Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
To his own family, Ernesto downplayed the news of his marriage and impending fatherhood, placing it at the end of a letter sent September 24 to his mother. The letter dwelled overwhelmingly on his reaction to the military coup d’état that had finally toppled Perón four days earlier. “I will confess with all sincerity that the fall of Perón deeply embittered me,” he wrote. “Not for him, but for what it means for all of America, because as much as you hate to admit it, and in spite of the enforced renunciation of recent times,
*
Argentina was the Paladin of all those who think the enemy is in the North.”
After predicting further social divisions and political violence for his homeland, he got around to his own news, writing: “Who knows in the meantime what will come of your wandering son. Maybe he will have decided to return and settle his bones in the homeland ... or begin a period of real struggle. ... Maybe a bullet of those so profuse in the Caribbean will end my existence (this isn’t a boast or a concrete possibility, it’s just that the bullets really do wander around a lot in this latitude) ... or I’ll just simply carry on vagabonding for as long as necessary to finish off a solid training and to satisfy the desires I reserved for myself within my life’s program, before dedicating myself seriously to the pursuit of my ideal. Things are moving with tremendous speed and no one can know or predict where or for what reason one will be next year.”
Almost as a postscript, he added: “I don’t know if you’ve received the formal news of my marriage and of the coming of the heir. ... If not, I communicate the news officially, so that you share it out among the people; I married Hilda Gadea and we shall have a child.”
Around this same time, the health of María, an elderly patient Ernesto had been treating over the previous year, suddenly deteriorated. Despite all his efforts, she died, asphyxiated by her asthma. He was at her bedside when she took her last gasp. The experience drove him to write a poem in which he poured out his anger over the social neglect he felt had driven her to death. In “Old María, You’re Going to Die,” she personifies all the wasted, poor lives of Latin America. To Ernesto, she had become the old woman in Valparaíso, the fugitive couple in Chuquicamata, and the browbeaten Indians of Peru.
Poor old María ...
don’t pray to the inclement god that denied your hopes
your whole life
don’t ask for clemency from death,
your life was horribly dressed with hunger,
and ends dressed by asthma.
But I want to announce to you,
in a low voice virile with hopes,
the most red and virile of vengeances
I want to swear it on the exact
dimension of my ideals.
Take this hand of a man which seems like a boy’s
between yours polished by yellow soap,
Scrub the hard calluses and the pure knots
in the smooth vengeance of my doctor’s hands.
Rest in peace, old María,
rest in peace, old fighter,
your grandchildren will all live to see the dawn
.
For now, the world of “red vengeance” was forced to boil away in Ernesto’s imagination. He could channel his indignation only in his writing, the occasional political discussion, and his growing hopes for Fidel Castro’s revolutionary project.
That project was moving slowly forward. Fidel, who had turned twenty-nine in August, was in regular contact, through couriers, with members of the Movement still in Cuba and was busy planning, plotting, reading, writing, issuing orders, and, above all, talking, always talking. As he had done in Cuba, Fidel took over the lives of whoever in Mexico proved susceptible to his varied charms and powers of persuasion. Arzacio Vanegas Arroyo, a short, Indian-faced printer and wrestler (“Kid Vanegas”), a friend of María Antonia and her husband, was drafted to print 2,000 copies of Fidel’s “Manifesto No. 1 to the Cuban People.” Fidel then had another friend smuggle copies back to Cuba, with orders to distribute them at Eduardo Chibás’s grave site on August 16, the fourth anniversary of his late mentor’s death. The manifesto revealed the formation of the July 26 Movement as a revolutionary organization seeking the restoration of democracy and justice in Cuba. Point by point, it outlined Fidel’s call for reforms: elimination of the feudal landowning oligarchy, or
latifundia
, and distribution of the lands to peasants; the nationalization
of public services; a mandatory rent decrease; an ambitious housing, education, industrialization, and rural electrification program; and so on, encompassing virtually every aspect of Cuban life. In essence, it was a call for the imposition of radical measures to turn Cuba into a modern, more humane society.
Fidel’s plans had progressed beyond pamphleteering and veered into military strategy. He had decided to land his invasion force along an isolated stretch of Cuba’s southeastern coast where the land rises up to form the Sierra Maestra mountain range. Fidel would launch his guerrilla war in the mountains of the Oriente region. It was not only where Fidel came from but also where Cuba’s nineteenth-century patriots, including José Martí, had launched their invasions to fight against the Spanish.
