Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The parched, hot lakeside city of Managua held little interest for Ernesto, and he spent his time in “a pilgrimage to consulates with the usual imbecilities,” hunting for visas. At the Honduran consulate, he ran into Rojo and his companions, who had been unable to get a ferry. On the spot, the group decided to split up: Rojo and Walter Beverragi would fly to San José; Ernesto and Gualo would drive with Domingo Beverragi to Guatemala, where Domingo would sell the car. That night, they had a long discussion about Argentina and Argentine politics, and, as Ernesto recorded it, they concluded the following about one another’s political positions. “Rojo, Gualo, and Domingo were
radicales intransigentes
[a liberal wing of the Argentine Unión Cívica Radical, led by Dr. Arturo Frondizi, Rojo’s mentor]; Walter was a
laborista
[of the leftist Partido Laborista] and I am a ‘sniper,’ at least according to El Gordo [Rojo].”
Walter Beverragi had been imprisoned and tortured in 1948 for his part in a plot to overthrow Perón. He escaped but was stripped of his citizenship
while in exile in the United States.
*
It was a reminder of how far Perón would go to punish his opponents, and Rojo was nervous for himself because he and Valdovinos had given a press conference in Guatemala City airing their own complaints against Perón. Ernesto himself was mostly aloof from this Argentine polemic, but he
was
interested and listened intently, occasionally launching one of the barbed commentaries that had earned him the Sniper nickname.
Ernesto drove on with Gualo and Domingo Beverragi to the Honduran border. They had twenty dollars among them. Stopping only to change punctured tires, they continued their journey across an arid stretch of rural Honduras, crossed El Salvador’s volcano-dominated landscape in a day, and pushed on to the green highlands of Guatemala. They paid the border tolls with coffee upon exiting El Salvador, and with a lantern upon entering Guatemala. On the morning of December 24, they arrived in Guatemala City with three dollars left.
In the 1950s, Guatemala City was a small, conservative, provincial place, a privileged white and mestizo urban enclave in an overwhelmingly rural and Indian country of astonishing natural beauty. The surrounding highlands of forested volcanos, lakes, and coffee plantations—dotted with the villages of indigenous peasants—dropped away to the sugar plantations and farms of the tropical Pacific coastal lowlands.
But the picture-postcard image—colorfully clad natives working happily in harmonious communion with their habitat—presented by successive Guatemalan governments to outsiders was deceptive. Guatemala was a place where the Spanish conquest seemed fresh despite the passage of time. A white and mixed-blood Creole minority had ruled for centuries over a native majority that existed by laboring on the vast private plantations of the oligarchy, or on those of the United Fruit Company.
This state of affairs was a fact of life until the reformist “revolution” of Juan José Arévalo overturned the ruthlessly authoritarian Ubico dictatorship in the 1940s and called for democratic change. Arévalo was unable to implement all the reforms he promoted, but he was succeeded by a left-leaning Guatemalan colonel, Jacobo Arbenz, who pushed on with them. The most inflammatory was the land-reform decree Arbenz had signed into law
in 1952, ending the oligarchic
latifundia
system and nationalizing the properties of United Fruit.
Arbenz had earned the undying enmity of Guatemala’s conservative elite and of United Fruit, which enjoyed extraordinarily close contacts with the Eisenhower administration. John Foster Dules, the secretary of state, and his brother Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, had been associated with United Fruit through their work with the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. This firm had a client, the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, which acted as the financial adviser to the International Railways of Central America (IRCA). Most of Guatemala’s railways were owned by IRCA before they were sold to United Fruit in a deal handled by John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles had been a director of the Schroder Bank, which was used by the CIA to launder funds for covert operations.
