Che Guevara (33 page)

At the Calle Bucarelli gymnasium, which was owned by friends, Vanegas gave the men exercise and personal defense classes. “I was very brusque with them,” Vanegas recalled. “I told them they were not señoritas, and had to become tough if they wanted to make war.” He showed Che and the others “how to hit people to cause maximum pain, to kick them in the balls, to grab their clothes and throw them on the ground.”

Alberto Bayo started giving classes in guerrilla warfare theory to the men in the safe houses, and in February a select group including Che began going to a firing range, Los Gamitos, to practice their shooting skills. By an
arrangement between Fidel and its owner, Los Gamitos was closed on certain days so the men could shoot in privacy, with live turkeys sometimes provided so they could practice on moving targets.

Ernesto and Hilda spent Valentine’s Day moving into a larger apartment on a different floor of the same building on Calle Nápoles. That night, Hilda went into labor. She gave birth the next day.

“A lot of time has passed and many new developments have declared themselves,” Ernesto wrote soon afterward. “I’ll only note the most important: as of the 15th of February 1956 I am a father; Hilda Beatriz is the firstborn. ... My projects for the future are nebulous but I hope to finish a couple of research projects. This year could be important for my future. I have left the hospitals. I will write with more details.”

But he never did. Those were the last lines Ernesto wrote in the journal he had begun nearly three years before, after passing his medical exams and taking to the road with Calica Ferrer. He had set out intending to rejoin his friend Alberto Granado at the leprosarium in Venezuela. Instead, he had veered off in an altogether different direction, on the road to revolution.

Ernesto Guevara’s mug shot, taken on June 24, 1956, when he was arrested in Mexico.

Like a marooned sailor who has finally seen the hope of rescue on the horizon, Ernesto threw his energies into the Cuban revolutionary enterprise. To keep his weight down, he cut out his usual steak for breakfast and went on a diet consisting of meat, salad, and fruit for supper. In the afternoons, he went straight to the gymnasium. Already looking ahead to the day when the revolution would triumph, he embarked on a cram course on the work of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and other economists; boned up on Mao and Soviet texts borrowed from the Instituto Cultural Ruso-Mexicano; and discreetly sat in on meetings of the Mexican Communist Party. Most evenings, he joined the Cubans at the safe houses for discussions on the situation in Cuba and other Latin American countries.

His knowledge of Marxism was maturing. Using his old philosophical notebooks as a base, he streamlined them into a single volume. This final
cuaderno filosófico
, totaling more than 300 typewritten pages, reflects the narrowing of his interests and shows a deepening understanding of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The last entry in the index, on the concept of “I” (
yo
in Spanish), is attributed to Freud: “There, where love awakens, dies the I, dark despot.”

He had begun to live a double life, withdrawing from contact with everyone he did not completely trust. He repeatedly warned Hilda to be cautious with her friends so as not to disclose his involvement with Fidel. Finally, he asked her to stop meeting her Peruvian
aprista
acquaintances—whom he especially distrusted—altogether. Apart from the Cubans, he saw very few people now.

Ernesto spent his spare moments with the baby. He was delighted with her. On February 25, when she was ten days old, he had written to his mother
to announce her birth: “Little Grandmother: The two of us are a little older, or if you consider fruit, a little more mature. The offspring is really ugly, and one doesn’t have to do more than look at her to realize she is no different from all the other children of her age. She cries when she is hungry, pees with frequency. ... the light bothers her and she sleeps all the time; even so, there is one thing that differentiates her immediately from any other baby: her papa is named Ernesto Guevara.”

Meanwhile, in his other identity—as Che the apprentice guerrilla—he was turning out to be a very good marksman. On March 17, Miguel “El Coreano” Sánchez—a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War who had been enlisted by Fidel in Miami to become the force’s shooting instructor—summed up Guevara’s performance on the firing range. “Ernesto Guevara attended 20 regular shooting lessons, an excellent shooter with approximately 650 bullets [fired]. Excellent discipline, excellent leadership abilities, physical endurance excellent. Some disciplinary press-ups for small errors at interpreting orders and faint smiles.”
*

Che already stood out from the crowd. His strong personality, closeness to Fidel and Raúl, and rapid rise to preeminence within the group doubtless aggravated the early resentment felt by some of the Cuban trainees toward this “foreigner” in their midst. Most of the Cubans referred to him as El Argentino. Only those who knew him best called him Che.

Fidel later recalled “a small, disagreeable incident” that took place after he appointed Che—“because of his seriousness, his intelligence, and his character”—as leader of one of the safe houses in Mexico City. “There were about twenty or thirty Cubans there in all,” Fidel said, “and some of them ... challenged Che’s leadership because he was an Argentinian, because he was not a Cuban. We of course criticized this attitude ... this ingratitude toward someone who, although not born in our land, was ready to shed his blood for it. And I remember the incident hurt me a great deal. I think it hurt him as well.”

In fact, Che was not the only foreigner in the group. Guillén Zelaya, a nineteen-year-old Mexican whom he had met briefly months earlier through Helena Leiva de Holst at a meeting of Honduran exiles, had run away from home to join up with Fidel and had been accepted. In time there would be others, including a Dominican exile and an Italian merchant marine, but that was where Fidel drew the line, explaining he didn’t want a “mosaic of nationalities.”

In his letters home, the preeminence of revolutionary thought in Ernesto’s life became more manifest, even when he was being whimsical.
Writing to Celia about his infant daughter, he gave a new twist to a father’s pride. “My Communist soul expands plethorically,” he said. “She has come out exactly like Mao Tse-tung. Even now, the incipient bald spot in the middle of the head can be noted, the compassionate eyes of the boss and his protuberant jowls; for now she weighs less than the leader, five kilos, but with time this will even out.”

