Che Guevara (131 page)

For Che’s Guatemalan and Mexican periods, I was assisted greatly by the journalist Phil Gunson, who arranged all of my interviews and conducted a number of them on my behalf. Those interviewed included Ricardo Romero, Edelberto Torres Jr., Antonio del Conde (“El Cuate”), Yuri Paporov, Alfonso Bauer Paiz, Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, Dr. David Mitrani, Dr. José Montes Montes, Dr. Baltazar Rodríquez, and others. I interviewed Nikolai Leonov in Moscow on three separate occasions in 1994. Myrna Torres also helped me with details of Che’s life in Guatemala.

Material Sources

For Che’s childhood and youth I referred to
Mi Hijo el Che
, the memoir written by Che’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch. The extracts from Che’s account of his first trip around Argentina, in 1950, are taken from this book. The translation is mine. The short story “Angustia,” which Che wrote while he was at sea in 1951, was published in the Argentine newspaper
Primer Plano
in 1992.

For Che’s travels with Alberto Granado in 1951–1952, I referred to Granado’s book
En Viaje con el Che por Sudamerica
, and Che’s own
Notas de Viaje
, which was published in English as
The Motorcycle Diaries
, first by Verso in 1995 and then by Ocean Press in 2004. I made extensive use of
Ernestito, Vivo y Presente
, the book of oral testimony encompassing Che’s life from 1928 to 1953, compiled by the Cuban Guevara historians Froilán
González and Adys Cupull. Their chronology of Che’s life,
Un Hombre Bravo
, was a useful reference for this and subsequent periods. Also,
El Che y los Argentinos
, by Claudia Korol, and
Testimonios Sobre el Che
, edited by Mírta Rodríguez. Quotations by Dolores Moyano are taken from an article she wrote for
The New York Times Magazine
in 1968.

Che’s widow, Aleida March, shared with me the full collection of Che’s “Diccionario Filosófico,” reflecting his reading in philosophy, religion, mythology, and psychology between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight; and the “Indice Literario,” his reading list covering the same period.

For Che’s life from mid-1953, when he left Argentina, through to his meeting in Mexico with Fidel Castro, I based much of my narrative on his diary, “Otra Vez,” which had not been published when I was working on this book but which was provided to me by Aleida March. The translations here are mine. After my book appeared, Aleida March authorized the publication of the journal under its original title. In 2001, an English-language translation,
Back on the Road
, was published together with a selection of Che’s letters home. In 2005, Calica Ferrer published his own version of the trip,
De Ernesto al Che: El Segundo y Ultimo Viaje de Guevara por America Latina
. It has since been published in English as
Becoming Che
. Fernando Barral gave me an original manuscript of
Aquí Va un Soldado de las Americas
, Che’s letters home compiled by his father in book form. The manuscript contained letters not included in the published version.

Calica Ferrer gave me copies of his letters written home while he was traveling with Che in 1953. Anita de García also shared her late husband “Gualo” García’s letters, and Andro Herrero gave me excerpts from his own diary, as well as letters he received from Che, Gualo García, Oscar Valdovinos, and Ricardo Rojo after they left him in Guayaquil and traveled north to Guatemala.

I was able to review original materials covering Che’s life from his infancy to his Mexico City period—including some previously unpublished family letters and early writings—at Cuba’s Council of State Historical Archives, with permission from its director, Pedro Álvarez Tabío. Heberto Norman Acosta, a specialist in the pre-
Granma
“exile” period of the July 26 Movement, allowed me to review Che’s censored testimony from his interrogation by the Mexican police and other materials. Lionel Martin lent me the late Harold White’s copy of the Marxist anthology that the young Ernesto Guevara helped him translate in Guatemala.

I employed Hilda Gadea’s book
Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara
for her account of their relationship, which includes a number of short memoirs by others, including Myrna Torres, Harold White, Lucila Velásquez, Juan Juarbe y Juarbe, and Laura Meneses de Albizu Campos.

Che’s
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
refers to his time on the road in Mexico and Guatemala as well. On October 17, 1967, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper,
Granma
, dedicated a special edition to Che, and I drew a number of quotations from this publication, including the recollections of Mario Dalmau and others. The Cuban house of culture, Casa de las Americas, also published a number of special editions devoted to Che; the quotations from Alfonso Bauer Paiz, referring to the Guatemala-Mexico period, are taken from them. Phil Gunson obtained articles published in 1956–1957 on the Cuban revolutionaries from Mexican press archives of that period.

