Che Guevara (21 page)

Indeed, in 1953, with the sole exception of Guatemala, the backward agrarian nations on the Central American isthmus were all “banana republics” dominated by the United States. On the slender neck of land joining the North and South American continents, Panama was barely a sovereign state fifty years after its creation by Theodore Roosevelt to ensure American control of the newly built Panama Canal. Despite mounting nationalist sentiment, the United States retained jurisdiction over the Canal Zone, which bisected the country. It had its own military bases and exercised a preponderant role in Panama’s economy and political life.

Nicaragua had been ruled by the corrupt General Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza García since the 1930s. Somoza’s rule had been secured by treachery. He ordered the assassination of the nationalist guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino during talks to end years of civil war and repeated incursions to “restore order” by American marines. Staunchly anticommunist, Somoza had a lot of friends in Washington, and it was on his urging that the CIA had first initiated hostilities against Guatemala’s reformist revolution.

Tiny El Salvador was firmly in the hands of an oligarchy of coffee growers. A succession of military rulers had run the country ever since a Communist-inspired peasant rebellion was quelled twenty years before at the cost of 30,000 lives. The peasant majority lived in feudal conditions. Neighboring Honduras was almost roadless, undeveloped, and underpopulated, and its governments were woefully subservient to United Fruit, which had extensive plantations there and owned the country’s ports and railroads.

Costa Rica also played host to United Fruit, but since a reformist revolution in 1948, led by José “Pepe” Figueres, it had extracted better trade terms
for itself while managing to stay on Washington’s good side. Touted as the “Switzerland of Central America,” Costa Rica exuded an atmosphere of political tolerance and moderation.

The neighboring Caribbean islands, with their plantation economies and poor black populations descended from African slaves, were a soup of imperial dominions ruled by white governors appointed from London, Paris, or The Hague. These same European powers still had colonies on the mainland as well: tiny British Honduras on the Yucatán peninsula and the remote Guyanas on South America’s northern cape remained in Dutch, French, and British hands. The United States had joined this imperial crowd with its virtual annexation of Puerto Rico, which it had seized from Spain half a century earlier. Puerto Rico had been made the first U.S. “commonwealth” in 1952. Only Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba were independent republics, and all remained under rule that was unstable, corrupt, or both. The egomaniacal, sinister General Rafael Trujillo had ruled and robbed the Dominican Republic since 1930. As for black Haiti, politically shaky since a coup in 1950, it would soon succumb to the terrifying rule of Dr. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Cuba was under the freewheeling grip of General Fulgencio Batista, who had come to power in a military coup in 1952.

When the
Guayos
docked in Panama, Ernesto and Gualo made their way to a cheap pension where they were allowed to sleep in the hallway for a dollar a day each. At the Argentine consulate, they discovered that Ricardo Rojo and Oscar Valdovinos had already gone on to Guatemala but had left a letter for them. It contained the names of some contacts at the Panama University students’ federation, and the surprising news that Valdovinos had gotten married after a whirlwind romance to twenty-three-year-old Luzmila Oller, the daughter of a Panamanian congressman.

They met Luzmila, who had stayed behind, and learned that her sudden marriage with Valdo had caused a “revolution” in the Oller family. Her father had moved out of their home; Luzmila’s mother had refused to meet Valdo. It was a real scandal, complete with accusations by the Ollers that Valdo was a rascal and a gold digger. In his journal, Ernesto disparaged Valdo for taking off to Guatemala without having “gotten a screw or, it seems, even a serious feel” with his bride. As for the new Mrs. Valdovinos, she was “
muy simpática
, seems really intelligent but is far too Catholic for my tastes.”

Ernesto and Gualo began to hustle. The Argentine consul was helpful, and so were their university contacts. They quickly made friends among
the students and fell in with an interesting crowd of poets, artists, and political activists who hung out at two cafés, the Iberia and the Coca-Cola. Their new friends helped them pay their pension bill and steered Ernesto toward magazine editors, to see if he could publish some travel articles, and to the university medical faculty, where it was arranged for him to give a talk on allergies.

