Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
His relationship with Hilda had reached a crossroads. Ernesto was ready for a new adventure in Mexico, while Hilda expected to head home to Peru. According to Hilda, Ernesto seemed unconcerned about their separation and made cavalier assurances that they would eventually meet up in Mexico and marry, while she sadly contemplated the prospect of losing him forever. The air was thick between them. They took a good-bye excursion together to their old picnic haunt of San Juan Sacatepéquez and had what Ernesto described as “a profusion of fondles and a superficial screw.”
In fact, marriage with Hilda was the farthest thing from Ernesto’s mind. On the same day as their final tryst, he wrote: “I believe I’ll take advantage of the fact that she can’t leave yet to split definitively. Tomorrow I will say good-bye to all the people I want to and on Tuesday morning I’ll begin the great adventure to Mexico.”
In mid-September, Ernesto crossed the border with a young Guatemalan student, Julio Roberto “El Patojo” Cáceres, whom he had met on the
road, and headed for Mexico City. (The two men became close friends, and years later, Ernesto wrote a story in honor of Cáceres called simply “El Patojo.”) Although Ernesto had some small doubts about his safety, their journey passed uneventfully.
*
In the end, John Foster Dulles’s instincts about the political exiles would prove correct. Besides Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a host of future revolutionaries had escaped his grasp in Guatemala. In Mexico and elsewhere, they
would
regroup and, from the ashes of the Arbenz debacle, eventually emerge—often with Guevara’s help—as the Marxist guerrillas who would haunt American policy makers for the next forty years.
Mexico City in the 1950s was far from the smog-shrouded megalopolis it has become. You could still see the snowcapped volcanoes Popocatépetl and Ixtacihuatl towering on the horizon. Apart from its historic labyrinthine downtown—the old Spanish colonial city built on the ruins of the Aztec capital—it was a place of serene, village-like neighborhoods and tree-lined boulevards. It was not uncommon to see men dressed as
charros
—Mexico’s cowboy-dandies—promenading on horseback down the Paseo de la Reforma on Sunday afternoons. But the city was also cosmopolitan and sophisticated. It retained some of the political and artistic effervescence that had peaked in the 1930s and 1940s when artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, and Tina Modotti were doing the work that made them famous. The influx of thousands of exiles fleeing Fascism in Europe had helped spark a cultural renaissance. Writers, artists, and political figures mingled at night in a thriving cabaret scene that featured the great stars of the Mexican bolero; a booming movie industry spawned cinema legends such as the director Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, the comic actor Cantinflas, and the screen idols Dolores del Río and María Félix. From the French writers Antonin Artaud and André Breton to the Beat poets and writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, foreigners flocked to seek nourishment in Mexico.
The political and the creative worlds had always intermingled in Mexico City, which had been the site of some infamous assassinations—of the Cuban Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella in 1929 and of Leon Trotsky in 1940. Modotti was Mella’s lover. Kahlo had had an affair with Trotsky. The muralist Siqueiros had led an attack with machine guns against Trotsky’s home before the Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader achieved
grisly success with an ice pick. Since the postrevolutionary consolidation of power by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI),
*
Mexico had earned widespread popularity among anti-imperialist Latin American nationalists and a grudging respect from Washington. In the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas had nationalized Mexico’s oilfields and pushed through a sweeping program of agrarian reform. Espousing a foreign policy fiercely independent of Washington, Mexico was a highly politicized environment, full of intrigue, where both the United States and the Soviet Union had important embassies and intelligence operations, and where exiles, spies, and wanderers mingled and conspired.
There is no single defining moment for the eclipse of Mexico’s “romantic” era, but few events are more emblematic of its passage than the last public appearance made by Frida Kahlo, on July 2, 1954. It was a cold, damp day, and the pneumonia-stricken artist left her bed to join a protest against the overthrow of Arbenz by the CIA. Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, pushed her wheelchair through the streets to the rally, which was held outside the pantheon of Mexican culture, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There, for four long hours, Kahlo joined in the crowd’s cries of
“Gringos Asesinos, fuera!”
and held aloft her glittering, ring-festooned hands. In her left hand was a banner depicting a dove of peace. Her clenched right fist was raised in defiance. Eleven days later, at the age of forty-seven, she died.
