Che Guevara (6 page)

They would evolve and mature in the coming years, but the character traits that later acquired legendary proportions in the adult Ernesto Guevara were already present in the boy. His physical fearlessness, inclination to lead others, stubbornness, competitive spirit, and self-discipline—all were clearly manifest in the young “Guevarita” of Alta Gracia.

Between 1932 and 1935, Paraguay and Bolivia fought an intermittent, bloody conflict over control of the parched
chaco
wilderness shared by the two countries. Ernesto Guevara Lynch followed the Chaco War closely in the newspapers,
and because he had spent time among Paraguayans in Misiones, he sided with their country. At one point, he declared that he was willing to take up arms to help defend Paraguay. Caught up in his father’s enthusiasm, the eldest son began following the war’s progress. Before long, Ernesto senior later recalled, the conflict had found its way into the local children’s games, with one side playing at being Paraguayans, their opponents at being Bolivians.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch later sought to portray his son’s interest in this war as influential in shaping his political consciousness. This seems unlikely, since Ernesto junior was only seven years old when the war ended. But the adult Che did recall his father’s passion for the conflict and, in tones that were both affectionate and sarcastic, told Argentine friends about his father’s bombastic threats to join the fighting. For the son, it summed up one of the bittersweet truths about his father, a well-intentioned man who spent his life coming up with schemes, but who rarely managed to achieve anything concrete.

The Spanish Civil War was probably the first political event to impinge significantly on Ernesto Guevara’s consciousness. Indeed, its effect was inescapable. Beginning in 1938, as the war in Spain turned in favor of Franco’s Fascists, a number of Spanish Republican refugees began arriving in Alta Gracia. Among them were the four González-Aguilar children, who showed up with their mother. Their father, Juan González-Aguilar, the republic’s naval health chief, had remained behind at his post but joined them after the fall of Barcelona in January 1939. The children of the two families were roughly the same ages, attended the same school, and sat out religion classes together. For a time the Guevaras shared their home with Celia’s eldest sister, Carmen, and her two children while their father, the Communist poet and journalist Cayetano “Policho” Córdova Iturburu, was in Spain covering the war for the Buenos Aires newspaper
Crítica
. When Policho’s letters and dispatches arrived in the mail, Carmen read them aloud to the gathered clan, bringing the raw impact of the war home in a way no newspaper article could do.

In the early 1930s, there had been little in Argentina’s domestic politics to engage the liberal Guevaras. Argentina had been ruled by a succession of conservative military regimes in coalitions with factions of the traditional “liberal” party, the Unión Cívica Radical, which had splintered and foundered in ineffectual opposition since President Hipólito Yrigoyen’s overthrow in 1930. The war for the Spanish Republic, a dramatic stand against the growing threat of international Fascism, was something one could become passionate about.

Ernesto Guevara Lynch helped found Alta Gracia’s own little Comité de Ayuda a la Republica, part of a national solidarity network with
Republican Spain, and he befriended the exiled Spanish newcomers. He particularly admired General Jurado, who had defeated Franco’s troops and their Italian Fascist allies in the battle for Guadalajara, and who now had to support himself by selling life insurance policies. General Jurado dined with the Guevaras and held them in thrall with war stories. Young Ernesto followed the war by marking the Republican and Fascist armies’ positions on a map with little flags. According to family lore, he named the family’s pet dog, a schnauzer-pinscher, Negrina—because she was black and in honor of the republic’s prime minister, Juan Negrín.

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 and World War II began, the inhabitants of Alta Gracia began choosing sides. Ernesto Guevara Lynch threw his energies into Acción Argentina, a pro-Allies solidarity group. He rented a little office from the Lozada family that was built into the exterior stone wall of the Jesuit mission overlooking Tajamar Lake. He traveled around the province, speaking at public meetings and following up tips about “Nazi infiltration.” He and his colleagues feared an eventual Nazi invasion of Argentina and monitored suspicious activities in Córdoba’s sizable German community. Now eleven, Ernesto joined the youth wing of Acción Argentina. His father recalled that “all the free time he had outside his playtime and studies, he spent collaborating with us.”

In Córdoba, one of the chief targets of concern was the German settlement in the Calamuchita valley, near Alta Gracia. In late 1939, after inflicting damage on British warships in the Atlantic, the crippled German battleship
Admiral Graf Spee
was chased into the Río de la Plata, where its captain scuttled it in the waters off Montevideo. The ship’s officers and crew were interned in Córdoba. Ernesto Guevara Lynch recalled that the internees were observed conducting military training exercises with dummy wooden rifles and that trucks loaded with arms from Bolivia were discovered headed for the valley. A German-owned hotel in another town was suspected of providing cover for a Nazi spy ring and of housing a radio transmitter that communicated directly to Berlin.

Alarmed at what they believed to be evidence of a flourishing Nazi underground network in Córdoba, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and his colleagues sent a detailed report to the headquarters of Acción Argentina in Buenos Aires, expecting prompt action to be taken by the pro-Allied administration of President Roberto Ortiz. But Ortiz was in ill health and was effectively replaced in his duties by his vice president, Ramón Castillo, who was strongly pro-Axis. Thus, according to Guevara Lynch, no substantive measures were taken against the Nazi network.

Argentina’s ambiguous position throughout the war—it remained officially neutral until the eve of Germany’s defeat in 1945—owed as much
to its economic concerns as to the considerable pro-Axis sentiments within its political and military establishment. Traditionally dependent on Europe as an export market for its beef, grain, and other agricultural products, Argentina was devastated by the wartime blockade. In return for supporting the Allies, the Ortiz administration had sought guarantees for its surplus exports from the United States, which supplied most of Argentina’s manufactured goods. But Ortiz was unable to get what the Argentinians considered a fair deal from the United States, and during the Castillo regime Argentina’s ultranationalists looked to Germany as a potential new market for Argentine exports and as a military supplier.