Ernesto was paid twenty dollars for an article he wrote about the raft adventure with Alberto Granado, which was published in
Panamá América
. In his journal he remarked that an article on Machu Picchu was “being fought over” with the editors of
Siete
because of its pronounced anti-American slant. The article, “Machu Picchu, Enigma de Piedra en America,” was published in
Siete
on December 12, 1953. In it, he fires both barrels at the Yankee looters of Peru’s archaeological patrimony. After describing the history of the Incan empire and Hiram Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu, he writes, “Here comes the sad part. All the ruins were cleared of overgrowth, perfectly studied and described and ... totally robbed of every object that fell into the hands of the researchers, who triumphantly took back to their country more than two hundred boxes containing priceless archaeo-logical treasures. ... Where can one go to admire or study the treasures of the indigenous city? The answer is obvious: in the museums of North America.” It isn’t surprising that he had trouble with his editors: these were provocative words. His conclusion revealed his emerging political viewpoint. “Let’s be content then, with giving the Incan city its two possible significances: for the fighter who ... with a voice of stone shouts with continental reach, ‘Citizen of Indoamerica, reconquer the past’; for others ... a valid phrase can be found in the visitors’ book of the hotel, left imprinted there by an English subject with all the bitterness of his imperial nostalgia: ‘I am lucky to find a place without a Coca-Cola advertisement.’”

Panama must have seemed an appropriate place to initiate hostilities against the country Ernesto had come to see as a mortal enemy. He began listing and describing the people he met there in his journal, evaluating them according to their human qualities and, increasingly, for their political “soundness” as well. At Panama University he mentioned meeting a “Dr. Carlos Moreno, who impressed me as an intelligent demagogue, very knowledgeable of the psychology of the masses but not so much in the dialectics of history. He is very simpatico and cordial and treated us with deference. He gives the impression of knowing what he does and where he is going but he wouldn’t take a revolution further than what was strictly necessary to contain the masses.”

Doctor Moreno’s knowledge of Marxist ideology and his potential value as a
revolutionary
were what mattered to Ernesto. One cannot help
feeling that people were being marked for their use as players in a revolution that transcended national boundaries. It was as if glimmerings of his future program were already seeping into his consciousness.

While Ernesto honed his sword in Panama, his father, in Buenos Aires, was fussing over his vagabond son. He had been fuming ever since he received Ernesto’s letter from Guayaquil with the account of pawning the suit. Determined that
el doctor
Guevara should be properly attired, Ernesto senior decided to have a new wardrobe—a suit, blazer, and ties—made and sent to Panama. Soon after Ernesto received them, he wrote to his father, saying, “What little value Argentine clothes have—for the whole lot I got only one hundred dollars!”

By late November, Ernesto and Gualo’s economic situation was getting desperate again. A ship they had hoped to take to Guatemala had been delayed. They resolved to continue overland but faced more visa problems. “Our situation is bad,” Ernesto wrote in his diary. “The Costa Rican consul is a dickhead and won’t give us the visa. ... The struggle becomes hard.”

Luzmila was ready to leave and join Valdo. The situation had been smoothed over with her family, and she was hoping for a possible diplomatic post at the Panamanian embassy in Guatemala. Before she took off, she came to Ernesto and Gualo’s rescue, lending them forty-five dollars. They had finally obtained their Costa Rican visas and were ready to go. With five dollars remaining in their pockets after paying debts, they were off. But they didn’t get very far before things started going wrong.

Somewhere in the middle of northern Panama the truck they were riding in broke down, then later drove off the road. After two more days of cadging rides on rural trains and hiking on foot, they crossed into Costa Rica and reached the pretty Pacific port of Golfito, a banana port of the United Fruit Company, built for its “10,000 employees.” Ernesto took note of the “city’s division into well-defined zones with guards who impede entry. Of course, the best zone is that of the gringos. It looks something like Miami but, naturally, without poor people. The gringos are trapped behind the four walls of their homes and the narrow social group they make up.” He visited the company hospital and observed critically, “The hospital is a comfortable house where correct medical attention can be given but the benefits vary according to the category of person working in the company. As always, the class spirit of the gringos can be seen.”

