Buying the Night Flight (21 page)

Moreover, the leaders had chosen a deeply forested, sparsely populated, isolated area on the eastern slopes of the Andes where they could hide but where they could do little else. It was a miserably difficult place, infested with strange bugs, and an area of steep mountains and debilitating heat. The tactics were to set up three fronts, one in the Andes, one in the north, and one in the center of the country. After the Cubans had "trained" the Bolivians, they would move on to another country. They fully expected Americans and Argentines to intervene and they reasoned this would inspire the nationalistic Bolivians to join up.

None of this happened. While "El Che" sat reading books in the camp, the disgruntled Bolivians began to desert. Two former miners left and told the police about the "strange ranch" in the mountains. And as the months crept by, the extraordinary mistakes of the Guevara movement piled as high as the mountains from which they had expected to launch their attack on a continent.

My next Bolivian prisoner was Orlando "Camba" Bazan, a young man with a ragged goatee and eyes, now sad, that must once have danced. Camba told me a fascinating story -- later confirmed to me by everyone, including Debray -- which explained, on the most im mediate gut level, why Che had failed.

It was New Year's Eve, 1966, out at the "strange ranch," and Che had inexplicably been idling his days away, as if the revolution could easily wait. That New Year's he had a special -- an important -- visitor, Mario Monje, general secretary of Bolivia's Soviet-line Communist Party. He had made his way through the high jungle for a clandestine rendezvous with Guevara. For two hours in the later afternoon Monje and Che had met privately in the camp near the house and discussed working together. The natural division was obvious -- the guerrillas would rule the countryside; the party, the urban support movement. But behind the two men on that historic occasion was the same division--the same difference in dogma -- that was to doom the movement and doom all of Castro's adventuring in the Latin Americas of the sixties and the seventies, until he turned to the much more malleable Africa and to Central America in the late seventies and the eighties.

The Soviet parties, born in the thirties and taking their cues from Moscow like a conditioned reflex, had since 1965 chosen a nonviolent line of working within the political processes. The line matched the Soviets' interest, in the second half of the twentieth century, in respectability, diplomatic relations, and trade treaties with Latin governments. For the Cubans this was anathema. Out to "revolutionize" Latin America, they were convinced it could be done only through violent overthrow of the present states.

As they sat there under the waning sun, as the year was about to turn so fatally, Monje laid down his demands. The Communist Party would take part if: (1) Bolivian Communists who followed the Peking line were not allowed to participate; (2) the military and political direction was in the hands of the Soviet-line party; and (3) Che solicited the help of all the Communist parties of Latin America.

Che was furious. Why had Monje come at all? He was particularly enraged by party leadership demands. Che would never give up direction of the movement, never!

Before he left, never to return, Monje then met privately for two hours with the fifteen Bolivians fighting with the movement and told them what Che had said. Camba told me, as this tale spun itself out, "Che warned Monje that if the Communists would not enter the movement, they would accept other non-Communists. Monje could not accept that either. We thought he should enter under the guerrilla movement in order to seize the directorate later. But Monje said that even if they took part, they wouldn't be given political leadership. He always stressed the political must dominate the military. Che thought the other way."

Why had the Bolivians, most of them Communist Party members, stuck it out?

"Bueno
..." Camba said. "Well ... we wanted the revolution the fastest possible way. We didn't want to die for the old ideas but for something more radical. Now we realize the party was right. You can't get thirty men to fight in the front lines unless it's for political reasons."

These may seem esoteric arguments -- theology debates -- but they were crucially important: It was this bitter division that sealed Che's fate in Bolivia and sealed, in effect, Cuba's attempt to "revolutionize" a Latin America that was not so ripe or rotten a fruit after all.

In real terms it meant that without anyone in the cities to provide information, support, and supplies, the movement became isolated and lost in the vast green forests and mountains of Bolivia. At the end they literally lost each other among the trees in a strange and lethal minuet of the blind. The guerrillas had no representatives anywhere. A press release on their activities took more than a month to reach nearby Cochabamba. At one point Che wrote in his diary, "I receive everything [from Havana] by radio, but it is useless if you don't communicate simultaneously with La Paz." He had to communicate with La Paz through Havana!

This information I put together through Paco and Camba and Debray, as well as other sources elsewhere, but I also learned of the sense of hopelessness of the entire venture from someone else - - Ciro Bustos, the Argentine Communist artist also captured with and held with Debray. As it happened, I was in the casino the second day interviewing the Bolivians when Bustos walked out of his room. He was a tall, sad-eyed, balding man who always wore a slightly desperate air about him. The Bolivians, kind as always, were letting him make extra money by allowing townspeople in for Bustos to draw their caricatures. I immediately asked permission for my caricature to be done, and permission was duly granted.

All of my interviews had been with the accompaniment of either an American Special Forces officer, or, if in Spanish, a Bolivian officer. This was my one chance to be totally alone -- for long periods of time -- with one of the principals. The first day Bustos worked on my caricature, which I still have, for two and a half hours. Every once in a while one of the officers came and looked in the window, smiling.

At that moment, of course, we were there unspeaking, I on a high stool, Bustos working assiduously behind the easel.' All of the rest of the time ... we talked feverishly.

At the end of the first day Bustos feigned artistic temperament, threw up his hands in the presence of the officer who had come to get me, gazed with darkened brows on his work, and crumpled it up in front of all of us.

"What are you doing?" I cried, like a benighted heroine of old, almost on cue.

"It is awful, awful," he cried out in answer. "We must do it over again." That meant three more hours of talk the next day.

As I sat there the next day on the high stool and he stood there wrinkling his brow and swiping at the paper with a piece of chalk, he talked freely. "Che did everything wrong," he began. "I myself couldn't understand it. After one attack, we stayed twelve days in the base camp, instead of moving. Twelve days! And then we returned to the place of the ambush." He paused and shook his head, as if in physical pain.