There were other cozy relationships with United Fruit. For instance, the family of the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, John Moors Cabot, owned interests in United Fruit. President Eisenhower’s personal secretary was the wife of the company’s public relations director. With such friends, United Fruit could afford to throw its weight around. The company hired the tenacious Spruille Braden, Harry Truman’s former top Latin emissary, as a consultant. In March 1953, Braden gave a fiery speech at Dartmouth College, urging the United States to intervene militarily against the “Communists” in Guatemala. Immediately afterward, in a hint of how far it was prepared to go, United Fruit organized an armed uprising in the provincial capital of Salamá. In the subsequent trials of some of the captured raiders, the company’s involvement in the rebellion was unmasked, but what
wasn’t
known publicly yet was that the CIA was also involved and that the agency was discussing plans with United Fruit to overthrow Guatemala’s government.
By the end of 1953, the battle lines were clearly drawn between Guatemala and Washington; Guatemala’s Central American neighbors, especially dictators such as Somoza, were vociferous about their concerns of a spillover effect to their countries. Meanwhile, hundreds of Latin American leftists had arrived in Guatemala, either as political exiles or, like Ernesto, as sympathizers eager to see Guatemala’s “socialist” experiment firsthand. Their presence lent a combustive element to Guatemala’s hothouse atmosphere as the war of words between the Arbenz government and the Eisenhower administration escalated daily.
Although it remained mostly concealed beneath his aloof exterior, by the time he arrived in Guatemala, Ernesto seems to have undergone a political conversion—or at least he was trying to talk himself into one. He wouldn’t act on his new beliefs for a while, but they help explain what drew
him to Guatemala. Part of the evidence for this lies in an enigmatic passage he wrote in Buenos Aires while transcribing his
Notas de Viaje
. Appropriately, he called it “Note on the Margin,” for it didn’t mesh with the rest of his travel narrative at all. It describes a “revelation.”
Ernesto writes that he was in “a mountain village under a cold star-filled night sky.” A great blackness surrounded him, and a man was there with him, lost in the darkness, visible only by the whiteness of his four front teeth. “I don’t know if it was the personality of the individual or the atmosphere that prepared me to receive the revelation, but I know that I had heard the arguments many times by different people and they had never impressed me. In reality, our speaker was an interesting guy; when he was young he had fled some European country to escape the dogmatizing knife; he knew the taste of fear (one of the experiences that make you value life), and afterward, after rolling from country to country and compiling thousands of adventures, he had come to rest his bones in this remote region where he patiently awaited the coming of the great event.
“After the trivial phrases and the commonplaces with which each put forth his position, the conversation languished, and we were about to part ways. Then, with the same rascally boy’s smile which always accompanied him, accentuating the disparity of his four front incisors, he let slip: ‘The future belongs to the people, and little by little or in one fell swoop they will seize power, here and in the whole world. The bad thing is that they have to become civilized, and this can’t happen before, but only after, taking power. They will become civilized only by learning at the cost of their own errors, which will be serious ones, and which will cost many innocent lives. Or perhaps not, perhaps they won’t be innocent, because they will have committed the enormous sin
contra natura
signified by lacking the capacity to adapt.
“‘All of them, all the unadaptable ones, you and I, for example, will die cursing the power they, with enormous sacrifice, helped to create. ... In its impersonality, the revolution will take their lives, and even use their memory as an example or a domesticating instrument for the youth who will come after them. My sin is greater, because I, more subtle and with more experience, call it what you wish, will die knowing that my sacrifice is due only to an obstinacy which symbolizes the rotten civilization that is crumbling.’”
This mysterious speaker, by inference a Marxist refugee from Stalin’s pogroms whose conscious sin was his “inability to adapt” to the new power wielded by the uncivilized masses, now turned his premonitory attention to Ernesto.
“‘You will die with your fist clenched and jaw tense, in perfect demonstration of hate and of combat, because you are not a symbol (something
inanimate taken as an example), you are an authentic member of a society which is crumbling: the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your actions; you are as useful as I am, but you don’t know how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.’”
Duly warned of the consequences of the revolutionary path, Ernesto acknowledges the “revelation” that came to him. “I saw his teeth and the picaresque expression with which he took a jump on history, I felt the squeeze of his hands and, like a distant murmur, the formal salute of farewell. ... In spite of his words, I now knew ... I will be with the people, and I know it because I see it etched in the night that I, the eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or trenches, will bathe my weapon in blood and, mad with fury, will slit the throat of any enemy who falls into my hands.
