Che Guevara (7 page)

Alberto Granado was the coach of the local rugby team, Estudiantes, and Ernesto wanted desperately to try out for it, although Alberto was doubtful
about his potential. “The first impression wasn’t very favorable,” Alberto recalled. “He wasn’t robust, with very thin arms.” But he decided to give the boy a try, and accepted him for training. Soon the wheezing lad was practicing with Estudiantes two evenings a week. He earned a reputation for his fearless attacks on the pitch, which he accomplished by running headlong at the player with the ball, yelling: “Look out, here comes El Furibundo Serna!” (
Furibundo
means furious, and Serna was an abbreviation of his maternal surname.) The war cry led Alberto to give Ernesto a new nickname, Fuser, while Alberto became Míal, for “
mi Alberto
.”

Alberto Granado took a special interest in Ernesto. He noticed that often, while his team waited for its turn on the practice field, the boy would sit on the ground reading, his back propped against a light post. Ernesto was already reading Freud, enjoyed the poetry of Baudelaire, and had read Dumas, Verlaine, and Mallarmé—in French—as well as most of Émile Zola’s novels, Argentine classics such as Sarmiento’s epic
Facundo
, and the latest work of William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. A zealous reader himself, Granado couldn’t comprehend how the teenager could have gotten through so much. Ernesto explained that he had begun reading to occupy himself during his asthma attacks, when his parents made him stay at home. As for his reading in French, this was the result of Celia’s influence. She had tutored him during his absences from school.

For all their new friends and comforts in Córdoba, Alta Gracia remained dear to the Guevaras, and the family returned there often, sometimes renting cottages during the holidays. Ernesto was able to keep up his friendships with Calica Ferrer, Carlos Figueroa, and other members of his old
barra
. The González-Aguilars had also moved to Córdoba, and they lived in a house not far from the Guevaras.

The new family home on Calle Chile turned out to have some disadvantages that had been overlooked by Ernesto senior in his initial enthusiasm over its proximity to Parque Sarmiento and the Lawn Tennis Club. Their neighborhood of Nueva Córdoba, built on a hill rising up from the city center, was still in the process of being urbanized. It was a hodgepodge of residential homes surrounded by undeveloped vacant lots called
baldíos
. On these lots, and in the dry creeks that ran through the area, poor people had built shanties. One of the shantytowns lay directly across from where the Guevaras now lived. It was inhabited by colorful personalities, among them a man with no legs who rode around on a little wooden cart pulled by a team of six mongrel dogs that he urged on with a long, cracking whip.

Dolores Moyano, who had become a close friend of Ernesto’s youngest sister, Ana María, was now a constant visitor in the Guevara household. Moyano recalled that one of their pastimes was to sit on the curb of the “safe
side” of the street and watch the goings-on among the slum dwellers of the
baldío
. One of them was a woman in black who nursed her baby under a
paraíso
tree and spit phlegm over his head. Another was a dwarfish twelve-year-old called Quico who had no eyebrows or eyelashes. They bribed him with sweets to show them his strange white tongue.

Although they were much better off than their poor neighbors in the hovels of cardboard and tin, the Guevaras soon discovered that their own home was built on a shaky foundation. Before long, huge cracks began appearing in the walls, and from his bed at night, Ernesto senior could see stars through a crack in his ceiling. Yet, for a builder, he was remarkably casual about the dangers. In the children’s room, where another crack appeared, he remedied the situation by moving their beds away from the wall in case it collapsed. “We found the house comfortable and we didn’t want to move, so we decided to stay as long as we could,” he recalled.

The sharp contrasts of urban life may have been new to the Guevaras but were becoming increasingly typical in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Since the late nineteenth century, changing economics, immigration, and industrialization had brought about a radical rural-to-urban population shift, as poor farmworkers migrated from the countryside to the cities in search of jobs and a better way of life. Many of them ended up in the shantytowns, or
villas miserias
, that sprang up in Córdoba and Argentina’s other large cities. In a span of only fifty years, Argentina’s demographics had reversed completely, from an urban population of 37 percent in 1895 to 63 percent in 1947. During the same period, the population as a whole had quadrupled from 4 million to 16 million. Despite this ongoing social transformation, Córdoba retained a placid, provincial air in the 1940s. Surrounded by the limitless yellow pampa, its horizons broken only by the blue ranges of the sierras, Córdoba was still mostly untouched by the industrialization and construction boom that was rapidly turning Buenos Aires into a modern metropolis.

