Che Guevara (125 page)

With Cuba awash in rumors, Fidel addressed the nation on television on October 15. He confirmed that the reports of Che’s death were “painfully true,” decreed three days of national mourning, and announced that henceforth October 8, the day of Che’s last battle, would be known as the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla.
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Aleida suffered an emotional breakdown. Fidel took her and the children to his house, and, over the next week, he comforted her. Then he moved her to another house, where she and the children lived incommunicado, out of public view. While Aleida was recovering, Fidel came every day to see her.

Orlando Borrego also went through an emotional crisis that lasted for several months. Che’s death affected him, he said, more than his own father’s had. His grief had been suspended at first as he rallied to comfort Aleida and the children, but it finally hit him. “It was as if my equilibrium had been thrown off,” he recalled. “I couldn’t come to terms with the idea that Che was dead, and I had recurrent dreams in which he appeared to me, alive.”

On the night of October 18, in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, Fidel spoke to one of his largest audiences. Nearly a million people had gathered for a national wake for Che. His voice raspy with emotion, Fidel gave an impassioned tribute to his old comrade, extolling him as the incarnation of revolutionary virtue. “If we want the ... model of a human being who does not belong to our time but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his behavior, is Che. If we wish to express what we want our children to be, we must say from our very hearts as ardent revolutionaries: we want them to be like Che!”

A banner with Alberto Korda’s soon-to-be-famous image of Che was hung in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana at Che’s wake on the night of October 18, 1967.

Over the succeeding days, four more of the fugitive guerrillas—Moro, Pablo, Eustaquio, and Chapaco—were tracked down and killed; their bodies too were buried secretly around Vallegrande. Incredibly, three Cubans (Pombo, Benigno, and Urbano) together with three Bolivians (Inti Peredo, Darío, and Ñato),
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had managed to escape from the ravine. The army continued to track them, and on November 15 they were caught in a firefight with army troops. Ñato was gravely wounded and asked his comrades to kill him. Benigno said it was he who delivered the coup de grâce. The remaining five men fled their encirclement, and three months later, with the help of members of the Bolivian Communist Party, who belatedly mustered their courage to save the survivors of Che’s insurgency, they emerged in Chile, on the other side of the snow-covered Andes. There, under the auspices of the Chilean socialist and Communist parties, the Cubans were taken in. The socialist senator Salvador Allende flew with them to Easter Island, in the Pacific Ocean, from where they traveled home via Tahiti, Addis Ababa, Paris, and Moscow.

Benigno and others would later claim that Fidel “abandoned” Che and his guerrillas in Bolivia, but the evidence suggests that Fidel did what he could, although it wasn’t much. After Che’s presence was discovered and the Americans arrived in force, Cuba’s agents in Bolivia had almost no room for maneuvering. With Bolivia’s borders either sealed or under heavy surveillance, and the Communist Party outlawed, a new guerrilla who tried to bolster Che’s effort would have been easily detected. As it was, the Bolivian military detained any suspicious foreigner who was spotted.

Cuba’s support for the guerrilla war in Bolivia did not end with Che’s death. Inti Peredo and Darío, the Bolivians who survived the debacle and made it to Cuba, returned home in 1969 with a new contingent of Bolivian volunteers. Later that year, Inti was gunned down in a safe house in La Paz. Not long afterward, Darío was caught and murdered. Inti’s younger brother, Chato, became the new leader, taking seventy-odd mostly untrained young Bolivian students to launch a guerrilla war near the mining outpost of Teoponte, north of La Paz, on the headwaters of the Río Beni. After a few months in the field, the disorganized, hungry ELN was surrounded by the

