Che Guevara (15 page)

In Antofagosta, a second attempt at stowing away on a ship heading farther north failed when the two young men were discovered before the ship set sail. It was their own fault. Hidden under a tarpaulin with a load of tasty melons, they had been devouring the fruit and heedlessly hurling the rinds overboard. The ever-growing procession of waterborne melon rinds eventually drew the captain to their hiding place. “A long line of melons, perfectly peeled, floated in Indian file upon the tranquil sea. The rest was ignominious.”

Their fantasy of continuing at sea having been rudely truncated, they hitchhiked inland. Peru was their next destination, but first they wanted to see the huge Chuquicamata copper mine, the world’s largest open-pit mine and the primary source of Chile’s wealth. Ernesto’s antipathy was already aroused. As the ultimate symbol of foreign domination, “Chuqui” was the subject of acrid debate within Chile. It and Chile’s other copper mines were run by American mining monopolies such as Anaconda and Kennecott. The Chilean subsidiary of Kennecott was the Braden Copper Company, which had once been owned by the family of the American proconsul Spruille Braden, whose meddling in Argentina’s politics during Perón’s rise to power had raised so many nationalists’ hackles. These companies reaped huge profits, and Chile’s economy was dependent on the revenues it received from them, which varied from year to year, depending on the fluctuating copper market. Resentful over the terms of this unequal partnership, many Chileans, particularly on the left, were lobbying for the nationalization of the mines. In response, the United States had pressured Chile’s recent governments to break up the mining unions and outlaw the Communist Party.

While waiting for a ride in the arid desert mountains halfway to the mine, Ernesto and Alberto met a marooned couple. As hours passed and the Andean night fell in all its harsh coldness, they talked. He was a miner, just released from prison, where he had been held for striking. He was lucky,
he told them. Other comrades had disappeared after their arrests and had presumably been murdered. But as a member of the outlawed Chilean Communist Party, he was unable to find work, and so, with his wife, who had left their children with a charitable neighbor, he was headed for a sulfur mine deep in the mountains. There, he explained, working conditions were so bad that no questions about political allegiances were asked.

Ernesto wrote at length about this encounter. “By the light of the single candle which illuminated us ... the contracted features of the worker gave off a mysterious and tragic air. ... The couple, frozen stiff in the desert night, hugging one another, were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world. They didn’t even have a miserable blanket to cover themselves, so we gave them one of ours, and with the other, Alberto and I covered ourselves as best we could. It was one of the times when I felt the most cold, but it was also the time when I felt a little more in fraternity with this, for me, strange human species.”

Here were the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation. Ernesto and Alberto had momentarily shared their lives—equally cold and hungry, equally tired and stranded. Yet he and Alberto were traveling for their own pleasure, while the other two were on the road because they had been persecuted for their beliefs.

The next morning, a truck heading for Chuquicamata came by. Leaving the couple behind to their uncertain future, Ernesto and Alberto climbed on board. The visit to the Chuquicamata copper mine became a wholly political experience for Ernesto, who still had the couple’s image fresh in his mind. He wrote disdainfully of the American mine administrators as “blond, efficient, and impertinent masters” who grudgingly let them see the mine quickly on the condition that they leave as soon as possible, because it wasn’t a “tourist attraction.”

Their appointed guide, a Chilean, but a “faithful dog of the Yankee masters,” nonetheless excoriated his bosses as he led them around. He said that a miners’ strike was brewing. “Imbecile gringos, they lose millions of pesos a day in a strike in order to deny a few centavos more to a poor worker.”

Ernesto dedicated a special chapter in his journal to the mine, carefully detailing its production process and its political importance to Chile. In his depiction, the ore-rich mountains surrounding Chuquicamata are “exploited proletariat,” too. “The hills show their gray backs prematurely aged in the struggle against the elements, with elderly wrinkles that don’t correspond to their geological age. How many of these escorts of their famous brother [Chuquicamata] enclose in their heavy wombs similar riches to his, as they await the arid arms of the mechanical shovels that devour their entrails, with their obligatory condiment of human lives?”

