Redeemers (41 page)

With his newly forged strength and endurance, he would set off on voyages, at first relatively local and then traveling rough through much of Argentina by himself in 1950 (stopping off to visit friends) on a motorbike trip of more than 2,500 miles. Two years later, with a friend and a motorcycle, he would journey across the body of Latin America. The urge to “move on” became another constant in his life. He kept a travel journal and steadily wrote to his family and his girlfriends. Women entered his life when he was quite young, yet he tended to move on from them as well. In the beginning it was a search for adventure without direction, but then his roaming—and his studies—came to be charged with a purpose, to confront and diminish human pain. He worked in leper hospitals on his travels; he thought he might become a celebrated allergist; but it was the discovery of America, the southern continent, the vast land and its miseries and its relation to the Colossus of the North, that finally possessed him.

On the motorcycle trip of 1952 (he also took various forms of ground travel, as the bike broke down) Guevara noted the “absurd sense of caste” in Bolivia (a country that at the time was actually undergoing its first agrarian reform—including some distribution of land—under President Paz Estenssoro). His sense of egalitarianism was deeply offended, as later he would be disturbed during his first voyage to Russia by the fact that there was a special elevator in a government building for party officials only. On his way to Machu Picchu he commented in his journal that “Peru hasn't yet emerged from the feudal condition of the colony. It's still waiting for the blood of a liberating revolution.” As usual, he took on his asthma like an enemy to be faced down, swimming two and a half miles in the Amazon. He would later write that “America will be the theater of my adventures in a way much more important than I would have believed. I really think I have come to understand America and I feel myself American, different from any other people on the earth.”

While he was in Peru, he met Doctor Hugo Pesce, director of Peru's leper treatment program, who had been a militant companion of José Carlos Mariátegui. (They had been co-founders of the Peruvian Socialist Party. Pesce wrote for Mariátegui's journal
Amauta
and was one of the delegates sent by Mariátegui to the 1929 Congress of the Comintern in Argentina.) Pesce gave him some of Mariátegui's writings and, long after, when he had already become
El Che
, Guevara would send Pesce a copy of his book
Guerrilla Warfare
inscribed “To Doctor Hugo Pesce, who aroused, perhaps without knowing it, a great change in my attitude toward life and society. With the adventurous enthusiasm of always but now directed toward aims more in harmony with the needs of America.”

In retrospect, Ernesto's time in Peru during his first great geographic adventure would be a critical turning point in his progress toward the near mythical persona of
El Che
. The young Argentine doctor had apparently begun the trip with his intention still intact of a future (hopefully outstanding) career as an allergist, the choice of a specialty clearly influenced by his own great physical problem. And he would speak with medical people and spend time (which he later described) working in a leprosarium. But in his personal diaries there is almost nothing about medicine. He does write about his asthma, briefly mentions his encounter with lepers, and raises questions that are not clinical but political. Sometimes he refers to his conversations with Pesce, but the points of interest are overwhelmingly political and social. It is already the picture of a young man on his way to becoming a revolutionary.

At the end of his trip, Guevara spent a brief and unhappy time in Miami. Back in Argentina, he quickly finished his medical studies. Then he left for good, for “America.” With the fall of the Arbenz government to the CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala (the beginning of almost four decades of guerrilla warfare and army genocide in that country), Guevara moved toward a more conscious Marxism, a strongly pro-Soviet position based on emotion rather than knowledge (he would cling to it for years and then in large part abandon it), and an ever stronger sense of the social illness that he felt was stripping the breath away from Latin America. He had a very specific idea about the cause of all this: “the blond and efficient administrators, the Yankee masters.” In the
bananera
zone of southern Costa Rica, he would write:

 

I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of United Fruit, convincing me yet one more time of how terrible those capitalist octopuses are. I have taken an oath before a picture of the old and lamented comrade Stalin not to rest until [I see them] destroyed.

