Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Ernesto responded to a letter in which his mother had criticized the
behavior of the Guatemalan Communist exiles he had sent to their house: “The Communists don’t have the same sense of friendship that you have, but among themselves they possess it equally, or better than your own. I saw it clearly in the hecatomb that Guatemala became after the fall, where everyone thought only of saving themselves. The Communists maintained their faith and comradeship intact, and were the only group which continued to work there. ... I believe they are worthy of respect and that sooner or later I will join the Party; more than anything else what impedes me from doing it now is that I still have a fantastic urge to travel through Europe, and I couldn’t do that submitted to an iron discipline.”
A month later, in December, he wrote to his mother again, apparently in response to her alarm over his declaration of intent to eventually join the Communist Party. “That which you so fear is reached by two roads: positively, by being directly convinced, or negatively, after disenchantment with everything,” he wrote. “I reached it by the second route only to immediately become convinced that one has to follow the first. The way in which the gringos treat America had been provoking a growing indignation in me, but at the same time I studied the theory behind the reasons for their actions and I found it scientific. Afterward came Guatemala.”
What he had seen in Guatemala had added weight to his convictions, he wrote, and at some moment he had begun to
believe
. “At what moment I left the path of reason and took on something akin to faith, I can’t tell you even approximately because the path was very long and with a lot of backward steps.” There it was. If his family hadn’t had enough prior warning, Ernesto had now declared himself and described his conversion. He was a Communist.
For the moment, Ernesto remained simply a young Argentine vagabond—who just happened to have a medical degree—scrabbling for work in a foreign country. His relationship with Hilda had had its ups and downs but reached a comfortable plateau early in 1955. This appears to have had less to do with any reconciliation over their basic differences than the fact that Ernesto needed her for the occasional loan and, as he wrote in his diary, to satisfy his “urgent need for a woman who will fuck.” By now, he knew her well enough to realize she was always available for both.
In mid-January, he had brought her a belated New Year’s present: a miniature copy of the Argentine classic
Martín Fierro
by José Hernández, bound in green leather. It was one of Ernesto’s favorite books. He inscribed it with what must have seemed a maddeningly ambiguous message: “To
Hilda, so that on the day of our parting, you retain a sense of my ambitions for new horizons and my militant fatalism. Ernesto 20-1-55.”
Hilda was still jobless but sustained by funds from home, and she had found ways to keep herself busy. She had signed up for a two-month course on the Mexican revolution at the Autonomous University, and she discussed what she was learning with Ernesto. They read relevant books, including John Reed’s
Insurgent Mexico
and Pancho Villa’s memoirs.
By now, there were a dozen or so Cuban
moncadistas
in Mexico City. Several were installed in a rooming house on Calle Gutenberg, and Ñico López and Calixto García were housed separately in the Hotel Galveston, downtown. They kept in close contact with the movement’s unofficial coordinator, María Antonia González, at her apartment in an ugly modern pink building at 49 Calle Emparán in the city center. Since his chance encounter with Ñico López at the hospital, Ernesto had stayed in intermittent contact with him and his comrades, gradually meeting more of the new arrivals. In March, he hired two of them, Severino “El Guajiro” Rossell and Fernando Margolles, to develop photographs he took for Agencia Latina of the second Pan American Games. José Ángel Sánchez Pérez, a
moncadista
just in from Costa Rica, came to live in Ernesto’s pension on Calle Tígres. A couple of months earlier, Sánchez Pérez had joined in the fighting in Costa Rica to defend President Figueres from an invasion backed by Somoza.
Just before the Pan American games began, Sánchez Pérez introduced Ernesto to María Antonia. According to Heberto Norman Acosta, a researcher at the Cuban Council of State and the son-in-law of one of Castro’s rebel expeditionaries—who spent many years researching the “exile” period prior to the Cuban revolution—Ernesto was taken in as a trusted friend by María Antonia on the basis of his contacts with Ñico López, Calixto García, and the other Cubans. He also hit it off right away with María’s husband, the wrestler Dick Medrano.