Tad Szulc’s biography,
Fidel: A Critical Portrait
, and Hugh Thomas’s
Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom
were invaluable resources for this period. Lionel Martin provided me with a treasure trove of index cards from his personal archive including quotations from many primary interviews he conducted in the 1960s, when he was planning to write a biography of Che Guevara.

Field Research and Interviews

In Cuba I interviewed a number of people who fought with Che in the Sierra Maestra, among them Harry Villegas (“Pombo”), Ricardo Martínez, Jorge Enrique Mendoza, Dariel Alarcón Ramírez (“Benigno”), and Oscar Fernández Mell.

Aleida March, Lolita Rossell, Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada, and Orlando Borrego also gave details of Che’s Escambray period, the battle for Santa Clara, and the drive on Havana.

Material Sources

I based most of my narrative for Part Two on Che’s then-unpublished “Diario de un Combatiente,” his private journal from 1957 to 1959. A typescript copy of the manuscript was provided to me by Aleida March, who said that the only other copy then in existence belonged to Fidel. At that time, the diary was being sanitized, with a view toward its eventual publication in Cuba. That is, the names of certain Cuban government officials who were mentioned critically, or antagonistically, were being removed. The journal encompassed almost the entire span of the two-year Cuban guerrilla war, but in the middle, an eight-month period was inexplicably missing. The first section of the text given to me began on December 2, 1956, and ended on August 12, 1957. The middle section (August 13, 1957, to April 17, 1958) was missing; the second section ran from April 18, 1958, through December 3, 1959, one month before the war’s end. For information on the missing months, I relied on interviews
and other published material, including Guevara’s own writings dealing with the relevant periods. I used his published account of the war,
Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria
, in both the English- and the Spanish-language editions. An English-language version had been published in 1968 as
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War
and then in 1996 as
Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War
. The Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana announced that it would publish the full journal as
Diarios de la Sierra
.

Hugh Thomas’s
Cuba
, Tad Szulc’s
Fidel: A Critical Portrait
, Lionel Martin’s
The Early Fidel
, Carlos Franqui’s
Diary of the Cuban Revolution
, and Robert Quirk’s
Fidel Castro
were all invaluable reference tools that I used extensively. I also used Jorge Ricardo Masetti’s
Los Que Luchan y Los Que Lloran
, Robert Taber’s
M-26: Biography of Revolution
, Herbert Matthews’s
The Cuba Story
, and Heinz Dieterich’s
Diarios Inéditos de la Guerrilla Cubana
. For the rebels’ internal correspondence and Che’s letters written in this period, I relied upon Franqui’s
Diary
, Guevara Lynch’s
Mi Hijo el Che
, and the Casa de las Americas commemorative compilation of Cuban army and July 26 reports, memos, and cables. I also made use of
Descamisado
by Enrique Acevedo, and the Cuban
comandante
Juan Almeida’s own series of autobiographical books on the sierra war.

The Cuban historian Andrés Castillo Bernal provided me with his extensively researched unpublished manuscript on the war, and I also drew from the Cuban oral histories
Ellos Lucharon con el Che, Los Doce, Testimonios Sobre el Che
, and
Entre Nostoros
.

Field Research and Interviews

I interviewed Orlando Borrego, Alfredo Menéndez, and Oscar Fernández Mell for the post-triumph La Cabaña period and the early revolutionary period. Aleida March, Alberto Castellanos, Enrique Viltres, Colonel Ricardo Martínez, and Nicolás Quintana also shed light on this time.

Doctor Salvador Vilaseca and Alfredo Menéndez both shared their accounts of Che’s 1959 trip to the nonaligned countries. For Che’s work at the National Bank, the Ministry of Industries, and the Central Planning Board, I was helped by Aleida March, Orlando Borrego, Dr. Salvador Vilaseca, Regino Boti, Nicolás Quintana, Nestor Laverne, Tirso Saenz, Juan Gravalosa, Cristina Campuzano, Ángel Arcos Vergnes, and others who gave me insiders’ accounts. For Che’s 1961 trip to Punta del Este, Julia Constenla, Ricardo Rojo, Roberto Guevara, and Carlos Figueroa shared their recollections.

In three visits to Moscow, I interviewed a number of former Soviet officials who spoke about the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet
Union and Che’s dealings with Moscow. Che’s role in forging Cuba’s links with the Soviet Union was explained to me in depth by Alexandr Alexiev, Giorgi Kornienko, Sergo Mikoyan, Nikolai Leonov, and Yuri Paporov, among others.

