Che Guevara (127 page)

Che’s officially induced “hibernation” lasted for a decade and a half. He reemerged as a revolutionary touchstone in Cuba only after the Soviet Union itself began to change in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev. Fidel opposed the liberal reforms of glasnost and perestroika with what he called a “rectification” process, which reinstituted Che’s ideas as the correct ones for Cuba’s Communists to follow. This coincided with the precipitous collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the long flow of Moscow’s subsidies to Cuba. Forced to allow limited foreign capital investment and other “market reforms” to rescue Cuba’s battered economy, while instituting austerity measures, Fidel managed to pull Cuba back from the brink of disaster. Throughout the difficult “Special Period,” as Fidel defined the post-Soviet era, he encouraged Che’s resurrection as a popular hero who best represented the ideals of revolutionary Cuba.

That Che and guerrilla warfare had not lost their allure as models for political action was demonstrated by the Zapatista uprising that erupted in 1994 in Chiapas, in southern Mexico. The Zapatistas’ less than aggressive military tactics and avowed political goals—to win autonomy for Chiapas’s indigenous peoples—were far more modest than Che’s, but his legacy was apparent in the guerrillas’ repudiation of Mexico’s subservience to U.S. capital interests and their appeals for sweeping social, political, and economic reforms. The charismatic figure of their gun-wielding, pipe-smoking, reflective, ironic, lyrical leader, Subcomandante Marcos—the thinking man’s guerrilla fighter—captivated the popular imagination as Che once had. Indeed, it was hard not to see Marcos as a reborn Che Guevara, adapted to modern times—less utopian but still idealistic, still willing to fight for his beliefs—perhaps having learned from his predecessor’s mistakes but modeled on him nonetheless. To a degree, the Zapatistas represented a successful implementation of the
foco
theory. Marcos had spent years undetected among indigenous communities in the forests of Chiapas, organizing and training its cadres, before going public with the insurgency.
*

Che’s rehabilitation as a saintlike presence in Cuba reached its apotheosis with the return of his remains to Cuban soil. I was with the joint Cuban-Argentine forensic team in November and December 1995, during the first
weeks of its search for Che’s body on the airstrip in Vallegrande. The team had been assembled after Mario Vargas Salinas broke his long silence and told me what happened the night Che disappeared. They rather quickly discovered the bodies of Octavio de la Concepcíon; of the two Bolivians, Pablo and Chapaco; and of the Peruvian, Eustaquio. But then the trail went cold, and I left to go home for Christmas. I remained in touch with the searchers by telephone over the following year.

In June 1996, the head of the Argentine forensic team, Alejandro Inchaurregui, met me in Paraguay, where I interviewed Socorro Selich, the widow of Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich. She and her husband had moved to Asunción in the early 1970s, when he was the Bolivian ambassador there. His family had stayed when he went back to Bolivia to foment a coup and was murdered. Selich was a mysterious figure. Very little was then known about his role in the death of Che, although there were vague, somewhat sinister, stories about his presence in La Higuera and Vallegrande during the period when the bodies disappeared. Socorro had been a widow for twenty-three years and was deeply immersed in the culture of Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay. The dictator had protected her and her several daughters, one of whom had dated a son of Stroessner. She was more or less apolitical herself, but I think that after we talked for a few days she felt that perhaps her husband’s name would be cleared if she told what she knew and shared the documents and mementos she had saved.

Socorro confirmed Mario Vargas Salinas’s story about Che’s burial. She said that the body had been dumped in a secret grave dug by a bulldozer somewhere in the brushy land near the Vallegrande airstrip and that a mass grave was dug nearby to bury six of Che’s comrades. Her husband had shown her the map coordinates of the grave sites. The coordinates had since vanished, but she was sure that Che had been buried separately. (Vargas Salinas, on the other hand, had told me that Che and his comrades were buried together, in a single mass grave.) Interestingly, the logbook in which Selich normally recorded his burial duties was blank from 3:45 P.M. on October 9 until 9:00 A.M. on October 11, omitting all mention of Che Guevara or what was done with his remains.
*
Socorro allowed me to study her late husband’s notes, among other things, including transcripts he had collected of the military interrogations of the peasants in the areas where Che and his
guerrillas were roaming. Before I left Asunción, Socorro promised to cooperate personally with the search for Che’s body by making a trip to Vallegrande, incognito, to see if she could identify his burial spot from her memory of the coordinates. She later did go there but was unable to pinpoint a spot.

