Che Guevara (10 page)

Students at the Medical Faculty of Buenos Aires University in 1948. Ernesto is in the top row, sixth from right, grinning incongruously.

Ernesto spent a great deal of time at Beatriz’s apartment, which was twenty blocks from his family’s new house on Calle Araoz. Beatriz had mothered him in ways Celia never did, sending him books, gifts, and new asthma remedies; encouraging him at his studies; and worrying about him. Now she prepared food and clucked over him. “My sister didn’t sleep while Ernesto studied,” his father wrote. “She always had his
mate
ready and accompanied him when he took a break. She did all this with the greatest affection.”

Ernesto’s special relationship with Beatriz was witnessed firsthand by Mario Saravia, a cousin seven years younger than Ernesto. In 1951, Saravia came from Bahía Blanca in southern Argentina, where his family lived, to attend a school in the capital. He lived with the Guevaras for the next two years, sharing Ernesto and Roberto’s bedroom. As Beatriz’s other pet nephew, Saravia often joined Ernesto for his meals at her house.

Beatriz was so fastidious that she wore gloves to handle money, Saravia recalled. If she shook hands with a stranger, she washed her hands afterward. Skeptical about the morals of the lower classes, she would put pincers on the service door so that the doorknob couldn’t be turned when the
mucama
who cooked for her went to bed at night. Ernesto loved to shock this woman who loved him so unconditionally, although he never got into an acrimonious confrontation. He would tease her with hints about unsavory activities. According to Saravia, some of those activities would have made Beatriz “drop dead on the spot from a heart attack” if she knew about them, for they included seducing the maid she so carefully locked into her room at night. At one lunch, between servings, Saravia watched in astonishment from his place in the dining room as Ernesto had quick sex with the
mucama
on the kitchen table, which was visible through open doors directly behind their unsuspecting aunt’s back. When he was finished, Ernesto returned to the dining room and continued eating, his aunt none the wiser. “He was like a rooster,” Saravia observed. “He mated and then continued with his other functions.”

Not surprisingly, Ernesto was an elusive figure to his classmates on campus. He gave the impression of being a young man in a great hurry. And he was. In some respects, Buenos Aires was merely a base for the progressive expansion of his geographical horizons as he set out hitchhiking, first on weekend or holiday jaunts back to Córdoba and to his late grandmother’s
estancia
at Santa Ana de Irineo Portela, but gradually extending his radius farther afield and for longer periods.

In spite of the changes that had occurred in Ernesto’s life, some things had remained constant. He still had his asthma; he continued playing chess—now one of his favorite hobbies—and rugby; he read assiduously and worked on his philosophical notebooks. He also wrote poetry. One of his earliest surviving poems, scribbled on the back inside cover of his fifth philosophical notebook, dates from this period. A short, unpolished ode, it appears to be an evocation of a grave site. As with most of the poems he wrote in his twenties, it is both awkward and pretentious:

Inconclusive tombstone of abstract garden,
With your archaic architecture,
You strike at the cubic morality of man.
Horrible figurines dye your verse with blood
and panegyric façades stain your front with light,
Portentous whims sully your dark name
Dressing you like all the rest
.

Ernesto’s private world of study and reflection began to dominate more and more of his time. His brother Roberto was astounded to find him systematically reading through their father’s collection of the twenty-five-volume
Contemporary History of the Modern World;
his philosophical notebooks are full of references to these tomes. With the same methodical approach, he began compiling an index of the books he read. In a black, clothbound notebook with alphabetically ordered pages, he made entries for authors, their nationalities, the book titles, and genres. The selection is lengthy and eclectic. It includes popular modern novels; European, American, and Argentine classics; medical texts; poetry; biographies; and philosophy. There are oddities scattered throughout the index, such as
My Best Chess Games
by Alexandr Aleksei, the
1937 Socialist Yearbook
, and
The Manufacture and Use of Celluloid, Bakelite, Etc
. by R. Bunke. But adventure classics predominate, especially the work of Jules Verne. A three-volume leather-bound set of Verne’s collected works was one of Ernesto’s prized possessions. A decade later, as a revolutionary
comandante
in Cuba, he had it brought to him from Argentina.

Ernesto continued to study Freud and Bertrand Russell, and he displayed a growing interest in social philosophy. He was now reading everyone from the ancient Greeks to Aldous Huxley. There is a great deal of cross-referencing between his literary index and his philosophical notebooks. His exploration into the concepts and origins of socialist thought was gathering momentum. He consulted Benito Mussolini on Fascism; Josef Stalin on Marxism; Alfredo Palacios, the flamboyant founder of the Argentine Socialist Party, on justice; Zola for a critical definition of Christianity; and Jack London for a Marxist description of social class. He had read a French biography of Lenin,
The Communist Manifesto
, and some speeches by Lenin; and he had dipped again into
Das Kapital
. In his third journal, he began to show a special interest in Karl Marx, filling dozens of pages with a thumb-nail biography culled from R. P. Ducatillon’s
Communism and Christianity
. (The figure of Marx became an enduring fascination. In 1965, while living clandestinely in Africa, he found the time to sketch an outline for a biography of Marx he intended to write.) He also copied out a portrait of Lenin from Ducatillon’s book that describes Lenin as someone who “lived, breathed and slept” socialist revolution and sacrificed all else in his life to its cause. The passage presages to an uncanny degree the way Che Guevara would be described by his revolutionary comrades. Yet for all his curiosity about socialism, now, as before, Ernesto showed no inclination to become formally affiliated with the left. In fact, throughout his university years, he remained on the political sidelines—observing, listening, and sometimes debating, but studiously avoiding active participation.

