The Death of Che Guevara (3 page)

things, and sweat. Cuba, too, prepares for invasion and (but how does one do this, except by resigning oneself, conforming oneself, to one’s own rhetoric) prepares for nuclear attack. Guevara says: “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims. The Cuban people are advancing fearlessly towards the hecatomb which specifies final redemption.” But Cuba finds itself another spectator at the court of kings, almost a jester, excessive in its rhetoric, clownish. It may comment, it may howl, but it only observes. Soviet ships on their way towards Cuba are told by their government to turn about from “final redemption”; the missiles are dismantled and withdrawn. Castro is not consulted but only, eventually, informed. Hearing the news, he swears, kicks the walls, throws a glass to the floor in impotent fury: “They betrayed us as they did in Spain.” (Pieces of his new, his always changing, interpretation: The Soviet Union will not protect an independent government in Latin America; Latin America must protect itself. Only a united Third World, struggling together, can defeat the savagery of imperialism.) President Frondizi of Argentina is deposed by the military. Guerrilla groups, mostly of students, appear briefly, flicker, and are put out in Ecuador, forty-eight hours after taking to the mountains. Leftist elements of the military in Venezuela rebel against the government and are put down; survivors join the guerrillas under Douglas Bravo. Guerrillas in Guatemala, under Turcios Lima and Yon Sosa, inflict casualties on the army. Haya de la Torre, the much-compromised nationalist leader in Peru, wins the presidential election but is prevented from taking office by the military. The Rebel APRA under de la Puente and Javier Heraud begins guerrilla operations. China condemns the Soviet Union as revisionists, betrayers of Communism, and social imperialists; it is inevitable, they declare, that One Splits into Two. (This quarrel will divide the Communist world; and sharp fragments—of propaganda that keeps people from moving, of supplies not delivered, of betrayal—will enter the hearts of many Latin American guerrilla movements, splintering them, rendering them, often, immobile, dead.) Algeria, its long war finally over, becomes independent of France.
1963
(Year of Organization) Fidel Castro visits the Soviet Union; he negotiates large sugar purchases by the Russians. Ernesto Guevara visits Algeria to establish economic cooperation among the socialist countries of the Third World. (Do they have something more to share than their poverty?) The Second Agrarian Reform Law in Cuba restricts all privately held estates to no more than a hundred acres. Jorge Masetti, an Argentine journalist who had first come to Cuba to interview his famous countryman Che Guevara, is encouraged by Guevara to establish a guerrilla center in Argentina. Masetti’s men gather at a Bolivian farm near the Argentine jungle. (Piece of his new interpretation: guerrilla war is the method
for class struggle on our continent.) In Bolivia the tin miners of Catavi go on strike against the government. President Ydigoras Fuentes of Guatemala is overthrown by the military. Hugo Blanco, the peasant organizer, alone and sick with fever, is captured in Peru. Javier Heraud, the Peruvian guerrilla leader, is killed, and his men decimated by the army at Puerto Maldonado.
1964
(Year of the Economy) The voice reading the epic of industrialization reads too quickly, stumbles over its words, makes disastrous mistakes. Blockade (the lack of spare parts, of raw materials), sabotage (defective ball bearings insinuated into shipments from Europe to destroy machinery), absenteeism (working for oneself under socialism—and with few things to buy—one gives oneself a vacation), poor planning (peasants leaving the land to move to the factories, wounding agricultural production; factories built far from transport, without roads, without access to materials; factories producing quantities of sulphuric acid before there is a place in the industrial process for sulphuric acid), all these things damage, nearly cripple, the Cuban economy. The Soviets advise their Cuban comrades, their Cuban clients, to concentrate on agriculture, to see themselves as interdependent with the Soviet bloc; agriculture will provide foreign exchange for future development. (Perhaps, they suggest, Guevara’s idea that workers do not require material incentives, that they will produce for “moral” reasons—to build socialism, to destroy imperialism—is idealistic, unrealistic.) The bourgeoisie of Brazil make it clear that even the mildest nationalism offends them; with the aid of the United States, Marshal Castelo Branco leads a military overthrow of President Goulart. (Further piece of his new interpretation: the national bourgeoisie, such as it is, is a weak parasite, in the pay of the imperialists.) In Bolivia, Paz Estenssoro is elected President again, only to be overthrown by Generals Ovando and Barrientos. In Peru, Hugo Blanco is sentenced to twenty-five years in jail.
1965
(Year of Agriculture) Guevara tours Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana, Guinea, Algeria, establishing new links between Africa and Cuba. (Do they have more to offer each other than their poverty? The Third World, he says, must draw together, like soldiers at the front line, to make themselves independent of the first world.) Fidel Castro, Premier of Cuba, makes himself Minister of Agriculture. A trade agreement is signed with the Soviet Union, granting Cuba a credit of 167 million dollars. Che Guevara, at the second Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference—and as if in dissidence to the Soviet loans—criticizes those “so-called socialist methods of aid which are no different from capitalism, that still leave one partner subservient to the other.” Upon his return to Cuba, Guevara drops from sight. Castro declares: “Major Ernesto Guevara will be found where he is most useful to the revolution.” Ben Bella, in Algeria, is overthrown by the rightist Colonel Boumedienne. A U.S.-financed military coup in Indonesia, led
by Suharto, overthrows President Sukarno. Coordinated with CIA help, a massacre of Indonesia’s Communists follows; in a few months half a million people will be killed. The United States sends twenty-two thousand Marines to the Dominican Republic, to prevent the election of Juan Bosch. At Catavi, the Bolivian miners do not become a mobile force, a guerrilla force; they remain with their homes and families. The Bolivian military blockades the area: the miners have no milk to give their children, no cough syrup for their silicosis. General Barrientos declares: “We will keep faith with the nation.” (A joke, repeated over and over, becomes threatening.) The Bolivian military occupies the mining area of Catavi and massacres the leaders of the strike. Luis de la Puente, the new leader of the Peruvian guerrillas, is killed. The Communist guerrilla base in Colombia, the “independent Republic of La Pato,” is eliminated by government troops. Camillo Torres, a Jesuit priest of prominent family, condemns the government for collaborating in the poverty of the people, and leaves the priesthood to join the guerrillas; in a few months his body is brought back to the capital by the army. Splits between the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet Communist parties mar the activities of the Peruvian guerrillas; the parties guard their ideological purity; neither aids the guerrillas. The Venezuelan Communist Party, like the Bolivian Communist Party, rejects the Cuban thesis, embraces the Soviet line of “peaceful coexistence.” One must support and strengthen the national bourgeoisie; competition between the national bourgeoisie and the United States will weaken the imperialists. Then, revolution will be on the agenda. Now one must distribute leaflets, build the consciousness of the masses. The party—not the guerrillas—is, and will remain, the vanguard of the Revolution, that Revolution whose time is not yet. (Piece of a new interpretation: the orthodox Communist parties are so much debris to be swept up by the guerrilla movement and the revolution they will lead.) Jorge Masetti’s guerrillas, containing both Argentines and Cubans, are infiltrated by the army and betrayed before ever attacking. Some of the men retreat into the jungle; there they are decimated by starvation, by internal disputes, by disease. Masetti, alone, goes deeper into the jungle to hide, to die. (A Cuban guerrilla, Joaquin, escapes to tell the story.) U.S. military action, delayed briefly by a presidential election, “escalates” in Vietnam. Half a million troops are sent to aid the regime in Saigon. The daily bombing of North Vietnam—Operation Rolling Thunder—begins. Areas of the South are “carpet bombed.” A new vocabulary for the world: forced urbanization (if the country surrounds the city, destroy the countryside so that none can live there), pacification (stillness, death, peace, all made the same); new words: they mean a fire in the home, in the bed, on the skin. (Pieces of his new interpretation: Only an armed people, prepared for a long march, for a struggle like that of
the Vietnamese, can oppose the imperialists. The revolution must be made by and for the peasants; it must offer them socialism from the start. Only the New Man created by the struggle, by the fires and crucible of revolution, by violence, will build and defend socialism. “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”) Fidel Castro reads the farewell letter of Ernesto Guevara to the Cuban people.
1966

