Che Guevara (95 page)

As Sartre had noted, the revolutionary honeymoon was over by late 1960, and that, in revolutionary terms, was a very long time ago. Che was now, at the threshold of middle age, the father of four children and a government minister at the pinnacle of his career in revolutionary Cuba. He was less lighthearted, and he looked his age. He had shorn the long hair that he had grown in the mountains and worn during the first year of the revolution. He still wore the beret, but his face appeared puffy and swollen. Despite what he had told Ricardo Rojo about cortisone giving him a heavier appearance, he
had
gained weight. So had Aleida, who had grown plump from her string of pregnancies.

Ever the iconoclast, Che steadfastly wore the shirt jacket of his olive green uniform outside his trousers, with his belt on top. He was the only Cuban
comandante
who refused to conform to the military dress code. More often that not, he wore his trousers hanging loose, outside his boots, instead of tucking them in. No one dared reproach him, of course.
“Che es como es,”
his colleagues would say, with a shrug of their shoulders: “Che is the way he is.”

When he was home, Che spent hours closeted in his austere little rooftop office full of books. Its only adornments were a bronze bas-relief of Lenin, a small bronze statue of Simón Bolívar, and a large framed photograph of Camilo Cienfuegos. When people asked him why he didn’t take a break, he gave work as an excuse. There was never very much time to be with Aleida and the children. More often than not, duty called, and his trips away were invariably long ones. He inspected factories, military units, cooperatives, and schools; gave speeches; received foreign dignitaries; attended diplomatic receptions. Whenever possible, he brought Aleida along to such functions in Havana, but his workweek lasted from Monday through Saturday, including nights, and on Sunday mornings he went off to do volunteer labor. Sunday afternoons were all he spared for his family.

During these afernoons at home, Che would throw himself down on the living room floor and play with his children and his dog, a German shepherd named Muralla who also escorted him to the office. His eldest child, Hildita, now almost eight, was usually there on weekends, and they watched boxing matches and soccer games together on television, pretending
to place bets. Occasionally he stopped by to see Hilda. She noted his extreme tiredness, and later recalled how he used to take their daughter in his arms and tell her he wanted to take her on a trip with him someday—but he never did.

At times, Che’s disciplinarian streak showed itself at home. Once, when Aliusha had a tantrum, Che walked over and smacked her bottom. Her wails increased. When her nanny, Sofía, tried to pick her up and comfort her, Che said to leave the child alone so she would remember why she had been punished. He was especially severe with his bodyguards, who lived in an annex of the house. One of their fiancées recalled a time when Che made Harry Villegas, his favorite, strip off his clothes before he was locked in a closet as punishment for some misdemeanor. Che’s mother was visiting, and she yelled at him, telling him to be more lenient. He told her to keep out of it, that he knew what he was doing.

This was Che the Implacable, Cuba’s avenging angel and ultimate political commissar, demanding the impossible of those around him but above reproach himself because he lived up to his own severe dictates. “Che had something of the missionary in him,” Manuel Piñeiro said. He was respected and admired, despised and feared, but nobody was indifferent to him.

Perhaps Che’s most controversial disciplinary innovation was Guanacahabibes, a rehabilitation camp at the remote, rocky, and devilishly hot westernmost tip of Cuba, where he dispatched transgressors from the Ministry of Industries to undergo periods of self-effacing physical labor to redeem themselves before returning to their jobs. The sanctions were “voluntary,” and could last from a month to a year depending on the offense, which was generally a matter of ethics. If someone had practiced nepotism, intentionally covered up a mistake, or had an affair with a comrade’s wife, he was called before Che, who gave offenders an opportunity to accept their punishment—a stint at Guanacahabibes—or else leave the ministry. If they did their time and showed that they had learned the error of their ways, they could return with no black mark on their record. If they refused, they were out of a job. In time, due to the excesses of the camp’s
comandante
, Guanacahabibes acquired a sinister reputation, a Cuban equivalent of a Siberian gulag.
*

