Che Guevara (11 page)

Many Argentines took umbrage when the Truman administration began lobbying for a hemispheric “mutual defense treaty” between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. Nevertheless, such a treaty, an outrowth of the recently announced “Truman Doctrine” of hard-line global containment of Soviet Communism, was signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 amid speeches extolling pan-Americanism. Latin American Communists denounced the U.S.-sponsored “brotherhood” as a warmed-over update of the old Monroe Doctrine, claiming that it gave Latin America to the colonialist interests of “Wall Street and the ‘capitalist monopolies.’” In effect, the Rio Treaty gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in neighboring states “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Ernesto remarked on the Rio conference and wrote an entry for
panamericanismo
in a notebook.

During the early 1950s, Ernesto’s strongest political emotion was a deep-seated hostility toward the United States. “In his eyes, the twin evils in Latin America were the native oligarchies and the United States,” Dolores Moyano recalled. The only things he liked about the U.S. were its poets and novelists. “I never heard him say one good thing about anything else,” Moyano said. “He would disconcert both nationalists and Communists by being anti-American without subscribing to either of their points of view. With much bad luck, since my mother was American, I would often rally to the defense of the United States. I was never able to convince him that United States foreign policy was, more often than not, the bumbling creature of ignorance and error rather than the well-designed strategy of a sinister cabal. He was convinced of the dark princes of evil who directed every United States move abroad.”

In the Latin America of the postwar years, there was plenty of evidence to nurture such perceptions. Ernesto was coming of age at a time when the United States was at an imperial apogee, aggressively pursuing its own economic and strategic interests in the region. In the anticommunist atmosphere of the Cold War, U.S. support of right-wing military dictatorships—Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Manuel Odría in Peru, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela—at the expense of outspoken nationalists or left-wing regimes was rationalized in the name of national security.

While Soviet expansion in postwar Europe was the main focus of alarm in Washington, by late 1950, the new Central Intelligence Agency felt sufficient concern about the hemispheric threat posed by Communism to prepare a secret assessment entitled
Soviet Capabilities and Intentions in Latin America
. “With respect to Latin America,” the report said, “the objective of
the U.S.S.R. must be presumed to be to reduce support of the U.S. as greatly as possible until the sovietization of the area becomes possible and its resources become available directly to augment Soviet strength.” The CIA was especially concerned about the potential for coordination between pro-Soviet Latin American Communist parties and Moscow if a war broke out between the two superpowers. It noted the potential for Communist exploitation of existing anti-American sentiments, commenting that already in Argentina “the Communists, playing upon Argentine isolationism, found a ready response among non-Communists to their incitement against the sending of Argentine troops to Korea,” while in Cuba, a recent incident in which American servicemen urinated on a statue of the Cuban nationalist hero José Martí had been “magnified” by local Communists, “thereby seriously, if temporarily, lowering popular esteem of the U.S.” The CIA also warned that the Communists could exploit “liberal democratic aversion to dictatorial rulers” in some nations, straining relations between their countries and dictatorships friendly to Washington.

Ernesto was in his fourth year of medical school when, citing his own Communist threat, Perón began cracking down on the left. During the purge, a Córdoba acquaintance of Ernesto’s, Fernando Barral, was arrested for “Communist agitation” and held in police custody for seven months. Barral was a Spanish Republican exile whose father, a famous sculptor, had been killed while defending Madrid. As a foreign national, he was to be deported back to an uncertain fate in Franco’s Spain, but after the Argentine Communist Party secured Hungary’s offer to receive him as a political exile, he was allowed to go there instead.

Except for random encounters, Barral and Ernesto had not had much contact since the Guevaras’ move to Buenos Aires. Barral had meanwhile fallen in love with Ernesto’s cousin Carmen Córdova Iturburu. Although his romantic feelings were unrequited, Barral and Carmen were close friends. Perhaps Ernesto viewed Barral as a rival for his cousin’s affections; perhaps he simply disliked Barral’s “dogmatism,” a speculation later made by Barral himself. Whatever the case, throughout Barral’s imprisonment, Ernesto remained unmoved. Ernesto neither visited Barral in prison nor (in a repetition of his behavior during Alberto Granado’s detention) joined the efforts to secure a release.

One friend recalled Ernesto advising his maids to vote for Perón because Perón’s policies favored their social class. According to Mario Saravia, Ernesto joined a Peronist youth organization on campus in order to use its extensive library facilities and check out books otherwise unavailable to him. Another time, on the suggestion, half in jest, of Tatiana Quiroga, prior to an ambitious trip through Latin America he was planning, he
drafted a letter to Evita, asking her for a jeep. Tatiana helped him write it, and she remembers that they had fun doing it. They never received a reply.

By the time he was in his early twenties, Ernesto stood out socially as an attractive oddball. Indeed, he defied definition and was oblivious of ridicule. Most of his peers dressed impeccably in ties, blazers, pressed slacks, and polished shoes, but he wore grimy jackets and odd-fitting, old-fashioned shoes that he bought at remainder sales.

Ernesto had perfected this untended image. As Dolores Moyano recalled, his sloppiness was a favorite topic of conversation among her friends. “One has to know the mentality of the provincial oligarchy to appreciate the remarkable effect of Ernesto’s appearance,” she wrote. “All the boys we knew put a great deal of effort and money into obtaining the latest fads: cowboy boots, blue jeans, Italian shirts, British pullovers, etc., back then in the early fifties. Ernesto’s favorite piece of clothing in those days was a nylon shirt, originally white but gray from use, which he constantly wore and called La Semanera, claiming he washed it once a week. His trousers would be wide, floppy, and once, I recall, held up by a piece of clothesline. With Ernesto’s appearance into a party, all conversation would cease, while everyone tried to look nonchalant and unimpressed. Ernesto, enjoying himself hugely and perfectly aware of the sensation he was creating, would be in complete command.”

