Che Guevara (19 page)

Although Ernesto wanted to get to know the Bolivian revolution better, their social contacts gave them entrée into a La Paz elite that was the natural enemy of the changes taking place in the country. Calica recalled, for instance, that Marta’s wealthy family was about to have its lands expropriated in the upcoming agrarian reform. One night, as they returned home from the Gallo de Oro, their car was stopped at gunpoint by one of the ubiquitous Indian patrols roaming the city. “They made us get out, asked us for documents, and Gobo, a bit drunk, said to one of them, ‘
Indio
, put away that shotgun, use it to shoot partridges,’” Calica recalled.

Calica tended to echo the racist attitudes of their rich white friends, but Ernesto reflected on what he was seeing. “The so-called
good
people, the cultured people, are astonished at the events taking place and curse the importance given to the Indian and the
cholo
, but in everyone I seem to sense a spark of nationalist enthusiasm with some of the government’s actions. ... Nobody denies the need to finish off the state of things symbolized by the power of the three tin-mine hierarchies, and the young people believe it has been a step forward in the struggle toward a greater equality in people and fortunes.”

They had intended to stay only a week in La Paz, but it was hard to leave. “This is a very interesting country and it is living through a particularly effervescent moment,” Ernesto wrote to his father on July 22. “On the second of August the agrarian reform goes through, and fracases and fights are expected throughout the country. We have seen incredible processions of armed people with Mausers and ‘piripipí’ [tommy guns], which they shoot off for the hell of it. Every day shots can be heard and there are wounded and dead from firearms.

“The government shows a near-total inability to restrain or lead the peasant masses and miners, but these respond to a certain degree and there is no doubt that in the event of an armed revolt by the Falange, the opposing party, they will be at the side of the MNR. Human life has little importance here and it is given and taken without any great to-do. All of this makes this a profoundly interesting situation to the neutral observer.”

Ernesto wanted to witness the historic and possibly tumultuous event on August 2. Meanwhile, he and Calica took advantage of every dinner invitation from Nogues. Calica wrote to his mother, “Ernesto eats as if he hasn’t eaten in a week. He’s famous in the group.” Gobo placed bets on how much Ernesto could down in one sitting and promised that if they met up in Lima, where they were all headed, he would take Ernesto and Calica to a restaurant where the food was free if the clients ate enough. It would give him great pleasure, he declared, “to show off these proud examples of the Argentine race.”

It was during one of these evenings at the Nogueses’ home that they met the Argentine lawyer Ricardo Rojo. A tall, beefy, balding man with a mustache, Rojo was only twenty-nine but was already a seasoned political veteran. An
antiperonista
of the opposition Unión Cívica Radical, he had recently escaped from police custody in Buenos Aires, where he had been detained on suspicion of terrorism. He had taken refuge in the Guatemalan embassy and was flown to Chile with travel documents from the leftist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. Rojo made his way to La Paz and, like Ernesto Guevara and every other Argentinian passing through, beat a path to the home of Isaías Nogues. Proud of his recent exploit, he carried a clipping from
Life
magazine with an account of his escape and flight to safety. From Bolivia he planned to go to Peru, then to Guatemala, and eventually to the United States.

At the Nogues home, Rojo also took notice of Guevara’s “savage” eating habits and was surprised to learn that he was a medical doctor, since he talked mostly about archaeology. “The first time I saw him, Guevara didn’t particularly impress me,” he said later. “He spoke little, preferring to listen to the conversation of others. But then, suddenly, he would cut the speaker down with a disarming smile and a razor-sharp comment.” It was a trait they shared. Rojo too had a mordant wit and sharp tongue, and he enjoyed debating as much as Ernesto did. That first night, they walked back together to Ernesto’s hostel, talking. According to Rojo, they “became friends, although the only thing we really had in common at the time was that we were both young university students pressed for money. I wasn’t interested in archaeology, nor he in politics, at least not in the sense that politics had meaning for me then and would later have for him.” Following this encounter the two arranged to meet again; in fact, Rojo would keep popping into and out of Guevara’s life over the next decade.
*

Ernesto wanted to be in La Paz on the second of August, but he was also eager to see the conditions in the notorious Bolivian mines for himself.
Although it meant being out of town on the momentous day, with its threat of a counterrevolutionary uprising, he and Calica arranged a visit to the Bolsa Negra wolframite mine. (Wolframite is a major source of tungsten, which is traditionally used in the manufacture of munitions.) The mine’s engineers showed them where striking miners and their families had been cut down by machine guns before the revolution. Now, the mine belonged to the state. Here, as at Chuquicamata, Ernesto was moved by what he saw. “The silence of the mine assails even those like us who don’t know its language,” he wrote.