Beyond symbolism, there was a sound strategic reason for his choice: the sierra’s close proximity to Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago. Here, Fidel counted on the able offices of his underground coordinator, a twenty-year-old student named Frank País. Once his men had landed and were in the mountains, Santiago would provide a pool of funds, intelligence, weapons, and recruits to fuel the war.
Celia Sánchez, a plantation doctor’s daughter and a recent convert to the Movement, had procured the coastal charts Fidel needed and had handed them over to Pedro Miret, an old university friend who was responsible for coordinating the invasion plans. Miret had gone over the area personally to pick possible landing sites; in September he came to Mexico to give the charts to Fidel and discuss strategy. Meanwhile, the Movement’s cells were screening their members for future fighters. It was Miret’s job to get the chosen ones to Mexico to undergo military training.
Fidel had already approached a man about training his force: the one-eyed, Cuban-born military adventurer General Alberto Bayo. Bayo had been a career officer in the Spanish army, fighting in the colonial campaign against the Moroccan guerrilla leader Abd-El-Krim and then with the Republican forces against Franco. Later, he had advised and trained men for several wars around the Caribbean and Central America and had written a book,
Storm in the Caribbean
, about these experiences. Now retired from the military, Bayo worked as a university lecturer and ran a furniture factory in Mexico. He seemed to be just the man Fidel needed.
Fidel began preparing for a speaking and fund-raising tour among the Cuban émigré communities of Florida, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. For this effort he was to be joined by his friend Juan Manuel Márquez, an Ortodoxo Party leader with good contacts in the United States. In the meantime, he kept up a continuous stream of messages to the members of his National Directorate in Cuba, instructing them to raise
funds there as well, and outlining new rules governing the duties and obligations of Movement members.
By now, his Cuban comrades were getting to know the man they called Che well enough to recognize his idiosyncrasies, and one of the personality traits that rubbed many of them the wrong way, at first, was his self-righteousness. When Jesús Montané’s new wife, the Moncada veteran Melba Hernández, arrived from Havana, he took her to meet Che at the General Hospital. Che took one look at Melba, just off the plane and still dressed up, and told her bluntly that she couldn’t possibly be a revolutionary with so much jewelry on. “Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the surface,” he declared. Hernández’s first impression of Che was understandably negative, but when she got to know him better she realized, as others did, that although he was judgmental and even rude, he was equally tough on himself. Eventually, Hernández said, she mulled over Che’s remark, decided he was right, and thereafter wore less jewelry.
Ernesto had continued with his physical conditioning, and in the second week of October he scaled Popocatépetl again. On this, his third try, he finally reached the volcano’s true summit, after six and a half hours, placing an Argentine flag there on the occasion of National Flag Day.
In a mordant letter to Beatriz, Ernesto joked about the name he planned for his son (Vladimiro Ernesto) and about the “new Argentina” since Perón’s ouster. “Now the people of class can put the common scum back in their proper place, the Americans will invest great and beneficent quantities of capital in the country, in sum, [it will be] a paradise.” He mockingly lamented the rejection of his offer of services to the Mexican government in the wake of the “aptly named” Hurricane Hilda, denying him the opportunity of seeing the catastrophe up close. “Part of the city was flooded and the people were left in the street but it doesn’t matter because no people of class live there, they’re all pure Indians.” Characteristically, he signed off by begging her to send him more
yerba mate
.
In mid-November, Ernesto and a visibly swelling Hilda took off for Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula to see the Mayan ruins. The high point of their five-day stay in Veracruz was finding an Argentine ship in port. Ernesto managed to cadge a few kilos of
yerba
. “One can imagine Ernesto’s joy,” Hilda wrote. “
Mate
of course was an inveterate habit with him; he was never without his equipment, the
bombilla, boquilla
, and a two-liter thermos for hot water. Studying, conversing, he always drank
mate
; it was the first thing he did when he got up and the last thing he did before going to sleep.”
