Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Many of the men who were associated with Che’s death in Bolivia went on to die violently, leading some people to believe in “the curse of Che.” The first to die was Bolivia’s president, General René Barrientos, whose helicopter fell out of the sky in unexplained circumstances in April 1969. In 1971, Colonel Roberto Quintanilla, Antonio Arguedas’s intelligence chief at the Ministry of Interior, the man who had made Che’s fingerprints, was murdered in Germany. The populist president General Juan José Torres—who as a member of Barrientos’s joint chiefs of staff had cast his vote in favor of Che’s execution in 1967—was murdered by Argentine death squads in 1976. Only two weeks earlier, General Joaquín Zenteno Anaya was gunned down in Paris, in an action claimed by the obscure “Che Guevara International
Brigade.” Captain Gary Prado rose rapidly within the armed forces, eventually becoming a colonel. But during an operation to suppress an armed revolt in Santa Cruz in 1981, he was shot and left paralyzed from the waist down. After retiring from the army as a general, he went into politics, aligning himself with the center-left, and for a period he served as Bolivia’s ambassador to London. Mario Vargas Salinas also became a general and a government minister for the dictator General Hugo Banzer Suárez in the 1970s.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich fared the worst of those who were directly involved in the capture and execution of Che Guevara. In 1971, Selich led a military revolt that ousted President Juan José Torres and brought Hugo Banzer to power. After serving as Banzer’s interior minister for only six months, Selich was sidelined and sent into diplomatic exile as ambassador to Paraguay. He soon began conspiring against Banzer and, after secretly reentering Bolivia in 1973, preparing for a new revolt, was caught and beaten to death by army thugs on Banzer’s orders.
After retiring from the military with the rank of colonel, Miguel Ayoroa lived discreetly in Santa Cruz. He denied having anything to do with Che’s death, laying the blame on the late Selich’s shoulders.
The executioner, Mario Terán, became a pathetic figure, a man who for many years lived in hiding—at times wearing wigs and other disguises—out of fear for his life, convinced he was targeted for assassination by Cuba or its allies. Although the army continued to employ him in a series of jobs—including one as a bartender in the officers’ club of the Santa Cruz Eighth Army Division headquarters—Terán became deeply embittered. He resented his superior officers, who wrote books and gained glory through their participation in Che’s defeat. He periodically offered (as he did with me) to speak about the events that took place in La Higuera on October 9, 1967, but he wanted to be paid for it. (I refused.) Stout and rumpled, with a face marred by a curving scar that cut across his upper lip, Terán exploded with rage when I asked if he regretted having killed Che. “What do you think?” he exclaimed. “You imagine that I just walked into that room and pulled the trigger? I was down in the
quebrada
the day before. I was there! I saw three of my friends die that day.”
Felix Rodríguez also believed he was targeted by the Cubans for assassination. He spoke of an incident in the 1970s when he was warned by American intelligence about a plot to hijack a plane he was planning to travel on. His career in the CIA continued in Vietnam, El Salvador, and other war-torn countries, but his cover was finally blown in the late 1980s when he had to appear before the Senate committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair. Rodríguez had worked as Oliver North’s point man in providing
illegal aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and in operations against the Salvadoran Farabundo Martí guerrillas. In his later years, Rodríguez was a heavyset man who seemed to live largely in the past. The den of his house in suburban Miami was filled with the necromantic talismans and ornaments of his long career as a CIA hireling: framed in glass, the brassiere he confiscated from a Salvadoran female guerrilla
comandante
he once captured; grenades; rifles; honorary plaques and diplomas from numerous counter-insurgency forces; a letter from the first President Bush thanking him for services rendered. The largest space on Rodríguez’s crowded wall was occupied by the framed portrait of him standing next to the wounded, doomed Che Guevara. He also showed me a photo album filled with gruesome pictures of dead bodies, including those of Che and Tania.
Whether they had fought with him or against him, a curious bond united those who had known Che. Over the years most of them had come to realize that if their own obituaries were ever to be published, it would be because of their relationships to Che.
Ricardo Rojo, Che’s occasional companion and political sparring partner, wrote his best-selling book,
My Friend Che
, in the immediate aftermath of Che’s death. It earned him fame and some wealth on the one hand, but bitter condemnation by Cuba and some of Che’s comrades on the other, for Rojo perpetuated the story that Che had had a falling-out with Fidel. Rojo fled Argentina in the 1970s, returning home to live only after the restoration of civilian rule in 1983. He practiced law and remained active in political and media circles. A charming and sharp-tongued ranconteur, Rojo died of cancer in Buenos Aires in 1996.