By 1950, the populist-nationalist
peronismo
movement had evolved. With Juan Perón as “conductor” and Evita as messianic avenging angel, the movement possessed its own quasi-spiritual social philosophy, officially defined as
justicialismo
. Its goal was an “organized community” of men living in harmony. Against this backdrop of high-minded rhetoric, however, Perón had stepped up the repression of his opponents. Political adversaries were silenced by intimidation or with jail terms under toughened laws for
desacato
, disrespect of public officials. The
descamisados
(shirtless ones), or working masses, were won over with gifts and public works projects sponsored by Evita, who was president of the Eva Perón Foundation.

Perón defined the international posture of this new Argentina as the “third position,” an opportunistic and intentionally ambiguous balancing act between the capitalist West and Communist East. “It is an ideological position which is in the center, left, or the right according to circumstances,” Perón said. “We obey the circumstances.” His cynicism was all too transparent, yet his desire to reinvent Argentina as a sovereign state beholden to no foreign power could generate a kind of grudging respect. Ernesto had
dubbed him, somewhat ambiguously,
el capo
, but he avoided expressing sympathy for either Perón or his opponents.

The opposition to Perón was not attractive. Argentina’s established parties displayed little social vision and had shown a woeful inability to counter Perón’s momentum. The Argentine Communist Party was still a legal political organization, but its power base in the unions and the Central General de Trabajadores (CGT) workers’ confederation had been weakened by Perón’s ability to co-opt the working class. The Party responded by allying itself with the centrist Radical Party and a grouping of smaller left-of-center parties in strategic opposition to Perón. The Party was doctrinaire, bogged down in theoretical wranglings; it lacked charismatic leadership and a popular base of support.

Ernesto knew some of the militants in the Federación Juvenil Comunista, the Communist Youth, at the university. One of them, Ricardo Campos, recalled their talks on politics as “brusque and difficult.” He said that he persuaded Ernesto to attend a “Fede” meeting, but that Ernesto stalked out while it was still in progress. “He had very clear ideas about certain things,” Campos said. “Above all from an ethical perspective. More than a political person, I saw him at that time as someone with an ethical posture.” To Tita Infante’s brother Carlos, another Communist, Ernesto was a “progressive liberal” whose main interests seemed to be medicine and literature. They discussed the works of the Argentine Marxist writer Aníbal Ponce, but Ernesto was very critical of the Party’s sectarianism.

Ernesto’s emerging worldview began to reveal itself in personal encounters. At the funeral of an uncle in 1951, he argued with his cousin Juan Martín Moore de la Serna, pitting his interpretations of Marx and Engels against Moore’s defense of French Catholic philosophers. On a visit to Córdoba, he mortified Dolores Moyano with a Nietzschean put-down of Jesus Christ. The Korean conflict sparked strong arguments between Ernesto and his father, with Ernesto opposing the Americans’ role—accusing them of imperial designs—and his father supporting them. But none of his friends or relatives thought of Ernesto as a Marxist; and indeed, neither did
he
, at the time. They attributed his outspoken espousal of un-fashionable positions to his “bohemian” upbringing and his iconoclastic personality, in keeping with his informal dress and his gypsy penchant for travel. Many of them probably assumed he would grow out of it in time.

There were parallels between Ernesto’s uncompromising posture and the political environment of Argentina. Perón’s Machiavellian exercise of power illuminated a formula for effecting radical political change
in spite of
the powerful opposition of a conservative oligarchy, the Catholic clergy, and sectors of the armed forces. Perón was a political master who could manipulate
situations by knowing the mood of the people, knowing who his real friends and enemies were, and knowing when to act. The lesson was clear: what was required to make political headway in a place such as Argentina was strong leadership and a willingness to use force to meet one’s goals.

Another politician who figured in the formation of Ernesto’s worldview was Jawaharlal Nehru. Ernesto read Nehru’s 1946 book
The Discovery of India
with great interest, underlining and scribbling comments about passages he found thought-provoking, and he talked about the book admiringly to his friends. Perón and Nehru may seem like strange bedfel-lows, but there are similarities between Nehru’s effort to “decolonize” India and Perón’s program to make Argentina economically self-sufficient. They were both strong and charismatic leaders who promoted the rapid industrialization of their overwhelmingly agrarian nations as an essential step in gaining fuller independence from the powerful countries—principally Great Britain and the United States—upon whom their fortunes rose and fell.

Perón’s platform of “social justice, economic independence, and political sovereignty” for Argentina was promulgated at a time when foreign interests—in particular British, but increasingly American as well—held significant monopolies in the country’s utilities, transportation, and railroad sectors, and supplied most of its manufactured goods. In his first year in office, Perón had embarked on an ambitious “import-substitution” program of industrial expansion, and in 1947 he moved to nationalize foreign-owned utilities and railroads and to pay off the country’s foreign debt. This was a fertile field politically. There was widespread distrust of foreign capital interests, due principally to the economic hardships caused by repeated decreases in the price of Argentine agricultural exports during the global Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and during both world wars. The ignominious Roca-Runciman Pact of 1933, which was renewed in 1936, had forced Argentina to buy British goods and grant concessions to British investors in return for Britain’s continuing purchase of Argentine wheat, wool, and beef. Foreign capital investment had become symbolic of foreign interference and was a rallying point for Argentine nationalist sentiments.

“Yankee” interference had become onerous during the period leading up to the 1946 general election in which Spruille Braden, briefly the American ambassador to Buenos Aires, and then assistant secretary of state for Latin America, openly campaigned against Perón. With characteristic panache, Perón had turned the American’s interference around to his favor, appealing to nationalist sentiments with counter-slogans suggesting that the election was not between Argentines at all, but a case of “Braden or Perón.”