Che Guevara (130 page)

Added to the rather complex mosaic of chronologies is the account provided by Che’s “official” Cuban biographers, former Ministry of Interior agent Froilán González and his wife, Adys Cupull, who were given access by the Interior Ministry to false passports that were allegedly used by Che to travel following his disappearance from public view in April 1965. According to them, Che left Tanzania on December 28, 1965, for an unspecified country in Eastern Europe and stayed there until July 14, 1966, when he traveled to Prague; between July 19 and 20 he traveled from Prague to Vienna, Geneva, Zurich, and Moscow, and then he immediately left for Havana.

But Ariel, Manuel Piñeiro’s deputy, told me that “the various passports held by Cuban intelligence with different stamps on them showing different
countries don’t mean anything. Various
leyendas
would have been prepared for him, and the stamps applied by us, here in Cuba.” Ariel also said that at the time Che left for Prague from Tanzania, Ariel was personally involved in spreading “disinformation” about him so as to confuse Western intelligence agencies and help throw them off his scent.

Manuel Piñeiro confirmed that Che did not stay rooted in Prague. At one point, he acknowledged, Che took a trip to Paris, to put his latest
leyenda
through a test.

Chapter 28
, page 649:
According to my sources in Cuba, Régis Debray, like Tania, was part of the intelligence network run by Barbarroja Piñeiro. He was handled directly by Ulíses Estrada and by Juan Carretero—Ariel—who implemented Cuba’s guerrilla programs. These sources said that Debray’s involvement in the program began when he came to Havana as a graduate student in philosophy in 1961. His public cover for his trip to Bolivia, as a French journalist, was both genuine and useful, for he did write about Latin America for the French publisher Maspéro. But he was also an underground courier for Barbarroja. It is said that Debray was regarded as useful by the Cubans in this latter capacity—as a propagandist and courier for the cause—rather than as a theorist and ally at the command level.

Chapter 29
, page 669:
“Che was not in command of the situation into which he was inserted,” a Cuban government source acknowledged, speaking of the Bolivian expedition. “It was the Department of the Americas [the name later chosen for Piñeiro’s restructured Liberation Department] that studied the conditions for revolution in other countries and made the recommendations to Fidel.”

Piñeiro’s people seem to have overplayed their hand in assuring Fidel that the conditions were right for Che to come to Bolivia. People close to Che in Cuba still privately blame Piñeiro and his men for “fucking things up.” Few suggest that there was a betrayal, but rather shoddy work and
guaperia
—a Cuban term meaning bully-boy arrogance—that brought about the chain of multiple errors that characterized the Bolivian operation.

Chapter 29
, page 686:
Arguedas’s name came up at a meeting in La Paz between Pombo, Papi, and Mario Monje on the night of August 8, 1966. In Pombo’s published diary, he recorded the meeting and Monje’s boast of having key allies placed inside Bolivia’s government but omitted their names for security reasons. In some unpublished notes, however, Pombo scribbled, “He spoke to us of Arguedas who had been named minister [of Interior]. ... He explained that, as a member, he [Arguedas] had been authorized to occupy said post by the [Bolivian Communist] Party, that he was situated in a
key post, [to which] we expressed our worries over the method applied and our belief that it was a double-edged sword. He stressed that [Arguedas] was a colleague who was easy to dominate (but he was very wrong).”

Chapter 29
, page 688:
In July 1997, Gustavo Villoldo Sampera—who had previously not come forth in public—told me that the CIA had additional intelligence sources in Bolivia, most importantly an informant who was an active member of the Bolivian Communist Party. Villoldo would not disclose the identity of the traitor, whom he described as “someone close to the Peredo brothers.” He said this person was still alive. Villoldo also said that Mario Monje informed regularly to Colonel Roberto Quintanilla, the intelligence chief at Antonio Arguedas’s Interior Ministry. He said that Quintanilla passed Monje’s information along to the CIA.

As for Bustos and Debray, Villoldo said that both men broke down during their first days in captivity and told what they knew. He added that anyone would have done the same thing in their situation. He said that they were threatened with death and were in fact going to be killed by the Bolivian military, but that he and his CIA colleagues saved them in order to obtain their information.