 

When, by chance, he came to meet Rómulo Betancourt, the Venezuelan democratic politician, Guevara raised the question many felt to be necessary during the Cold War: “If war breaks out between the United States and Russia, who would you support?” Betancourt inclined toward Washington and Ernesto on the spot branded him as a traitor. Of course, at the time, the American government had decided that Betancourt was a communist.

Among the young radicals attracted to the Guatemala of Jacobo Arbenz was a young Peruvian exile, three years older than Ernesto, named Hilda Gadea. She had more political experience than him but less committed passion. In April 1954 he wrote to his mother: “I'm carrying on interminable discussions with Comrade Hilda Gadea, an Aprista girl. With my characteristic tact, I've been trying to convince her to abandon that shit-eating party.” Hilda would become his first wife. It was a relation of intellectual and political comradeship between the radical reader of Mariátegui and the adherent of Haya de la Torre. True to its tradition of welcoming political exiles, Mexico gave shelter to the young couple and other refugees from the Guatemalan military coup.

“In those days, Guevara had a Bohemian quality, a pedantic sense of humor that was provocative and Argentine, he went around shirtless, was somewhat of a narcissist, olive-skinned, of medium height and strongly built, with his pipe and his
mate
, somewhere between an athlete and an asthmatic, he would alternate Stalin with Baudelaire, poetry with Marxism.” This perfect description of Ernesto is that of Carlos Franqui, a journalist at that time, who would later play an important part in the cultural life of Cuba during the first years of the Revolution. He had been sent to Mexico by the Cuban anti-Batista movement
26 de Julio
to make contact with their leader, Fidel Castro, who was living in exile after his already legendary and unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks.

Guevara had arrived in Mexico in 1954. He would remain there till the end of 1956, when the
Granma
cast off from the port of Tuxpan, on the coast of Veracruz. He had worked for a time as a sports photographer and practiced his originally projected profession of allergist at the Centro Médico of Mexico City. (The doctors who worked with him remember him as limited in his knowledge but full of medical passion.) His patients adored him. In Mexico he and Hilda married, a daughter was born, and he traveled incessantly across Mexico and through the landscapes of his own imagination. One hundred and sixty-one times in his letters, he writes about traveling. He climbs volcanoes, visits the Maya country, dreams about Paris, where he intends to go “swimming, if need be.” He is a “knight errant,” a “pilgrim,” “an anarchic spirit,” “a total vagrant,” a man “ambitious for horizons.” Suddenly he meets someone who stops him in his tracks. For almost ten straight hours, they talk.

Fidel Castro, writes Che, “impressed me as an extraordinary man. The most impossible things were just what he would confront and resolve. He had an exceptional faith in the fact that once he set out for Cuba he would get there. That once there he would fight. That once he began fighting, he would win.” By the time Guevara embarked on the voyage that would finally define his life, Che's ideas had taken on a sharply ideological cast. He was reading Marx; he supported the Russian intervention in Hungary; he took classes in Russian (though he would never be any good at languages); he established a friendship with Nikolai Leonov, a Russian “student” who later came out as a full-fledged KGB agent attached to the Russian embassy in Mexico. And he not only devoured Lenin and Marx, he tried to turn them into poetry:

 

and in the bugle call of new countries

I receive head-on the spreading impact

of the song of Marx and Engels.

 

Setting aside the literary worth of his writing, it is in his poems that he expresses his most intimate feelings. He had once thought he might write a book on Latin American “social medicine.” He would now raise medicine into the sphere of revolutionary practice. He stood by the bed of an old woman, an asthmatic, who was dying, and, stretching his hands out over her, he swore, with the “low and virile voice of expectations / the most red and virile vengeances / so that your grandsons will experience the dawn.” It would seem that, for him, asthma was a metaphor for the suffering of Latin America, the United States its cause, the Revolution its cure. And one night, Che makes his decision—to enlist as a doctor in Castro's band of future expeditionaries. Symbolically, it was a meeting of the two great strains of Latin anti-Americanism—the abstract ideological disdain of the Southern Cone and the grievance-fueled resentments of the Caribbean.