As the site of the country’s first university, founded by Jesuits, and with many old churches and colonial buildings, Córdoba had earned a reputation as a center of learning, and
cordobeses
were proud of their cultural heritage. The city’s leading role in education had been secured in 1918 when Radical Party students and teachers at the University of Córdoba spear-headed the University Reform movement that guaranteed university autonomy. The movement had spread beyond Córdoba to Argentina’s other universities and throughout much of Latin America. Dolores Moyano recalled the Córdoba of her youth as “a city of bookstores, religious processions, student demonstrations, and military parades; a city gentle, dull, almost torpid on the surface but simmering with tensions.”

Those tensions burst out shortly after the Guevaras arrived. On June 4, 1943, in Buenos Aires, a cabal of military officers banded together and overthrew President Castillo, who had named as his successor a wealthy provincial strongman with ties to British corporate monopolies. Early reaction to the coup was guardedly positive among both liberal Argentines who regarded Castillo’s pro-German administration with suspicion and nationalists fearing further encroachment by foreign economic interests.

Within forty-eight hours a leader had emerged: the war minister General Pedro Ramírez, representing the military’s ultranationalist faction. Very quickly, he took measures to silence all domestic opposition. Declaring a state of siege, his regime postponed elections indefinitely, dissolved the congress, gagged the press, intervened in the country’s universities, and fired protesting faculty members. In a second wave of edicts at the year’s end, all political parties were dissolved, compulsory religious instruction in schools was decreed, and even stricter press controls were established. In Córdoba, teachers and students took to the streets in protest. Arrests followed, and in November 1943 Alberto Granado and several other students were imprisoned in Córdoba’s central jail, behind the colonnades of the old whitewashed
cabildo
on the city’s Plaza San Martín. Granado’s brothers and Ernesto visited him there, bringing him food and news of the outside world.

The weeks dragged by, with no sign that the students were to be charged or released any time soon. An underground “prisoners’ committee” asked Córdoba’s secondary school students to march in the streets and demand that the detainees be freed. Alberto asked the fifteen-year-old Ernesto if he would join, but he refused. He would march, he said, only if given a revolver. He told Alberto that the march was a futile gesture that would accomplish little.

In early 1944, after a couple of months in detention, Alberto Granado was released. Despite Ernesto’s refusal to demonstrate on his behalf, their friendship remained intact. In light of his penchant for daredevil stunts, Ernesto’s unwillingness to help his friend is striking. And, given his extreme youth and apparent unconcern with Argentine politics, his “principled” stance seems dubious. This paradoxical behavior of making radical-sounding declamations while displaying complete apathy about political activism was a pattern during Ernesto’s youth.

As yet unknown to most of the public, a key figure behind the political changes taking place in Argentina was an obscure army colonel with a fleshy face and Roman nose whose name—Juan Domingo Perón—would soon
be very familiar. After returning from a posting in Mussolini’s Italy, where he became a fervent admirer of Il Duce, Perón had briefly been a troop instructor in the province of Mendoza before going to work at military headquarters in Buenos Aires. There, he had made his move as the driving force behind the shadowy military group calling itself the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, which had launched the coup of June 1943.

Over the next three years, Perón maneuvered his way to the top. After the coup he became undersecretary for war, serving under his mentor, General Edelmiro Farrell. When Farrell became vice president in October 1943, Perón asked for and was given the presidency of the National Labor Department. It quickly became his power base. Within a month, he had transformed his seemingly obscure job into a ministry renamed the Department of Labor and Welfare and was answerable only to the president.

