.” From would-be liberator to would-be terrorist of the peasantry. But he even failed at brutalizing them into silence. The peasants turned on him, the Bolivians killed him, and his journal ended up in enemy hands. The CIA document concludes, reasonably:
“When the diary is published, the Guevara legend will only be dulled by this account of the pathetic struggle in Bolivia.”
Which is what any sane and rational man would have thought. Did theory ever more conclusively fail in a clash with reality than in the case of the man whose image is painted over the main square of one of Colombia’s best universities? Reason demanded that Che would fade into embarrassed ignominy. And so, the Americans let the journal out into the world.
Castro, however, was a true genius, and true men of genius are never entirely sane or rational. They know when to toss the stuffed dummy of reason overboard, grab the wheel, and navigate by feel through the howling pitch and toss that is the chaos of human life. When Castro got ahold of the journal, he used it.
The Cubans published a free edition of Che’s Bolivia diaries—250,000 co
pies of his supposed suffering and bravery. At the Museum of the Revolution, Che’s image dominates—Castro is a hidden figure. The revolution is of the sainted dead, not of the living, making the revolution untouchable, sanctified by blood.
Imagine the CIA’s confusion as Che’s sainthood began to extend far beyond Cuba’s shores. “The most complete human being of his age,” said Jean-Paul Sartre. “An inspiration for every human being that loves freedom,” said Nelson Mandela. Ernesto Sabato declared that “the struggle of Guevara against the U.S. was the struggle of the Spirit against Matter,” which at least had the virtue of being a little true, though not in the way Sabato thought.
This used to make me rage. In Colombia, we have no military celebrities—we only worship enemies of the state. In Medellín you’ll still see Pablo Escobar T-shirts. Our television screens are dominated by narco stories, and sympathetically reintegrating guerrillas. Simón Bolívar is neglected. No one cares about the Man of the Laws. Even Uribe is tarred and feathered with the paramilitary brush. There are no official gods.
* * *
• • •
A simple text, over WhatsApp. “I think I know why you gave me those books.” I arranged to meet her at the Che mural. And so, under the eyes of the saint, she told me what she’d learned, dissecting where Che had gone wrong.
“In a way,” she said, coming to what she thought was the point of the lesson, “ideology killed him. He fooled himself into believing the myth. There’s something a little tragic about it.”
Tragic. Right. She pitied him. This man with the soulful eyes and the bohemian hair looking down on us. Good. I didn’t want her to look up at the mural in rage, as I might have done at her age. Rage is too close to love. But pity . . . that’s a small step away from contempt, which never dies.
“I think it’s funny,” I said. “He was an inspiration to generations of guerrillas. Carlos Marighella in Brazil. Luis de la Puenta and Héctor Béjar in Peru. For Humberto Ortega in Nicaragua. For our own ELN. And they followed his tactics, because they believed in the saint.” At least, they did until they realized how bad those tactics were. Which, in some cases, took decades.
“I suppose that is lucky for you.”
“Think of them,” I said, “decades in the jungle, fighting without a hope of victory because of the unbelievable stupidity of their Che. Think of the men who followed his lessons and died pointlessly, because their hero was a fool who wanted to believe his own legend.” I pointed at the mural. “The church should canonize him. The patron saint of capitalism.”
“He looks so romantic,” she said, her gaze up on the mural, taking in the haunted eyes, the flowing hair, a fake Christ promising fake salvation built upon his martyrdom.
“When you walk by that, I want you to remember that the people who put it up didn’t even have enough patriotism to put up a Colombian communist. At least the Universidad de Antioquia has Camilo Torres for their guerrilla icon. And I want you to remember that the people who put it up didn’t even have enough brains to put up a true champion of communism. The CIA couldn’t have dreamed up a more effective way of sabotaging the guerrilla, corrupting their tactics, and training their armies for failure. But that’s the left for you. No substance, no intelligence. Just . . . good hair. Think of that, every time you pass through here. It’s the funniest joke in history.”
She promised me she would. I left, secure in the knowledge that I had sufficiently prepared my daughter for school. She would take what she needed from this place, but not be changed by it. She would still be mine.
* * *
• • •
That was months ago. As I head to meet Valencia at a bakery a few blocks from campus, around the corner from the American embassy, I wonder how secure that feeling really is. Whether I really have inoculated her against poisonous ideas so that she can continue moving into the future I have envisioned. And it doesn’t help that before I can even begin, just as we’ve barely sipped our aromáticas, she announces an unexpected plan of her own.
“I was in the Plaza Ch . . . Santander,” she says, “looking at the mural. And I was thinking about what you told me. About how ideology kills the mind.”
This was not what I had told her. I had told her leftists were stupid. But fine. A worthy lesson.
