The Death of Che Guevara (54 page)

If you manage a factory will you be doing the most you can for that cause, for my cause?

If for some reason you cannot work in Cuba anymore, then there’s Algeria, where Mr. Ben Bella would be happy to have your advice in organizing the economy. There’s Ghana, where Mr. Nkrumah would welcome your help. Vietnam, where you would be warmly welcomed I’m sure by Mr. Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. Yes. You will always, like me, be a foreigner, a stranger in every land. That’s your fate

And then, typed after the last paragraph:

Dear Ernesto (I will never be comfortable with that slang name, son): Your mother died yesterday evening at five o’clock, May 1. She has been complaining of fatigue for months, and I had been anxious for her to see a doctor. But she had refused, as she always has, saying that it was nothing to be concerned about. I think that, ever since the operation twenty years ago, she has been living as if in expectation of this event, suspected then that it had come, and didn’t want to know about it herself, or have us worry. When she began to lose weight I insisted on her going to Stapler’s Sanitorium. Three days after admission she was asked to leave by the management! The owner told us that the presence of the mother of a famous Communist leader could well ruin their reputation! I think this event gave her some of the most profound joy of her last days. We found another place for her, also in Buenos Aires.

The pleasure of cursing the manager at Stapler’s was to be her last. She
came out of her final coma only long enough to smoke a cigarette. I took the cigarette from her fingers, still burning. As you can see, she didn’t finish this letter.

When she first went into the hospital I tried to reach you in Havana, but you had apparently left strict orders that you were not to be contacted under any circumstances. Your friend Soto says it is a tactic of yours when you are having a dispute with Castro. By your silence, apparently, you usually get him to come around. Soto, by the way, has been very useful, and very kind during the weeks of your mother’s hospitalization. And he has agreed to take these letters to Cuba, and to see that they reach you, wherever you are.

You can see from your mother’s letter how very much your work meant to her. She was always very proud of you. Your ways are not mine, admittedly. I am not sure that one does not do more good for the world, as your cousin Alvarados said to me, a little at a time. But you have done what you thought best, and perhaps you are right. Your mother, certainly, thought so.

Love, son,   
your father,
Ernesto  

My inclination now is to organize the Cuban nucleus, and begin a sort of training operation (for us and for the native forces) in either the Congo or Vietnam. Meanwhile, arrangements can proceed in Bolivia. But I will have to see what the situation looks like from Havana.

I was packing up the manuscripts this morning when Ponco came into the room. I had laid them out on the unfinished board, like a subject for dissection. They made several neat piles.

“What shall I do with them?” I wondered aloud as he came in.

“You could give them to Fidel,” Ponco said. But that idea seemed to make him sad. “For a book.”

“No,” I said, responding, I thought, to his sadness. “They’re too incomplete.” I had lost all interest in these things. I had resumed my position within the large costume of my fame. My name. I wanted to begin operating the levers, making the feet move, working the machinery for the voice. My mind was already in Bolivia, and the many steps that must be taken. My anxiety had fallen from me, my waiting was over, my work beginning. I had no more interest in myself as a subject for reflection, the subject of—the hero of—a book.

“I’ll take care of them,” Ponco said, quickly, a gravel slide. I thought I detected a suppressed greed in his voice. He picked up the piles, and placed them neatly one upon the other.

“You’ll be my archivist.”

“What?” His mind seemed to be on ordering the manuscripts. “I’ll see that they find a safe place.”

“That’s what I mean. Archivist. He’s the man who minds the records.”

“Ah. Yes. They’re in good hands,” he said. “A safe place. I’ll be your archivist.”

But as he said it the word suddenly sounded a little ominous.

We spent the afternoon by the radio, the last day here, listening to Fidel’s speech. There was a comfort to being so much in the provinces, so far from the platform. I could leave the room to take a piss, I could make myself a cup of mate. The speech went on till evening, and the only light in the room was the green glow of the old radio on the scarred wooden table.

Fidel read my farewell letter to the Cuban people. “Other lands claim the help of my modest efforts. I can do what you cannot because of your responsibilities at the helm of Cuba. The time has come for us to separate.”

“A divorce,” Ponco said. “How sad.” He brushed imaginary tears from his large eyes.

“Let it be known that I do so with a mixture of happiness and pain. Here I am leaving my purest hopes as a builder, and the dearest of those who are dear to me … and I am leaving a people who accepted me as a son. This is like a knife cutting my spirit. But to the new battlefields I shall carry the faith you taught me, the feeling that I am fulfilling the most sacred duty: fighting against imperialism wherever it is. That comforts me and heals my wounds.”

Etc.

The reading made the culmination of the speech.

Ponco had his head down, resting on his crossed arms. “Nice job,” he said, as if he’d just woken from a deep sleep. I thought I heard a craftsman’s appreciation buried within his growl.