“And I see, as if an enormous tiredness shoots down my recent exaltation, how I die as a sacrifice to the genuine revolution of individual will, pronouncing the exemplary
mea culpa
. I feel my nostrils dilated, tasting the acrid smell of gunpowder and of blood, of the dead enemy; now my body contorts, ready for the fight, and I prepare my being as if it were a sacred place so that in it the bestial howling of the triumphant proletariat can resonate with new vibrations and new hopes.”
This passage reveals the extraordinarily passionate—and melodramatic—impulses at work in Ernesto Guevara at the age of twenty-five. Powerful and violent, uncannily precognitive of his death and the posthumous exploitation of his legacy by many so-called revolutionaries, “Note on the Margin” must be seen as a decisive personal testimonial, for the sentiments it contained would soon emerge from the penumbra of his submerged thoughts to find expression in his actions.
*
In Guatemala City, Ernesto and his companions looked up Valdo and Luzmila and then found a pension where, as Ernesto put it, “we could get stuck and begin owing money.” Ricardo Rojo arrived and soon introduced Ernesto to a woman, Hilda Gadea, who would become an important addition to his life. Hilda was an exiled leader of the youth wing of Peru’s APRA and was now working with the Arbenz government. She was in her late twenties, short and plump, with Chinese-Indian features. “On our first meeting,” she wrote later, “Guevara made a negative impression on me. He seemed too superficial to be an intelligent man, egotistical and conceited.”
Despite her initial disdain, which she admitted had been compounded by her innate “distrust” of Argentines, who are renowned among their neighbors for their snobbery and conceit, Hilda soon became infatuated with Ernesto. For the time being, however, his mind was elsewhere. He was busy meeting people to see about getting a job, and he took little notice of Hilda. She is mentioned briefly in his journal as the person who introduced him to the American Marxist professor Harold White: “I met a strange gringo who writes stupidities about Marxism and translates it to Spanish. The intermediary is Hilda Gadea, and Luzmila and I are the ones who do the work. Until now we’ve charged twenty-five dollars. I give English-Spanish lessons to the gringo.” But this activity was just a time-filler. What Ernesto was hoping for was an interview with Guatemala’s minister of public health, although all his attempts to meet with the man failed.
“My personal opinion is that Guatemala is interesting, although, like all revolutions, it loses something with intimacy,” Ernesto wrote to Andro Herrero. “Revolutionary” Guatemala may not have fulfilled all of Ernesto’s expectations, but then he had yet to venture into the countryside, where the land reform had taken place. The capital remained largely unchanged. Its small commercial center was noisy with street vendors and cluttered with neon signs. The wealthy residents in the outlying residential districts continued living tranquilly in their bougainvillea-shrouded walled compounds. Even so, Ernesto met compelling new people among the eclectic community of Latin American political exiles gathered there. There were
apristas
from Peru, Nicaraguan Communists, Argentine
antiperonistas
, Venezuelan social democrats, and Cuban
antibatistianos
.
After a meeting with a Honduran exile, Helena Leiva de Holst, Ernesto wrote enthusiastically, “She’s close on some points to the Communists and she gave me the impression of being a very good person. In the evening I had a discussion with [Nicanor] Mujíca [an exiled Peruvian
aprista
] and Hilda, and I had a little adventure with a dirty female teacher. From now on I will try to write in my diary every day and try to get closer to the political reality of Guatemala.”
Try as he did to find gainful employment in Guatemala’s health ministry, Ernesto had not come this far just for a job. He was on a political quest, and if his family had been unaware of the fact previously, his letters now dispelled any other notions they may have harbored. On December 10, while still in San José, he had sent an update of his journey to his aunt Beatriz. For the first time, his ideological convictions made a marked appearance in his personal correspondence. “My life has been a sea of found resolutions until I bravely abandoned my baggage and, backpack on my shoulder, set out with
el compañero
García on the sinuous trail that has brought us here.
Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible the capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. In Guatemala I will perfect myself and achieve what I need to be an authentic revolutionary.”