Che Guevara (150 page)

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Fidel had sent word that he was doing what he could to help. He’d met with the union leader Juan Lechín, who had promised his help and men for the cause. Lechín would be returning secretly to Bolivia in a few weeks. But Lechín ran into problems of his own and, as with so many of the Bolivians who at one time or another had promised their support, did little to help in the end. Previously, Fidel had sent Che a message saying that his meetings with Kolle Cueto and Simón Reyes from the Bolivian Party had gone well; they were “understanding,” he said, and had promised their help. Kolle was supposedly going to visit Che; now, of course, that was out of the question. The army had flooded the area, picking up any civilian suspected of dealings with them, and, since Barrientos’s ban on their activities, the Party leaders had had to go underground.

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When, the next day, the radio reported ominously that “three foreign mercenaries” had been “killed in battle,” Che made a note in his diary to launch a revenge mission if it turned out they had been murdered by the army. Luckily for the three men, however, a local newspaper photographer had taken pictures of them alive in custody. The publication of that photograph may have saved their lives, for by the end of the month they were reported to be in prison in Camiri.

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Jorge Vázquez-Viaña was reported captured and wounded, but later the army said he had “escaped.” In fact, he had been removed from his hospital bed and executed; his body was taken up in a helicopter and hurled into the forested mountains near Lagunillas.

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At the end of June, General Ovando Candia confirmed publicly that Che was in Bolivia. Writing in his diary on June 30, Che observed, “Ovando’s declaration is based on the statements made by Debray. It appears the latter said more than was necessary, although we cannot know the implications this may have, nor the circumstances in which he said what he did.”

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The enigmatic Arguedas was not only working for the CIA. He was a former member of the Communist Party and a friend of Mario Monje’s, and over the next several years, he functioned as a triple agent. He worked for the CIA, the Bolivian Communist Party, and eventually the Cubans. Thirty years later, none of his former colleagues in these various services could say with certainty where his true loyalties lay at any given time. (See Notes.)

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See Notes.

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According to Manuel Piñeiro, it was important to bring Renán back to Cuba to provide him with new documentation and to debrief him in order to assess whether or not he had been “detected.” Ariel says Renán was withdrawn because he was extremely ill with “acute parasites.” Whatever the case, Piñeiro did not allow Renán to return to Bolivia, apparently out of fear for his security. Piñeiro conceded that the decision did not make him popular. “Renán blames me for denying him his chance to have been part of a historic mission,” he said. (See Notes.)

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See Notes.

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According to Vargas Salinas, he assented to the execution when his soldiers demanded to take the life of one of the two prisoners in revenge for the death of a fellow soldier. As he tells it, Maymura was “defiant,” and Paco was terrified. While Vargas Salinas pondered what to do, he could feel Paco, who had been sitting next to him, squirm underneath his legs for protection. At that moment, Vargas Salinas said, he made a motion with his head toward Maymura, who was immediately shot to death by his men. Paco’s life was spared.

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Late in 1969, Honorato Rojas was executed by a group of Cuban-trained Bolivians who had returned to their country to continue Che’s guerrilla war.

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A
cacharpayas
is an Andean farewell party, with singing, dancing, and drinking. The poem was confiscated by Selich, whose widow showed it to me.

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See Notes.

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In 1996, Selich’s widow, Socorro, allowed me to review and copy her late husband’s documents, which had not been seen by anyone else. They included photographs, cables, internal army memorandums, Selich’s daily log of military activities for 1967, the uncompleted notes of his talk with Che Guevara, and a secret report he filed to General La Fuente about the events and circumstances of Che Guevara’s execution. (See Notes.)

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According to Selich’s report, none of the officers at La Higuera—including himself and Felix Rodríguez—agreed with the decision to execute Che. “We believed it would be better to keep Sr. Guevara alive because in our judgment it would be more advantageous to present him before world opinion in defeat, wounded and sick, and to then obtain compensation [from Cuba] to offset the expenses incurred by fighting the guerrillas, and to compensate the families of the soldiers murdered by the Guerrilla Band.”

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Rodríguez’s account contains certain claims that are contradicted by the Bolivian officers who were also present in La Higuera—just as there are numerous discrepancies among the officers’ versions. According to Miguel Ayoroa, for instance, Willy and Juan Pablo Chang were held together in the second room of the schoolhouse and executed at the same time. This testimony coincides with the most widely believed version of events, which is that Che’s photo session with Rodríguez came
before
Willy’s execution, and that afterward, he and Willy and Juan Pablo Chang were executed almost simultaneously, by Bolivian army “volunteers.”

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Although her story has been impugned by military officers who were present, the woman, Julia Cortéz, who was then twenty-two years old, claimed that Che had asked to see her and that she had been permitted into the room where he was held. She had been nervous, and when she entered, Che fixed her with a penetrating stare that she found impossible to meet. He motioned to the blackboard and pointed out a grammatical error in what she had written, then told her that the squalidness of the school was shameful and that in Cuba it would be called a prison. After a short talk, she left. According to her, Che asked to see her again shortly before his execution, but she had felt too afraid to go.

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Fidel gave all of the Cubans Rolexes—Oyster Submariners with stainless-steel cases and red and blue faces—when they departed for the battlefield. If a fighter was killed, one of his comrades often kept the watch in his honor. Che had kept Tuma’s watch, intending to give it to his widow, but in the meantime he wore it as a cherished memento.

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The date of Che’s death, October 9, was assiduously ignored, and the photographs of his body were not allowed to circulate in Cuba for decades to come.

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Moro and Morogoro were both noms de guerre of the Cuban doctor Octavio de la Concepción de la Pedraja; Pablo and Chapaco, who were both Bolivians, were Francisco Huanca Flores and Jaime Arana Campero. Eustaquio’s real name was Lucio Edilberto Galván Hidalgo. He was a Peruvian citizen. Dario and Ñato were David Adriazola Viezaga and Julio Méndez Korne.

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Chato Peredo told me that in the summer of 1967, when Che and Chato’s brothers, Coco and Inti, were still alive and in the field, and he was studying in Moscow, he asked the Soviets to give him and other Bolivian students military training so they could go to Bolivia and help in the struggle. He was turned down, he said. The Soviets told him that such a request could only be channeled—or approved—through the Bolivian Communist Party. Chato survived the massacre of the ELN and went on to become a successful psychotherapist in the city of Santa Cruz. He specialized in taking his patients “back to the womb.”

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During a meeting with me in 1993, Monje mentioned an interest in the trade in precious gems as a possible livelihood.

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See Notes.

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To add to the contradictions, a few days after the repatriation of Che’s remains to Cuba, in July 1997, the former Cuban-American CIA agent Gustavo Villoldo emerged from years of obscurity to summon me to a meeting in Miami, where he insisted that he had presided over Che’s burial with several of Selich’s men, but denied that either Selich or Vargas Salinas was present.