Chile was in the midst a heated presidential campaign, and most of the working class seemed supportive of the right-wing candidate, the former dictator General Carlos Ibañez del Campo, a man with aspirations to a populist caudillismo similar to those of Perón. Ernesto called the political scene “confusing,” but ventured some guesses as to the outcome of the elections. Disqualifying the leftist candidate, Salvador Allende, from any chance at the polls because of the legal prohibition against Communist voters, he predicted that Ibañez woud win on an anti-American nationalistic platform that would include nationalizing the mines and undertaking large-scale public works projects.
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He concluded with a recommendation and a prescient caveat for this “potentially rich” Latin American country. “The biggest effort it should make is to shake the uncomfortable Yankee friends from its back and that task is, at least for the moment, herculean, given the quantity of dollars invested and the ease with which they can exercise efficient economic pressure the moment their interests seem threatened.”

When they left Chuquicamata, Ernesto and Alberto set out for Peru, crossing the border a few days later. Riding on the backs of trucks loaded with taciturn Aymara Indians, they headed inland, climbing toward Lake Titicaca, three miles above sea level. As the land unfolded, revealing ancient Incan canals sparkling with cascading water cut into the steep mountain slopes, and higher up the snowcapped Andean peaks, Ernesto became jubilant. “There we were in a legendary valley, detained in its evolution for centuries and which is still there today for us, happy mortals, to see.”

Ernesto’s euphoria didn’t last long. Stopping in the Indian town of Tarata, he looked around for effects of the Spanish conquest and found them: “A beaten race that watches us pass through the streets of the town. Their stares are tame, almost fearful, and completely indifferent to the outside world. Some give the impression that they live because it is a habit they can’t shake.”

Sustained contact with the “beaten race” over the next several weeks had an impact on Ernesto as he and Alberto wandered through the Andes. The harsh historical realities of four centuries of white domination were all too evident. If indigenous people in his own country were almost completely eradicated, devoured in the melting pot of modern Argentina with its millions of European migrants, here in Peru’s highlands they were still a visible majority, their culture largely intact but pathetically subjugated.

In the crowded trucks they traveled on, carrying produce and human cargo alike in squalid heaps, Ernesto and Alberto were usually invited to ride up front with the drivers. It was the
cholos
, or Indians, with their filthy ponchos, their lice and unwashed stench, who sat in the exposed open backs of the trucks. For all their lack of money and their need to scrounge their way, Ernesto and Alberto were privileged, and they knew it. As whites, professionals, and Argentinians, they were the social superiors of those around them and, as such, were able to obtain favors and concessions beyond the imagining of Peru’s indigenous citizens.

For accommodation and the occasional meal, they threw themselves at the mercy of Peru’s Guardia Civil, the national police force, which had posts in every town. They were almost never refused. In one town, the police chief reacted to their plight by exclaiming: “What? Two Argentine doctors are going to sleep uncomfortably for lack of money? It can’t be.” And he insisted on paying for them to stay in a hotel. In Juliaca, they were having drinks in a bar as guests of a drunken Guardia Civil sergeant when he decided to show off his prowess as a marksman by firing his revolver into the wall. When the bar’s owner, an Indian woman, ran for help and returned with a superior officer, Ernesto and Alberto went along with their host’s story that no gunshot had been fired. Alberto, they said, had set off a firecracker. After an admonishment, they were free to go. As they exited the bar, the Indian woman screamed in futile protest: “These Argentines, they think they are the owners of everything.” They were white; she was Indian. They had power; she didn’t.

They were repeatedly asked questions by Peruvian Indians eager to hear about the marvelous land of Perón, where the poor had the same rights as the rich. Like doctors lying to terminally ill patients, they found themselves saying what their listeners wanted to hear.

The spectacular colonial city of Cuzco, built on the ruins of the Incan capital, with its outlying temples and fortresses, inspired Ernesto to fill his journal with lyrical and studious descriptions of the area’s architecture and history. He and Alberto spent hours in the city’s museum and library to gain a clearer understanding of the mysterious Incan archaeology and the culture that had created it.