Chapter 29
, page 689:
Most of the survivors of the Bolivian episode agree that withdrawing Renán from La Paz was an error. Why was he pulled out at such a crucial moment? Piñeiro said it was to renew his documentation, and run a check on his cover identity. But Loyola Guzmán, who met with Renán several times in 1967, got the distinct impression in her last rendezvous with him that he was “running scared,” that he was afraid of being caught. Ariel said that Renán was “extremely ill.” They were preparing another man to replace him, Ariel said, but events in Bolivia disrupted that plan. By the time the other agent was ready to go, it was too late. But Guzmán was puzzled. She sent two letters by couriers to Havana, stressing the urgent need for a substitute for Renán; and later, after Che’s diary was captured and published, she found that the messages had arrived, because in August he wrote that he had received a coded message from Havana essentially retransmitting her remarks, and advising him that a replacement was on his way. “How is it possible that they could get my letter, retransmit it to Che, and still take no action?” she asked.

By late August, Guzmán and her companions in the city had resolved that she would go to Havana to explain the urgency of their situation. First, she followed up a message that the Party was reconsidering its position and was willing to meet her in the city of Cochabamba. Before setting out, she began to feel that she was being followed. She told Humberto Vázquez-Viaña,
who ran a test to see if her suspicions were true. She spent a day moving around the city, getting on and off buses, with Humberto following at a discreet distance, watching. At the end of the day, he confirmed it. She was being followed.

A couple of days later, she was arrested.

Responding to the accusations thrown in the direction of him and his agents, Piñeiro was adamant that Che’s survival and ultimate success had been their main concern. He rejected as “repugnant” any suggestions to the contrary.

Chapter 29
, page 690:
In the spring of 1967, Régis Debray had smuggled out word about Che’s situation to Cuba’s secret services via his Venezuelan girlfriend, Elizabeth Burgos, who was allowed to visit Debray in jail in Camiri. Ciro Bustos also asked his wife, Ana María, to get word to Havana that Che desperately needed new radio equipment and added his recommendation that a second guerrilla
foco
be started so as to distract attention away from Che. Ana María wrote a letter, but, owing to a number of problems, it did not reach Havana until the eve of Che’s capture. In September 1967, Bustos’s friend Hector Schmucler was asked by Cuban intelligence agents in Paris to travel to Argentina, and then to Bolivia, to find out what he could about Che’s situation. Schmucler said he got the impression that the Cubans were very worried. He agreed to go, but by the time he arrived in Argentina in early October, it was already too late. (Schmucler studied semiotics with Roland Barthes in Paris, and in the 1970s he was a cofounder, with Ariel Dorfman, of the Chilean journal
Communicacíon y cultura
. He went on to have a long and distinguished academic career. His son, Pablo, who was a Montonero guerrilla, disappeared in Argentina in 1977. In 2005, when Schmucler was still teaching at the University of Córdoba, he and his old friend Oscar del Barco had a public exchange of letters in which they repudiated the violence they had endorsed when they were young.)

Chapter 29
, page 699:
Among some of his friends and associates in Cuba, it is acknowledged off the record that Che’s Bolivian operation was a catastrophe from beginning to end. They point out that Che never had the support of the peasants in Bolivia; that the Cuban and Bolivian guerrillas never established good rapport; and that Che, older and weaker than his tougher former sierra self, was loath to act against the slackers in his ranks. “This humanity cost him in the end,” one Cuban official said. “A lesser man would have carried out some executions, but Che didn’t; he didn’t want to scare people off; he wanted to get people to join him, and he knew he was, after all, a foreigner.”

Manuel Piñeiro defended Che’s efforts in Bolivia and the Congo, calling them “heroic exploits” and quoting Fidel on the issue of whether or not
Che’s final battles were failures: “I always say that triumph or failure does not determine the correctness of a policy.”

Chapter 29
, page 705:
In my rendition of their encounter, I used extracts from Selich’s notes from his talk with Che. The following exchange was not included:

Selich: What do you believe is the reason for your failure? I think it was the lack of support of the peasants.

Che: There may be something of truth [in that], but the truth is that it is due to the effective organization of Barrientos’s political party, that is to say, his
corregidores
and political mayors, who took charge of warning the army about our movements.

Selich’s notes end, inexplicably, with an unanswered question he posed to Che: “Why didn’t you manage to recruit more national [Bolivian] elements, such as the peasants of the zone?”