Ernesto (on the front fender, third from left) with fellow students. The bus took them from Alta Gracia to the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, their high school, in Córdoba.

In Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s rendition of his wartime activities, there is an inescapable sense of the Walter Mitty in him. He desperately wished for a life of adventure and daring, but he was destined to be, for the most part, at the periphery of the large events of his time. He had trumpeted his willingness to fight for Paraguay, but he had not gone. The Spanish Civil War and World War II gave him new issues to champion, and later he would take up others, but he did so from the sidelines. In the end, it was not these
activities he would be remembered for, but his role as the father of Che Guevara.

Young Ernesto Guevara became a teenager while war raged abroad and Argentinian politics grew increasingly volatile. Although his physical development was slow—he remained short for his years and didn’t experience a growth spurt until he was sixteen—he was intellectually curious, questioning, and prone to answering back to his elders. His favorite books were the adventure stories of Emilio Salgari, Jules Verne, and Alexandre Dumas.

In March 1942, just before his fourteenth birthday, Ernesto began attending high school, or
bachillerato
. Since Alta Gracia’s schools offered only primary school education, he traveled by bus each day to Córdoba, twenty-three miles away, to attend one of the best state-run schools, the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes. One morning someone took a photograph of Ernesto posed on the front fender of the bus. Impishly grinning into the camera, wearing a blazer and tie but still in shorts and crumpled kneesocks, he is surrounded by older students attired in button-down collars, suits, ties, and trousers.

During the summer holidays in early 1943, the Guevaras moved to Córdoba. Ernesto Guevara Lynch had found a partner there to launch a building firm. With Ernesto already commuting to school, and his sister Celia about to enter a girls’ high school in Córdoba, the move from Alta Gracia seemed a practical choice.

The Guevaras’ move to Córdoba was buoyed by a brief upswing in their economic fortunes, although it was also the beginning of the end of their days as a united family. Ernesto and Celia’s attempt at a reconciliation resulted in the birth, in May 1943, of their fifth and last child, Juan Martín, who was named for Celia’s father, but the strains between them deepened, and by the time they left for Buenos Aires four years later, their marriage would be finished.

As before, according to family friends, the problem was Ernesto’s chronic womanizing. “The father had pretensions of being a playboy,” Tatiana Quiroga, a friend of the Guevara children, recalled. “But he was a disorderly playboy, because when he worked and earned money, he spent it all ... on going out with ‘young ladies,’ on clothes, on stupidities, nothing concrete ... and the family would get nothing.”

Ernesto’s business partner in Córdoba was an eccentric architect who was known as the Marqués de Arias because of his extreme height and aloof, aristocratic air. The Marqués came up with the building contracts, usually houses, and Ernesto oversaw their construction. “We lived divinely, and all the money just went; they never thought in terms of investments,” Ernesto’s elder daughter, Celia, recalled. But before the crunch came, he bought a country chalet in the hills outside Córdoba at Villa Allende and joined Córdoba’s exclusive Lawn Tennis Club, where his children swam and learned to play tennis. The Guevaras settled into a two-story rented home at Calle Chile 288, near the end of the street, where it met with Avenida Chacabuco, a boulevard lined with bulbous shade trees known as
palos borrachos
. Across the avenue lay the clipped green expanse and woods of Parque Sarmiento, the city zoo, the Lawn Tennis Club, and beyond, the University of Córdoba.

The Guevara home at Calle Chile retained the free, open atmosphere their friends had so enjoyed in Alta Gracia. Dolores Moyano, a new friend from one of Córdoba’s richest families, found it all very exotic. The furniture could barely be seen because of the books and magazines piled everywhere, and there were no fixed mealtimes that she could discern—one just ate when one felt hungry. The children were allowed to ride their bicyles from the street, through the living room, into the backyard.

Dolores soon discovered that the Guevaras exacted a price for their open-house policy. Once they sensed any pomposity, pedantry, or pretense in a visitor, they would tease him or her mercilessly. Young Ernesto led these attacks, and more than once Dolores found herself a target. His mother was just as provocative and could be exceedingly stubborn. His father, on the other hand, seemed immensely likable. Dolores remembered him as a man who exuded warmth and vitality. “He spoke in a booming voice, and was rather absentminded,” she wrote later. “Occasionally, he sent the children on errands which he had forgotten by the time they returned.”

The move to Córdoba coincided with the onset of young Ernesto’s adolescence. He began increasingly to assert himself, questioning the values of his bickering parents and forming the first glimmerings of his own worldview.

In his first year at the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, Ernesto made new friends. The closest of these was Tomás Granado, the youngest of three sons of a Spanish emigré who worked as a railway conductor. At fourteen, Ernesto was still short for his years, but he was now slim instead of stocky. The bigger, huskier Tomás wore his hair stylishly slicked back, but Ernesto had an unfashionable buzz cut that earned him the nickname El Pelao (Baldy), one of several he acquired during his adolescence. (Latin Americans have a propensity for nicknames, and Argentinians, who love word-play, are especially keen on them.)

Before long, Tomás’s older brother Alberto had entered their circle as well. A first-year student of biochemistry and pharmacology at the University of Córdoba, the twenty-year-old Alberto, or Petiso (Shorty), was barely five feet tall and had a huge beaked nose, a barrel chest, and a footballer’s sturdy bowed legs. He also possessed a good sense of humor and a taste for wine, girls, literature, and rugby. He and Ernesto were separated by age, but in time their friendship became stronger than that between Ernesto and Tomás.