Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Ernesto thought the Arbenz government was being too complacent. “He believed it was necessary to organize a
defensa popular
[an armed people’s militia] and be prepared for the worst,” Alfonso Bauer Paiz, the economics minister, recalled. Interestingly, in the wake of his own recent attempt at writing slanted journalism, one of Ernesto’s chief targets of scorn was the unbridled freedom of Guatemala’s press. In a letter of January 5 to his aunt Beatriz, he wrote, “This is a country where one can expand one’s lungs and fill them with democracy. There are dailies here run by United Fruit, and if I were Arbenz I’d close them down in five minutes, because they’re shameful and yet they say whatever they want and help contribute to creating the atmosphere that North America wants, showing this as a den of thieves, Communists, traitors, etc.”
In a letter to his family, he predicted, “In the [upcoming OAS] conferences in Caracas, the Yankees will set all their traps to impose sanctions on Guatemala. It is certainly true that the governments bow to them, and
their battle horses are Pérez Jiménez, Odría, Trujillo, Batista, Somoza. That is to say, among the reactionary governments, the ones that are most fascist and antipopular. Bolivia was an interesting country, but Guatemala is much more so, because it has set itself against whatever comes, without having even an iota of economic independence and withstanding armed attempts of all sorts ... yet without even going against the freedom of expression.”
With storm clouds gathering menacingly on the horizon, many political exiles began leaving town. These included most of the Venezuelans and Hilda’s
aprista
comrades. In early February, Oscar Valdovinos and Luzmila took off. Valdo was homesick, and Luzmila had wangled a diplomatic post in Argentina for herself. Then Ricardo Rojo and Gualo announced their intention to leave as well. Very few of the political exiles in Guatemala seemed willing to defend Guatemala’s revolution. Here was a chance to fight for political freedom, just as internationalists had fought to defend the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, and yet nothing was happening.
Ernesto declared his intention to stay for the time being, come what may. “Guatemala right now is the most interesting country in America and must be defended with all possible means,” he wrote to Beatriz.
As his quest for a job continued, Ernesto read up on medical topics that interested him, occasionally treated patients, and helped out in the lab of Dr. Peñalver, a Venezuelan specialist in malaria. He also began work on a new project that wedded his two chief interests, medicine and politics. “I am preparing a very pretentious book that I think will take me two years of work,” he wrote to Beatriz. “Its title is
The Role of the Doctor in Latin America
and so far I have only the general outline and the two first chapters written. But I think that with patience and method I can say something good.”
Once he had done a bit of work on the book, he showed Hilda what he had written. “It was an analysis of the lack of state protection and the scarcity of resources that the medical profession had to face, and of the tremendous problem of sanitation prevailing in our countries,” she recalled. “He asked me to help him collect health statistics for each Latin American country, and I promised to do so, as I believed it a very worthwhile work. Moreover, it showed me that this was the work of a restless mind, sensitive to social problems.” The proposed work was a manual for a doctor in a revolutionary society. It was not a coincidence that Ernesto planned to take two years to finish the book, the same length of time he hoped to serve as a doctor in the Guatemalan backwoods.
In his outline, Ernesto charted the history of medicine in Latin America from the colonial period to the present day, the range of clinical problems, and the geographic and economic contributing factors. His broad analysis for treatment concluded that only a preventive program of social medicine could adequately deal with the ills caused by underdevelopment. A sketch for a chapter called “The Doctor and the Environment” set forth a scenario in which the doctor would play a direct role in helping to bring about a revolutionary transformation to socialism. The doctor would have to confront the established authorities openly in order to obtain adequate medical attention for the people and wipe out pillage and profit. During the transition from “armed neutrality” to “open war,” the doctor should acquaint himself intimately with the people under his care and their health conditions, and help raise their class consciousness and their awareness of the importance of good health in daily life. It was the duty of the
médico revolucionario
to fight against all the blights—social and otherwise—affecting the people, who were the “only sovereigns” he should serve.
