Companero Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Jorge G. Castañeda’s

  Compañero

  “Brilliant … rich in narrative detail.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Brilliant research … [reveals] the last myth of 20th-century revolution.”

  —Washington Post Book Review

  “Analyzes Guevara and his legacy with the clarity and insight that have earned [Castañeda] his place as one of Mexico’s most distinguished political scientists.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Astute … a gripping tale of a man bent on martyrdom.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Carefully documented and critical … [and it] reads like a thriller.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “[Castañeda’s] powerful intellect aims at uncovering the roots and development of Che’s thinking.”

  —The New York Times

  Also by Jorge G. Castañeda

  Utopia Unarmed

  Limits to Friendship

  (with Robert Pastor)

  The Mexican Shock

  Jorge G. Castañeda

  Compañero

  Jorge G. Castañeda was born and raised in Mexico City. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris. He has been a professor of political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico since 1978. He has also been a senior associate of the Carnegie Institute for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and a visiting professor at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997 he began a long-term, half-time appointment as Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at New York University. He is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek International, and the Mexican weekly Proceso.

  For Jorge Andrés

  who was born in another time

  and will live a better life

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Childhood, Youth, and Asthma in Argentina

  Chapter 2 Years of Love and Indifference in Buenos Aires:

  Medical School, Perón, and Chichina

  Chapter 3 First Blood: Navigating Is Necessary, Living Is Not

  Chapter 4 Under Fire with Fidel

  Chapter 5 Our Man in Havana

  Chapter 6 The “Brain of the Revolution”; the Scion of

  the Soviet Union

  Chapter 7 “Socialism Must Live, It Isn’t Worth Dying

  Beautifully.”

  Chapter 8 With Fidel, Neither Marriage Nor Divorce

  Chapter 9 Che Guevara’s Heart of Darkness

  Chapter 10 Betrayed by Whom in Bolivia?

  Chapter 11 Death and Resurrection 391

  Notes

  16 pages of photographs will be found following page 268

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes a great deal to many people, but most of all to Miriam Morales, who read it, reread it, and put up with it (and me) endlessly. To her my thanks, as well as to Maria Caldelari, Georgina Lagos, Cassio Luiselli, Joel Ortega, Alan Riding, and my friend and editor at Knopf, Ash Green, who all read the manuscript in its entirety and are responsible for any improvements it may have undergone.

  I am also particularly grateful to the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment at Dartmouth College, where I carried out part of the research for the book; Marisa Navarro, Barbara Gerstner, Lou Anne Cain, and Luis Villar at the Dartmouth College library were extremely generous with their support, time, and patience. I also wish to thank Marisela Aguilar, Lisa Antillón, Carlos Enrique Dίaz, Aleph Henestrosa, Silvia Kroyer, Marcelo Monges, Marina Palta, Christian Roa, Tamara Rozental, and John Wilson at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library at the University of Texas in Austin, for their invaluable help in researching the material for the book.

  Many friends in many places provided precious help in obtaining access to interviews, archives, or documents: Gerardo Bracho, Zarina Martínez-Boerresen, Arturo Trejo, and Abelardo Treviño in Moscow, Juan José Bremer and Adriana Valadés in Germany, Miguel Díaz Reynoso in Havana, Jorge Rocío in Mexico, Sergio Antelo and Carlos Soria in Bolivia, Alex Anderson and Dudley Ankerson in England, Rogelio García Lupo and Felisa Pinto in Argentina, Leandro Katz in New York, Jules Gérard-Libois in Brussels, Anne-Marie Mergier in France, and Carlos Franqui in Puerto Rico. I am particularly indebted to Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., for their constant support in obtaining documents from the U.S. government. I must also acknowledge and be thankful for Jennifer Bernstein’s infinite patience and help at Knopf in getting the manuscript into shape.