Meanwhile, Hilda was anxious to renew her affair with Ernesto, which he had interrupted after a recent argument. “I decided that, since I missed Ernesto and wanted to make up,” she wrote, “I should take the initiative.” Hilda’s opportunity came with the arrival from Canada of Myrna Torres; she had decided to marry her boyfriend, Humberto Pineda, who was now in Mexico after months on the run in Guatemala. “Taking advantage of her friendship, I asked her to accompany me to visit the house of the Cubans; I knew that Ernesto was frequently there developing pictures,” Hilda recalled. The visit gave Hilda the opening she wanted. They resumed their affair.
Agencia Latina folded that spring. Perón’s bid to create an international news agency had not paid off, and with its demise went Ernesto’s main source of income. He calculated that the agency owed him 5,000 pesos. “It’s an amount
that I could really use,” he wrote. “With it, I could pay off some debts, travel around Mexico, and beat it to hell.” Ernesto waited anxiously for the money, but, just in case, he made off with one of the agency’s cameras.
On the “scientific” side of things, he was starting to make some headway. He had turned down a tempting offer to work in Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican border with the United States, unwilling to commit himself to a two-year contract. He also self-righteously rejected his aunt Beatriz’s offer to use her contacts to get him a job in a pharmaceutical laboratory. “In spite of my vagabonding, my repeated informality and other defects, I have deep and well-defined convictions,” he wrote to Beatriz. “These convictions prevent me from taking a job of the type you describe, because these places are dens of thieves of the worst type, who traffic with human health that is supposed to be under my qualified custody. ... I am poor but honest.” In case Beatriz harbored any doubts about where he was coming from, he signed the letter “Stalin II.”
In April, Ernesto traveled to León in the state of Guanajuato to attend a conference on allergies and present a paper, “Cutaneous Investigations with Semidigested Food Antigens.” It received what he described as a “discreet reception” but was commented upon favorably by Dr. Mario Salazar Mallén, his boss at Mexico City’s General Hospital, and was due to be published in the next issue of the journal
Alergia
. Afterward, Salazar Mallén, “the
capo
of Mexican allergy,” according to Ernesto, offered him an internship at the General Hospital and a small sinecure to carry out new allergy research. Ernesto began the internship in May. He received a minuscule salary of 150 pesos a month, with free lodging, board, and laundry. For now, at least, the job covered his basic needs. In a letter to his mother, he wrote, “If it weren’t for the charity of friends I would have gone on the police blotter as a death by starvation.” As for wages, he was indifferent: “Money is an interesting luxury but nothing more.”
Hilda offered to marry and support him. “I said no,” he wrote in his diary. “We should stay as little lovers until I beat it to hell, and I don’t know when that’ll be.” But when, soon afterward, Hilda invited Ernesto to move into the apartment she shared with Lucila Velásquez, he accepted. The two women had recently gotten a new place on Calle Rhin, and Hilda had found a temporary job at the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The arrangement not only solved the question of food for Ernesto—and offered a more comfortable lodging than the hospital bed he had been granted—but also enriched his circle of contacts. Hilda knew a great many people among Mexico’s flourishing expatriate community. They included the prominent Cuban exile Raúl Roa, an editor of the magazine
Humanismo
, and his coeditor, the Puerto Rican exile Juan Juarbe y Juarbe. Others in the group were the young Peruvian lawyer Luis de la Puente
Uceda,
*
leader of a leftist youth wing of APRA; and Laura Meneses, the Peruvian wife of Pedro Albizu Campos, the Puerto Rican independence fighter imprisoned in the United States for leading an attack on the governor’s palace in San Juan in 1950. Ernesto got along especially well with the Puerto Ricans, and he and Hilda began visiting them to discuss Latin American politics, particularly the issue of Puerto Rican independence, a cause he had come to sympathize with strongly.
Ernesto’s life with Hilda slipped into an unexciting, but not unhappy, routine of work, study, and domesticity. They met with friends, went to the occasional movie, and cooked dinners at home. Many nights, Lucila came back to the apartment to find the two of them deeply absorbed in study, usually of books on economics. On such occasions she didn’t speak, but tip-toed past them to her bedroom and retired for the night. In the middle of May, Ernesto and Hilda consecrated their union with a weekend tryst at the popular retreat of Cuernavaca and began exploring other sites within easy reach of the capital. His life, as he told his mother in a letter sent in mid-June, had acquired a “monotonous Sunday-style rhythm.”
