Che Guevara (147 page)
Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Wangüemert, Luis,
433
“War and the Peasantry,”
285
“Warhol Che,”
738
Watergate,
310
n
.
Westphalen, Jenny,
539
“What Is a Guerrilla?”,
380
Wieland, William,
259
Willauer, Whiting,
399
–400
Williamson, William,
261
Wollam, Park,
313
Ydigoras Fuentes, Miguel,
445
,
450
,
476
,
507
Yon Sosa, Marco Aurelio,
476
,
507
Zanzibar,
571
Zapatistas in Mexico,
726
Zeissig, Herbert,
131
Zelaya, Guillén,
184
Zenon Acosta, Julio,
224
,
233
,
241
Zenteno Anaya, Colonel Joaquín,
700
,
705
–7,
712
,
720
Zhukov, Yuri,
393
Zionism,
454
Zweig, Stefan,
723
Pages
x
,
369
(top),
438
,
506
,
562
, and
715
:
Salas;
pages
14
,
17
,
19
(top and bottom),
42
,
46
,
55
,
59
,
66
,
164
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168
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173
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182
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191
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197
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204
,
226
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240
,
284
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294
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320
,
337
,
345
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369
(bottom),
383
,
402
,
434
,
446
,
595
,
607
,
618
,
626
, and
665
(bottom):
Cuban Council of State Office of Historical Affairs;
page
25
:
Courtesy of Carlos Barceló;
pages
106
and
122
:
Courtesy of Carlos “Calica” Ferrer;
pages
355
and
358
:
Burt Glinn, Magnum Photos;
page
403
:
Agenzia Contrasto;
page
463
:
TASS/Prensa Latina;
pages
468
and
592
:
Prensa Latina;
page
482
:
Liborio Noval;
pages
488
and
585
:
AP/Wide World Photos;
page
524
:
courtesy of Thomas Billhardt;
pages
582
and
589
:
UPI/Corbis-Bettmann;
pages
665
(top),
668
,
676
(top), and
691
:
courtesy of Richard Dindo;
page
676
(bottom):
Che Guevara’s confiscated film, courtesy of General Luis Reque Terán;
page
704
:
courtesy of Socorro Selich;
page
708
:
courtesy of Félix Rodríguez;
page
713
:
Freddy Alborta.
*
See Notes section regarding birth date.
*
Ernesto Guevara Lynch seemed especially damned when it came to choosing partners. Once their business was up and running, Verbruch succumbed to a deep, lasting depression and abandoned him. Guevara Lynch found another partner and the company survived, with ups and downs, until the right-wing military coup in 1976 forced him to flee the country.
*
Jorge was Celia’s younger brother and a colorful personality, given to wandering around the country as a kind of solitary adventurer. He was much loved by the family—and a favorite of Ernesto’s—but quite mad, and had to be institutionalized at least once in a psychiatric hospital.
*
After Che’s death, this diary was discovered by his father, who transcribed it and included it in his memoir,
Mi Hijo el Che
(My Son Che). Except for some illegible sections, he said, the published version was entirely faithful to the original.
*
Chichina and Dolores Moyano were first cousins, and Dolores’s architect father knew Ernesto Guevara Lynch through his building work. The Ferreyras also intermarried with the illustrious Roca family, whose son Gustavo was a friend of Ernesto’s. His father, one of the University Reform’s founders, was another eminent Córdoba architect of Guevara Lynch’s acquaintance. Tatiana Quiroga, a childhood friend of both the Ferreyras and Guevaras, was dating Chichina’s first cousin Jaime “Jimmy” Roca, whom she would later marry.
*
Notas de Viaje
, the account Ernesto wrote of his journey, which contains extracts from his journal, was transcribed and published posthumously by Che’s widow, Aleida March. The published version is supposedly authentic and unabridged, although some explicit sexual references have almost certainly been expurgated. It was first published in English in 1995 as
The Motorcycle Diaries
.
*
As Ernesto predicted, Ibañez was elected president. Salvador Allende came in last. The mines would not be nationalized under Ibañez, who soon had to go begging to the International Monetary Fund to cover a major balance-of-payments deficit. The IMF’s harsh anti-inflationary terms caused widespread unrest, further polarizing the country. The preponderant role of North America in Chile’s economy continued until 1970, when Salvador Allende became the hemisphere’s first popularly elected socialist president. One of Allende’s first acts was to nationalize the mines. North American influence in Chile did not lessen, however. Within three years, Allende’s government was overthrown in a military coup backed by the United States.
*
According to Pepe González-Aguilar, Ernesto did not try to see Chichina again when he returned home, but he did send her the scarf.
*
This journal, spanning three years of Guevara’s life, was found and transcribed by his widow, Aleida March, after his death. Except for a few extracts, it had never been made public when I was in Cuba working on this book, but Aleida March made the entire text available to me. It appeared to be largely unabridged, except for several sexually graphic passages that she acknowledged having deleted in the interest of preserving the “propriety” of her late husband’s image. Subsequent to the publication of my book in 1997, the journal was published in Spanish and English.
*
See Notes.
*
In later years, Walter Beverragi became a prominent ultranationalist, espousing anti-Semitic views. In his book
El Dogma Nacionalista
, he attacked “democracy” and “liberalism” as twin evils of modern, decadent society.
*
See Notes.
*
I was not permitted to see Che’s outline when I was working on this book, but the historian Maria del Carmen Ariet, who has worked in Che’s personal archives for many years, described it to me in detail. In 2004, a sketch of one chapter, “El Médico y el medio,” appeared in an anthology,
Latin America, el despertar de un continente
(Latin America: The Awakening of a Continent), which was published under Che’s name.