Epilogue, page 726
: Che’s ghost periodically reappeared in the unreconciled conflicts that persisted after his death. In December 1996, the seizure of hostages in the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, by a “Guevarist” guerrilla group, the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupác Amaru, focused the attention of the world on a previously obscure cause and rattled the confidence of a regime that had thought of itself as secure. Only a few weeks earlier, far away in Africa, with regional tensions rising from the presence of several million Rwandan Hutu refugees and the armed militias hiding in their midst in eastern Zaire, a previously unknown Zairean rebel movement made a spectacular appearance, forcing the refugees back into Rwanda, seizing Zairean towns, and putting the Hutu militias on the run. The man leading the rebellion soon made his appearance. It was Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader whom Che had unsuccessfully tried to assist in the Congo three decades earlier. In an extraordinary comeback, Kabila emerged from obscurity to raise the battle standard once again. By May 1997, after a stunningly rapid military campaign, he had overthrown Mobutu’s thirty-one-year-old dictatorship, assumed power himself, and renamed the country the People’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kabila had shown himself to be a canny survivor, but he proved to be little better than his corrupt predecessor. He soon plunged his country into a war that cost the lives of more than 4 million people. Kabila was assassinated in 2001 by one of his own bodyguards, but that, sadly, did not end Congo’s bloodletting. It was a reminder that some of the battles that had begun while Che was alive had no resolution.

Field Research and Interviews

To research Che’s childhood and family history, I spent three months in Argentina in 1994, much of the time traveling in the company of Che’s friend Alberto Granado. Roberto and Celia Guevara were extremely helpful with clarifications of the family history, as well as in their personal reflections on their brother. Julia Constenla de Giussani, a friend of Che’s mother, provided me with the account of Che’s birthdate. Ana María Erra, Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s second wife, also helped with details of Guevara family history.

Alberto Granado and I traveled together to Misiones and found the Guevaras’ old Puerto Caraguataí homestead. We interviewed a number of people who remembered Che’s parents, including Gertrudis Kraft and Johann Fahraven; others who helped with local history were Emiliano Rejala, Dr. Oscar Darú, and Leonor and Epifanio Acosta.

With Alberto Granado and “Calica” Ferrer, I traveled to Alta Gracia and Córdoba; Carlos Figueroa let us stay in his old family house on Calle Avellaneda in Alta Gracia, just down the street from the Guevaras’ former homes, Villa Chichita and Villa Nydia. I was able to gain a privileged glimpse into the past as these men reminisced and took me to meet Guevara’s other childhood friends and acquaintances. They included Rodolfo Ruarte, Sarah Muñoz, Enrique Martín, Paco Fernández, Carlos Barceló, Mario and Chicho Salduna, Blanca de Alboñoroz, Juan and Nelly Bustos, José Manuel Peña, Alberto Ferrer, and Ofelia Moyano. I also met Rosario López, the Guevaras’ former housekeeper; and Elba Rossi, Ernesto’s third-grade school-teacher at the Escuela Liniers.

In Córdoba and Buenos Aires, I interviewed a number of Che’s school-mates at Dean Funes, among them Raúl Melivosky, Oscar Stemmelin, Roberto “Beto” Ahumada, Osvaldo Bidinost, Carlos López Villagra, Jorge Iskaro, and José María Roque. Among his teenage acquaintances were Miriam Urrutia, Nora Feigin, Betty Feigin (the widow of Gustavo Roca), Tatiana Quiroga de Roca, Jaime “Jimmy” Roca, Carlos Lino, and “Chacho” Ferrer. In Spain, I interviewed Carmen González-Aguilar and her brother “Pepe.” In Cuba, Fernando Barral gave me his own reminiscences. Chichina Ferreyra and I exchanged e-mails in 2009.

In Rosario, Alberto Granado and I were assisted by the journalist Reynaldo Sietecase of
Pagina 12
, a Che aficionado, and together we explored the city where Che spent his first month of life. Granado’s cousin Naty López recalled for us the day long ago when, as “Míal” and “Fuser,” Alberto and Che had roared through town on “La Poderosa,” on their “escape to the north.”

For Che’s years in Buenos Aires and on the road, I talked with Ricardo Rojo, Carlos Infante, Dr. Emilio Levine, Fernando Chávez, Adalberto BenGolea, Nelly Benbibre de Castro, Andro Herrero, Anita García (Gualo García’s widow), and Mario Saravia. Alberto Granado and Calica Ferrer shared with me their memories of the trips they took with Ernesto.