Read The Death of Che Guevara Online
Authors: Jay Cantor
12/10/66: Three camps completed, each several miles from the farmhouse—though the nearest one, called Bear Camp, is on a hill overlooking it. Construction is finished on the defensive trenches and the brick bake-oven for bread. I’ve overseen the construction of showers made of muleskins (the skin, stretched taut on sticks, has holes punched in it; a partner pours water through), and Ricardo has taken charge of constructing an amphitheater of split logs, with a lectern—for speeches on tactics, daily lessons in Quechua. Also under way: operating tables for the doctor; and latrines. We have completed more than a dozen observation posts overlooking the camps, the Tin House, the trails, and the river. Lines have been laid for radio communication between the camps. Marcos has drilled the men in defensive maneuvers and in setting up ambushes.
12/17/66: Tania came to the camp today, accompanied by the liaison to Peru. She can travel freely over the whole countryside, without, she assures me, arousing suspicion. (Though from now on I have ordered her to remain with the city network.) She’s gotten herself a job with the Ministry of Information, collecting native songs and stories, going to Indian villages, tape-recording their chants. She says she’s done a little of it already, interesting work, though all their songs are mournful. (Ponco said, “Well, they don’t have much to rejoice about.”) I was impressed by this useful coup, this job with its built-in cover, but she said it was minor magic. She’s also arranged a job with a radio station in Camiri, her own show, broadcasting advice to the lovelorn once a week. This will be a perfect way for the urban people to remain in contact with us, through nonsensical coded love letters that she’ll read on the air. She had to convince the station manager that she knew about radio work.
Once, I remember, several years ago, I was talking with her and Joaquin about such things, admiring her accomplishments. They had just returned
from preparing the ground for Masetti. “It’s simple,” she said, “you play upon their idea of what a woman is, of who you are. You do it too,” she said to me, “in your way. You let them make you into an idol, then show them how they can placate you, win your approval, be like you.”
Joaquin said, “Playing on people like that would make me feel dirty.” He pursed his lips as if sucking something sour. It looked funny on such a big man. His face is in broad slabs, a huge thing, but it used to be very expressive in its way.
She didn’t act insulted; he had been working with her for a while; it was allowed between them. “It doesn’t bother me, Joaquin, you know that. I live far back in my skull.” She pointed to the middle of her head and grinned at us, crossing her eyes a little, and smiling. She had a pleasing, antic way of making faces, very appealing. She didn’t brood about what happened to her. Like cartoon figures, or Venus, she could go through any disaster and be restored, whole, in the next frame. Perhaps that, I thought, is what gave her face such an appealing vivacity, such lightness.
The same quality, though, made you want to do something with her (and then, sometimes in anger, to her) that would matter to her, touch her, get a real response, leave a mark. I had first met her in East Germany; she had been my interpreter. Her parents had been Communists, refugees from the Nazis who had fled to Argentina. It was a bond between us; we shared childhood stories, and made mildly ironic remarks (initiated by her) about the Party bureaucrats I was meeting, for the most part men with sullen unpleasant faces. She made one feel intimate with her, and yet there was a line that was not being crossed, a distance between you. Of all the people I’ve known since the Cuban Revolution, I always felt that she was least impressed by my fame. That fascinated me. But perhaps that isn’t the way she is; perhaps that distance was something she devised to interest me, something she used. She had me arrange a scholarship for her to study in Cuba, and then offered to help me in the Masetti project.
She continued, “I take it all in from far away, Joaquin. It doesn’t reach me. I laugh at them, the truth is. They think I’m this. They think I’m that. What do I care what they think! They think I’m a pin-up. An easy lay. A reckless woman, a helpless person. Whatever. What do I care what they think? I use their image of me for our work. There’s always something in it, a little point that I can ride in the direction I want to go. Do they want to help the helpless? Be strong to the weak? Do they want to fuck me—ignite the cold woman? Or act really dirty with the sensualist? Or do they want to cure the crazy—that one is more popular than you’d think!—calm down the hysteric? It remains
their image, not mine. I’m far away from their hands, their eyes, their words. Taking it all in, getting what I want. I don’t care.” She smiled. She had her hair down that evening, and several buttons of her green blouse open. (I disapproved; I was attracted.)
