Che Guevara (2 page)

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, 1960.

I became interested in Che Guevara in the late 1980s, while researching a book about modern-day guerrillas. Nearly a generation had elapsed since the poster bearing Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che in the black beret with the star pin first adorned so many college dorm walls. That era had drawn to a raggedy end with the demise of the student protest movement, when the Vietnam War was over. But in the insurgent backwoods of Burma, El Salvador, the Western Sahara, and Afghanistan, Che endured as a role model and as an almost mystical symbol of veneration. He inspired new generations of fighters and dreamers because of the revolutionary principles he represented—fearlessness, self-sacrifice, honesty, and devotion to the cause.

There were few books about Che still in print then. Most were twenty years old and were either official Cuban hagiographies or equally tiresome demonizations written by his ideological foes. Che’s life had yet to be written because much of it was still cloaked in secrecy, not least the mysterious circumstances of his final hours in Bolivia in 1967. Even the whereabouts of his body was unknown.

Who was this man who had given up everything he cherished in order to fight and die on a foreign battlefield? At the age of thirty-six he left behind his wife and five children and his ministerial position and commander’s rank in order to spark off new revolutions. And what had compelled a well-born, intellectual Argentinian with a medical diploma to try to change the world in the first place? Unravelling the mysteries of Che’s life story would shed light on some of the most fascinating episodes of the Cold War and bring into sharper focus one of its central characters.

It seemed to me that the answers to most of the questions about Che lay in Cuba, and in 1992 I went to Havana, where I met with his widow, Aleida March. I told her of my plan to write a biography of her late husband,
and I asked for her cooperation and assistance. She eventually agreed. A few months later I moved to Havana with my wife and three young children for a stay that stretched into nearly three years. It was a bleak moment for Cubans. The Soviet Union had suddenly ceased to exist, bringing to an abrupt end the generous financial subsidies that had sustained Cuba for the past three decades. But even as his country’s economy disintegrated, Fidel Castro held the socialist banner stubbornly aloft and, invoking Che’s example, demanded revolutionary fortitude and sacrifices from his countrymen.

The biggest challenge for me was to break through the sanctimonious atmosphere that surrounded Che’s memory. Che was virtually the patron saint of Cuba, and the reminiscences of people who had once known him were often cravenly laudatory or unabashedly politically deterministic. It wasn’t until I spent several months roaming around Argentina in the company of Che’s boyhood friends that the man—the young Che Guevara—began to emerge as a believable figure. Finally, back in Havana, I was given privileged access to some of his then unpublished diaries, which helped explain the boy’s transfomation into the legendary Che.

One morning in November 1995, when I was in Bolivia to interview everyone I could find who had had anything to do with Che’s guerrilla efforts there, I went to Santa Cruz to see Mario Vargas Salinas, a retired general in his early fifties. As a young army officer in 1967, Vargas Salinas became famous for leading an ambush on the Masicuri River that wiped out Che’s second column. Che’s German companion, Tania, and eight other fighters were killed. The massacre on the Masicuri marked the beginning of the end for Che. A little over a month later, on October 8, 1967, he was cornered in a canyon by a large number of army troops. Che was wounded and taken captive. The next day, on the orders of the Bolivian military high command, and in the presence of a CIA agent, he was shot dead. After announcing that Che had died in battle, the army displayed his body to the public for a day in the nearby town of Vallegrande. Photographs were taken of the shirtless, bullet-riddled corpse. Che lay on his back with his head propped up, his eyes open. A resemblance to images of the dead Christ was apparent to everyone. That night, Che’s body, and those of several of his comrades, vanished. His enemies intended to deny him a burial place where admirers might pay homage. One army officer later said, vaguely, that Che’s body had been tossed out of an airplane into the jungle. Another officer claimed that the corpse had been incinerated.