Che’s friend Alberto Granado stayed on in Cuba, raising his family and working in the biochemical research industry. In 1980, he published his account of the road trip he had taken with the young Ernesto Guevara, but it got little attention. After Che’s
Motorcycle Diaries
was published in the mid-1990s, however, Granado became rather famous. By then in his seventies, he relished the limelight, assuming his role as Che’s old road buddy with amiable panache, giving interviews and traveling abroad to hold forth at Che-themed events.
Che’s children grew up under the protective eyes of
tío
Fidel and
tío
Ramiro Valdés. His sons, Ernesto and Camilo, both spent five years in Moscow, which included a stint at a KGB training academy. For a time, Camilo worked in the Cuban Ministry of Fisheries under Che’s old friend Enrique Oltuski. Ernesto worked for Ramiro Valdés in a state-owned electronics firm, but he eventually quit that job and thereafter devoted himself to fixing up and riding vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Aliusha became
a doctor with a specialty in allergies. Against her mother’s wishes, she volunteered for duty in Nicaragua and Angola in the 1980s, at the height of Cuban military involvement in those countries. For a time, she was married to a son of Gustavo Machín de Hoed, one of the men who died with Che in Bolivia. Che’s daughter Celia became a marine biologist and worked with dolphins and sea lions at Havana’s Seaquarium. Aliusha, who bore a striking resemblance to her father—with his penetrating eyes and sharp tongue, if not his quick wit or sense of humor—emerged as the family’s spokesperson and defender of her father’s legacy, a role hastened by her mother’s withdrawal from public life. Eventually, her brother Camilo joined her in this task, and the two frequently traveled abroad to public events where they were expected to speak about their father.
A few years after Che’s death, Aleida remarried, as Che had said he wished her to. She moved out of the house on Calle 47 to a new one in Miramar, just down the street from Alberto Granado and directly across from Ana María, the widow of Che’s father. Aleida’s new husband was a foreign ministry official. He proved to be bitterly jealous of Che, and his periodic mistreatment of Aleida and her children led to several separations, but Aleida always returned to him. Her example of less than noble widow-hood was frowned upon in Cuba’s ruling circles but was not discussed openly. For years she was active in Cuba’s Communist Party Congress as a deputy, and in the Cuban Women’s Federation, which was headed by Raúl’s wife, Vílma Espín. But Aleida gradually relinquished her public duties to dedicate herself to her family and the perpetuation of Che’s legacy, eventually opening a research center across the street from their old home.
La Casa del Che, as it is called, is painted marine blue. Its roof garden and entryway are covered with red and purple bougainvillea. In the 1990s, when I lived in Havana and visited the house frequently, paintings of Che adorned the walls of the foyer, although they were threatened by water damage from the perpetually leaking roof. Upstairs, Che’s little office remained as it was when he left Cuba, with his small white Formica-covered desktop built into varnished plywood and his vinyl-backed office chair on wheels. The double windows at either end of the room looked out to the same view of the neighborhood Che had seen. His books were still there, just as he’d left them: the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, their margins messy with his jottings; Stefan Zweig’s biographies of Marie Antoinette and Joseph Fouché, one of the most bloodthirsty Jacobins, who became Napoléon’s minister of police. In a little alcove under Che’s desk were the books he was reading last: several about Bolivia, Africa, and Algeria’s revolution, many of them in French, and one about the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. A portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos hung behind Che’s desk, and on top of the bookcase that stretched across the front there was a bust of Simón Bolívar and a bronze bas-relief of Lenin. A carved ornamental
yerba mate
gourd and a silver sipping straw were on a side shelf, and on the floor, a bronze statue symbolizing “New Soviet Man” gathered dust. On the shelf of a narrow closet were some of the belongings Che left behind: an olive-green army backpack, a web belt, and other military apparel, all disintegrating in the Cuban humidity.
