Che Guevara (117 page)

Che’s criticism, heard by everyone, lacerated Borrego; tears began running down his cheeks. Without saying a word, he walked away, burning with shame and indignation. He sat on a log listening to the rough-and-ready guerrillas titter and break into guffaws behind his back. After a few minutes, he heard steps. A hand was placed softly on his head and tousled his hair. “I’m sorry for what I said,” Che whispered. “Come on, it’s not such a big thing. Come back.” Without looking up, Borrego said, “Fuck off,” and stayed where he was for a long time. “It was the worst thing Che ever did to me,” Borrego recalled.

One of the passports Che used to travel clandestinely.

Fidel with the disguised Che before he left for Bolivia.

The last few days were emotional for everyone, but the most poignant moments were Che’s final encounters with Aleida and his children, who were brought out to the
finca
to see him. Che did not reveal himself as their father. He was “Uncle Ramón.” He had seen their father recently, he said, and he was there to pass on his love, along with little pieces of advice for each of them. They ate lunch together, with
tío
Ramón sitting at the head of the table, just as Papá Che used to do.

Che’s three-year-old daughter, Celia, was brought separately to see him. Borrego described the visit as wrenching. There was Che with his child, unable to tell her who he was or to touch her and hold her as a father would, for she could not be trusted to keep the secret. Of course, it was the ultimate test of his disguise. If his own children could not recognize him, nobody would.
*
During another visit, five-year-old Aliusha came up to give him a peck on the cheek and then ran back to Aleida’s side to exclaim in a loud whisper: “Mama, I think that old man’s in love with me.” Che overheard the comment, and tears welled up in his eyes. Aleida was devastated but managed to contain her own tears until she was out of sight of the children.

The time had finally come. The operation to liberate South America was beginning. All the men present at Che’s farewell banquet the night before he left felt the momentousness of the occasion. Special food had been prepared—a cow cooked
asado
style, red wine, and a roast pig and beer—for Che had wanted it to be an Argentine-Cuban meal. But as Fidel talked and talked, giving advice and encouragement to Che, reminding him of past times and moments shared in the sierra, everyone forgot the food and sat listening raptly. Benigno, one of the guerrillas who were present, recalled that hours passed in that way. Finally, realizing it was time to go to the airport, Che leaped up.

Che and Fidel met in a quick, short embrace, then stood back looking at each other intently, their arms outstretched on each other’s shoulders, for a long moment. Fidel later described his good-bye with Che as a manly
abrazo
befitting two old comrades in arms. Since both were reserved men
when it came to public displays of emotion, their hug, he said, had not been very effusive. But Benigno remembered it as a deeply charged moment.

Then Che got into his car, told the driver: “Drive, damnit!” and was gone. Afterward, said Benigno, a melancholy silence fell over the camp. Fidel walked away from the men and sat by himself. He was seen to drop his head and stay that way for a long time. The men wondered if he was weeping, but no one dared approach him. At dawn, they heard Fidel call out and saw him pointing to the sky. Che’s plane was heading away from Cuba.

A self-portrait taken by Che in the mirror on a door in his room at the Hotel Copacabana in La Paz, Bolivia, in November 1966. He was disguised as a middle-aged Uruguayan economist, Adolfo Mena González.

Bolivia must be sacrificed so that the revolutions in the neighboring countries may begin
.

C
HE
December 1966, speaking to his guerrillas in Bolivia

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome
.

C
HE
April 1967, in his “Message to the Tricontinental”

In his postmortem of the Congo fiasco, Che acknowledged that one of his greatest mistakes was to have attempted a
chantaje de cuerpo presente
, blackmail by physical presence. He had foisted himself unannounced on the Congolese rebels, causing animosity and suspicion among the leadership. It was one of the mistakes he had vowed to learn from. Yet when he went to Bolivia in early November 1966, he neatly replicated his Congo
chantaje
, once again appearing on alien turf without an invitation, convinced that the Bolivian Communist Party leaders wouldn’t back out of the impending guerrilla war once he presented them with the fait accompli of his presence.
*

Things began well enough. When Che—or rather Adolfo Mena González, a middle-aged Uruguayan businessman on an economic fact-finding mission for the Organization of American States—arrived with Pacho in La Paz on November 3, he was met by his closest aides: Papi, Pombo, Tuma, and Renán Montero. He checked into a third-floor suite of the Hotel Copacabana on the graceful, tree-lined Prado boulevard of central La Paz. His favorite mountain, Illimani, snowcapped and blue, overlooked the scene. Che took a photograph of himself in the mirror of his wardrobe door. The pudgy-looking man sitting on the bed stares back at the viewer with an intense, inscrutable expression.

The reflective interlude was brief, for Che was not in a mood to waste time. Tania provided him with the letters of introduction that he had asked her to obtain for him. Using her newfound friendships within the Bolivian government, she had secured an official document signed by none other than the president’s chief of information, Gonzalo López Muñoz. It identified
Adolfa Mena as a special envoy of the OAS and requested “all possible cooperation” from the “national authorities” as well as “private individuals and institutions.”