The first letter Ernesto wrote home from Mexico, on September 30, 1954, was to his aunt Beatriz. “Mexico, the city, or better said the country, of the
mordidas
[bribes], has received me with all the indifference of a big animal, neither caressing me nor showing me its teeth.” His immediate plans were to find work and make enough money to survive, then to travel around Mexico and “ask for a visa from the Titan of the North [the United States].” If successful, he would visit his aunt Ercilia in New York, “and if not, to Paris.”
Guessing that his money would hold out at most two months, Ernesto immediately began looking up people who might help him. One was Ulíses Petit de Murat, a friend of his father’s who now worked as a screenwriter. Before leaving Guatemala, Ernesto had mentioned Petit to Hilda and had said that there might be an opportunity for him to work as a film extra in
Mexico. He could try out his “unrealized artistic ambitions of becoming an actor.” Hilda called this a frivolous scheme and begged him not to waste his talents. According to Hilda, a somewhat chastened Ernesto had defended the idea, saying that he had merely thought of it as a means of making ends meet, but finally agreed with her and promised not to be sidetracked.
Now he needed work, and Petit de Murat was one of the few contacts Ernesto had in Mexico. Their meeting went well enough. “He took me out to show me around and we argued about politics,” Ernesto reported in his diary. “He has a nice daughter, but she comes from a typical clericaloid bourgeois education.” Petit and his daughter Marta took Ernesto to see the Aztec pyramids of Teotihuacán on the outskirts of the city. Using Marta as a model, Ernesto tried out a new toy he had bought purchased with half of his remaining funds—a 35mm Zeiss camera.
Petit invited Ernesto to stay at his house and offered help in getting some kind of study grant, but Ernesto declined the offer. In a letter to his father on September 30, he wrote, without apparent irony, that he had “decided to maintain a certain degree of independence as long as the pesos you sent hold out.” Certainly, he and Petit were not a good match politically. “We locked horns over the same argument you and I always had about liberty, etc., and he is as blind as you are, with the aggravating element that it’s easy to see that deep down what has happened in Guatemala makes him happy.”
Several “zero days” followed, in which Ernesto explored the city, visited museums, and looked up friends. He tracked down Helena Leiva de Holst, who had also left Guatemala for exile in Mexico. Afterward he wrote in his diary that there seemed to be “something weird” going on between her and Hilda. Helena had spoken of Hilda in a “very disparaging manner.” Whatever Helena told him must have been convincing, for he wrote in his diary, “I believe I must cut off this unsustainable situation with Hilda.”
From home, he heard that most of the “Guatemalan lefties” who had been evacuated to Argentina had been imprisoned. A letter to his mother is full of recriminations about why his family hadn’t done more for the comrades he had sent their way. In an aside, he shared with Celia his frustration over what had occurred in Guatemala and confessed to feeling torn about what to do with himself. In light of events, he declared himself “completely convinced that [political] halfway measures can mean nothing other than the antechamber to treason. The bad thing is that at the same time I haven’t taken the decisive attitude that I should have taken a long time ago, because deep down (and on the surface) I am a complete bum and I don’t feel like having my career interrupted by an iron discipline.”
Ernesto was still digesting his Guatemalan experience, and in his letters he carried on a kind of extended postmortem. He wanted everyone to
understand what he thought was the “truth” about what had happened there. To his friend Tita Infante, whose last letter to him in Guatemala he thought had betrayed a concern that went beyond the platonic, he wrote, “Today, with the distance—material and spiritual—that separates me from Guatemala, I reread your last letter and it seemed strange. I found in it a special warmth, in your desperation over not being able to do anything, that really moves me.” Like the Spanish Republic, he said, Guatemala had been betrayed “inside and out,” but it had not fallen with the same nobility. What sickened him most of all was the revisionist picture of the Arbenz government. “Falsehoods” were being printed in newspapers all over the Americas. For one thing, he told her, “there were no murders or anything like it. There
should
have been a few firing squads early on, which is different; if those shootings had taken place the government would have retained the possibility of fighting back.”
