Che Guevara (99 page)

While Bustos was away, Masetti broke his promise about Nardo. After spending his week with Nardo and Grillo, Lerner had returned with them to camp and reported to Masetti on their behavior. Grillo was “recuperable,” but there was “nothing to be said” about Nardo, whose behavior had worsened.

“Totally broken, he didn’t talk,” Lerner recalled. “He got down on all fours, he dragged himself, poor thing, he wept, he masturbated. That was how he cleaned himself, like a primitive form of hygiene.”

Masetti ordered a trial for Nardo. Federico was the prosecutor, Héctor was the defense lawyer, and Hermes played the role of tribunal president. Lerner recalled that they all sat around, “like a chorus.” Lerner’s memory blocked out much of the trial, which lasted ten or fifteen minutes, but he remembered feeling that Nardo had “decided to inculpate himself” because he said nothing to rebut the charge that if they freed him and he was caught by the police, he would tell all he knew.

The verdict was, of course, a foregone conclusion and was quickly delivered. “He was condemned to death,” Lerner said, “told that he would be shot by a firing squad, for not complying with the revolutionary laws.” Masetti decided that he would be shot at dawn the next day, February 19, and that the newest volunteers would form the
pelotón de fusilamiento
, to toughen them up.

The grave was dug and Nardo was shot beside it. Lerner stood to one side watching. At the last minute, when the order to fire came, he saw Nardo swell out his chest. “He looked straight ahead, he didn’t tremble, he didn’t fall on his knees, he didn’t ask for anything,” Lerner recalled. Afterward, nobody said a word. “We all tried to hide from ourselves,” Lerner said. Masetti acted as if nothing had happened. “Nardo was buried, his grave covered over, life went on.”

The veil of suspicion that had hung over Lerner was now lifted and Masetti’s treatment of him improved. It was only many years later that he came to grips with the fact that he himself had come very close to becoming one of Masetti’s victims. Lerner reflected on the fact that he, Miguel, Pupi, and Nardo were all Jews, and he wondered about Masetti’s political origins as a student member of the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista.

When Bustos arrived back in camp he was upset about Nardo, but there was little to be done about it. They had bigger problems. He told Masetti about Pirincho’s desertion, but Masetti refused to believe him. Pirincho was one of his golden boys; he wouldn’t desert. He knew Pirincho had a problem with his girlfriend—surely that was all it was—and Bustos had misunderstood him. He ordered Bustos to return to Buenos Aires and bring Pirincho back with him. But it was too late, and not only for Pirincho, who had, as promised, left for Europe and vanished. It was also too late for the Ejercito Guerrillero del Pueblo. A few days after Bustos left again for the city, five new volunteers arrived, forwarded by a dissident Communist Party cell in Buenos Aires. Two of them were undercover agents for the Argentine DIPA, the secret police. Their orders were to infiltrate the EGP, find its base, and return with information.

The DIPA agents’ infiltration coincided with the
gendarmerías’
detection of the guerrillas’ location. The group’s supplier and courier in Salta, the young and cultured Enrique Bolini-Roca, had simply not been a believable provincial bookstore owner; he made too many unexplained trips out of town in his
camioneta
, and he was also too handsome for his own good. The local women chased him: he attracted attention. The gendarmes soon had the remote spot he drove to on the Salta-Orán road staked out. Now they sent their first reconnaissance patrol into the forest.

Almost immediately, the soldiers stumbled into a group of guerrillas at the small supply camp where provisions were stored before being dispatched up to the main group in the mountains. Among them were Castellanos, Lerner, Grillo Frontíni, and another guerrilla known as El Marqués. They claimed they were hunters, looking for wild turkeys in the bush. Nobody believed them. The two DIPA agents were also captured, but soon told the gendarmes their identity and what they had learned. More patrols were sent in, and gradually the EGP began to fall.