“Anyway, comrade,” she said, “it’s the same in any case. The truth is, I’ve learned, that others always decide who you are. You’re just playing a part that they need for their production, their play. And they’re doing it too, strangely enough, for each other, though they don’t know it. I wonder where the director has gone? I know that sounds adolescent. I know it’s an adolescent feeling. But it’s true too, and I can’t outgrow it. I can’t forget it, and I can’t outgrow it. It’s funny having the feeling that I should be so happy play-acting. But if there’s nothing real, then knowing you’re play-acting makes it better. I’m like a great actor who doesn’t care that his wife is having an affair.” She puffed her chest out, and curled her mustache ends. “He decides he
wants
her to do it, wants to be jealous, so he can play a great Othello. He knows that everyone’s wife is unfaithful, after all, his, yours”—she looked at me—“but he knows that he’s different from you, he can use it. At least this way I have my little joke on everyone. When I’m doing something in our cause, all I worry about is if I have enough script to get me through the scene.” She laughed. She was bringing an intensity to her speech (her bit of dialogue?) that suggested she was willfully making an embarrassing revelation. It was hard for me to see what was so awful about what she was saying. I guess it did seem a little adolescent. But it mattered to her: she looked as if she were doing something shameful. “You say to yourself: I know what I’m doing. And because it’s secret you feel that it is all yours, you have an inside, you are someone. You think to yourself: I know why I’m doing this, I know how it will bring about the world to come. And
you
don’t.” She looked at me, at Joaquin, and back again, and once more this way and that, this way and that. “I read somewhere,” she said, “in Fanon, I think, that when people are tortured it can drive them crazy. But the ones who are really harboring secrets, they never go mad. Even when they put electric currents through them. They bite down on their secret. They know why they’re there. The torture is really traumatic, he says, only if you don’t have information to hide. Then it’s all so unjust. Why are they doing this to you when you can never satisfy them! It’s good to have our secret project. Most people aren’t so lucky. They have nothing to hide, they have no
real
secrets.” She opened her arms rigidly to the two of us. Her face was willful, her features sharp. The attraction I had felt was transformed by now; she made me feel queasy, gave me a dry feeling as at a clinical demonstration.
“Most people,” she said, “most people have no secrets. They’re spread open to the world.”
This evening we were sitting near my hammock. She was wearing fatigues, her black hair in braids. She had a little green spiral notebook in front of her, but she never consulted it. I asked her how Monje had responded to our apparent change in plans, to my arrival here.
“He goes this way and that,” she said. “He repeats what he told Fidel, that the Bolivian Revolution must be run by Bolivians. But he needs Cuban money. When I mentioned your name he promised twenty of his best men for the struggle in the mountains. That’s what he calls it always. Mention the word ‘guerrillas’ and he talks about mountains. He’s got mountains on the brain. He told Fidel that he’d follow you anywhere. But I got the feeling that if it were dangerous where you were leading, he’d want to follow from pretty far behind. Then, after making his promise, he talks vaguely about insurrection in the mines again. Or in the city. He says the rest of the Party is against beginning the armed struggle ‘in the mountains’ too soon. They’re afraid of the crackdown, afraid of being outlawed from the next election. They’re afraid of being thought of as bed-wetters. They’re afraid of a lot, frankly. I did as you said and arranged a meeting for here. Perhaps seeing you will clarify things for him. And anyway, we’ve recruited the most militant members of the Party. The two brothers, Coco and Inti, they’re the best of them. And Jorge is all right. But if the Party turns against you, it will be up to your personal magnetism to hold them.”
“And the correctness of my position.”