As they traveled south to the Mayan temples at Palenque in the tropical swelter of Chiapas, Ernesto’s asthma—which had all but vanished in the
high altitude of Mexico City—suddenly returned. Hilda’s offer to give him an injection brought on what she called the “first spat” of their trip. “He violently refused,” she wrote. “I realized that it was that he did not want to feel protected, to be helped when he was sick. I kept quiet in the face of his brusqueness, but I was hurt.”
Ernesto was entranced with Palenque’s temple pyramids and their carved bas-reliefs. He scribbled page after page in his journal on Palenque and the Mayan sites of Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, combining elaborately detailed physical descriptions of the ruins with histories of the ancient civilizations that had built them. He ran around the ruins excitedly, dragging a weary Hilda along behind him. “Ernesto joyfully wanted to climb every temple,” she wrote. “I gave out on the last one, the tallest. I stopped halfway up, partly because I was very tired, and partly because I was worrying about my pregnancy. He kept urging me not to play coy and join him.”
Finally, feeling “tired, impatient, and thoroughly cross,” Hilda refused to budge another step. Undeterred, Ernesto asked someone to snap their picture. In the photograph, a dowdy-looking Hilda glares angrily out from under a Mexican sombrero. At her side, wearing a dark short-sleeved shirt and a Panama hat, Ernesto looks slim, youthful, and thoroughly preoccupied.
After visiting Uxmal, they sailed back to Veracruz on a small coastal freighter, the
Ana Graciela
. Hilda was reluctant to go to sea, but Ernesto was teasingly reassuring, telling her that at least they’d die together. The voyage began peacefully enough, but on their second day out a strong northerly blew, and Ernesto wrote gleefully that it gave them “a good dance.” Hilda’s own rendition was more sour: “Almost all of the passengers were seasick. I didn’t exactly feel great either. But Ernesto was like a boy. Wearing swimming shorts, he was all over the decks, jumping from one side to the other, calculating the roll of the boat to keep his balance, taking pictures and laughing at the discomfiture of the others.”
Hilda’s implication was obvious: Ernesto had been inconsiderate and irresponsible, and she didn’t appreciate it one bit. Pleading the safety of her unborn child, she took to her bunk for the rest of the trip, plied by a rueful Ernesto with mugs of hot tea and lemon. But afterward, Hilda romanticized the experience. “They had been fifteen days of unforgettable travel, with the immense satisfaction of being in one another’s company at all times, alone in the midst of all that beauty.” By contrast, in his own account of the trip, Ernesto never once mentioned Hilda.
Fidel returned to Mexico before Christmas. His fund-raising and organizing trip to the United States had been a great success. He had traveled up and down the East Coast for two months speaking, convincing, and
promising. He had invoked Chibás and Martí and made grandiose vows such as: “In 1956 we shall be free or we will be martyrs”; in return, he had been applauded and given money, enough to begin organizing his rebel army. July 26 Movement chapters and “Patriotic Clubs” had been opened in several of the cities he had visited. His media profile had grown even more prominent, and in Cuba his widely publicized intention to launch a revolution had spurred a mood of mounting expectation. Back in Mexico, Fidel Castro was invigorated, on a roll, ready for war. On Christmas Eve he cooked a traditional Cuban dinner of roast pork, beans, rice, and yucca. Che and Hilda were there, and Fidel expounded his plans for Cuba’s future with “such certainty,” said Hilda, that she imagined for a moment that the war had already been fought and won.
On his own word, 1956 was to be the decisive year for Fidel Castro’s revolution. To be in shape, Ernesto had kept up his mountain climbing. He now threw himself at Ixtacihuatl, the smaller but more difficult volcano next to Popocatépetl, making several abortive attempts to reach the summit.
During January and February, Fidel’s future fighters began arriving in Mexico City from Cuba, and half a dozen safe houses were rented around the city to house them. By mid-February, there were twenty or so future expeditionaries in place. Strict codes of discipline and secrecy were imposed on them as their training began. At first, the training consisted of marathon walks around the city. Then, led by Arzacio Vanegas, the men went on conditioning and endurance hikes on hills around the capital’s outskirts. Vanegas made them climb backward and sideways to strengthen their legs and teach them balance. On one outing, he found Che gasping for breath and struggling with his asthma inhaler. Later, when Che had recovered, he asked Vanegas not to tell anyone, even Fidel, what he had seen. He was clearly worried about being dropped from the force because of his affliction and was under the illusion that his comrades didn’t know about it.