Che Guevara (68 page)

Moved, he said: “If that’s how it is, then it’s all right ... friends, and comrades?”

“Yes,” I said.

Whether Hilda did, in fact, let Che off the hook so easily might be debated, but the estranged couple reached a quick and fairly amicable settlement. Hilda would stay on in Cuba and be given a useful job just as soon as things were organized. She and Che would get a divorce, and then he and Aleida would be married.

Che made a special effort to establish a fatherly role with the dark-haired little girl he knew only from photographs. Evidently trying to avoid direct contact with Hilda for Aleida’s sake—the two women had despised each other on sight—Che frequently sent for Hildita to be brought to him at La Cabaña. His men often saw them together, walking around the fortress hand in hand. She would play in his office while he went through papers. On February 15, he attended her third birthday party. In a photograph taken of the occasion, a smiling Hilda sits at the head of the table, holding Hildita close to her. Che sits hunched over on the other side of the table. He is wearing his beret, a leather jacket, and a sharp, self-contained look, as though he wished he were elsewhere.

On February 15, 1959, Che attended his daughter Hildita’s third birthday party. Hildita’s mother, Hilda Gadea, is holding her.

Che also had his family—who stayed in Havana for a month—to deal with. In the early days, their short visits and Che’s hectic schedule kept things pleasant enough, but tensions simmered between Che and his father. Quite apart from their divergent political views, Che had never forgiven his father’s treatment of his mother. As he explained to close friends, his father had “spent all the old lady’s money and then ditched her.” Things finally came to a head when Ernesto senior went to the home of a ham radio enthusiast to speak with friends in Buenos Aires. His “Cuba support committee” in Argentina had acquired a shortwave radio transmitter to communicate with Radio Rebelde—too late to ever be used for that purpose—and he wanted to finally test it out, so he spent an afternoon on the air. That evening, he was reprimanded by his son. “Old man, you are very imprudent,” Che remonstrated. “You have been speaking by shortwave to Buenos Aires in the home of a radio
aficionado
who is a counterrevolutionary.” His father made his excuses, insisting he had said nothing of political interest, and the matter was dropped, but later he reflected: “It was evident that the information services of the incipient revolutionary government were already working.”

The Guevaras were moved from the Hilton to the seaside Hotel Comodoro in the exclusive suburb of Miramar, presumably to make it harder for Ernesto senior to drop in on his son at La Cabaña at inconvenient times, as he was in the habit of doing. From then on, Che visited them by helicopter, alighting on the hotel’s lawn. “He descended,” Guevara Lynch wrote, “chatted for a while with his mother, Celia, and left again.” Celia herself, by all accounts, was enthralled by Cuba, caught up by her maternal pride and the euphoria of her son’s triumph. She more or less uncritically tried to share the victory he had helped bring about.

Taking a brief break from his revolutionary duties, Che escorted his family on a sightseeing trip, showing them Santa Clara and his old haunts in the Escambray, visiting the house of Aleida’s family and the sites of battles he had led. At Pedrero, he left them to return to Havana, and two soldiers were delegated to guide them on horseback into the hills to see his former
comandancia
. His father provoked a new incident there when, out of curiosity, he picked up the field telephone in the old general staff headquarters. His guides told him that it had been used to communicate with the nearby radio transmitter but was now disconnected, and he got a shock when he heard a man’s voice come on the line. “Who are you?” Ernesto senior asked. “And who are
you
?” came the retort. “I am Che’s father,” he replied. The man on the other end sputtered in disbelief, insulted him in a threatening manner, and hung up.

The soldiers escorting the family became alarmed. They tried to make contact on the radio themselves, but there was no reply, and they went into
the woods to investigate. In their absence, Che’s father’s vivid imagination got the best of him. “I began to get worried,” he recalled. “Who were the people on the other side? If they were counterrevolutionaries, they could catch us easily, because we had only two soldiers as escorts and we were armed only with pistols. It would have been a magnificent blow for the counterrevolutionaries to take Che’s father, mother, and brother and sister as prisoners.”

Guevara Lynch ushered his wife, daughter, and youngest son into a fortified cave. “If any strangers approached, my son-in-law Luis and I resolved to defend the entrance together by shooting.” But a short time later, their escorts returned, smiling. At the radio installation, they had found some militiamen who had been disassembling the transmitter at the very moment of the call. They too had become frightened, thinking counterrevolution-aries were about to attack them, and had taken up defensive positions. Che guffawed with laughter when Celia told him the story later.

The family’s visit was awkward for Che. Compared with many of his comrades, he was almost obsessively concerned about the image he presented to the public. He didn’t want to appear to be abusing his power by dispensing government favors to family and friends. Camilo had arranged the Guevaras’ free flight as a surprise. If Che had known about it, he probably would have forbidden it. As it was, the Guevara family experienced Che’s austerity measures firsthand. They were given a car and driver for trips around Havana, but they had to pay for gas. When his father said that he wished to explore the battlefields of the Sierra Maestra, Che said he would provide a jeep and a veteran soldier to guide them, but Ernesto senior would have to pay for gas
and
meals. Guevara Lynch had not brought enough money, and abandoned his plan.

The family’s final departure was abrupt. As Guevara Lynch recalled it: “My duties in Buenos Aires demanded my attention. Suddenly I decided to travel. I told Ernesto on the telephone that I was leaving that night. He went to say good-bye to me at the airport in the company of Raúl Castro.”

As they chatted at the departure gate, a man came over and spoke to Che in a thick
porteño
accent. He was a fellow Argentine, he said, and wished to shake his hand. Che assented wordlessly, but when the man dug out a notebook and pen and asked for an autograph, Che turned his back. “I am not a movie star,” he said.