army. The group’s second attempt to build a guerrilla
foco
expired in a miasma of blood and wasted lives.
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After impassively observing the fatal denouement of Che’s attempt at guerrilla warfare, the Bolivian Interior Minister, Antonio Arguedas, inexplicably rediscovered his Marxist leanings. In 1968, with the help of several Bolivian Communist friends, he smuggled a microfilmed copy of Che’s diary to Cuba, where it was soon published. He later arranged for Che’s amputated hands and death mask to be taken to Cuba. When he was suspected of being the person who had leaked the diary, Arguedas fled Bolivia, reappearing eventually in Cuba and presenting himself as a kind of secret hero of the whole episode. In a mystifying series of about-faces, he later left Cuba, reinitiated contact with the CIA, and returned to Bolivia, where he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. In the 1980s, Arguedas was accused of belonging to a gang of kidnappers, and he spent three years in prison. In the late 1990s, he led a semi-clandestine life in La Paz, where he was, reportedly, involved in drug trafficking. He died in February 2000. According to the Bolivian police, a bomb in his possession accidentally exploded. Like so much of Arguedas’s life, the circumstances of his death remain mysterious.

Mario Monje lost his position as leader of the Bolivian Communist Party and went into exile in Moscow. Upon his arrival there, he said years later, he was instructed by Soviet intelligence officials not to talk, and he didn’t talk until the 1990s, when the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. For several decades, Monje was subsidized by the Latin America Institute, a Party-run policy-research office. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Monje became a man without a country or a big brother to look after him.
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Most of the survivors of Masetti’s guerrillas who were incarcerated in Salta were released in 1968 through the efforts of their lawyer, Gustavo Roca. During their time in prison, some of them got the shock of their lives when El Fusilado, the man Masetti had condemned to death in Algeria, showed
up one day as a visitor. According to him, the Algerians had spared his life, and instead of shooting him had locked him in a prison cell. He had remained there, cut off from the outside world, for a year or two, until one day he was inexplicably freed and sent to Cuba. He believed that his predicament may have been brought to the attention of Che during Che’s visits there in 1965, and that Che had ordered his release. Back in Cuba, he was sent to fight counterrevolutionaries in the Escambray, and then, having been deemed rehabilitated, he was dispatched to Argentina to explore the possibilities of organizing a breakout for his former comrades. He told them he bore them no grudge for what had happened to him; he was thankful merely to be alive. According to Henry Lerner, who met him for the first time, El Fusilado was a fellow Jew.

After spending three years and eight months in prison, Che’s bodyguard Alberto Castellanos was spirited out of the country and made it back to Cuba. The appeals for Héctor Jouve and Federico Méndez were denied; their fourteen- and sixteen-year sentences were extended to life imprisonment. When Juan Perón returned to Argentina in 1973, however, they were given amnesty. Perón died the following year, and his second wife, Isabela, became president. She was deposed by a military junta in 1976, initiating a wave of anticommunist repression that became known as Argentina’s Dirty War, and Jouve and Méndez soon fled the country. They returned home when civilian rule was restored, in the early 1980s. Jouve lived with his family in Córdoba, where he worked as a psychotherapist. Federico Méndez died of cancer.

Henry Lerner, who nearly died at Masetti’s hands, was captured by the Argentine military. He was said to have “disappeared,” but in fact he was slated for execution. After being incarcerated for three years, he was saved in an unusual deal arranged by the Catholic Church, whereby the lives of 100 people in government detention were spared. They were then expelled from Argentina. Lerner was accepted for asylum by Israel. Later, he emigrated to Madrid, where, like his old comrade Héctor Jouve, he became a psychotherapist.

Harry Villegas stayed on in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and became a commander of the expeditionary troops in Angola. Promoted to general, he was awarded the rare official distinction of Hero of the Revolution. He continued to live in a modest apartment not far from Che’s old house in Havana. Leonardo “Urbano” Tamayo remained in the Cuban military with the rank of colonel; he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown after returning to Cuba, but recovered and went on to live a quiet life in Havana. Dariel Alarcón Ramírez—Benigno, Che’s able
machetero
in Bolivia—moved on to a career in Cuba’s prison system, and, into the late
1980s, as a trainer of guerrillas from a variety of Latin American countries. Over time, however, he became disenchanted with the Revolution. In 1994, while on a trip to France, he asked for asylum. In 1997, he published a book harshly critical of Fidel’s regime. Knowing that he had become an official traitor to the Revolution and that he faced a probable execution by firing squad if he returned home, Benigno became a permanent exile in Paris.