Ernesto was convinced that the American intervention in Guatemala was merely the first skirmish in what would be a global confrontation between the United States and Communism, and he brought up this terrifying prospect rather inopportunely in a letter to his sister Celia. He had learned she was engaged to the young architect and Guevara family friend Luis Rodríguez Argañaraz. She had evidently inquired about job prospects in Mexico, for he wrote, “Stay there without thinking nonsense about other countries, because the storm is coming, and although it might not be atomic it’ll be the other, that of hunger, and Argentina will be one of the less affected because it depends less on the friend to the north.”
He repeated these dire predictions to his father. A world war was inevitable, he announced in a letter sent a few months later. The risks had grown “gigantically” in the wake of the shake-up in the Kremlin since Stalin’s death. “Argentina is the oasis of America, and we have to give Perón all possible support to avoid entering into a war that promises to be terrible—whether you like it or not, that’s the way it is. Nixon is traveling through all these countries, apparently to set the quotas of men and cheap primary resources (paid with expensive and old machinery) with which each of the poor states of America will contribute to the new Koreas.”
Ernesto continued to look for work. He tried to arrange interviews for hospital jobs but made little headway. For the time being, he used his new camera to earn money, taking people’s portraits in the city’s parks and plazas. Over the coming months, he would work as a night watchman, a photographer for the Argentine news agency Agencia Latina, and an allergist and researcher at both the General Hospital and the Pediatric Hospital.
Hilda Gadea reentered his life. Just after Ernesto’s departure from Guatemala, Hilda had been rearrested, jailed overnight, and sent under
escort to the Mexican border. After a few days, she had been smuggled into Mexico by her own guards, for a fee. After being stranded in the border town of Tapachula for eight days, waiting to be granted political asylum by the Mexican government, she made her way to Mexico City and to Ernesto.
Ernesto’s thoughts and actions since their parting had not been those of a concerned lover. Upon hearing that she was marooned at the border, he commented laconically in his diary, “Hilda is in Mexico in Tapachula and it isn’t known in what condition.”
As usual, Ernesto and Hilda’s accounts about their on-again, off-again relationship don’t dovetail with regard to events in Mexico City. Following their first meeting, Ernesto wrote, “With Hilda it seems we’ve reached a status quo, we’ll see.” Hilda’s version reasserted her position that things were more intense: “Again Ernesto spoke of the possibility of getting married. I said we should wait. ... I had the feeling that my ambiguous response had created a certain tenseness, because he then said that we would just be friends. I was a little surprised: I was only asking him to wait. But I accepted his decision. I had just arrived and here we were already quarreling.” They continued to see each other, occasionally going out for a meal together or to the cinema, and Hilda soon moved into a boardinghouse with an exiled Venezuelan poet, Lucila Velásquez, in the affluent Condesa neighborhood. She too began looking for work.
A happier development was Ernesto’s accidental reunion with the Cubans he had met in Guatemala, notably his friend Ñico López, who showed up one day at the General Hospital, where Ernesto was volunteering. Ñico was seeking treatment for a comrade who was suffering from allergies. As Hilda told it, Ernesto and Ñico immediately rekindled their friendship. Ñico was buoyant about the future, telling Ernesto confidently that he expected Fidel Castro, his younger brother Raúl, and the other imprisoned comrades to be released from prison before too long.
Castro’s exiled Cuban followers had been trickling into Mexico City from around the hemisphere since early 1954. They had established an informal headquarters at the apartment of María Antonia González, a Cuban woman married to a Mexican professional wrestler named Dick Medrano. Castro had become a cause célèbre in Cuba. Batista had called for elections to legitimize his de facto rule, and now there was mounting public pressure on him to release Castro and the other imprisoned
moncadistas
in an amnesty. Once Castro was free, Ñico told Ernesto, Mexico was to be the base for his grand scheme, to organize and train an armed insurrectionary movement that would return to Cuba and fight a guerrilla war to topple Batista.