  Finally, a special word of thanks to Homero Campa, Régis Debray, Chichina Ferreyra, Enrique Hett, James Lemoyne, Dolores Moyano, Jesús Parra, Susana Pravaz-Balán, Andrés Rozental, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Each in their way made a very special contribution to this book. I am deeply indebted to them. And lastly, my warmest appreciation to Marina Castañeda, who not only did a splendid job of translating and editing from the Spanish, but did so at breakneck speed and, moreover, under extreme, often irrational, and always irritating pressure from her brother the author, or the author her brother.

  J.G.C.

  Prologue

  They uncovered his face, now clear and serene, and bared the chest wracked by forty years of asthma and months of hunger in the wilds of the Bolivian southeast. Then they laid him out in the laundry room at the hospital of Nuestra Señora de Malta, raising his head so all could look upon the fallen prey. As they placed him on the concrete slab, they undid the ropes used to tie his hands during the helicopter trip from La Higuera, and asked the nurse to wash him, comb his hair, and trim the sparse beard. By the time journalists and curious townspeople began to file past, the metamorphosis was complete: the dejected, angry, and disheveled man of the day before was now the Christ of Vallegrande, reflecting in his limpid, open eyes the tender calm of an accepted sacrifice. The Bolivian army had made its only field error after capturing its greatest war trophy. It had transformed the resigned and cornered revolutionary, the defeated fugitive from the Yuro ravine, face shadowed by fury and frustration, into the magical image of life beyond death. His executioners had bestowed a human face upon the myth that would circle the world.

  Whoever examines these photographs will wonder how the despondent Guevara at the little school of La Higuera was transfigured into the beatific icon of Vallegrande, captured for posterity by the masterful lens of Freddy Alborta. The secret is simple, as General Gary Prado Salmón, Che’s captor and the most lucid and professional of his pursuers, explains:

  They washed, dressed and arranged him following instructions from the forensic physician. … We had to prove his identity and show the world that we had defeated … Che. There was no question of displaying him the way other guerrillas were always exhibited, as corpses on the ground but with expressions that always had an enormous impact on me … their faces all twisted. That was one of the things that made me put the handkerchief on Che’s jaw, precisely so it wouldn’t be deformed. But what everyone wanted, instinctively, was to show that this was Che; to be able to say, “Here he is, we won”: this was the feeling among the armed forces of Bolivia. There should be no doubt as to his identity, because if we had exhibited him as he was, all dirty, tattered, and uncombed, there would have been a doubt.1

  What his hunters did not foresee was that this logic would apply not only to them but also to those who would mourn him in the years to come. The emblematic impact of Ernesto Guevara is inconceivable without its dimension of sacrifice: a man who has everything—power, glory, family, and comfort—renounces it for an idea, and does so without anger or reservation. His undeniable willingness to die is not to be found in Che�
��s speeches or writings, nor in the eulogies delivered by Fidel Castro, not even in the posthumous exaltation of his martyrdom, but rather in his mortuary gaze. It is as if the dead Guevara looks upon his killers and forgives them; and upon the world, proclaiming that he who dies for an idea is beyond suffering.

  The other Guevara, whose rage and dejection were not reflected in his death mask, would hardly have become an emblem of heroism and sacrifice. The vanquished Che, with dirty hair, tattered clothes, and feet wrapped in Bolivian abarcas, a stranger to friends and enemies alike, would never have aroused the sympathy and admiration awakened by the martyr of Vallegrande.*1 No wonder, then, that the three extant photographs of Che just after his capture did not circulate until twenty years after his execution. Neither Felix Rodríguez, the CIA operative who took one of them, nor General Arnaldo Saucedo Parada, who snapped the others, made them public until then. Again, the reason was perverse. Though it was acknowledged a few days after the Yuro ambush that Che did not die in combat, it was still best to conceal the ultimate proof of his summary execution: the pictures of Che alive after his capture. The dead Che was compelling without being accusatory, and generated an inexhaustible myth. The pictures of Che alive would have aroused pity in the best of cases, but raised doubts as to his identity; they pointed to a murder unacknowledged though known to all. The Christlike image prevailed; the other, ravaged and somber, vanished.