He was hopelessly tone-deaf and learned to dance only when his friends taught him the steps and pacing of the beat. At the beginning of each dance, he would ask whether it was a tango, a waltz, or a mambo. Then he would clumsily guide his partner around the dance floor. “Dancing didn’t interest him in the slightest,” his close friend Carlos Figueroa recalled. Ernesto was a relentless seducer of girls, and the only reason he danced was to get close to his prey.

Only a few of his closest male friends and relatives were privy to his dalliances. Mario Saravia recalled Ernesto’s liaison with his family’s maid, a Bolivian Indian woman in her late thirties named Sabina Portugal, with whom Ernesto slept regularly. “She was the ugliest woman I have ever seen,” said Saravia. “But when she invited him, he would go to her room.”

Ernesto was informal with his parents, calling them affectionately
vieja
and
viejo
, but was equally self-deprecating when it came to himself. The nickname El Chancho (The Pig) was a particular source of enjoyment because of the outraged reaction it elicited from his socially sensitive father.

Ernesto on a hitchhiking trip, 1948.

When Ernesto senior discovered that Carlos Figueroa was its source, he stormed at him, furious over what he perceived as a slight to the family honor. In spite of or possibly because of his father’s displeasure, Ernesto kept the nickname and, in the rugby magazine
Tackle
he founded and edited for the eleven issues it survived, signed his articles Chang-Cho. (His merciless reviews of rugby matches were written in a quickly paced sportswriter’s jargon, peppered with anglicizations.)

Whereas Ernesto’s relationship with his father was combative, he was solicitous of his mother, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1946 and had undergone a mastectomy. Their union was so special that it excluded the other children, and several friends spoke sympathetically about the effect it had on Roberto in particular. More physically fit and two years younger than Ernesto, Roberto eventually excelled at rugby, but within the family his triumphs were overshadowed by those of his older brother, who was always seen as “conquering” his asthma. It took Roberto many years to overcome the resentment he had felt toward Ernesto since childhood.

Everyone in the family simply ignored the fact that Ernesto senior and Celia no longer shared a bed. He would come home late and, oblivious of whatever else was going on around him, flop down on the sofa and go to sleep. His other eccentricities made this behavior seem natural. He could not leave the house without intentionally forgetting something, like his keys, in order to come back. It was “bad luck” if he didn’t. This became an obsessive ritual. If anyone said “snake” around the family table, he would immediately say “wild boar,” the “countervenom” to the bad luck the forbidden word portended.

Celia, meanwhile, continued to run her house like a salon. The dinner table was her throne. She sat there for hours playing solitaire, which—like the cigarettes she habitually smoked—she had become addicted to, but she was always ready to receive some young person for conversation or to dispense advice. As for the practicalities of everyday life, she was above the fray. On her cook’s days off, she threw together meals with whatever happened to be in the refrigerator, with no notion of measurements or recipes. Visitors noted the absence of furniture, adornments, or paintings in the house, but were struck by the plethora of books, shelved and stacked everywhere. There were other peculiarities. The kitchen stove had a perennial short circuit, and the walls gave off electrical shocks to unsuspecting newcomers who leaned against them.

Just as Ernesto found the space and quiet he needed to study at Beatriz’s apartment or in the university library, his father soon found some refuge in a rented studio nearby. He had a new business partner, and together they set up a combination real estate agency and contracting firm called Guevara
Lynch y Verbruch. Before long, they had found some business around the city, but, as always with Ernesto senior, it was touch and go.
*

Although his studio had a bedroom, Ernesto senior had outfitted it with desks and architects’ drawing tables, and he continued sleeping on the living room sofa at Calle Araoz or else at his sister Beatriz’s apartment. Inevitably, however, with Calle Araoz so crowded, the studio became a spillover study for the Guevara youngsters and their friends, who came and went as they pleased. Ernesto used it to cram for exams, as did Roberto, who went to law school. Celia, Ana María, and her boyfriend, Carlos Lino, all of whom studied architecture, regularly worked on their projects there, and for a time it served as the editorial offices of the short-lived rugby review,
Tackle
.

For money, which was always short, Ernesto embarked on a series of commercial schemes that were as impractical as they were inventive. These enterprises usually involved his old friend Carlos Figueroa, who was now studying law in Buenos Aires and, like him, was forever in search of cash. Their first venture was Ernesto’s inspiration. He felt that the locust insecticide Gamexane would make a good domestic roach-killer. After testing it in the neighborhood, he decided to go into industrial production. And so, together with Figueroa and a patient of Dr. Pisani’s, he began packaging boxes of the stuff, mixed with talcum powder, in the garage of his home. He wanted to give it a registered trademark and came up with “Al Capone,” but was advised he needed authorization by the Capone family to use the name. His next choice was “Atila,” for Attila the Hun, the idea being that it would kill everything in its path, but there was already a product with this name. In the end, he decided on “Vendaval,” which in Spanish means a strong southerly gale, and he acquired a patent for it. Ernesto’s father offered to introduce him to potential investors but was rebuffed. Ernesto had a jaundiced view of his father’s business partners.

The Vendaval factory gave off a horrible and pervasive stench. “A nauseous smell expanded throughout the house,” his father recalled. “Everything we ate tasted to us like Gamexane; but Ernesto, imperturbable, continued his work.” The end came soon enough, however, when first his helpers and then Ernesto himself began feeling sick, and the business was abandoned.