In Cuba, the pace of events had begun to quicken. In November 1954, running unopposed, Fulgencio Batista was elected president, and in January, Vice President Richard Nixon made a congratulatory visit from the United States. Then, in April, over the Easter weekend, the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, visited Havana and met with Batista. Dulles successfully urged Batista to open a special police intelligence bureau to deal with Communist encroachment in the hemisphere. The result, largely funded and advised by the CIA, was the Buro de Represión a las Actividades Comunistas (BRAC). Soon enough, its activities were to earn it a sinister reputation.
Ironically, neither Dulles nor the CIA’s station chief in Havana had Fidel Castro in mind when they proposed the creation of BRAC. In May, Fidel, his brother Raúl, and the eighteen other
moncadistas
incarcerated with them on the Isle of Pines were granted their freedom. Batista described his ill-advised amnesty as a goodwill gesture in honor of Mother’s Day.
Batista was not the worst of Latin America’s dictators at the time. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo had ruled over the Dominican Republic as absolute
dictator since the 1930s, thanks to the ruthless efficiency of his secret police. Trujillo imposed an official cult of personality that was unparalleled in the western hemisphere. The capital of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo, had been renamed Ciudad Trujillo. Signs bearing Orwellian-sounding messages like “God Is in Heaven—Trujillo Is on Earth” and “We Live in Happiness, Thanks to Trujillo” were ubiquitous.
Compared with the flamboyant despotism of his Dominican colleague, Batista was a political choirboy. A mulatto army officer, he had left the barracks to be Cuba’s president once before, in the 1940s. That time, he had achieved office through elections generally considered fair, and he ruled over a coalition government with the Partido Socialista Popular, the Communists. The uninspired, graft-ridden presidencies of Grau San Martín and his protégé, Carlos Prío Socarrás, followed. (Grau founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano Auténtico in the 1930s. Its followers were known forever after as
auténticos
.) Batista put an end to Prío Socarrás’s presidency in the coup of 1952, and although he may have legitimized his rule in Washington’s eyes—with elections and by turning against his old Communist allies—to Cuba’s disenfranchised political parties, the students, and the urban middle-class intelligentsia, he was a dictator who had usurped power and sabotaged their hopes for a constitutional reform to bring about social change and a genuine Cuban democracy.
Since the Moncada assault, Batista had shown that he was not averse to resolving challenges to his rule through police death-squad tactics, and official graft and bribery flourished as never before. By the mid-1950s, Cuba was earning a reputation as the whorehouse of the Caribbean, where weekending Americans came to gamble, drink, and carouse with Havana’s many prostitutes. A notorious character named Schwartzmann ran a theater featuring hard-core “blue” films and live sex performances, and the American crime syndicates were moving in as well, opening nightclubs and gambling casinos.
Cuban aristocrats despised Batista, perceiving him as a half-caste gangster. He was put in his place when as president he applied for membership in one of Havana’s most exclusive whites-only country clubs and was summarily rejected. To Cuba’s new generation of nationalist idealists, exemplified by Fidel Castro, he was little more than a pimp, selling off their country to degenerate foreigners. His behavior compounded the resentment they already felt over such issues as the continued U.S. naval presence at Guantánamo Bay, a legacy of the ignominious days earlier in the twentieth century when (after the United States had won the Spanish-American War and ousted the Spaniards from Cuba) Washington had governed Cuba like a vassal state.
Fidel Castro wanted to change his country, and his time in prison had only toughened his resolve. When he emerged from the gates of the Modelo prison on May 15, to media fanfare, he was in an ungrateful, scrappy mood. He vowed to continue the struggle against Batista’s “despotism.”
At this point, Castro’s movement had a fairly hard inner core of mostly middle-class, reform-minded Cuban professionals who were united by their hatred of Batista. Only a few
moncadistas
were Communists. Most of them were activists from the youth wing of the opposition Ortodoxo Party. Castro had emerged as their most charismatic leader in the vacuum left by the suicide in 1951 of the party’s leader, Eduardo Chibás. Castro was a Young Turk who, since Moncada, had shown he was not just full of bombast. His followers were nationalists, imbued with the romantic rhetoric of José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence who was shot off his horse in 1895 during a reckless charge against Spanish colonial troops.