Their luck as expert scroungers held out in Cuzco. Alberto went to see a doctor he had once met at a medical conference. The doctor graciously put a Land Rover and driver at their disposal to visit the Valley of the Incas, and he obtained tickets for a train journey to Machu Picchu, where they spent hours prowling around the stone ruins. After joining in a soccer game and showing off what Ernesto called their “relatively stupendous skills” at the sport, they were invited to stay on by the manager of the local tourist inn. After two days and nights, however, they were asked to leave to make way for a busload of paying North American tourists.

Returning to Cuzco on the stop-and-start, narrow-gauge train through the mountains, Ernesto saw the filthy third-class wagon reserved for Indian passengers and compared it to cattle cars in Argentina. Evidently still smarting over being forced to leave Machu Picchu, he vented his spleen at North American tourists. “Naturally the tourists who travel in their comfortable buses would know nothing of the condition of these Indians. ... The majority of the North Americans fly directly from Lima to Cuzco, visit the ruins and then return, without giving any importance to anything else.”

By now, he found it hard to contain his antipathy. In his journals, he took jabs at the “blond, camera-toting, sport-shirted correspondents from another world” whose presence he found irritating and intrusive. In a chapter called “The Land of the Inca,” he derided North Americans as “ignorant of the moral distance separating them from the living remnants of the fallen [Incan] people, because only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can appreciate these subtle differences.”

Ernesto had a fraternal feeling for the conquered indigenous races through whose lands he now traveled, whose ruins he visited, whose ancestors his own forebears had helped put to the knife. The two races, the Indian and the European, had met in a vast bloodletting, and centuries of intolerance and injustice still held them apart, but it was also what joined them together. It was from this unholy union that a new race, the mestizo, had been born. As the progeny of their shared history, the mestizo was perhaps the truest Latin American of all. But together, all of them—European-blooded Creoles, mestizos, and Indians—were closer to one another than to the Anglo-Saxons from the north, strolling around Cuzco and Machu Picchu’s ruins like so many “aliens.” They had a common language, history, and culture, and they faced common problems.

Like the medical researcher he was on his way to becoming, Ernesto searched for a cause when he saw a symptom. And, having found what he thought was the cause, he searched for an antidote. Thus, in Ernesto’s mind, the old woman dying in Valparaíso and the persecuted couple on the road to Chuquicamata were “living examples of the proletariat in the whole
world,” who were in misery because of an unjust social order, and whose lives would not improve until enlightened governments changed the state of things. Symptom and cause were wrapped up into one ugly package. Standing behind the local regimes and perpetuating the injustice were the North Americans and their overwhelming economic power. Ernesto’s antidote in the case of Chile was to “get the uncomfortable North American friend off its back,” but he warned in the same breath of the dangers and difficulties of expropriation. Ernesto didn’t have a cure for all these ills, but he was searching. Perhaps the “red flame dazzling the world” was the answer, but he wasn’t yet sure.

After a fortnight in the domain of the Inca, Ernesto and Alberto traveled on to the Andean town of Abancay, where they requested, and received, free room and board at the hospital. In return, they gave some lectures on leprosy and asthma and flirted with the nurses. Ernesto had an attack of asthma, which had hardly bothered him since leaving Argentina; it was serious, and Alberto had to inject him with adrenaline three times.

Having made so much of being “leprosy experts,” they were trying to live up to the description, and they had secured a letter of recommendation from their doctor friend in Cuzco to the authorities at the remote Huambo leprosarium. They set off for Huambo, and at the village of Huancarama, with the leper colony still several miles away over the forested hills, and with Ernesto’s asthma so bad he could barely stand up, they asked an official for help in obtaining horses. A little while later, a Quechua-speaking guide appeared before them with two skinny mounts.

After traveling for several hours, Ernesto and Alberto noticed that they were being pursued on foot by an Indian woman and boy. When the pair finally caught up, they explained that the horses belonged to them. The official had seized them to help out the Argentine doctors. After many apologies, Ernesto and Alberto returned the horses and continued on foot.