When Che’s first wife, Hilda, died of cancer in 1974, their daughter, Hildita, went to Europe. It was a kind of escape: she did not have a good or close relationship with her stepmother, Aleida. Hildita worked at odd jobs and led the life of a hippie in Italy and other European countries. She later lived in Mexico and married a Mexican guerrilla named Alberto. They came to live in Cuba, but Alberto’s conspiratorial activities against Cuba’s staunchest regional ally made Fidel’s regime uneasy, and he was asked to leave. Hildita went with him, but they eventually divorced. Returning to Cuba in the mid-1980s with two young sons, she worked at La Casa de las Americas as an archivist and researcher and began to compile a bibliography of her father’s writings.
Loyal to Cuba’s revolution but outspoken about what she saw as its defects, Hildita earned the quiet disapproval of the regime for her views and personal conduct. When her older son, Canek, then a teenager, made remarks to the foreign press that were critical of Fidel’s government, opprobrium fell more heavily over her little clan. In 1995, Hildita died of cancer at the age of thirty-nine, the same age her father was when he was killed. Neither Fidel nor Raúl appeared at her wake, although both sent large wreaths. At the funeral in the vast Cementerio Colón, where she was interred in the Pantheon of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, no one spoke.
Che’s unshakable faith in his beliefs was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytical thought. This paradoxical blend was probably the secret of the near-mystical stature he acquired, but it seems also to have been the source of his inherent weaknesses—hubris and naïveté. Gifted at perceiving and calculating strategy on a grand scale, yet at a remove, he seemed incapable of seeing the small, human elements that made up the larger picture, as evidenced by his disastrous choice of Masetti to lead the Argentine
foco
. There, and in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia, the men he believed in consistently failed him, and he consistently failed to understand how to alter the fundamental nature of others and get them to become “selfless Communists.” But, along with his
mistakes, what is most remembered about Che is his personal example, embodying faith, willpower, and sacrifice.
As a veteran Cuban intelligence official in Havana observed, “Toward the end, Che knew what was coming, and he prepared himself for an exemplary death. We would have preferred him to remain alive, with us here in Cuba, but the truth is that his death helped us tremendously. It’s unlikely we would have had all the revolutionary solidarity we have had over the years if it weren’t for Che dying the way he did.”
The island went through many shifts in political position under Fidel’s long tenure as
jefe máximo
. In the immediate aftermath of Che’s death, relations with the Soviet Union went into a deep freeze. Angered over Moscow’s implicit backing of the Bolivian Communist Party line, and because of harshly critical articles on Che and the “export” of revolution published in
Pravda
, Fidel shunned the Kremlin. As an expression of his displeasure, he sent his lowly health minister to attend the annual festivities in Red Square in November 1967. Ambassador Alexandr Alexiev, who was seen as too close to Fidel, was withdrawn from his post in 1968 and dispatched to, of all places, Madagascar. Fidel launched a new purge of the pro-Soviet “old Communists” after allegedly uncovering a dissident faction engaged in a talking conspiracy against him with members of the Soviet embassy staff. Like the purge of “sectarianism” in 1962, this plot featured the redoubtable Aníbal Escalante; this time, he was not sent to Moscow but was given a fifteen-year prison sentence. Among Escalante’s and his fellow conspirators’ tape-recorded crimes was criticism of Che.
Invoking Che’s spirit, Fidel made a desperate attempt to make Cuba economically self-sufficient. After proclaiming that the nation would produce an unprecedented 10 million tons of sugar in 1970, he poured all of Cuba’s hard-stretched resources into reaching that goal. When Orlando Borrego, the minister of sugar, warned Fidel that it could not be done, he was fired. It was
not
done, and the Cuban economy was left in a state of near-total collapse. For all intents and purposes, Fidel’s disastrous
zafra de los diez milliones
—the 10-million-ton harvest—as it was known, represented the end of any hope for Cuban autonomy, and the Soviets, who were already buoyed by Fidel’s declaration of support for their invasion of Czechoslovakia, swiftly asserted themselves. Che’s Ministry of Industries was divided up into many smaller ones and was gutted of his loyalists; many of the foreigners who had come to work for him soon left Cuba. The rehabilitation camp, Guanacahabibes, and the Ciro Redondo experimental farm were both shut down. Che’s “department of control,” with more than 40,000 archives on individuals cataloging their revolutionary aptitude and work records, was destroyed. Orlando Borrego remained loyal to Fidel and the revolution, but he never
again held a senior government position. For years, he worked as an adviser to the Ministry of Transportation and, after it was inaugurated in 1995, to the Che Guevara Faculty at the University of Havana.