“Yes,” she said smiling. “That too. Absolutely. But be crafty when you talk with Monje. You can bring him round if you do it right. Be wily as a serpent, gentle as a dove. Don’t define him out of things. Let him think he’s a very big part of your plans. He’s got a sizable ego. He’s got to be flattered a lot, always, made to feel the important man, central to everything. And he’s pretty clever too. He’s been around awhile.”
“And Moises Guevara?”
“He holds down the Peking line among the miners. He’s split with the CP about their foot-dragging. Very ardent for the armed struggle. Debray likes him. Moises is working-class. That counts big with Regis. Ricardo met him, though, and says he’s a silly troublemaking prick. If we have his support Monje won’t touch us. Debray hates Monje. Thinks he’s unclear and deceitful. But it’s the lack of clarity he hates most. He thinks everyone in the world but you is insufficiently
clear
.” She sat up straight and set her lips in a thin tight line.
With one hand she smoothed down an imaginary Debray mustache. “No compromises for him.”
I said, “You’d better close down the warehouse. It’s more dangerous than it’s worth now.”
I met with El Chino, and talked of his plans for Peru. We talked standing, very close to each other, because of his difficulty seeing. He seemed overwhelmed by my presence, effusive as always, hopping back and forth, as if drunk. A small vital man, he squints constantly, despite thick glasses, giving his eyes a Chinese look. A problem with an optic nerve; progressive myopia. “I share your vision of a continental revolution,” he said, incongruously, for it was hard to imagine him seeing anything very clearly. He wants to send twenty men for training. “The best opportunity in the world, they’ll consider it an unparalleled opportunity.”
He’d stay with us for a training march, then go to Cuba and talk the situation over with Fidel. I’d see that the Peruvians got twenty rifles. After we’re well established he could send five more men for my “unparalleled” training. We must not internationalize the struggle too quickly. He wanted a photo of me to show the boys in Peru and drive them crazy.
He thinks de la Puente was infiltrated and betrayed. And he believes some of de la Puente’s guerrillas are still operating, but he’s not certain. I think this is like Jorge’s conjectures about Masetti—the need for the immortality of rebellion becomes a ghostly belief in the immortality of rebels.
We had our first batch of homemade bread.
SUMMARY:
While the army is still dispersed we’ll retreat back towards camp, and our fortifications.
If the army follows, we’ll kill them.
But the army will have difficulty operating; and we know the terrain.
We must have stable lines of communication, and supplies of food. The Party’s support is essential. With it providing supplies, doing propaganda work in the cities, spreading news of our victories, and sending recruits, we can and will stay here a long time.
12/23/66: Today the men finished work on the supply caves and lined them with canvas. Radio equipment (the transmitting unit), spare clothing, photos, passports, lists of urban contacts have been stored. The caves were covered over with wire gratings, logs, then camouflaged with dirt and bushes.
12/24/66: The mosquitoes are thick at night, and very annoying. I still have an allergic reaction to their bites; they swell on my arm to the size of walnuts. So I’ve appropriated the only mosquito netting for my own hammock (fortuitous conjunction of power and need). Poem on mosquito netting?
On the radio: a strange piece of advice for the lovelorn of Camiri: “And for my good pal: keep watch! Your lover with the Italian name is on his way to you.” This means that Mario Monje, first secretary of the Bolivian CP, is coming to the Nancahuazu camp.
12/25/66: We were gathered in the amphitheater when he arrived, digesting Christmas dinner—roast pig, nougat from Spain, beer and cider. I was leading a session of self-criticism. In the last few days there have been fights between the Bolivians and the Cubans, especially Ricardo, who has been leading the vanguard group. Many of the Bolivians—Chingolo and Coco among them—say he’s too harsh, makes them work too much, shows favoritism to Cubans. But many of the Bolivians (I suspect Chingolo) are slackers. It’s a bad sign against us (I was saying), for even the shadow of nationalism must be banished. The only nationalism for a country under imperialism is socialist internationalism. So I was saying. (I had to be vague; I didn’t know if the Bolivians involved were lying.)