Che Guevara (23 page)

After this declamation, which must have been quite mystifying to Beatriz, Ernesto signed off with hugs and love and kisses “from your nephew of the iron constitution, the empty stomach and the shining faith in the socialist future. Chau, Chancho.”

In Managua, Ernesto had checked the Argentine consulate for mail from home and found a “stupid” telegram from his father, who was anxious for news of him and had offered to wire him money if he needed it. It had infuriated Ernesto, and in his first letter from Guatemala, on December 28, he was as harsh as he could be. “I guess you now realize that even if I’m dying I’m not going to ask you for dough, and if a letter from me doesn’t arrive when expected you’ll just have to be patient and wait. Sometimes I don’t even have stamps but I am getting along perfectly and I always manage to survive. If you ever are worried about anything, take the money that you’re going to spend on a telegram, and go and drink with it or something like that, but I’m not going to answer any telegram of that type from now on.”

The harsh tone seemed to be Ernesto’s way of throwing up a defensive line between himself and his family. From a safe distance away, in a place where he couldn’t be stopped or sidetracked by their persuasions, he was saying, “This is me, the real me, like it or not; you can’t do anything about it, so you’d better get used to the idea.”

Guatemala, 1954. Ernesto is standing, third from the right, next to his future wife, Hilda Gadea, who is second from the right. Ricardo Rojo is next to her in the sunglasses. Gualo García is in the foreground.

For better or for worse, Ernesto had chosen Guatemala’s leftist revolution as the first political cause he openly identified with. Despite its many flaws and defects, he told his family, Guatemala was the country in which one could breathe the “most democratic air” in Latin America. The skeptic, the analytical Sniper, the “eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas” had taken the plunge.

Finding something useful to do was the next hurdle he faced. Ironically, he never would. The next six months became a succession of “days without shame or glory, a refrain that,” he wrote, “has the characteristic of repeating itself to an alarming degree.” Meanwhile, however, he was meeting people. Hilda Gadea introduced him to some high-level government figures, including the aristocratic economics minister, Alfonso Bauer Paiz; and President Arbenz’s secretary, Jaime Díaz Rozzoto. Ernesto grilled them about Guatemala’s revolution and also attempted to secure a medical post.

Through Hilda, Ernesto met Professor Edelberto Torres, a Nicaraguan political exile and a scholar of the late poet Rubén Darío. Torres’s pretty young daughter, Myrna, had just returned from a year in California studying English, and she worked with Hilda in the Instituto de Fomento a la Producción, a farm credit agency set up by the Arbenz government. Myrna’s brother Edelberto Jr., who was secretary general of Guatemala’s Communist Youth organization, the Juventud Democrática, had just come back from a trip to China. The congenial Torres household was a gathering point for Hilda and other exiles, and Ernesto and Gualo were welcomed into this circle.

On his first day at the Torreses’ home, Ernesto met some ebullient and outspoken Cuban exiles who had been in town for several months: Antonio
“Ñico” López, Armando Arencibia, Antonio “Bigotes [Mustache]” Darío López, and Mario Dalmau. The Cubans stood out in the exile community because they alone were veterans of an armed uprising against a dictatorship. Although their effort had failed, they had shown determination and bravery, and they earned widespread admiration—and publicity—for their campaign against Batista. After participating in the attacks led by the young lawyer Fidel Castro Ruz against the Moncada and Bayamo army barracks, Ñico and his comrades had eluded capture by taking refuge in the Guatemalan embassy in Havana. Granted asylum by the Arbenz regime, the
moncadistas
, as they were called, were cooling their heels in Guatemala as guests of the government until they received further orders from their organization. Meanwhile, they were celebrities, de rigueur guests at dinner parties and picnics.

Castro had just been tried in Cuba and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was serving his sentence in a solitary cell on the Isle of Pines. But despite the adverse circumstances, the Cubans in Guatemala, and particularly Ñico, spoke with passionate conviction about the future of their struggle. “Ñico was sure that his stay in Guatemala would be a short one,” Hilda wrote, “and that soon he would be leaving for another country to join Fidel and work for the revolution. His faith was so great that whoever listened to him was forced to believe him.”

Ernesto too was impressed and quickly developed a strong liking for the warm, extroverted Ñico. They saw each other socially and became friends. To earn some pocket money, Ñico and his comrades teamed up with Ernesto selling products on commission. It was Ñico who gave Ernesto the nickname El Che Argentino.
Che
is a Guaraní word that Argentinians typically use in a locution that translates loosely as “Hey, you.”

When another Cuban exile, José Manuel “Che-Che” Vega Suárez, who lived in their hostel, experienced sharp stomach pains, Ñico and Dalmau called for Ernesto’s help. Ernesto examined Vega, called an ambulance, and accompanied him to the hospital, where he was treated and improved within a few days. After that experience, said Dalmau, the Cubans saw Ernesto almost every day, either in the Central Park or in the pension.

Ernesto struck out with the minister of public health, who informed him that he needed to go back to medical school for a year in order for his Argentine medical degree to be valid in Guatemala. He made light of his economic woes to his family, quipping in a letter on January 15, 1954, “I am selling a precious image of the Lord of Esquipulas, a black Christ who makes amazing miracles. ... I have a rich list of anecdotes of the Christ’s miracles and I am constantly making up new ones to see if they will sell.” If his family thought he was joking, they were wrong. Ñico López had come up with
what he thought was a lucrative gimmick. He placed little portraits of Guatemala’s black Christ behind glass frames and rigged up a lightbulb at the base to illuminate them. Ernesto helped sell them.