By April 18, Che’s advance patrol had been liquidated. Hermes was dead, ambushed by a patrol at a peasant’s house. With him died Jorge, a philosophy student; their peasant host; and one of the ambushing soldiers. The rest of the guerrillas split up and tried to find a way across the mountains. They climbed and climbed. Before long they were in the cloud forest
high in the mountains, at an altitude of more than 10,000 feet. They had no food. They could barely see because of the fog. Three of the newcomers died of starvation in their sleep.

Masetti, barely able to walk because of his injured back, was with Oscar Atilio Altamirano, one of the Argentine recruits; Héctor Jouve; and Antonio Paul. He sent Héctor and Antonio back to find the others. As they climbed down the mountain, Antonio fell off a high cliff above a river; Héctor tried to catch him and fell, too. Antonio hit the rocks and broke his neck. Héctor hit the water. He crawled over to where Antonio lay, gave him an injection of morphine, and stayed with him until he died.

Within a few days the remaining survivors were captured. Bolini-Roca and other members of the urban underground were caught and arrested in Jujuy, Orán, and Buenos Aires. Bustos and the members of the Córdoba network went into hiding, fleeing into Uruguay. Abelardo Colomé Ibarra made it back to Cuba undetected.

Nothing more was heard of Masetti and Atilio. Gendarmes combed the forest for them but came back empty-handed. By the end of April, there were eighteen men in Orán’s prison, among them Castellanos, Lerner, Frontíni, and Federico and Héctor Jouve. The group was hermetic and unrepentent. They acknowledged and defended their revolutionary goals, but kept silent about their Cuban links and even managed to keep the true identity of Che’s bodyguard, Alberto Castellanos, a secret.

The Cuban connection was soon uncovered, however. Hermes’s diary was found, and, from the slang terms he used, police were able to determine that the dead man had been a Cuban. The Argentine security forces checked the origin of the arms seized and learned that their Belgian FAL automatic rifles were from a shipment sold by Fabrique Nationale to Cuba. Some dollars found on the guerrillas were also traced back to Cuba. As for their Soviet-issue weapons, Cuba was the only country in the hemisphere that these could have come from.

The press speculated. Was Che Guevara the driving force behind the EGP? When Hermes Peña was revealed to have been one of his bodyguards, the connections were easily made. When the missing Comandante Segundo was identified as Jorge Ricardo Masetti and Che paid public homage to him as a “heroic revolutionary,” the question became academic.

But neither Che nor anyone else involved in the adventure confirmed anything more specific than that. The whole episode of the “guerrillas of Salta” remained something of an enigma, a small incident that was quickly overtaken by larger, more dramatic events. Only a handful of people knew how important the episode had been to Che, or that Masetti’s failure had altered the course of Che’s life and of history.

Masetti was never found, and his surviving companions believe there are only three possible explanations regarding his fate. One theory is that when Masetti realized it was all over, he and Atilio committed suicide. The second is that they starved to death. The third is that the gendarmes did find them, stole the estimated $20,000 Masetti had in his possession, and then murdered both men to keep the secret.

Before long, the guerrillas were brought to trial. They had a good team of lawyers, including Grillo’s father, Norberto Frontíni; a left-wing lawyer from Córdoba named Horacio Lonatti; Ricardo Rojo; and Gustavo Roca—but all the defendants received prison sentences, ranging from four to fourteen years. Federico Méndez was given the longest sentence for his role as the prosecutor in Nardo’s execution; Héctor Jouve was given a dozen years for his part in the same trial. Castellanos and Lerner were each given sentences of five years. Their sentences would be appealed, but little could be done for them immediately.

Che was devastated and bewildered by the news of his
foco
’s nightmarish collapse. He learned about it while traveling in Europe, where he had gone to speak at the UN Conference on Trade and Development, which was held in Geneva at the end of March 1964. Afterward, he traveled to Paris, where Gustavo Roca met him and informed him of the unraveling disaster.
*
After stopping briefly in Algiers and Prague, he returned to Cuba, arriving on April 18, the same day Hermes was killed. As the weeks passed and Masetti wasn’t found, Che knew he was probably dead. It was a personal tragedy as well as a major setback to his carefully laid plans to launch the armed struggle in Argentina. Not only had Che lost two of his closest disciples—Hermes and Masetti—but it was obvious that they hadn’t heeded his warnings and had committed a number of errors that led to their discovery.