During the Dirty War against the left in Argentina, the Guevara family soon found themselves to be targets. Che’s father fled for Cuba with his new bride, Ana María Erra, a painter some thirty years his junior. They raised a family in Havana and named one of their boys Ramón, Che’s Bolivian nom de guerre. After his brother’s death, Roberto was radicalized, and both he and Juan Martín became active in a “Guevarist” Argentine guerrilla movement. Roberto moved between Cuba and Europe, but Juan Martín made the mistake of returning to Argentina, hoping to fight in the guerrilla underground there. Within a month he had been arrested, and he spent nine years in prison. His sister Celia spent most of that time in London, working through Amnesty International to secure his release. With the end of the
Proceso
, as the Dirty War became known, Che’s siblings gradually returned to Argentina, where Roberto went to work as a lawyer for leftist labor unions. Juan Martín ran a bookshop in Buenos Aires and eventually opened a restaurant. Che’s youngest sister, Ana María, died in 1990. Celia Guevara also returned from exile and lived a quiet life in Buenos Aires. Their father died in Havana in 1987, at the age of eighty-seven. He spent his final years producing books based on Che’s letters and diaries. His wife, Ana María, and their children—Che’s half-brothers and sisters—remained in Cuba.

In 1970, nearly three years into the thirty-year sentences they had been given at their trials, Ciro Bustos and Régis Debray were released from prison on the orders of Bolivia’s new military ruler, the reformist General Juan José Torres. They were flown to Chile, where Salvador Allende was then president. Debray, whose celebrity had increased during his public trial in Bolivia, remained an active voice in European leftist intellectual circles. In the 1980s, he became an adviser on Latin American policy to the French president, François Mitterrand. Gradually, however, his infatuation with Cuba’s revolution soured. In 1996, he published a memoir that was highly critical of Fidel Castro, whom he called a “megalomaniac,” and of Che Guevara, whom he described as “more admirable” but less “likable” than Castro, accusing him of being harsh and unfeeling to his men in Bolivia.

Of those who survived the Bolivian affair, perhaps none suffered more emotional anguish than Ciro Bustos. He took the brunt of the blame for “betraying” Che’s presence in Bolivia. Drawing the portraits of Che and the
other members of his guerrilla band was an act of disloyalty that would torment Bustos for the rest of his life. Vilified by Debray and frozen out by his former comrades in Cuba, Bustos worked for a time in Chile before fleeing the CIA-backed coup of General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. He returned home to Argentina and resumed painting, only to flee once more, to Sweden, when the Dirty War began. When it ended, Bustos did not return home but remained living in a kind of self-imposed exile in the southern port city of Malmö, where he made paintings of people without faces.

Loyola Guzmán, Che’s Bolivian “national finance secretary,” was freed from prison in 1970 after her comrades in the ELN took two German engineers hostage to force her release. She made her way to Cuba, where she met Che’s widow, Aleida, who took her under her wing, since nobody in Cuba’s secret services seemed to want to see her or offer her an explanation for what had gone wrong in 1967. By that time, Che had become almost unmentionable in Cuba. The Soviets had finally clasped Fidel in a bear hug. That hug would last for the next seventeen years, and “adventurism” like Che’s was discredited, at least for the time being.

Guzmán and some of her comrades returned unaided to Bolivia, intending to continue with the guerrilla effort, but in 1972, she, her husband, and a few other guerrillas were tracked down and surrounded by the military at a safe house in La Paz. Her husband and the others escaped, only to be killed and “disappeared” later. Guzmán, who was pregnant, was caught and spent the next two years in prison, where she gave birth to her first son. She named him Ernesto, in honor of Che. As Latin America’s U.S.-backed armies became ever more brutal in their efforts to quell the spreading Marxist insurgencies that Che had helped inspire, Guzmán became a spokesperson for the families of the disappeared. She remained in La Paz, a tireless champion of the efforts to locate the bodies of Che and the other guerrillas who were killed in 1967, as well as those of the approximately 150 people who disappeared under the Bolivian military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s.