  Ernesto Guevara came to inhabit the social utopias and dreams of an entire generation through an almost mystical affinity with his era. Another person in the gentle yet angry sixties would have left but a slight trace. Che himself, in a time less idealistic and turbulent, would have passed unnoticed. Guevara has survived as a figure worthy of interest and remembrance largely because of the generation he inspired. His relevance does not stem from his works or ideas but from his almost perfect identification with an historical period. Premature death negating life’s promise became a leitmotif of the era, starting with James Dean in the mid-fifties, Lenny Bruce in the mid-sixties, and then the icons of the decade: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, but also Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Kennedys. But no one symbolized it as clearly as Che Guevara. Myriad consonances helped create that crucial identification between myth and context. Another life would never have captured the spirit of its time; another historical moment would never have found itself reflected as it did in him.

  As with the decade that saw him live and die, a guiding principle in the life of Ernesto Guevara was the exaltation of will, bordering on willfulness or, as some might say, omnipotence. In his stark and enigmatic letter of farewell to his parents, he refers to it in no uncertain terms: “A willpower that I have polished with an artist’s care will carry my weak legs and tired lungs.”2 From his youthful rugby days in Córdoba to his execution in the jungles of Bolivia, he always started off from the premise that it was enough to want or will something for it to happen. There was no obstacle too great for willpower. Che’s loves and travels, his political vision and his military and economic leadership were permeated by an indomitable will which would permit extraordinary feats and achieve outstanding victories. It would also engender recurrent, and ultimately fatal, mistakes.

  The origins of that almost narcissistic willfulness are many: his own determination, his lifelong struggle with asthma, and his mother’s unending vigilance, full of adoration and guilt. But beyond the question of origins, there is the effect. Few figures have attained the self-confidence of Ernesto Guevara which allowed him to undertake the most inconceivable follies and conduct the most lucid and merciless bouts of self-analysis. If anyone ever believed that wanting the world was enough to have it, and have it now, that man was Che Guevara. If there was ever a time when millions thought the same thing, it was the sixties.

  Another thread unifying his life and the times he embodied lay in his eternal refusal of ambivalence, a trait shared by too many in the generation he personified. To a large extent, the sixties were based upon a wholesale rejection of life’s contradictions. The era was writ in black and white. Many members of the first postwar cohort simply excluded from their souls the very principle of contradictory feelings, of conflicting desires, of mutually incompatible political goals. Who better than Che to incarnate that generation’s inability to live at cross-purposes?

  Che Guevara’s legendary willpower was shattered by time, geopolitics, and the intractable complexities of social struggle. The fervent idealism and generational arrogance of 1968, from Berkeley to Beijing and Prague to Mexico City, led to undeniable cultural changes whose scope we are only beginning to understand. But there was no return to Eden, no storming of the Winter Palace. The political shifts stemming from those heady days of student protest and intellectual ferment, unequaled in the postwar era, led to significant though highly localized victories: the end of the Vietnam war, the departure of General de Gaulle in France, a hint of liberalization in Mexico at the beginning of Luis Echeverría’s presidential term, exemplary and long-lived social conquests in Italy—not much to show for all the struggle. Still, 1968 left us a lasting legacy. And so did the one man who most closely embodied its deeper meaning.

  Relevance cannot be separated from context. Che’s ideas, his life and opus, even his example, belong to the past. As such, they will never be current again. Of course, history is far from over: the idea of social revolution might one day reappear. But the window of opportunity is closing. Che’s aspirations died at the close of the millennium, within the prolonged agony of nineteenth-century socialism. The fleeting references to Guevara within a few internal debates in Cuba do not signify a rehabilitation, or even an adaptation of his ideas to contemporary history. The main theoretical and political doctrines associated with Che—the armed struggle, the foco guerrilla movement, the creation of a new man and the primacy of moral incentives, the struggle for militant international solidarity—are virtually meaningless today. The Cuban Revolution—his greatest triumph and truest success—is now disintegrating, and lingers on thanks only to a wholesale rejection of Guevara’s ideological heritage.