A sweeping series of reformist labor decrees began to flow from Perón’s office. The measures were aimed at appealing to disenfranchised workers while organized labor groups linked to the traditional political parties were being destroyed. Before long, Perón had brought the country’s workforce to heel under his own centralized authority. The phenomenon that would be known as
peronismo
had begun. Very soon, it would radically alter Argentina’s political landscape.

By late 1943, with the United States in the war, Nazi Germany was on the defensive throughout Europe and North Africa, and Mussolini had been overthrown in Italy. Suspecting the Argentine regime, and Perón in particular, of serving as thinly disguised representatives for the Third Reich in Latin America, the United States stepped up pressure on Argentina to abandon its official neutrality in the war. Many Argentines shared the Americans’ suspicions. Perón’s populist appeals to the social “underclass” in rhetoric reeking of Fascism had alienated Argentina’s liberal middle classes. They were joined by the traditional oligarchy, which saw the status quo in danger. Most people of the Guevaras’ social class had become virulent
antiperonistas
. But their opposition did not stop Perón from becoming even more powerful.

In March 1944, Farrell became president. Perón was war minister, and by July he was vice president as well. Of the three high-level positions he now held, however, the most important was still his post as Secretary of the Department of Labor and Welfare. Perón was known to everyone in Argentina.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch remained active in Acción Argentina, and he and Celia also joined Córdoba’s Comité Pro–De Gaulle, a solidarity network aimed at helping the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France. Unbeknownst to them, young Ernesto had resumed the old Nazi-hunting activities his father had left unfinished. With a school friend, Osvaldo Bidinost
Payer, he stealthily returned to the small mountain community of La Cumbre, where his father’s group had conducted surveillance of the hotel suspected of being the headquarters for Nazi operations in Argentina’s interior. Ernesto senior had warned his son against sniffing around, telling him that of the two government investigators sent there, only one had returned, the other presumably having been murdered. But the boys went anyway. They approached the hotel at night. Through an open window, Bidinost recalled later, they caught a glimpse of a couple of men busy at “a long table with lots of metal boxes and things.” But before they could see more, their presence was detected. “They heard us, someone came out with lanterns, and they fired two shots at us. We left and never returned.”

In spite of such escapades, Ernesto’s commitment to political causes fell far short of active militancy during his high school years. He and his friends, who included children of Spanish Republican refugees such as the González-Aguilars, were, like their parents, politically “anti-Fascist,” and given to arguing precociously over what had “really happened” in Spain. But they had much less notion of, or even interest in, the events taking place in Argentina at the time. When young Ernesto did espouse a political opinion, it was usually provocative, designed to shock his parents or peers. For instance, when Córdoba’s
peronista
militants were rumored to be preparing to attack, with stones, the local Jockey Club, a symbol of the conservative landed oligarchy, Ernesto declared his willingness to join them. “I wouldn’t mind throwing some stones at the Jockey Club myself,” some of his friends heard him say. They assumed this was a sign of his pro-
peronista
sentiments, but it was just as likely he was being a bloody-minded teenager.

When Argentina’s government finally broke off diplomatic relations with the Axis powers, Ernesto’s parents were overjoyed. But his young friend Pepe González-Aguilar had never seen Ernestito so angry as the moment when he confronted his celebrating parents. “I couldn’t understand how he, who had always been anti-Nazi, didn’t share our happiness,” he said. Later, Pepe surmised that Ernesto’s anger was due to the fact that the decision had been made not on principle, but because of U.S. pressure, and he shared Argentine nationalists’ sense of shame that their country had buckled under to the Americans. Nevertheless, when the Allied forces liberated Paris in September 1944, Ernesto joined the celebrating crowd in Córdoba’s Plaza San Martín, accompanied by several of his school friends, their pockets stuffed with metal ball bearings, ready to hurl at the hooves of the horses of the mounted police called in to keep order. (In recognition of his own efforts, Ernesto senior received a certificate signed by de Gaulle himself, thanking him for the support he had given to the people of France in their hour of need. For the rest of his life, he kept it with him as one of his proudest possessions.)