They embarked the next day aboard a United Fruit Company ship that Ernesto nicknamed “the famous
Pachuca
(which transports
pachucos
, bums).” The ship’s real name was the
Río Grande
, and it made the run to the Costa Rican port of Puntarenas. The trip started well enough, but within a few hours the sea got rough. “Almost all the passengers including Gualo
started to vomit,” Ernesto wrote. “I stayed outside with a
negrita
, Socorro, whom I’d picked up, more whorish than a hen with sixteen years on her back.” Seasoned mariner that he was, Ernesto was unaffected by seasickness, and spent the next two days romping with the pliant Socorro. After docking at Puntarenas, he said good-bye to her, and he and Gualo headed inland for the Costa Rican capital of San José.

A tiny city perched on gently rolling green hills, San José was the new headquarters for the Caribbean Legion, a regional pro-democracy alliance that had previously been based in Havana, where it had enjoyed the patronage of Cuba’s former president, Carlos Prío Socarrás. The Caribbean Legion had moved to San José following Batista’s coup. Now, under the guiding hand of President Figueres, exiled political leaders from the dictatorships in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua met in San José to plot and conspire.

Pepe Figueres was a rarity—a Latin American politician whose opinion was respected in Washington by both conservative and liberal policy makers. He had achieved this feat by treading a cautious middle ground in his political reforms. He had abolished Costa Rica’s army, nationalized the banks, and extended state control over the economy, but he left foreign interests untouched. He had further endeared himself by banning Costa Rica’s Communist Party, while lobbying Washington to move away from its traditional reliance on dictatorships in the region and to support democratic reform.

At the time, in addition to Figueres, Latin America’s leading “democratic alternatives” were Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) movement in Peru, and Venezuela’s Acción Democrática, led by Rómulo Betancourt, who had presided over a liberal coalition government until it was toppled by the military in favor of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The policies they espoused were moderately “social democratic,” yet firmly anticommunist, and promoted social reform and foreign investment at the same time. The Dominican Partido Democrático Revolucionario, led by the mulatto storyteller and politician Juan Bosch, represented the most left-wing of the exile parties, though it too fell short of an overtly Marxist platform.

While Haya de la Torre was in his fifth year of political asylum as a guest of the Colombian embassy in Lima, both Bosch and Betancourt were in Costa Rica, and Ernesto very much wished to hear their ideas on social and political reform. He was especially interested in their positions regarding the United States, a topic that had become his weather vane for determining political legitimacy. But he and Gualo also needed to survive, and so a new round of scrounging began as they pursued their double agenda.

They spent a day chatting with Juan Bosch and the Costa Rican Communist leader Manuel Mora Valverde. A few days later, Ernesto finally met Rómulo Betancourt. Of the three, it was the Communist Mora Valverde, “a calm man ... with a series of movements like tics that indicate a great internal restlessness,” who most impressed Ernesto. He took careful notes on Mora’s analysis of Costa Rica’s recent history and of Figueres’s pro-American policies. “When Figueres is disabused of his faith in the compassion of the Department of State comes the
incognita:
Will he fight or submit? There is the dilemma and we will see what happens,” Ernesto wrote.

Ernesto described Juan Bosch as “a literary man of clear ideas and leftist tendencies. We didn’t speak of literature, simply of politics. He described Batista as a gangster surrounded by gangsters.” He was scathing in his appraisal of Rómulo Betancourt. “He gives me the impresson of being a politician with some firm social ideas in his head but the rest are fluttery and twistable in the direction of the best advantages. In principle he’s on the side of the United States. He went along with the [1948] Rio [Inter-American Defense] Pact and dedicated himself to speaking horrors of the Communists.”

Soon afterward, Ernesto and Gualo began hitchhiking to Nicaragua, which Ernesto referred to as “Tacho’s [Somoza’s]
estancia
.” Across the border, during a torrential downpour, Ricardo Rojo suddenly reappeared. He was traveling with two Argentine brothers, the Beverragis, who were driving their own car to South America. Feeling at loose ends after a few weeks in Guatemala, Rojo had come along for the ride. Since the road into Costa Rica was impassable, they went to the coast to see about a ferry south, while Ernesto and Gualo traveled to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.