  Nostalgia endures, though. Subcomandante Marcos, the media-Friendly leader of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, often invokes (graphically or verbally) the example and images of Che Guevara—especially those recalling betrayal and defeat. In response to a devastating offensive by the Mexican armed forces on February 9, 1995, Marcos brandished two icons: Emiliano Zapata at Chinameca, and Che at Vado del Yeso and the Yuro ravine.*2 Che also lives on in the media. His ongoing appeal harks back to that final call for a modern utopia. It reflects that last convergence of our era’s great and generous ideals—equality, solidarity, individual and collective liberation—with actual men and women who tried to make them reality. The values of Che Guevara are still relevant, together with those of his generation. The hopes and dreams of the sixties still resonate at the close of a century bereft of utopias, lacking in a collective project, and torn by the conflicts inherent in our monolithic ideological uniformity.

  Che’s fifteen minutes of fame have survived him. More than anyone else, he continues to shed light and meaning upon a moment of time whose memory endures, albeit faintly. His life, like the sixties, should be played in fast-forward; that is how it was lived. The story should be read like that of the sixties: high-strung, eventful, and fleeting. In his childhood, youth, maturity, and death can be found the keys to deciphering the mystic encounter of a man and his world.

  *1 “He had a full beard. And his hair was long, very long, like this. His hair was very dirty. We changed his clothes because they were very dirty. We put a pajama on him. A hospital pajama, they put on him.” Susana Oviedo, interview with the author, Vallegrande, October 27, 1994.

  *2 Zapata was ambushed and assassinated at the Hacienda de Chinameca in 1919. The rear guard of Che’s guerrilla column in Bolivia was annihilated in Vado del Yeso; Che himself was taken prisoner at la Quebrada del Yuro, on the outskirts of a town called La Higuera. The communiqué
from Marcos appeared in La Jornada (Mexico City), February 25, 1995.

  Chapter 1

  Childhood, Youth, and Asthma

  in Argentina

  Argentina before the Great Depression was not a bad country to be born and raised in—especially if, like the first son of Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, one belonged to a blue-blooded aristocracy. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario—the third largest city in a country of 12.5 million inhabitants. On his father’s side, the Guevara Lynch family had lived in Argentina for twelve generations: more than enough to fulfill the requirements of nobility in a land of immigrants, most washed up only recently on the shores of “God’s country South.” On his mother’s side, there was also a long and distinguished lineage, as well as extensive property, which in Argentina meant money.

  From his father Ernesto inherited Irish and Spanish blood. His greatgrandfather, Patrick Lynch, had fled from England to Spain, and eventually to Argentina, assuming the governorship of Río de la Plata in the second half of the eighteenth century. He even had Mexican-American parentage: Che’s paternal grandmother, Ana Lynch, was born in California in 1868. Roberto Guevara, Che’s paternal grandfather, was also originally from the United States, though only by chance: his parents had joined in the California Gold Rush of 1848, returning to the land of their birth a few years later.

  Not only by birth were the Guevaras of old Argentine stock. The Guevara Lynch branch of the family was so closely identified with the history of the local aristocracy that Gaspar Lynch was one of the nineteenth-century founders of the Argentine Rural Society—a genuine board of directors for the country’s landowning oligarchy. If Enrique Lynch was one of that oligarchy’s mainstays toward the end of the nineteenth century, Ana Lynch, the only grandmother Che ever knew, was a liberal and iconoclast. She became a significant figure in his youth; his decision to study medicine rather than engineering was partly due to her illness and death.