*
At that moment, Guatemala’s internal situation could be described as “armed neutrality,” while “open war” was threatened by the U.S.-backed Liberation Army of Castillo Armas. Ernesto still hoped that when the crisis came, the militants of the Partido Guatemalteco de los Trabajadores (PGT), the Guatemalan Communist Party, would be armed by the government to help in its defense. If this were to happen and the “people” were successful in repelling the invasion, a socialist revolution could be unequivocally established in Guatemala.
His work on the book led him to deepen his readings of Marx, Lenin, Engels, and the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui. Hilda joined in this reading marathon, and they spent many hours discussing the works and the points they raised. Hilda lent Ernesto a copy of Mao Tse-tung’s
New China
. “It was the first work he had read on the great revolution,” she wrote. “When he had read it and we talked about the book, he expressed great admiration for the long struggle of the Chinese people to take power, with the help of the Soviet Union. He also understood that their road toward socialism was somewhat different from the one followed by the Soviets and that the Chinese reality was closer to that of our Indians and peasants. Since I also admired the Chinese Revolution, we often talked about it.” Ernesto talked
about China with Helena Leiva de Holst and Edelberto Torres, who had both been there. He added China to his list of countries to visit.
Somewhat ironically, given his antipathy for and suspicion of Americans, one of the key figures in Ernesto’s political education during this time was Harold White. Ernesto’s initial reserve about the older man had softened, and before long he told Hilda, “This is a good gringo. He is tired of capitalism and wants to lead a new life.” Ernesto, Hilda, and White now spent a lot of time together, just the three of them. Most weekends they organized a picnic in the countryside. With Ernesto’s rudimentary English and White’s rough Spanish, smoothed by Hilda’s frequent translation, they discussed everything from current events “to Marxism, Lenin, Engels, Stalin, Freud, science in the Soviet Union, and Pavlov’s conditioned reflexes.”
By late February, Gualo García and Ricardo Rojo had left Guatemala. Ernesto’s closest remaining friend was Hilda. Already, their mutual acquaintances teased them about what they saw as a budding romance, but in fact nothing had happened between them yet.
Besides their intellectual affinities and her physical attraction to him, Hilda’s infatuation with Ernesto appears to have been spurred on at least partly by maternal instincts. Soon after they met, Ernesto had told her about his asthma. “Thereafter, I always felt a special concern for him because of his condition,” she wrote. For his part, Ernesto, all too aware of the effect he had on Hilda, seems to have exploited her feelings while trying to avoid committing himself to a serious relationship.
A few days after Gualo and Rojo’s departure, Hilda called upon Ernesto at his boardinghouse. She found him waiting for her in the downstairs lobby, in the grip of an asthma attack. “It was the first time I had seen him or anyone else suffering from an acute attack of asthma, and I was shocked by the tremendous difficulty with which he breathed and by the deep wheeze that came from his chest. I hid my concern by insisting that he lie down; he agreed that it would be better, but he couldn’t climb the stairs and refused to accept my help. He told me where his room was and asked me to go up and bring him a syringe that was ready to use. ... I did as he said and watched him as he applied an injection of adrenaline.
“He rested a bit and began to breathe more easily. We went slowly up the stairs; we reached his room and he lay down. He told me that since the age of ten he had been able to give himself injections. It was at that moment that I came to a full realization of what his illness meant. I could not help admiring his strength of character and his self-discipline. His dinner was
brought up—boiled rice and fruit. ... Trying to conceal how much I had been touched by all this, I conversed about everything and anything, all the while thinking what a shame it was that a man of such value who could do so much for society, so intelligent and so generous, had to suffer such an affliction; if I were in his place I would shoot myself. I decided right there to stick by him without, of course, getting involved emotionally.”
In her memoirs, Hilda portrays Ernesto as the one who chased her, but Ernesto’s journal describes Hilda as the hunter. In late February he wrote, “I haven’t budged due to the asthma, although it seemed to reach a climax with vomiting last night. ... Hilda Gadea continues worrying a great deal about me and constantly comes by to see me and brings me things.” The main contender for Ernesto’s attentions in February and March 1954 was a nurse named Julia Mejía. She had arranged for a house at Lake Amatitlán where Ernesto could spend weekends; she helped him in his job search as well. Soon, they were having a casual affair.