Mario Vargas Salinas turned out to be an unusually amiable and candid man. We ended up spending over three hours talking in his walled garden in Santa Cruz, and I discovered that he was willing to discuss subjects that were controversial. At one point he acknowledged that his soldiers had
executed one of Che’s wounded fighters. Vargas Salinas’s frankness prompted me to ask him about Che’s body, although I did not really expect an honest answer. I was stunned when he replied that he wanted to come clean with the past. He said that after Che was killed, his hands were amputated. Fingerprints were made to preserve physical proof of the body’s identity, and the hands were placed in formaldehyde and hidden away. Then a nocturnal burial squad, which Vargas Salinas was part of, secretly dumped the bodies of Che and several of his comrades into a mass grave. The grave had been bulldozed into the dirt airstrip at Vallegrande.

When I wrote an article about Vargas Salinas’s confession for
The New York Times
, the effect in Bolivia was both immediate and dramatic. President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada said he had heard that I had invented the whole story after getting Vargas Salinas drunk. Vargas Salinas, meanwhile, went into hiding and issued a statement denying everything. At a press conference in La Paz, I pointed out that I had a tape recording of the interview and suggested that the former general might be under duress of some sort. Vargas Salinas soon recanted his statement and verified the accuracy of my story, but he remained in hiding. Then, in a remarkable turnaround, President Sanchez de Lozada announced that he was reversing decades of official secrecy, and he ordered that a commission be formed to look for the bodies.

Over the weeks to come, the spectacle of former guerrillas, soldiers, and forensic experts digging holes in and around Vallegrande opened many old wounds and revealed the nastier details of an era in which Bolivia’s powerful military had gotten away, quite literally, with murder. From the 1960s and into the 1980s, a succession of dictators had run the country. Under their hamfisted and often brutal rule, hundreds of citizens had been “disappeared.” Now, encouraged by the hunt for Che Guevara’s body, people began clamouring for justice and for information about their loved ones. There were also angry demonstrations by former soldiers who had fought against Che’s band as youthful conscripts, men who in some cases had suffered grievous wounds and received no disability pensions, or any pensions at all. They too demanded their rights.

The past had been stirred up. Bolivia’s military chiefs complied with the president’s order, but they were furious with Vargas Salinas over his betrayal. He was flown into Villegrande on a small plane, and as he strolled around the airstrip, flanked by two unsmiling army generals, a scrum of reporters crowded close to him. After about thirty minutes, he declared that he could not pinpoint Che’s burial spot. It had been “too many years.” He and his escorts then climbed back into their plane and flew away. Days later, word spread that the army had placed Vargas Salinas under house arrest. It was several years before he was heard from again.

The search effort in Vallegrande yielded nothing at first. After several fruitless weeks, the generals in charge of the commission made it clear they wanted to stop looking, and they headed off to La Paz to make their case to the president. A few hours after they left, however, some local peasants, who had until then been too terrified to come forward, revealed the location of a burial site they had known about for years. It was a lonely spot in the forest a couple of miles out of town. It did not take long to confirm what they said. There, in several shallow graves, lay the remains of four of Che’s comrades.

The eleventh-hour discovery put an end to the military’s brinksman-ship. The search resumed with renewed vigor, but, before long, the trail went cold again. It wasn’t for another sixteen months, in July 1997, that Che’s skeleton was finally discovered by a Cuban-Argentine forensic team. The thirty-year conspiracy of deception was finally over. The skeleton lay together with six others at the bottom of a pit dug under the Vallegrande airstrip—just as Vargas Salinas had said. Che was stretched out full length at the base of the pit, face up, as if special care had been taken in laying him there. The other bodies had been dumped in a promiscuously tangled heap next to him. Che’s hands had been amputated at the wrists.

The remains were exhumed and placed in coffins and flown to Cuba, where they were received in an emotional private ceremony that included Fidel and Raúl Castro. Three months later, on October 10, 1997, at the beginning of a week of official mourning in Cuba, Fidel and Raúl paid their respects formally. The coffins of Che and his six comrades lay in state at the José Martí monument, an obelisk in the center of the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. For the next few days, an estimated 250,000 people waited in line for hours to file past. Children left letters to Che. Weeping men and women recited poems and sang revolutionary songs. Then the flag-draped coffins were driven slowly in a motorcade to the city of Santa Clara, which Che had conquered in the final and most decisive battle of Cuba’s revolutionary war, almost forty years earlier. He and his comrades were interred there in a mausoleum that had been built to honor the Heroic Guerrilla.