Ernesto and Calica spent a night at Bolsa Negra, and as they prepared to go back to La Paz they saw truckloads of miners returning from the city. The miners had been demonstrating their support for the agrarian reform law and now they were firing their guns into the sky. With their “stony faces and red plastic helmets” they appeared to be “warriors from other worlds” to Ernesto, although it turned out that there had been little unrest for them to be involved in.

The visit to Bolsa Negra reinforced Ernesto’s belief that real independence was impossible as long as the United States controlled export markets: “Today this is the only thing that keeps Bolivia going; it is a mineral the Americans buy and for this reason the government has ordered production increased.” Bolivia’s revolutionary government had already come under strong pressure from the Eisenhower administration to proceed cautiously with its reforms. And it had heeded the advice. Only the mines of the three biggest tin barons had been confiscated. Bolivia was still dependent on the United States as a buyer for its minerals and for the prices they brought.

Since Eisenhower had assumed office, the United States had embarked on an aggressive policy to contain “Soviet-Communist expansionism” abroad, and Bolivia’s President Paz Estenssoro had only to look around in the summer of 1953 to see what difficulties his government might encounter should he incur Washington’s wrath. Guatemala’s left-leaning government was coming under mounting attack from Washington for its own agrarian reforms, which had nationalized the powerful United Fruit Company’s interests there. United Fruit wanted revenge and was already showing that it had influential friends in high places.

Joseph Stalin had died in March 1953, but the Cold War continued unabated. In a bid to achieve strategic-arms parity with the United States, the U.S.S.R. was putting finishing touches on the hydrogen bomb, which it would explode on August 12. Two weeks earlier an armistice was signed in Korea, ending three years of bloodletting. The truce left the peninsula divided and in ruins. Now East and West faced each other across another hostile border, adding a new flash point to an increasingly divided world.

In Cuba, a country considered “safe” by Washington, events were taking place that would soon have a profound significance in Ernesto’s life. On July 26, a group of young rebels hoping to spark off a national revolt against the military dictator Fulgencio Batista had attacked and temporarily overrun the Moncada army barracks in the city of Santiago. Only eight rebels died in the actual fighting, while nineteen government soldiers were killed, but the rebels were finally routed. Despite attempts by Batista to link the attack to “Communists,” Cuba’s Communist Party decried it as a bourgeois putsch and denied any involvement. Sixty-nine of the young rebels were subsequently executed or tortured to death. The survivors, including the revolt’s twenty-six-year-old student leader, Fidel Castro, and his younger brother, Raúl, were taken into custody.

In revolutionary La Paz, Ernesto and Calica met with the head of the newly created Ministry of Peasant Affairs, Ñuflo Chávez, whose job it was to implement the agrarian reform bill. Ernesto found the ministry “a strange place, full of Indians of different groups of the altiplano waiting their turns to be received in audience. Each group had its typical costume and was led by a caudillo or indoctrinator who addressed them in their native tongue. The employees dusted them upon entering with DDT.”

The spectacle made Ernesto indignant. It pointed to the cultural divide that still existed between the revolution’s leaders and the common people they were supposed to represent. To Calica, the spraying with DDT seemed reasonable enough, since the Indians “were filthy and crawling with lice, and the ministry’s carpets and curtains had to be protected from such vermin.” Whenever they saw an Indian in the street with his hair dusted white, he and Ernesto would look at each other and remark, “Look, he’s been with Ñuflo Chávez.”

By now Ernesto and Calica had been in La Paz nearly a month. They had spent half of their available capital, and they had their visas for Venezuela. It was time to get back on the road, but both of them were finding it difficult to pull up roots. When they finally agreed to leave, Ernesto wrote: “Each of us had his amorous reference to leave behind. My good-bye was more in the intellectual plane, without sweetness, but I believe there is something between us, her and me.” Calica, meanwhile, believed he was in love, and had made promises to return to La Paz for his new sweetheart after he had found his feet in Caracas.