Two days later, Che had descended from the bright chill of the altiplano into the dry-season dust and swelter of the
chaco
. Accompanied by Pombo, Tuma, Papi, Pacho, and the Bolivian Loro Vázquez-Viaña, he set out on a three-day drive to Ñancahuazú. During one roadside stop to eat lunch, Che revealed his true identity to Loro, asking him not to let the Party know he was in the country until he had spoken with Monje. “He told Loro that his decision to come to Bolivia was because it was the country with the best conditions for a guerrilla base in the continent,” Pombo wrote. Che then added, “I’ve come to stay, and the only way that I will leave here is dead, or crossing a border, shooting bullets as I go.”

By New Year’s Eve, Che’s hair had begun to grow back and he had a sparse beard. His Cuban comrades and a Peruvian guerrilla, “Eustaquio,” had arrived at Ñancahuazú, joining the Bolivians who had been in training there. He had an army of twenty-four men. Only nine were Bolivians. Two of them, Coco Peredo’s older brother Inti and Freddy Maymura, a Japanese-Bolivian former medical student, had just undergone training in Cuba. The men had built a proper base camp and a secondary bivouac concealed in the forest above a steep, red-stone canyon several hours’ hike upriver from the place they called the Casa de Calamina—a tin-roofed, mud-brick house, their legal “front” for the future Ñancahuazú pig and timber farm. They had a mud oven for baking bread, a meat-drying hut, and a rustic medical dispensary, even crude log tables and benches for eating. They had dug a latrine, and tunnels and caves for storing their food, ammunition, and most compromising documents. In one cave they had set up a radio transmitter for sending and receiving coded communications to and from Havana, or “Manila,” as it was now referred to.

The urban underground in La Paz was taking shape. Bolivians such as Rodolfo Saldaña, Coco Peredo, and Loro Vázquez-Viaña—the “owner” of the farm—came and went to buy supplies, carry messages, ferry newcomers, and transport weapons. But Che was already worried about the preponderance of foreigners in his “Bolivian army.”
*
Signs of competitive
discord between the Cubans and Bolivians were showing. Che tried to remedy the situation with lectures about discipline and by announcing that the Cubans would temporarily be the officers of the little troop, until the Bolivians had gained more experience. This measure, obviously, was not popular with the Bolivians. When word came from Juan Pablo Chang that he wanted to send twenty Peruvian fighters to the camp, Che stalled him, concerned about “internationalizing” the struggle before Monje was involved. What Che needed was a solid base of Bolivian support, and he wanted to have at least twenty Bolivians with him before beginning operations. To do that, he needed Monje.

Despite precautions, the presence of newcomers soon provoked the interest of their few neighbors in this backwoods region—just as it had done at Masetti’s base near the Río Bermejo, farther south. Even before Che had arrived, in fact, his advance men had learned that Ciro Algarañaz, their only immediate neighbor, was spreading the word that he suspected the newcomers were cocaine traffickers, a budding profession in this coca-producing nation. Algarañaz’s house and pig farm lay at the roadside on the approach to their own
finca
, and they had to pass it to get to Casa de Calamina. Although Algarañaz lived in Camiri during the week, his caretaker lived on the property permanently.

By late December, Monje was expected at the camp, and before he arrived, Che talked to his men about the proposals he would make. First, Che would insist that he should be military commander, and in charge of finances; he had no interest in being the political chief, however. For outside support, he proposed asking both the Soviet Union and China for aid, and he suggested that Moisés Guevara could go to Beijing with a letter from him to Chou En-lai to ask for help with “no strings attached,” while Monje could go to Moscow “together with a comrade who could at least say how much he was given.” Che’s proposal shows that even at this late date, he thought he could hammer out the differences between the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet Communists in Bolivia. If he could achieve a local peace in South America, then perhaps there was still hope for socialist unity on a larger scale.

From his crude camp in the Bolivian outback, Che foresaw an astonishing, even fantastic sequence of events. “Bolivia must be sacrificed so that the revolutions in the neighboring countries may begin,” he said. “We have to create another Vietnam in the Americas with its center in Bolivia.” Starting the war and spreading it to neighboring nations were the first two stages of his plan. In the third stage, wars in South America would draw in the North Americans. This would benefit the guerrillas by giving their campaigns a nationalistic hue; as in Vietnam, they would be fighting against a foreign invader. And by deploying forces in Latin America, the United States
would be more dispersed and, ultimately, weaker on all fronts, in Bolivia as well as in Vietnam. Finally, the spreading conflagrations would lead China and Russia to stop their feuding and align their forces with the revolutionaries everywhere to bring down U.S. imperialism once and for all. To Che, what happened in Bolivia was to be no less than the opening shot in a new world war that would determine whether the planet was to be socialist or capitalist. First, though, he had to deal with Mario Monje.