Ernesto’s Aunt Beatriz sent him some money in a letter that never arrived, and then sent another letter asking if he’d received it. His reply to her second letter, on February 12, was doggedly tongue-in-cheek. He told Beatriz he could only assume that a “democratic post office employee made a just distribution of the riches. Don’t send me any more money, as you can’t afford it and here I find dollars lying around on the ground. I should tell you that at first I got lumbago from so much bending to pick them up.”

Myrna Torres and some of her girlfriends had begun to entertain romantic notions about Ernesto and Gualo. One night, Myrna and Blanca Mendez, the daughter of Guatemala’s director of petroleum reserves, playfully tossed a coin to see which of them would get Ernesto. “Blanca won,” Myrna wrote later. “Ernesto, of course, never knew anything about it.” But soon enough, Myrna became aware that it was the older, plainer Hilda who most attracted Ernesto. “Little by little, my friends, too, came to realize that the Argentinians, especially Ernesto, preferred to talk with Hilda because she could discuss politics.” On January 11, Myrna noted in her diary: “The Argentine boys are the strangest people: today they came through my office on their way to Hilda’s, and all they said was,
‘Buenos días,’
and when they came back, just
‘Adiós, Myrna. ...’
It seemed odd to me because I’m so used to the effusiveness of the Cubans. Actually they were sociable enough; but they just preferred political connections.”

Hilda was well read, politically oriented, and generous with her time, her contacts, and her money, and she appeared in Ernesto’s life when he was in need of all these things. Hilda later claimed to have introduced Ernesto to Mao and Walt Whitman, while he widened her knowledge of Sartre, Freud, Adler, and Jung, about whom they disagreed. Hilda rejected what she saw as the narrowness of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy and Freud’s sexual interpretation of life. Over time, she said, Ernesto’s adherence to these points of view softened as his interpretations gradually became more and more Marxist.

Hilda’s own philosophy had some Marxist influences but remained within a social democratic outlook. It was one of their main bones of contention. Ernesto pointed out that while Hilda “thought” like a Marxist, she was a member of the APRA, whose constituency was primarily the urban middle class. In conversations with other
apristas
, Ernesto had discerned that
at the core of APRA’s ideology lay a fundamental anticommunism. He viewed the APRA and its leader, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, with disdain. He resented Haya de la Torre for abandoning his original anti-imperialist platform, which had called for struggle against the Yankees and the nationalization of the Panama Canal. Hilda countered that the party’s guiding philosophy was still anti-imperialist and antioligarchist, that any abandonment of APRA’s original principles was purely tactical, and that once power was attained, a “true social transformation”’ would be carried out.

Ernesto argued back that given present circumstances in Latin America, no party that participated in elections could remain revolutionary. All such parties inevitably would be forced to compromise with the right and then seek an accommodation with the United States. For a revolution to succeed, a head-on confrontation with Yankee imperialism was unavoidable. At the same time, he was critical of the Communist parties, which he felt had moved away from the working masses by engaging in tactical alliances with the right.

Others joined in these debates. Frequently, they included the Honduran exile Helena Leiva de Holst, with whom Ernesto had developed a close rapport. She was politically active, versed in Marxism, and had traveled to the Soviet Union and China. Ricardo Rojo was also involved in the discussions, and he and Ernesto argued incessantly. “Guevara would tell about his great sympathy for the achievements of the revolution in the Soviet Union, while Rojo and I frequently interposed objections,” Hilda wrote. “But I admired the [Soviet] revolution, while Rojo deprecated it with superficial arguments. Once after one of these discussions, while they were taking me home, the discussion started again and promptly became bitter. The subject was always the same. The only way, said Ernesto, was a violent revolution; the struggle had to be against Yankee imperialism and any other solutions ... were betrayals. Rojo argued strongly that the electoral process did offer a solution. The discussion became more heated with each argument offered.”

While Ernesto and his friends debated political theory, the Central Intelligence Agency was well along in its plans to bury Guatemala’s brief experiment with social revolution. By January 1954 the covert program even had a code name: Operation Success. Throughout the region, friendly dictators such as Trujillo, Somoza, Pérez Jiménez, and the presidents of neighboring Honduras and El Salvador were brought in on the CIA’s plans. A Guatemalan figurehead had been handpicked to lead the anti-Arbenz “Liberation Army,” a former army colonel and furniture salesman named Carlos Castillo Armas. His paramilitary force was now being armed and trained in Nicaragua.

To better coordinate the operation, loyal CIA men had replaced American envoys in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras. John Puerifoy, the flamboyant new ambassador to Guatemala, had taken up his post only two months earlier. He had been selected for the specific purpose of coordinating Operation Success and the transition of power in Guatemala.

At the end of January, the covert campaign was unmasked when correspondence between Castillo Armas, Trujillo, and Somoza detailing their machinations in alliance with a “government to the North” was leaked. The Arbenz government promptly made the news public and demanded an explanation from the “government to the North” (the United States). In a letter of February 2 to his father, Ernesto wrote, “Politically, things aren’t going so well because at any moment a coup is suspected under the patronage of your friend Ike.”

The State Department denied any knowledge of the plots being hatched and the CIA calmly continued with its preparations. Agents circulated throughout Guatemala and the neighboring countries with an openness that would seem buffoonish today, but the CIA counted on creating a climate of tension and uncertainty that would prompt divisions in the armed forces, weaken Arbenz’s resolve, and, with luck, provoke a coup d’état.

In this unsettled atmosphere, Ernesto’s habitual suspicions about Americans were sharpened. When Rojo introduced him to Robert Alexander, a professor at Rutgers University who was gathering material for a book about the Guatemalan revolution, Ernesto wondered aloud if Alexander was an FBI agent. Neither Hilda nor Rojo shared Ernesto’s suspicions, but they found it difficult to convince him and had to admit that he might be right.