What, I probed, did Debray really think? "Debray agrees," he answered. "When I was in prison at the time of the death of Che and heard him saying that that wouldn't stop the revolution, I was bewildered. To me, it was the end. I was in total disagreement. Then I realized he was saying that for political reasons. There were many errors in everything. It was almost unbelievable. There were no political ties with the city. I said something to Che once about the political liaison, and he said ironically, 'Yes, we have three people.' He didn't seem to want it. There was no support at all."

But the biggest problem he outlined was the one I had already seen in my interview with Debray. "Because of Che's vision of the revolution as continental, because of this, he didn't see the weak nesses of choosing Bolivia," he said. "He underestimated Bolivia -- the army, the will, the nationalism. He simply didn't expect them to resist the way they did. He didn't expect the army to fight the way it did. And then there were the Cubans. They were a draw back." He shook his head. "Too many Cubans." A lot of people in the world would come to echo those words.

***

Two days later I moved on, over the mountains by small plane to Santa Cruz, a bustling "new city" on the Bolivian edge of the vast flat Chaco that spreads out to Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina. From Santa Cruz I moved up, by car, to my last stop, the mountain town of Vallegrande, where Che's body had been brought and laid out after he had been killed in the small town of La Higuera.

Vallegrande is no typical Indian town, with small plain buildings and colorfully dressed people. Nor is it a
mestizo
or
cholo
town, of mixed blood. Vallegrande is an almost pure Spanish town, with women with black shawls over their heads and a sad, desolate air about it. All pitted whitewash and restless dark shadows, Valle grande seems to be a town in perpetual mourning.

I checked into one of the hotels, a simple little place with a large, flowery patio. The room was tiny and we washed at the fountain in the patio. I soon discovered that the "legend of Che" had quite taken over this strange, anomalous backwater, fed by its dark Spanish curiosity and superstition. Picture postcards of Che in death, his eyes open, his bearded, handsome face closely resembling a drawing of Christ, were in every store window. I bought as many as I could find. The townspeople, with their dark Spanish heritage, perhaps understood much more than the rest of the world what had brought Che Guevara to Bolivia.

One night, for instance, I sat in the pleasant dining room of my little hotel with the wife of the owner. She wore her black shawl, with its echoes of Moorish times, around her head and shoulders. Why, I asked her -- and myself, for the thousandth time -- had Che come to Bolivia?

She fixed her dark olive eyes upon me. "They came looking for death," she said, unsmiling, unemotionally. "They killed many, and they found it."

The chill of those words remained with me as I went my rounds, talking to everyone from soldiers who had captured him to towns people, to the doctor who had examined him. In trying to put together the story, I, too, had become obsessed with death.

At the end, without shoes (they were not even
that
well prepared) and in two groups totally out of contact with each other, Che's band, including an East German agent, Tania, with whom he was having a love affair, wandered aimlessly through the forest. The peasants, whom he himself had written must support any guerrilla movement or it would fail, had reacted only with empty stares and cryptic answers. Then, when the strange band, as strange with their beards as the Spanish Conquistadores had been to the Aztecs and Incas, had passed, the Indians informed
their
(Bolivian) army of the passing of the New Conquistadores.

"They are impenetrable as rocks," Che wrote finally in his diary. "When you talk to them it seems that, in the depths of their eyes, they are mocking you." Finally, too, he dropped all pretense of "inspiring" or "liberating" people, as do all totalitarians when they cannot have everything precisely their own way. By the end he was writing in his diary, "Until now, the peasants have not been mobilized, but through terrorism and intimidation, we will win them." That, I was to learn in Bolivia and many other places, is what revolution and "love of the masses" so often comes down to.

It all grew so desperate that when a peasant tried to enlist toward the end in a village of Alto Seco, Che told him bitterly, "Don't be crazy. Can't you see we're finished? We don't even know how to get out of the forest!"

Then, with the suddenness of one of the jungle storms, it was all over. The day of his capture, October 9, 1967, which was also his last day on earth, Che and seventeen guerrillas met Bolivian rangers at 1:30 p.m. in a narrow valley one mile from the remote village of La Higuera. Just before 3:00 p.m., Captain Gary Prado, tall, hawk- nosed leader of ninety rangers, suddenly found himself face to face with the "legendary" Che. Through interviews I was able to reconstruct the day:

"I am Che Guevara," the guerrilla said simply. By now he was wounded in the leg and barely able to walk.

"Show me your left hand," Captain Prado commanded, for Che had an identifying scar from the days in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. It was there.

"We did not know the rangers were going to be here," Che said, his voice wandering. "Everywhere we go, there are soldiers." Then, to Prado, "Don't worry, Captain, it's all over." Later Che recouped and said, "Don't be naive, my friend, the revolution does not have a chief. But very soon, Captain, these same soldiers that you now command are going to shoot against you."

This was more than Prado could stand. "We have a democratic army here," he told him. "We have had our own revolution. When I go out on the street at night, I go with my soldiers. They are my best friends. Why didn't you go to your own country, to Argentina. You need a revolution there."

"Maybe you're right," Che answered reflectively. The enigmatic, bittersweet smile again.

Meanwhile a Bolivian guerrilla named Willy muttered despondently, "We're just pieces of meat. They throw us here, they throw us there. Of what importance are we to anybody?" Like a Greek chorus.

Meanwhile Prado got into radio contact with the command in nearby Vallegrande. "Hello, hello," he kept repeating. "We have papa, we have papa."

"I'm papa?" Che asked, amused. "You call me papa?" For a moment the two adversaries smiled at each other.