CRITICISM,
SELF-CRITICISM

Isle of Pines, June 1965

Again this morning I walked across the open field outside our house, down to the ocean. Once, when I was eleven, I looked into one of my mother’s black notebooks and read from her angular hand, “Life is not a walk across an open field.” But in this field, for now, the only ambushes are specters.

I stood for a minute or two on the beach, staring abstractedly at the water breaking in high white waves. My head was still fuzzy from sleep. Small clear lines, transparent hairs, floated annoyingly in front of me, and yet inside my eyes where I couldn’t get at them, like mistakes in theory or flaws in character. The brightness made my head hurt. The ocean meant nothing to me this morning, empty of correspondences. I turned and started back through the tall scratchy grass that grows along the edge of the field, by the fence.

Today I stopped halfway up to watch the prisoners, leaning forward with my hands against the thick strands of wire mesh, testing one of the sharp barbs with my fingertip. I drew a drop of blood. Sometimes a small sharp pain breaks through the fuzz in my head, focuses my attention. The fuzz remained; my finger stung. I placed my hands carefully between the barbs, my head down so I wouldn’t be recognized. I was dressed in fatigues, as the guards would be—probably I’d be taken for one of them.

The prisoners worked among young trees with long thin waxy leaves, orange trees I think. They were shoveling fertilizer into the dry earth around the roots, mixing it under. The revolution is in growing things, you said; each tree a soldier of revolution. Heat wavered up from the mounds of black earth in the wheelbarrows, a warm sharp smell that I like. The day was just beginning, but circles of sweat were already spreading under the men’s arms, and across the backs of their gray shirts. I thought of a phrase: there’s no way to put an end to prison, except to make the whole island a prison, each man in the care of every other, as guerrillas are, each man his brother’s keeper, teacher, guard. (—Hard to imagine the country where one could use that in a speech!)
I put my fingertip to my mouth and sucked a drop of blood from it: it was less salty than I expected.

One of the prisoners turned from his comrades and picked up a long green leafy weed with two pale-red flowers on its stem. His eyes closed, he pressed the flower against his lips for a moment, as if feeling its pleasant soft texture. With a few quick bites he ate both flowers, and an inch or two of stem. He dropped the stalk to the ground and returned to his shoveling. They must not have enough to eat in the prisons. The pollen from the grass began to make my nose stuffy, so I headed back to the house.

Walter—comrade, bodyguard, keeper—was sitting on the porch. He said hello in his painful raspy voice. Nodes had grown on his vocal cords during the war and had had to wait for the victory of the revolution to be cut away. His voice now is a harsh whisper he hates the sound of; he doesn’t talk as much as he did in the Sierras. I said hello, and he returned to his reading.