Unaware of Ernesto’s secret fling, Hilda continued using her contacts to help him find a job. She spoke to a man who worked in her office, Herbert Zeissig, a member of the youth wing of the Communist Party. Zeissig found Ernesto a job but told Hilda he would first have to join the Party. Ernesto told Hilda to tell Zeissig that when he joined the Party he would “do so on his own initiative,” and refused on ethical grounds to do so for the purpose of getting a job. This principled stance made Hilda admire Ernesto even more.
Meanwhile, Ernesto’s money situation remained critical. Ricardo Rojo had paid Gualo’s half of their pension bill before leaving, but Ernesto was still seriously in arrears and the occasional paying work he found simply didn’t bring in enough. On February 28, he wrote to his parents and asked them for the address of Ulíses Petit de Murat, an actor friend of his father’s who made films in Mexico: “Just in case I beat it to there.” Meanwhile, he told them, he had an offer to work in a sign-painting factory but was not inclined to take it, since it would rob him of time to look for work in the health field. He had offered his services as a doctor to a peasant cooperative and to a banana plantation, but both jobs had slipped from his grasp because he didn’t belong to the “shitty” Guatemalan doctors’ union.
He heard from home that his aunt Sara de la Serna, his mother’s sister, was gravely ill with cancer, and, betraying his self-absorption with almost casual brutality, he wrote to Celia
madre
, “I can offer you no type of consolation, not even that of my presence which is impossible due to the economic reasons you’re aware of. Just a strong embrace and look to the future, distance yourself a little from the present is my only advice. Chau.”
In March, Hilda paid off part of his pension bill, and Julia Mejía got him a job interview for a medical post in the Petén jungle, the site of the
Mayan temple complex of Tikal, which briefly lifted his spirits. “I Am Optimistic,” he wrote in his diary. The Petén was precisely the place he wanted to go. He wrote to his mother and father that it was “a splendid place because that is where the Mayan civilization flourished ... and because there are more illnesses there than shit, one can really learn in style (if one wants to, of course)!” The job was tied, however, to the approval of the doctors’ union, and the president of the union, with whom Ernesto had an interview, was enigmatic. “A man with hopes of conserving his job, anticommunist, an intriguer it seems to me, but he appears disposed to helping me,” Ernesto wrote. “I wasn’t sufficiently cautious but I didn’t take too many risks either.”
When Hilda heard of the possibility of a job in the Petén, she kicked up a fuss, apparently demanding some kind of commitment from him in their relationship. A few days later Ernesto wrote, “Hilda told me of a dream she had in which I was the protagonist and which clearly betrayed her sexual ambitions. Though I hadn’t dreamed, I had an asthma attack. Up to what point asthma is an escape is something I would like to know. The funny thing is that self-analysis leads me honorably—as far as one can take it—to the conclusion that I don’t have anything to run from. And yet ... Hilda and I are slaves of the same boss and both of us deny it with our actions. Maybe I am more consistent but deep down it’s the same.”
The tentativeness he recognized in his personality extended into the political arena. “When I heard the Cubans make grandiloquent affirmations with absolute serenity I felt small,” he wrote. “I can make a speech ten times more objectively. ... I can read it better and convince an audience that I am saying something that is right but I don’t convince myself, and the Cubans do. Ñico left his soul in the microphone, and for that reason he inspired even a skeptic such as myself. The Petén puts me face-to-face with my asthma problem and myself, and I believe I need it. I have to triumph without help and I believe I can do it, but it also seems to me that the triumph will be more the work of my natural aptitudes—which are greater than my subconscious beliefs—than the faith I put in them.” Mere identification with Guatemala’s revolution wasn’t enough, and Ernesto knew it. Hilda was still affiliated with APRA, and at the crucial moment Ernesto himself had abstained from joining the Communist Party. However principled his motives for doing so, the fact was that he was
still
hanging back, still the skeptical outsider; the same dispassionate Sniper as before.