Alejandro Inchaurregui had promised to let me know immediately when Che’s body was found, and he was as good as his word. In early July 1997, I was in Miami—coincidentally, speaking about Che and giving interviews to journalists—when Alejandro telephoned me. In a quiet voice that was taut with excitement, he said, “We’ve found him. Come.”

I flew to Santa Cruz the next day and then drove to Vallegrande. Nothing had yet appeared in the press, but rumors of a discovery had begun to circulate. The bodies had been found by a team of Cuban and Bolivian forensic experts. They, in turn, had quietly summoned the Argentines. Alejandro and two colleagues had flown in a couple of days earlier. A few journalists had also arrived, but were being kept at bay, and in the dark. Out at the airstrip, a mere fifteen feet from the last of the holes dug there in November 1995, was a new pit. The area around it was roped off, and some Bolivian soldiers guarded the approaches. Alejandro walked me over to the far edge of the pit. It was about six and a half feet deep. At the bottom, a skeleton lay on its back. The body had been laid out, apparently with some respect, just a few feet away from a tangled heap of six other cadavers. They were later identified as Pacho, Aniceto, Willy, Juan Pablo Chang, Arturo, and Olo.

The skull of the body that had been laid out neatly was covered by an olive-green military jacket. One of the arms, cocked at the elbow, pointed skyward. The hand had been amputated at the wrist; the bone appeared to have been cut with surgical precision. Alejandro and the other experts had few doubts that the body was Che’s. They had found plaster of Paris in a pocket of the jacket—traces from the death mask that was made when Che’s hands were amputated. Alejandro had also found some pipe tobacco, which Che was known to have been given to smoke the night before his execution. All that was left to do, he said, was to check the dental records.

Things moved quickly after that. Within a day, the news was out and a media frenzy had begun. Fearful of an order to halt the proceedings by the former military dictator, Hugo Banzer (who had won Bolivia’s recent presidential election and was due to assume office in a few weeks), the Cubans and their Bolivian counterparts decided not to waste any time. On the night of July 5, they evacuated the bodies of Che and his comrades from Vallegrande in a lightning operation involving a convoy of vehicles. The bodies were taken to a hospital in Santa Cruz, where they were kept under
guard and examined further. Che’s teeth were matched with the plaster mold that the Cubans had made before he left for the Congo. A few days later, the remains were put on a plane and flown to Cuba. In keeping with the revolutionary tradition of giving each year an official title, 1997 was consecrated as the Year of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Death in Combat of the Heroic Guerrilla and His Comrades.

Manuel Barbarroja Piñeiro died in 1998, at the age of sixty-eight, after losing control of his car while returning home from a diplomatic reception in Havana. Barbarroja, who had retired from his post as the head of the Americas Department a few years earlier, had remained faithful to Fidel. An affable man and a great raconteur who still wore his trademark long beard, he liked to spend long evenings gathered with friends in the kitchen of his book-crammed home in Miramar, smoking, drinking whiskey, and discussing international affairs. Despite his love of conversation, Barbarroja kept a lot of secrets to himself, and he took the majority of them with him to his grave.

Aleida finally published her memoirs. Her book,
Evocación
, contained some of Che’s private letters and poems dedicated to her. By the fortieth anniversary of Che’s death in 2007, Aleida had gradually released most of Che’s writings and diaries for publicaton. Living in Europe, deeply estranged from Cuba, Hildita Guevara’s son, Canek, meanwhile, wrote a reflective, melancholy blog called “Diaries without a Motorcyle.”