Dates

1966
The Tricontinental Conference meets in Havana, with delegates from Third World countries—and movements in rebellion—on three continents. They inaugurate the Organization for Solidarity of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. (The Third World must share more than its poverty; it must share in liberation or death.) Ernesto Guevara (not present) is “honorary chairman.” In Peru, Guillermo Lobaton and Ricardo Gadea (the brother of Ernesto Guevara’s first wife) gather up the scattered fragments of the guerrilla movements, to continue the war in the mountains. Lobaton is killed by the army. In Ghana, Nkrumah is overthrown by a right-wing army coup. The leadership of the Guatemalan Communist Party is arrested and then shot. Leonel Brizola, governor of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, flees into exile in Uruguay; he prepares a guerrilla front for his country. Douglas Bravo, a leader of the Venezuelan guerrillas, is expelled from the Communist Party. Codovilla, head of the Central Committee, reaffirms that the Party will follow the line of peaceful coexistence. (“After all, history is not our pet. Right now, talk of armed struggle is premature.”) Mario Monje, leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, meets again with Fidel Castro. He reaffirms his intention to cooperate in a plan to establish a guerrilla base in Bolivia. Castro provides another twenty-five thousand dollars for the Bolivian Party to use in promoting the Bolivian Revolution. Fabricio Ojeda, a Venezuelan guerrilla leader, is captured by the army, with many of his men, and then shot. Joaquin, Ponco, and Ricardo—veterans of the Cuban Revolution—go to La Paz, to organize men, supplies, and support networks for the Bolivian guerrillas. Mao Tse-tung encourages Chinese peasants, workers, and students to rebel against Party bureaucrats, revisionists, and all those—however highly placed—who have taken the capitalist road. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution begins. Regis Debray, the French theoretician, returns to Bolivia, to continue his research on the best terrain for a guerrilla base. A huge piece of land is purchased in a canyon in the semitropical southeast of Bolivia. Coco Peredo, a young Communist militant and taxi-driver, rents a warehouse in La Paz. Supplies are bought or smuggled in, taxied
to the warehouse, slowly moved to the farm. In Guatemala, Turcios Lima, and most of his men, are killed by the army; Cesar Montes becomes leader of the guerrillas. The United States begins the long intensive bombing of Hanoi, North Vietnam. The people of Hanoi dig holes in the streets to hide in. North Vietnam protests to the world its civilian casualties.

THE DIARIES OF THE BOLIVIAN CAMPAIGN

Isle of Pines, May 1968

My plan:

1. Separate the papers into neat piles. (My mother said I was incapable of neatness, I would always be a careless slovenly pig.
I
said
she
would never stop drinking.
She
was wrong.
I
was right.)

The documents: His journal from the campaign. My journal from the campaign. His journals from before. The notebook he left behind with Hilda. The manuscript of his life that he wrote on
this very board
. The other men’s diaries. (He told everyone to keep a daily record. He said it was good hygiene. Why? I think it was some idea of Gandhi’s—a vow left over from Che’s adolescence. Anyway, most of the men didn’t write much in their journals, they never got the habit. They would do it only every so often, as a way of imitating
him.
)

2. Spread everything out on the board.

3. Put the piles of paper in order, the papers within each pile to be arranged by date. Get a view of what I have to work with. Look through everyone’s entries for September, etc.

4. Make one long account of it, covering all the details.

5. Decide which details
matter
.

6. Decide how to tell the story in its final form. For whom am I telling the story? To make them do what? Or some other question? (It’s on the tip of my tongue, it’s in the part of my vocal cords that I don’t have anymore. I can’t put it into words.)

To make them weep!—that’s one answer. Or to make them vomit—that’s the answer my own body gives me over and over.

His room—mine now. His board—mine now, too.

When I first returned here I slept, as before, in the small room across from the kitchen. I thought he would walk out of his room in the morning, holding
a sheaf of papers, the next installment of his less than honest—or more than honest—story of his life for me to read. (What might be on the ghost’s pages?) But the specter never came to the table. And I couldn’t sleep in that room anymore. I can only sleep here, in
his
room, on
his
cot, with
his
brown blanket. At night I play with the blanket edges, running them between my fingertips the way he did even as a man. (The athletes he trained—they were
usi
) And I work at
his
board, a piece of wood over two sawhorses, with piles of papers spread out on it, the same scene I would see when I sneaked in here before.

It’s the board over the two sawhorses where they put his body, outside the laundry shed in Vallegrande. I have a picture of it tacked to the wall, next to the ocean view and the framed unreadable poem. A photographer stands over his corpse, his right hand pointing towards Che’s poor chest. (So there must have been another photographer, not in the picture, taking the picture.) A Bolivian general holds a rag to his face. But he doesn’t look like he’s protecting himself from a bad contagious odor. He doesn’t look like the body really
smells
. The general just wants to show he finds the business distasteful; he’s gentry, he’s particular. (Jesus, do
I
think
his
body
didn’t
smell?)