I revised this edition of my book on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution. It seemed a fitting moment to polish and refresh Che’s biography and to think about what he means to a new generation of readers. His surviving comrades are old men now, and Cuba is nearing the end of an era. For better or for worse, the revolution is part of Che’s legacy, although he has already transcended it.

Che’s face and his name have been emblazoned on snowboards and wristwatches and millions of T-shirts. But what, exactly, does the mythologized and commodified Che represent? More often than not, whatever the
image signifies has little to do with Che himself. The resurrected Che Guevara—handsome and long-haired, with flashing eyes—is in many ways as unreal as the virtual heroes and villains of a video game. The real Che Guevara, who was only thirty-nine when he died, has been both canonized and demonized. However much the facts of his life are documented, I suspect that his paradoxes and his place in popular culture will ensure that that is always so. But neither school of opinion will ever be able to claim him entirely.

The horoscope was confounding. If Ernesto “Che” Guevara had been born on June 14, 1928, as stated on his birth certificate, then he was a Gemini—and a lackluster one at that. The astrologer doing the calculations, a friend of Che’s mother, repeated her work and got the same result. The Che who emerged from her analysis was a gray, dependent personality who had lived an uneventful life. But this was in the early 1960s, and Che was already one of the most famous people in the world. He had been on the cover of
Time
magazine. He was a highly visible, charismatic figure renowned for his independent spirit.

When the puzzled astrologer showed Che’s mother the dismal horo-scope, she laughed. Then she confided a secret she had guarded closely for more than three decades. Her son had actually been born one month earlier, on May 14. He was no Gemini, but a headstrong and decisive Taurus. The deception had been necessary, she explained, because she was three months’ pregnant when she married Che’s father. Immediately after their wedding, the couple had left Buenos Aires for the remote jungle backwater of Misiones, 1,200 miles up the Paraná River, on Argentina’s northern border with Paraguay and Brazil. There, as her husband set himself up as a
yerba mate
planter, she went through her pregnancy away from the prying eyes of Buenos Aires society. A doctor friend falsified the date on the birth certificate, moving it back by one month to help shield them from scandal.

When their son was a month old, the couple notified their families. They said that they had tried to reach Buenos Aires, and that Che’s mother had gone into labor prematurely. A baby born at seven months, after all, is not unusual. There may have been doubts, but their story and their child’s official birth date were quietly accepted.

It seems fitting that a man who spent most of his adult life engaged in clandestine activities and whose death involved a conspiracy should have begun life with a subterfuge.

In 1927, when Ernesto Guevara Lynch met Celia de la Serna, she had just graduated from an exclusive Catholic girls’ school, Sacré Coeur, in Buenos Aires. She was a dramatic-looking young woman of twenty with an aqui-line nose, wavy dark hair, and brown eyes. Celia was well read but un-worldly, devout but questioning. Ripe, in other words, for a romantic adventure.

Celia de la Serna was a true Argentine blue blood of undiluted Spanish noble lineage. One ancestor had been the Spanish royal viceroy of colonial Peru; another a famous Argentine military general. Her paternal grandfather had been a wealthy landowner, and Celia’s own father had been a renowned law professor, congressman, and ambassador. Both he and his wife died while Celia was still a child, leaving her and her six brothers and sisters to be raised by a guardian, a religious aunt. The family had conserved its revenue-producing estates, and Celia was due a comfortable inheritance when she reached the age of twenty-one.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch was twenty-seven. He was moderately tall and handsome, with a strong chin and jaw. The glasses he wore for astigmatism gave him a clerkish appearance that was deceptive, for he had an ebullient, gregarious personality, a hot temper, and an outsize imagination. He was the great-grandson of one of South America’s richest men, and his ancestors included members of both the Spanish and the Irish nobility, although over the years his family had lost most of its fortune.