Another pet project of Che’s was the Ciro Redondo Experimental Farm in Matanzas province. The Ciro Redondo was an agricultural cooperative farm where mostly illiterate
guajiros
from his old sierra column lived and worked communally according to his doctrine of moral incentives. He
insisted that they better themselves through schoolwork as well and had assigned them a teacher. He often flew there to check up on their progress in the little Cessna airplane he had learned to fly with his private pilot, Eliseo de la Campa. He once took the economist Regino Boti with him to the farm and tested some of the men on their reading comprehension. One man did very badly and Che said, “Well, if you keep studying, maybe you’ll get to be as smart as an ox in twenty years.” Then he turned on his heel. The poor
guajiro
was so humiliated that he began to cry. Boti talked to Che, persuading him that he had been wrong to be so cruel, that he should go back and speak to the man, to lift his spirits.

Che’s tendency to be harsh often had to be tempered by a more diplomatic companion or friend. He seemed to have little sense of the intimidating effects his words could have on others. There were also some comic incidents that served to remind him of his public celebrity, however. He was a notoriously bad driver, and one day he rear-ended a car on the seafront Malecón in Havana. The driver of the car got out, cursing the mother and father of whoever it was who had hit him. When he saw it was Che, he became cravenly apologetic. “Che, Comandante,” the man sighed. “What an honor for me to have my car struck by you!” Then, caressing his new dent, he announced that he would never have it repaired, but would keep it as a proud reminder of his personal encounter with Che Guevara.

Such tales became enduring folklore in Havana. Most of the stories concerned Che’s famous working hours; his hatred of
adulónes
, or “flatterers”; and his personal austerity. People speak of the time that Celia Sánchez, Fidel’s great dispenser of favors, sent Aleida a new pair of Italian shoes. When Che found out, he made Aleida return them. Did the average Cuban wear imported Italian shoes? No. Then she couldn’t, either. When they moved from their house on Calle 18 in Miramar to their new home in Nuevo Vedado, Che discovered Aleida fixing decorative lamps. She explained that she had taken them from their previous home, and he blew up and ordered her to take them back. When one of the children was sick, Aleida asked to be allowed to take the child to the hospital in Che’s car. He refused, telling her to take the bus like everybody else. The gas in the car belonged to “the people” and was intended for use in his public duties, not for personal reasons.

When food rationing began, and one of his colleagues complained, Che said that his own family was eating fine on what the government allowed. The colleague pointed out that Che had a special food supplement. Che investigated, found that this was true, and had the benefit eliminated. His family would receive no special favors. Rumors circulated about how the Guevaras often didn’t have enough to eat, and that Aleida had to borrow money from the bodyguards to make ends meet. Timur Gaidar, a former
correspondent for
Pravda
in Cuba, claimed that a sympathetic Soviet embassy official slipped some hors d’oeuvres into Aleida’s purse at a diplomatic reception when he was sure Che wasn’t looking.

Che’s relationship with Aleida was a source of curiosity to many. He was an intellectual, a scholar, and an assiduous reader of books. Aleida preferred movies and social gatherings. He was austere and shunned the good things in life. Aleida, like most people, appreciated them, and aspired to possess some of the comforts enjoyed by most
comandantes’
wives—even in revolutionary Cuba. It was a constant bone of contention between them and produced frequent arguments. Some Cubans close to them have drawn comparisons between their relationship and that of Karl Marx with his unintellectual wife, Jenny Westphalen. While Che had his head in the clouds with his work, his philosophizing, and revolutionary theory, Aleida kept the house running, the bills paid, and the children fed. She was fiercely devoted to him. And, despite their differences, they enjoyed each other’s company, had a strong physical attraction for each other, and, by all accounts, were faithful. Both enjoyed an open, earthy repartee; at times it was shared with others. Once, while he was visiting his mother-in-law’s house in Santa Clara, she asked him if he wanted a bath. “Not if Aleida’s not in it,” he quipped.