In Latin America, history seemed to have come around in a big circular loop. By January 2009, when Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president of the United States, more than a dozen Latin American countries had acquired left-of-center governments. Most of them were demanding a new relationship with the United States, and several were downright hostile. Three of them had recently ousted their U.S. ambassadors, and one, Venezuela, had been host to Russia in joint naval war games in the Caribbean. Things had begun to change a decade earlier, in 1999, with the electoral victory in Venezuela of Hugo Chávez, a former army paratrooper, whose call for a “Bolivarian revolution” and willingness to confront “the Empire,” as he called the United States, helped accelerate a deteroriation in American influence in the region. Chávez regarded Fidel as his political mentor and Che Guevara as one of his greatest heroes. Using Venezuela’s vast oil resources, Chávez became the primary economic sponsor for Cuba, and for Bolivia as well. In 2006, one of his political protégés, Evo Morales, an indigenous Aymara, was sworn into office as Bolivia’s president. For
some, the alliance between Chávez, Fidel, and Evo Morales represented a resuscitation of Che’s dream of a continental revolution—only this time carried out without weapons. That was certainly Chávez’s aspiration.

Evo Morales attended a ceremony held in La Higuera on June 14, 2006, to commemorate Che’s seventy-eighth birthday. Standing next to him were Che’s son, Camilo, and the ambassadors of Cuba and Venezuela. After asking for a moment of silence in Che’s memory, Morales said, “We will never betray the struggle of Che Guevara, of Fidel, or of Chávez, and we say this on the spot where our elder brother lost his life.” Two months later, Chávez and Fidel paid a joint visit to Che’s boyhood home in Alta Gracia, Argentina. They were feted by the townspeople and toured the recently inaugurated Casa-Museo del Che, in the former Guevara family home, Villa Nydia. Calica Ferrer was there, as was Carlos Figueroa. On the flight back to Havana, Fidel fell ill and vanished from public view for a long period. He was replaced in office by his brother, Raúl, who succeeded him formally as Cuba’s president in February 2008. Fidel’s illness did not prevent him from receiving some foreign dignitaries and from appearing in short video clips that were periodically released to the public. He could be seen talking, and often laughing, with his most frequent vistor, Hugo Chávez.

Around the time Che’s body was exhumed, a scrawl of graffiti in Spanish had appeared on the wall of the Vallegrande public telephone office. It said: “Che—Alive as they never wanted you to be.”

Notes

Sources

Selected Bibliography

Maps

Chronology

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1
, page 8:
According to Julia Constenla de Giussani, who was a friend of Che’s mother and of the astrologer who drew up Che’s astral chart, Celia said that she gave birth on May 14, 1928, the same day, and at the same hour, as a striking dockworker called “Diente de Oro” (Gold Tooth) died of gunshot wounds. The yellowing archives of Rosario’s daily newspaper
La Capital
confirm the story. In May 1928, a strike by dockworkers escalated into violence. Stabbings and shootings took place almost every day, most of them carried out by armed scabs working for the stevedores’ hiring agency, the Sociedad Patronal. At 5:30
P.M.
on Tuesday, May 13, 1928, a twenty-eight-year-old stevedore named Ramón Romero, alias “Diente de Oro,” was shot in the head during a fracas at the Puerto San Martín. At dawn the next day, May 14, he died in the Granaderos a Caballo Hospital in San Lorenzo, about twelve miles north of Rosario.

Chapter 7
, page 99:
In 1968, Rojo wrote a book,
My Friend Che
, in which he gave his account of Che’s life and their friendship. Perhaps because it was written in a rush to publish following Che’s highly publicized death, the book has a number of inaccuracies. Rojo also made somewhat more of their relationship than was actually there, but he was not alone in seeking a vicarious limelight among the posthumous horde of former Guevara friends and acquaintances. The fact is, they did know each other and were friendly, and therefore Rojo’s book has some historically salvageable aspects. In his book Rojo claimed that after they first met, he traveled with Calica and Ernesto for most of their journey northward from La Paz. This is untrue. They met again in Lima, in Guayaquil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, but always traveled separately. He later visited Che a couple of times in Cuba.

Chapter 8
, page 119:
“Note on the Margin” was published as part of
Notas de Viaje
by Guevara’s widow, Aleida March, although her husband had instructed her to burn this and other early writings after his death. Fortunately, she decided not to. She believed that the enigmatic person he described might have been a fictional composite of several people encountered along his journey or a literary device that he employed to evoke the scene of self-revelation.