The rebels trained in secret. They practiced rowing, wrestling, gymnastics, mountain climbing, and hiking. They rented a ranch near Mexico City, where they could fire their weapons undisturbed. Among them was the asthmatic Dr. Guevara, who, as in the rugby days of “Raging Serna,” excelled at his commitment. He was the best marks-man among the trainees.

They were arrested by the Mexican police and about to be extradited to Cuba directly from their cells. Former president Lázaro Cárdenas, the social and nationalist reformer of the 1930s, interceded for them before President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and in favor of Fidel Castro, whom he described as “that young intellectual with a vehement temperament and the blood of a warrior.” Che would write a poem that, as is usual with his verse, is far more interesting emotionally than poetically. He called it “Canto to Fidel”:

 

Let us go,

blazing prophet of the dawn

along remote, paths without boundary wire

to free the green caiman that you so love.

 

(The “green caiman” is a metaphor for Cuba from the poetry of Nicolás Guillén.)

With a few exceptions, such as Che himself and Fidel's brother Raúl, the expeditionaries on the
Granma
—most of whom, on landing, were killed in battle or summarily executed—did not consider themselves Marxists. They were “guerrillas,” like the first idealistic adventurers to have been so designated, the irregular Spanish soldiers who harassed Napoléon's invading army in 1808. Guevara, as a non-Cuban volunteer, would add an important chapter to the history of this romantic impulse—like Francisco Xavier Mina, the Spaniard who crossed the Atlantic in 1816 to fight against his own country for the independence of Mexico, or like Byron on his way to support the Greeks against the Turks. Che had chosen war as a higher form of poetry.

 

III

Che's campaign in the Sierra Maestra established his reputation as a skilled, egalitarian, and courageous leader of men. As a military commander, he was a stern disciplinarian who demanded much of his men but no more than he did of himself. He was “parsimonious and ascetic,” says the historian Hugh Thomas. “Guevara was regarded as first in the fight, first to help a wounded man, first to make sacrifices.” And Carlos Franqui remembers:

 

. . . Che did it alone. With his skill, his force of will and his bravery. Che converted sick men, with broken weapons, into the second strongest guerrilla force in the Sierra. He made the first forays down into the lowlands. He created the first liberated territory in El Hombrito . . . [Although] he wasn't sentimental, he didn't forget that a soldier was a human being.

 

But he also could be merciless. Rapists, traitors, and deserters among Che's troops were shot. Che in his diaries describes some of these executions almost clinically, with the cold eye of a surgeon. In Jon Lee Anderson's biography, a much more balanced picture of Che than the often idealized figure in the biography by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Che describes the killing of an informer:

 

The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for him. So I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 caliber pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal lobe. He gasped a little while and was dead.

 

And Anderson comments in general: “Che's march across the Sierra Maestra was littered with bodies of informers, deserters and criminals, men whose deaths he had ordered and sometimes executed himself.”

In Paco Ignacio Taibo's book, we witness Che's gradual discovery of the
guajiros
, the Cuban mountain peasants, and the “magic aura” that they conferred upon him. It was from this genuine connection that Guevara—always disposed to devise general theories out of his personal experience—came to develop his notion of the central role of the peasantry in a revolution. In the Sierra Maestra, as new recruits swelled the guerrilla ranks, the importance of peasant adhesion seemed, for Guevara, an unquestionable fact. Nevertheless, the peasant population of the Sierra Maestra was sparse. (It was the least fertile territory in Cuba.) The guerrilla force never amounted to more than two or three thousand soldiers at its highest point, most of them combatants from the cities recruited by the clandestine urban movements. The idea that the triumph of the guerrillas was due to peasant fighters would later, at least in part, cost Che Guevara his life.