I conducted other interviews with Yuri Pevtsov, Vladimir Bondarchuk, Timur Gaidar, Feder Burlatksy, Nikolai Metutsov, Kiva Maidanek, Yuri Krasin, Yvgeny Kosarev, Marat Muknachov, Vitali Korionov, Rudolf Shlyapnikov, and the former Soviet generals Gribkov and Garbus.

The most comprehensive accounts of Che’s life in all its facets, both public and private, during his time in Cuba, came from his widow, Aleida March, and his friend Orlando Borrego. Other details came from Lolita Rossell, Sofia Gato, and Che’s daughters Hilda Guevara and Aliusha Guevara; and from Alberto Granado, Fernando Barral, Pepe Aguilar, Harry Villegas, and Alberto Castellanos. For his relationship with his family in Argentina, Aleida March, Ana María Erra, and María Elena Duarte were especially valuable sources.

To document Che’s guerrilla activities, I interviewed people in Moscow, Havana, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Spain, and Sweden. They included Aleida March, Orlando Borrego, Manuel Piñeiro, Juan Carreterro (“Ariel”), Osvaldo de Cárdenas, Regino Boti, General Harry Villegas (“Pombo”), Dariel Alarcón Ramírez (“Benigno”), Alberto Castellanos, Ricardo Gadea, Rodolfo Saldaña, Ciro Roberto Bustos, Héctor Jouve, Henry Lerner, Alberto Granado, Oscar del Barco, Hector Schmucler, Alberto Coría, Alberto Korn, Nestor Laverne, Loyola Guzmán, Marlene Lorjiovaca, Humberto Vázquez-Viaña, Ana Urquieta, Chato Peredo, Antonio Peredo, José Castillo (“Paco”), Oscar Zalas, Jorge Kolle Cueto, Simón Reyes, Juan Lechín, Gustavo Sánchez, and others. I interviewed Mario Monje on two separate occasions in Moscow.

Among Che’s enemies, I met with the former CIA agents Felix Rodríguez and Gustavo Villoldo; former Bolivian generals Reque Terán, Gary Prado Salmon, and Mario Vargas Salinas; ex-sergeant Mario Terán; and the former Bolivian army majors Rubén Sánchez and Miguel Ayoroa. The former CIA station chief in La Paz, John Tilton, spoke to me by telephone from his home in Georgia. In Asunción, Paraguay, the widow of Colonel Andrés Selich, Socorro Selich, provided me with her account of her late husband’s activities in the campaign against Che.

Material Sources

A great many books have been written on the Cuban revolution, and I had access to most of them. Among those I found most useful were Hugh Thomas’s
Cuba
, Tad Szulc’s
Fidel: A Critical Portrait
, Richard Gott’s
Rural
Guerrillas in Latin America
, Carlos Franqui’s
Diary of the Cuban Revolution
and his
Family Portrait of Fidel
, Robert Quirk’s
Fidel Castro
, K. S. Karol’s
Guerrillas in Power
, and Maurice Halperin’s
The Taming of Fidel Castro
. I also used Hilda Gadea’s
Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara
, Ricardo Rojo’s
My Friend Che
, Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s
Mi Hijo el Che
, and José Pardo Llada’s,
El “Che” Que Yo Conoci
.

Other resources were Régis Debray’s
Revolution in the Revolution?
and his
Castroism: The Long March in Latin America
and
La Guerrilla del Che en Bolivia
. Also,
El Che y los Argentinos
by Claudia Korol;
Tania: Misión Guerrillera en Bolivia
by Marta Rojas and Mírta Rodríguez; Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir
All Said and Done; A Thousand Days
by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Che’s own
Diario del Che en Bolivia;
the seven-volume set of Che’s collected works edited by Orlando Borrego,
El Che en La Revolución Cubana;
Casa de las Americas’ two-volume selected works,
El Che Guevara: Obras 1957–1967;
Gianni Miná’s
An Encounter with Fidel;
Harry Villegas’s memoir,
Un Hombre de la Guerrilla del Che
, and Humberto Vásquez-Viaña’s monograph,
Antecedentes de la Guerrilla del Che en Bolivia;
the five-volume collection of documents and interviews
El Che en Bolivia
, edited by Carlos Soria Galvarro. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Felix Guerra, and Froilan Escobar’s book,
El Año Que Estuvimos en Ninguna Parte
, is the first to be written on Che’s time in the Congo. Gary Prado’s
La Guerrilla Immolada
, General Arnaldo Saucedo Parada’s
No Disparen Soy el Che
, and General Reque Terán’s
La Campaña de Ñancahuazú
were insightful accounts of the Bolivian military’s view of Che’s campaign in Bolivia, as was Richard Dindo’s extensively researched documentary
The Diary of Che in Bolivia
.