“You know, for one of my classes my first semeseter, top students were invited—”
“Yes, yes,” I say. “The trip to do field work in Norte de Santander.” Documenting the violence.
“I didn’t say anything at the time, because I didn’t think I’d want to go. But . . . I was offered a spot.”
She looks at me, her beautiful face still, expressionless.
“Of course you were,” I say. “You’re a brilliant student.”
She goes on to explain the nature of the work, and how we as a society need to acknowledge and respond to the violence suffered by rural populations at the hands of the FARC, yes, but also at the hands of paramilitaries and police and even . . . but she doesn’t say the army. She just lets me infer. “It’s not dangerous there anymore,” she says. “My professor says it’s very settled now.”
Her professor knows nothing. The Mil Jesúses are in charge now, and Representative de Salva claims the Mil Jesúses are like ISIS. I could tell her that. But she’s my daughter. That might make it more appealing. And besides, Representative de Salva is wrong. There have been very few murders around La Vigia since the Mil Jesúses took over, following the El Alemán raid. I’ve been keeping track. So what to tell her?
My daughter is looking down at her hands, long, elegant hands. Hands unblemished by hard work. Behind the counter, I can see the baker pulling a tray of pan de yuca out of the oven.
“One moment,” I tell Vale, and get up and walk to the cash register. I wait while the woman carefully loads the tray of hot pan de yuca onto a shelf.
“Nothing better than a pan de yuca fresh out of the oven,” I tell her. She glances at the sign above her, which says the exact same thing.
“Clearly,” she says, pulling oven mitts off her coarse, calloused hands.
I hand her a twenty mil note and ask for four pan de yuca. I think about what Valencia is saying as the woman slowly grabs a set of tongs and drops them, one by one, into a paper bag. She hands them to me, counts out my change, and though I still don’t know what to say as I head to the table and sit down, when Valencia opens her mouth to say more I raise one finger, halting her. Then I break into the crust of the pan de yuca, letting out the steam.
“This is a good life,” I tell her. “If you enjoy the small things.”
I tear off a piece, the gooey strands of yuca inside the crust pulling and then breaking, and I put the piece in my mouth. I close my eyes. There is nothing better than a pan de yuca fresh from the oven. I chew, then open my eyes.
“You actually want to participate in this clinic?”
She nods her head. “My professor says the spot is still there for me.”
I take another bite of my pan de yuca. She starts talking about a revelation she had during Lent.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” she says. “The ARN work is mostly administrative. And we did works for the poor at Santa Clara, but it was always easy. The faces of the people I met quickly faded.”
Santa Clara is an Opus Dei school. My wife’s idea, but I didn’t mind. Opus Dei teaches you to find God in the dignity of daily work, whether it’s the work of a poor day laborer or the work of a student, sharpening the tools of the mind. A fine lesson. But like so many young people, and like Che himself, she wants a more heroic role. Never mind that I’ve warned her, more than once, that a desire for heroism leads to most of the suffering in the world.
“This would be hard,” she says. “And it would bring me face to face with victims but also with—”
“Murderers. Kidnappers.”
“Yes, exactly,” sh
e says. “And child soldiers. Rural poor. Didn’t you say, during the paramilitary demobilization, that most of the paracos were confused kids caught up in the violence and we shouldn’t judge them by the cruelty their worst leaders spurred them to do?”
I did say that. But the paramilitaries frequently fought on our side, and my concerns have never been about individual justice, but about the progress of the state.
“I know Mom thinks the peace treaty is unjust because it lets them off too easy,” she says. “But even if that’s true”—she trails off a bit—“even if that’s true, if, ideologically, Mom is right, there’s still another way to think about it.”
I feel a bit of trepidation about where she’s going, but say nothing.
“As Christians, we’re called to mercy.” She delivers that pat phrase with an affirmative nod of her head.
“What?”
“Mercy is always an injustice.”
“What?”
“If it weren’t, then it wouldn’t be mercy. It would just be justice.”
“Is this,” I say, stammering, surprised, “is this a religious thing?”
She laughs, a delicate, gentle laugh. My daughter has never laughed at me before.
“Christ spent time among the fallen.” She smiles shyly, as if she knows how ridiculous and self-aggrandizing that sounds. “I want to spend time with the defeated and the scorned. And even, in some cases, the unworthy and the cruel.”
I sit back in my seat. This is not the turn I expected. I can say no. Obviously, I can say no. She won’t go if I don’t allow her. Her mother will want to say no as well. But I’ve led enough soldiers to know that there are times when a young mind must be given strict commands, and there are times a young mind must be held in the hand like a little bird. And if she’s spouting religious cant, then this must be handled carefully.