Few people realized the depth of Che’s longing for his homeland. An Argentine journalist, Rosa María Oliver, thought she had caught a glimpse of his feelings during a conversation they had in February 1963. They had been sipping
mate
together and talking nostalgically about their country when suddenly Che struck his knee with his hand and exclaimed, almost imploringly, “Enough: Let’s not talk about Argentina anymore.”

“Why, if you love it so?” Oliver asked.

“For that very reason ...”

Not long after the news of Masetti’s disappearance, Alberto Granado went to see Che at his office. He looked depressed. Trying to cheer him up, Granado said, “Che, what’s the matter, you’ve got the face of a dead dog.” Che answered, “Petiso, here you see me, behind a desk, fucked, while my people die during missions I’ve sent them on.”

Che continued talking, wondering out loud why Hermes, an experienced guerrilla, hadn’t followed his instructions to keep on the move. The group’s mistake had been to stay in one place long enough for the Argentine gendarmes to find them. Continual movement was a cardinal rule of guerrilla warfare, and Hermes should have known better, even if Masetti didn’t. That was why Che had sent him along, to lend a guerrilla veteran’s instincts and expertise to the mission, and it hadn’t helped.

The failure of the guerrillas of Salta was a watershed for Che. Once again, “good” but inexperienced men had failed trying to test his theories of guerrilla warfare. It was plain that he would have to demonstrate personally that his ideas could work. Just as the Cuban revolution had been able to count upon Fidel as a figure to rally around and unite disparate revolutionary forces into an effective fighting machine, the success of the continental revolution depended upon the physical presence of a recognized leader, and he was it.

Che and Fidel in 1964.

By the summer of 1964, Che had resolved to leave Cuba and return to the revolutionary battlefield. Achieving this goal became his great obsession. He was no longer indispensable in Cuba. The revolution was probably as secure as it would ever be. Although there were still plenty of overflights by U-2 spy planes and counterrevolutionary activities sponsored by the CIA, it seemed unlikely that the Americans would attack anytime soon. In return for the withdrawal of the Soviet nuclear missiles, President Kennedy had promised not to invade. A promise could always be broken, but Lyndon Johnson had his hands full with acrimonious civil rights issues, the upcoming presidential race, and the escalating conflict in Vietnam.

Khrushchev now extolled Cuba as the “daughter” of the Soviet Union, and nobody chanted
“Nikita mariquita”
in public in Havana anymore. Soviet aid flowed more generously than ever to the island. This meant that Cuba was more dependent than ever on Moscow, and the political atmosphere, from Che’s point of view, was becoming claustrophobic. Latin America’s mainline Communist parties were furious about his export of the armed struggle to their countries. The Salta episode had outraged Victorio Codovilla, the Argentine Communist Party’s venerable strongman, and he had vigorously condemned Masetti’s
foco
, pointing out that the Communists involved were radicals who had been expelled from the Party. Needless to say, Peru’s Communist Party and Mario Monje and his Bolivian comrades shared Codovilla’s feelings. Like him, they had made their sentiments known in Moscow.

Despite Che’s reassurances, the consensus in the Kremlin was that he was a Maoist, a dangerous extremist, a Trotskyite. Sergo Mikoyan was in Geneva when Che was there for the UN Conference on Trade and
Development, and he tried to arrange an informal get-acquainted meeting between Che and the Soviet foreign trade minister, Nikolai Patolichev. When Mikoyan went to Che’s hotel, he noticed that there were Chinese agents in the lobby. Che was happy to see him, immediately agreed to the meeting with Patolichev, and then asked, “Did you see any Chinese downstairs?” When Mikoyan said he had, Che nodded. “In Moscow you think I’m China’s agent or connected to them, but I’m not. The truth is they follow me around all the time.” They were watching who went up and down the elevator to his floor.