After a brief trip to Lake Titicaca, Ernesto and Calica reached the Peruvian border. At the customs post in the border town of Puno, Ernesto’s
books provoked an incident. As he told it, “they confiscated two books:
Man in the Soviet Union
and a publication of the Ministry of Peasant Affairs, which was described as Red, Red, Red in exclamatory and recriminating tones.” After a “juicy chat,” however, the police chief let them go and agreed to send Ernesto’s books to Lima.

They traveled from Puno to Cuzco. Ernesto was delighted to be back, but Calica was singularly unimpressed. He wrote his mother that although Cuzco was an interesting city, it was also “the dirtiest you can possibly imagine,” so filthy that it “obliged one to bathe.” However, he told her jokingly, in the eight days they were there, Ernesto “bathed once and by mutual agreement, for health purposes only.”

After a few days, Calica’s complaints about the dirt and discomfort had begun to wear on Ernesto. Writing to Celia on August 22, he vented his frustration. “Alberto threw himself on the grass to marry Incan princesses, to recuperate [lost] empires. Calica curses the filth and every time he steps into one of the innumerable turds that litter the streets, instead of looking at the sky and a cathedral framed in space, he looks at his dirty shoes. He doesn’t smell the evocative mystery of Cuzco, but instead the odor of stew and dung; a question of temperaments. We’ve decided to leave this city rapidly in view of how little he likes it.”

As for his immediate future, he told his mother, he was uncertain, because he “didn’t know how things were” in Venezuela. As for the more distant future, he said he hadn’t budged on his hopes to somehow earn “$10,000 U.S.” Then, “with Alberto, maybe we’ll take a new trip, but in a North-South direction, and maybe by helicopter. After Europe and after that, darkness.” In other words, anything was possible.

After a detour to Machu Picchu, which, although still crawling with American tourists, continued to entrance Ernesto, they set out on a grueling three-day bus trip to Lima. Some comic relief came at a rest stop where he and Calica climbed down the hillside for a swim in the cold waters of the Río Abancay. Stark naked, Ernesto took a special delight in leaping up and down to wave to the shocked female passengers on the road above. Arriving exhausted in Lima, they found a hotel and slept “like dormice.”

On September 4 Ernesto wrote to his father, complaining that he had expected to discover “a ton of letters” from Buenos Aires, but had found only one, from him. “I’m glad to hear the economic difficulties aren’t so many that some little help from me is urgently needed. I am happy for all of you ... but don’t forget to tell me
‘si las papas queman’
[if things get bad], to hurry up a bit.” Although he felt under pressure to find paying work to help the family, his father’s reassurances that things were all right had eased his conscience for the time being. In the same letter, he sent a barbed
reproof to pass on to his mother for not writing to him. He suggested she try writing each time she sat down to play solitaire, as a cure for her addiction to the game.

In Lima, Calica was finally in his element. “I like it a lot, it’s modern, clean, with all the comforts, a great city,” he wrote to his mother on September 8. They were well taken care of, having met up with Ernesto’s friends at the Guía leprosarium and with Dr. Pesce, who helped them find a clean pension with hot water and a university cafeteria in which to eat their meals. And they had met up again with Gobo Nogues. “Gobo has introduced us to the social life. We’ve eaten twice in the Country Club, really good, super-expensive. Naturally they didn’t let us put our hand in our pockets, and we’ve been a lot to the Gran Hotel Bolívar [Lima’s most expensive hotel],” Calica gushed.

Ernesto, by contrast, viewed Lima with an ascetic’s critical eye. “Her churches full of magnificence inside don’t achieve externally—my opinion—the display of august sobriety of Cuzco’s temples. ... The cathedral ... seems to have been built in a period of transition when the warrior fury of Spain entered into decadence to give way to a love of luxury, of comforts.” In his journal, there is a dismal mention of a party at which “I wasn’t able to drink because I had asthma, but it allowed Calica to get totally smashed.” As for their visit to a cinema to see a “revolutionary” new “3-D” film for the first time, he was unimpressed. “It doesn’t seem to be a revolution in anything and the films are still the same.”