Che and his father made a symbolic peace at the last minute. When their flight was announced, Guevara Lynch removed from his wrist the old gold watch he wore, an heirloom that had belonged to Che’s beloved grandmother, Ana Isabel Lynch, and gave it to his son. Che took it, slipped off the watch he was wearing, and handed it to his father. It was, he said, the watch Fidel had given him when he was promoted to
comandante
.

Che had not been looking or feeling well for some time. He was gaunt and his eyes were sunken. Ill health was one of the reasons he hadn’t accompanied Fidel to Venezuela, where he had been invited to speak by a medical society, but it wasn’t until March 4 that he took a break in his schedule and allowed doctors to X-ray him. He was diagnosed with a pulmonary infection and told that he had to convalesce. He was also told to stop smoking cigars. Che, who had became addicted to tobacco during the war, persuaded the doctors to allow him one
tabaco
a day. The patient interpreted this rule liberally, as Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, now a factotum for Fidel, discovered when he went to Che’s house one morning. “I found him smoking a cigar about a foot and a half long,” Nuñez Jiménez recalled. “He explained with a naughty smile: ‘Don’t worry about the doctors, I am being good to my word—one cigar a day, and not one more.’”

Che and Aleida had been moved, on doctor’s orders, to a requisitioned villa at the nearby beach community of Tarará. The new location made it possible for Che to conduct his revolutionary work with more secrecy. By now he was deeply involved in preparing Cuba’s agrarian reform law and designing the agency that would implement it. The agency was given an innocuous-sounding name—Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA)—but in essence, it was to be the genesis of the
real
Cuban revolution. An amalgamation of the July 26 Movement’s left wing, the former Rebel Army, and the Cuban Communist Party, INRA was to gradually assume the functions of the regime headed by Manuel Urrutia.

Immediately after arriving at La Cabaña, Che had summoned his new group of unofficial advisers at the sugar institute, including Juan Borroto and the PSP man Alfredo Menéndez, for talks. The 1959 sugar harvest season had begun, and Che suggested reducing the working day from eight to six hours to create more jobs. Menéndez pointed out that this would set off a wave of similar work-reduction demands throughout the Cuban labor market, increase the cost of sugar production, and affect Cuba’s profits on the world market.

“You may be right,” Che replied. “But, look, the first mission of the revolution is to resolve the unemployment problem in Cuba. If we don’t resolve it, we won’t be able to stay in power.” He insisted that Menéndez give him a proposal on reducing the workday, but in the end Fidel quashed the idea. It would have created too many problems. Besides, the sugar industry was still in the hands of powerful private capital interests, both Cuban and American, and he couldn’t afford to antagonize them just yet. “Fidel’s vision was longer-range,” Menéndez observed. “He was telling the workers
that they shouldn’t fight for crumbs, but for power. He was already planning to nationalize the industry.”

By February, the pace of consultations had increased, and Menéndez joined a high-level Communist Party group, the “Economic Commission,” that met in secret every night at a house in Cojímar, conveniently close to La Cabaña. The house was rented in the name of Francisco “Pancho” García Vals, a bright young Communist Party member who spoke both English and French. Although García Vals hadn’t participated in the war, Che had taken to him and made him a lieutenant and his executive assistant. García Vals’s unearned military rank and new duties may have seemed inexplicable to outsiders, but he served a vital function for Che. The nightly meetings at his house were convened for the purpose of working on a draft proposal for the agrarian reform law.

Che was in the habit of dropping by the house in Cojímar in the afternoons. While García Vals and Menéndez worked away on economic affairs, Che dictated his thoughts on guerrilla warfare into a tape recorder. His new personal secretary, José Manuel Manresa, a former Batista desk sergeant he had kept on at La Cabaña, transcribed the tapes. Occasionally Che would call Menéndez over and ask him to read a section. The resulting book,
La Guerra de Guerrillas
(Guerrilla Warfare), was a how-to manual intended to adapt the lessons learned in Cuba to other Latin American nations.

Once Che was ensconced in Tarará, the work on INRA intensified. Fidel, who moved into his Cojímar villa around the same time, named Antonio Nuñez Jiménez as chairman of an agrarian reform task force that included Che, Fidel’s old Communist friend Alfredo Guevara, Pedro Miret, Vílma Espín—whom Raúl had married in January—and two senior PSP advisers. The group met every night at the house in Tarará to discuss changes and additions to the proposals drafted by the PSP team at García Vals’s house. Alfredo Guevara told Tad Szulc, Fidel’s biographer, that they usually worked until dawn, at which point “Fidel would come and change everything.” But gradually, the project began to take shape. All the while, absolute secrecy was maintained from the ministers in Urrutia’s government; certainly, the putative agriculture minister, Humberto Sorí-Marín, was not invited to attend. At the same time, Che was attending the long-range unity talks between the Rebel Army and the PSP at Fidel’s house.

The group’s need to maintain a low profile helps explain Che’s reaction to a magazine article mentioning that he was now living in a luxurious confiscated villa. He responded vehemently in
Revolución
:

I must clarify to the readers of
Revolución
that I am ill, that I did not contract my sickness in gambling dens or staying up all night in cabarets, but working more than my body could withstand, for the revolution.

The doctors recommended a house in a quiet place away from daily visits. ... I was forced to live in a house that belonged to representatives of the old regime because my salary of $125.00 as an officer of the Rebel Army does not permit me to rent one sufficiently large to house the people who accompany me.

The fact that it is the home of an old
batístiano
means that it is luxurious; I chose the simplest, but at any rate it is still an insult to popular sentiments.

Two months later, when his health was better and the agrarian reform law had been completed, Che moved to a much humbler house in the countryside near the inland village of Santiago de las Vegas, on the other side of Havana.