His irritation with Hilda, held in abeyance during her pregnancy, grew more evident. Returning to the familiar theme of Argentina in his correspondence, he badgered his mother about the capitulation of Argentina’s new regime to U.S. corporate interests and then went out of his way to take a swipe at Hilda: “It consoles me to think that the aid of our great neighbor isn’t confined only to this region. ... It now seems that it has lent its help to APRA and soon everyone will be back in Peru and Hilda can go there in tranquillity. Big pity that her intemperate marriage to this fervent slave of the red plague will rob her of the enjoyment of a well-remunerated salary as deputy in the next parliament.”

Ernesto told Hilda that the revolution was a cause for which they both had to make sacrifices, the first of which would be their prolonged separation. Although she claimed to feel both pain and pride at the idea of his going off to war, Hilda was most likely deeply unhappy about the turn of events. Having espoused a certain revolutionary commitment herself, however, she could not very well hold him back. If she tried, he would have cited it as proof that she was hopelessly tied to her middle-of-the-road
aprista
political philosophy.

Money had begun to trickle in from Fidel’s supporters in the United States and Cuba, and he now had some guns and was acquiring more through Antonio del Conde, a Mexican arms trafficker he nicknamed El Cuate (The Pal). El Cuate was sent on an arms-buying trip to the United States and asked to look for a suitable boat for Castro’s “army” to sail on to Cuba when the time came. Meanwhile, Fidel was searching for a place outside Mexico City where his men could complete their field training in greater secrecy.

Fidel was evidently hoping to time his invasion to coincide with the third anniversary of Moncada, on July 26. Not only had he made a public vow to launch the revolution in 1956, but recent events had shown that if he wanted to play the revolutionary trump card, he needed to act soon. He was facing increasingly serious competition from several quarters. Among his potential rivals was former president Carlos Prío Socarrás. After first testing the insurrectionary waters by assisting the recently formed Directorio Revolucionario, a militant underground student group, in an abortive plan to assassinate Batista, Prío had taken advantage of the general amnesty that
had freed Fidel and had returned to Cuba. Publicly renouncing the use of violence, he was trying to extend his base of support by declaring his intention of opposing Batista through legal, democratic means.

The autumn of 1955 had been fractious in Cuba, with civic unrest countered by police brutality, and some armed attacks against the police by the Directorio. At the year’s end, a broad spectrum of opposition groups, including Fidel’s July 26 Movement, backed a sugar workers’ strike, and more street riots ensued. Although an atmosphere of rebellion was spreading, there was still little organization or unity in opposition circles, and for now Batista retained the upper hand.

When that balance shifted, Fidel planned to be at the fore. In March 1956, he publicly broke with the Ortodoxo Party, accusing its leaders of not supporting the “revolutionary will” of its rank and file. This was a clever move, for it left him a free hand to proceed with his revolution without feigning loyalty to a political party he hoped to supersede. Now everyone in Cuba’s various
antibatistiano
camps would have to choose a side, and Fidel would be able to see more clearly who his friends and enemies were.

Fidel was vigilant about the danger of betrayal and had already taken precautionary measures, creating a cell structure for his men in Mexico. They had been separated into groups, met up only during training sessions, and were forbidden to inquire about one another. Only Fidel and Bayo knew the location of all of the safe houses. Finally, Fidel had drawn up a list of punishments for infractions. The Movement now lived according to the rules of war, and the punishment for the crime of betrayal was death.

Fidel had good reason to be security conscious. He knew that if Batista wanted to have him killed, there were ways and means to do it, even in Mexico. He didn’t have to wait long to confirm that he was indeed an assassination target. In early 1956, Batista’s Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM) denounced Castro’s conspiracy and conducted a wave of arrests of his followers in Cuba. Shortly after the SIM investigations chief arrived in Mexico, Fidel got wind of a plan to assassinate him. When he let it be known that he was aware of the plot, the scheme was aborted, but Cuban government agents and Mexicans on their payroll remained active, tracking his movements and reporting back to Batista.

The political climate within Cuba continued to heat up. In April, the police uncovered a plot by army officers to overthrow Batista. When a Directorio squad tried to take over a Havana radio station, one of its members was gunned down. Days later, in emulation of Castro’s Moncada assault, a militant group of Prío’s
auténticos
attacked some provincial army barracks in a bid to force their leader out of his public posture of peaceful opposition. They were massacred for their efforts. Afterward the regime
unleashed a massive crackdown on Prío’s party, and he fled back into exile in Miami.

In Mexico, the number of Cubans with Fidel had grown to about forty. Ernesto’s tireless distinction in the training exercises had become obvious to Fidel, and one day he used the Argentine as an example to the others and as a reproof of their own flagging efforts. In May, the trainees were asked to evaluate the performances of their comrades, and Ernesto was unanimously judged by his mates to be qualified for a “leadership or chief of staff position.” It was an important threshold. Ernesto had won the respect he so craved from his new peers.

Ernesto was able finally to fulfill his old urge to try out his acting skills. Bayo and Ciro Redondo, one of Fidel’s key men, had found a ranch for sale at Chalco, about thirty-five miles east of the city. The Rancho San Miguel was huge. Encompassing both rangeland and rough hills, it was perfect terrain for guerrilla training. The main house itself was not large, but the grounds were surrounded by a high fortress like stone wall, complete with crenellated sentry’s turrets at the corners. There was one problem: its price was almost $250,000. The ranch’s owner, Erasmo Rivera, had a colorful personal history, having fought alongside Pancho Villa in his youth, but being a revolutionary veteran had apparently not made him impervious to greed.