They were romantics at heart, although Che rarely showed this side of himself in public. At night, in the privacy of their bedroom, he would recite poetry to Aleida. This thrilled her. His favorite poet was Pablo Neruda. Another thing they shared was bluntness of speech. If anything, Aleida was less tactful and even more brutally honest than Che. If she didn’t like someone, she would say so to his face. It was, Che used to say, one of the things he liked about her the most. But the main reason Che loved Aleida, their closest friends said, was that she provided him with a home, something he’d never really had in the conventional sense. Che regarded his father warmly but thought he was immature. (Aleida never had much time for Ernesto senior and acknowledged that after Che’s death, they had a public falling-out when she heard him tell a gathering that he was responsible for inculcating Che’s early socialist leanings. She challenged him, telling him it was a lie, and the old man never forgave her for that.) As much as Che loved his mother, she had never been a physically demonstrative woman. Just as in his adolescence he had gone to his aunt Beatriz for some maternal attention, he sought it as a grown man from Aleida. She recognized this need and responded by mothering him, dressing him, and even bathing him.

Che was notoriously careless about his appearance. The reason he wore his uniform shirt outside his trousers, with the web belt over it, Cossack-fashion, with the top button undone, Aleida said, was that he suffered from
the high humidity in Cuba, which exacerbated his asthma. Health reasons also explained why there were no carpets in their home or in his office. He often sat on the floor—where numerous visitors to his office recall finding him—because it was cooler there. Since Che disliked air-conditioning, the solution they came up with for his office was to seal the windows tightly.

Such eccentricities added to the popular myth woven around Che in Cuba. He was aware of it, and he seemed not to care. Indeed, Che stood out in contrast to almost everyone around him. He didn’t like parties—a Cuban national pastime—and rarely invited people to his home, or went to theirs, for that matter. Orlando Borrego, one of his closest friends, said that Che dropped by his house only once, although they lived just two blocks from each other. In a country where the people love to dance, and sensual Afro-Caribbean rhythmic music is the heart blood of the culture, Che liked to listen to tangos, but was tone-deaf and didn’t dance. On a Caribbean island with beautiful beaches, to which Cubans traditionally escape during the hot summers, Che didn’t swim. In a country where rum is the time-honored means of relaxing and passing the time with friends, Che didn’t drink. He allowed himself red wine when it was available. Most Cubans do not like wine. In a nation of coffee drinkers, where the average person punctuates his or her day with little cups of hot, sweet espresso, Che vastly preferred his native home-brewed
yerba mate
. Cubans love to eat roast pork, whereas Che preferred a good grilled beefsteak. Cubans have a sense of humor that is straightforwardly bawdy or scatological; Che’s was ironic, witty, and acid. The one Cuban habit Che did indulge was smoking Havana cigars—which was disastrous, of course, for his asthma. But even this he did with singular determination, smoking the
tabacos
right down to the nub in order not to waste anything that human labor had helped produce.

Despite his honorary Cuban citizenship and the passage of time, Che was culturally still very much an Argentine. He liked to say, pointedly, that he considered himself a “Latin American.” This fit into his scheme to unite the nations of the hemisphere into a socialist fraternity. But his best friends, the people he talked most freely to, such as Alberto Granado, were Argentines. Granado was one of the few people who could criticize Che to his face and get away with it. He challenged him on many things he saw as
irreflexivo
, or overly rigid, in Che’s personality, and, although he had helped Che recruit people for the Masetti expedition and evidently also served as his liaison with some of the Venezuelan guerrillas, Granado actually disagreed with Che’s belief in jump-starting revolutions in Latin America through guerrilla warfare. It was an issue they argued over frequently, and never resolved.

Granado recalled one conversation with Che in which he pointed out what he believed was the fundamental difference between them. Che could look through a sniper scope at a soldier and pull the trigger, knowing that by killing him he was “saving 30,000 future children from lives of hunger,” whereas when Granado looked through the scope, he saw a man with a wife and children.

With his penchant for dance, drink, and good times, Granado fit right into Cuban society, but Che never really did, and even Granado, who was completely loyal to Che, conceded that his friend’s caustic nature rubbed some Cubans the wrong way. To many, he seemed altogether too serious about revolution, unrelentingly moralistic, and holier-than-thou. Although many of his subordinates tried to emulate him—unsuccessfully, it must be said—his
austeridad
was a constant reproof to his high-living and philandering fellow revolutionaries.