*
The previous year, when Myrna was studying in California, she had become engaged to a Canadian student she met there, but, as she explained years later, after she returned to Guatemala she fell in love with the Guatemalan activist Humberto Pineda. The purpose of her trip to Canada was to tell the Canadian that she was not going to marry him after all. Ernesto’s allusion to “broken hearts” was to the anxiety felt by Humberto. The only real broken heart, according to Myrna, was that of Armando Arencibia, a Cuban who had fallen in love with her.
*
See Notes for elaboration.
*
In August, Castillo Armas finally allowed Arbenz to leave for Mexico, but reserved a special humiliation for him at the airport, where he was jeered and then, at customs, forced to strip off his clothing in public.
*
Ernesto’s appraisal was prescient. Pellecer found asylum in Mexico, where he repudiated his earlier beliefs and wrote anticommunist pamphlets under CIA sponsorship.
*
Asturias’s son was to become a top guerrilla leader under the nom de guerre Gaspar Ilom, which he adopted from an Indian character in one of his father’s novels.
*
Then only twenty-three years old, Ricardo Ramírez would go on to become “Rolando Morán,” leader of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, the strongest of several Marxist guerrilla forces that emerged in the early 1960s and fought successive Guatemalan governments for nearly four decades.
*
In fact, Ernesto’s position was more precarious than he realized, since the CIA had already begun a file on him. As Peter Grose, the author of a courteous biography of the CIA director Allen Dulles (
Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
, Houghton Mifflin, 1994), wrote: “Sorting through the files of the fallen Arbenz regime in Guatemala a few weeks after the coup, David Atlee Phillips came across a single sheet of paper about a twenty-five-year-old Argentine physician who had arrived in town the previous January to study medical care amid social revolution. ‘Should we start a file on this one?’ his assistant asked. The young doctor, it seemed, had tried to organize a last-ditch resistance by Arbenz loyalists; then he had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy, eventually moving on to Mexico. ‘I guess we’d better have a file on him,’ Phillips replied. Over the coming years the file for Ernesto Guevara, known as ‘Che,’ became one of the thickest in the CIA’s global records.”
*
After several name changes following its creation in 1929, Mexico’s long-ruling party adopted its present name in 1946.
*
Ernesto and Luis de la Puente Uceda did not meet at this time. Uceda had already left for Peru when Hilda and Ernesto patched things up. But he and Ernesto would meet a few years later, in Cuba, when Uceda was organizing a Peruvian guerrilla movement.
*
A reference to Perón’s recent rapprochement with American financial interests and his controversial attempt to push through a bill allowing Standard Oil to undertake explorations in the Patagonian oilfields.
*
See Notes section.
*
“Green caiman” was a metaphor for the reptile-shaped island of Cuba. It was coined by Cuba’s Communist poet Nicolás Guillén.
*
Che’s private wartime journal, “Diario de un Combatiente” (A Fighter’s Diary), was the source for his book
Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria
(Episodes [or Reminiscences] of the Cuban Revolutionary War), first published in Havana in 1963. When I was writing this book, the journal itself had not been published, except for a few carefully vetted excerpts about Che’s first three months in Cuba. I worked from a complete text of the journal, which was shown to me by Che’s widow, Aleida March. The unexpurgated version of events, from Guevara himself, provides raw and revealing glimpses of his life during the guerrilla war. See the Sources section for more information.
†
The exact figure of the
Granma
’s survivors has remained imprecise. Official accounts have always referred to the number who survived and regrouped to form the core of the rebel army as twelve. This figure, with its unabashed Apostolic symbolism, was consecrated by the revolutionary Cuban journalist and official historian Carlos Franqui in his book
Los Doce
(The Twelve). Like many other early supporters, Franqui later went into exile as an opponent of Castro.
*
Castro’s full name is Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz.
*
Presumably, this is how Hilda lost many of the letters, poems, and other writings Ernesto had left in her care.
†
Che apparently believed cats had seven, not nine, lives.
*
See the Notes for elaboration.
*
Most Cuban sugarcane workers were hired only for the four months of
zafra
, harvest season. They survived the
tiempo muerto
, or “dead time,” by wandering the country as itinerant laborers or as pickers of other crops, such as coffee and tobacco.
*
This particular letter has disappeared from the official record of Cuba’s revolutionary history, as have any on-the-record admissions about the secret contacts made during the guerrilla campaign between the July 26 underground and the U.S. government, but such contacts evidently did take place. Previous accounts have speculated that the contacts began in the summer of 1957. Che’s remark suggests that U.S. government officials were making overtures to some of Fidel’s comrades as early as March.
*
After the war, the Beatón brothers became outlaws, murdering a revolutionary commander and taking up arms against the revolution before they were caught and executed. Joel Iglesias became an army commander and leader of the Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) organization. Cantinflas remained in the army with the rank of lieutenant.
*
Israel Pardo and Teodoro Bandera returned without finding René Cuervo or Sinecio Torres, but Cuervo was later caught and executed by a revolutionary firing squad. Sinecio Torres’s fate is unknown. Bandera later died in battle. Pardo survived and remained in the revolutionary army after the war, attaining the rank of captain. El Mexicano rose to a captain’s rank in the Rebel Army, but when one of the men who had informed on him was killed during a battle, there was a suspicion that El Mexicano may have murdered him. As of 1962, according to Che, he was living in Miami, “a traitor to the Revolution.”