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  On his mother’s side, Guevara’s landed roots went back to General José de la Serna e Hinojosa, the last Spanish viceroy of Peru, whose troops were defeated by Sucre in the historic battle of Ayacucho in 1820, when South America’s independence was finally secured.*1 A daughter of Juan Martín de la Serna y Edelmira Llosa, Celia was not yet twenty-one when she married the young former architecture student in 1927. Her parents had died years earlier: Don Juan shortly after her birth, according to one of his granddaughters, by throwing himself overboard at sea on discovering he had syphilis1; and Edelmira soon afterward. Celia was raised by her older sister, Carmen de la Serna, who in 1928 married the Communist poet Cayetano Córdova Itúrburu. They were both card-carrying members of the Argentine Communist Party; the couple’s affiliation lasted fourteen years.2

  Celia’s family “had lots of money,” as her husband would admit unblushingly. Her father had inherited “a great fortune … and several ranches. A cultivated man, very intelligent, he was active in the ranks of the Radical Party,” participating in the “revolution of 1890.”3 Though the family fortune was divided among seven children, it was initially large enough for all of them. The Guevara de la Serna family would live from Celia’s rents and inheritance, much more than from the failed business ventures repeatedly launched by the head of the household. If Celia received, on her mother’s side, a classical Catholic education at the School of the Sacred Heart, the freethinking, radical, leftist beliefs of her sister would make her into a singular figure: a socialist, anticlerical feminist.†1 She held endless meetings in her own home during the many struggles led by Argentine women during the twenties and thirties,*2 maintaining, both before and after her marriage, an identity of her own until her death in 1965.

  This exceptional woman was the most important affective and intellectual figure in the life of her eldest son, at least until he met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955. Nobody—not his father, his wives, or children—would play as crucial a role for Che as did Celia, his mother. A woman who lived for twenty years under the threat and stigma of cancer; a militant who spent weeks in jail shortly before her death for being the mother of her son; a mother who raised five children virtually on her own—she had a profound influence on Che Guevara. Only Castro would have a similar impact on him, later, during a brief interlude in both their lives. Few things illustrate the glory and tragedy of Guevara’s saga as aptly as his aching lament when in the Congo, that perpetual heart of darkness, he learned of his mother’s death:

  Personally, however, [Machado Ventura] brought me the saddest news of the war: in a telephone conversation with Buenos Aires he was told my mother was very ill, in a tone which made me suppose it was but a preparatory announcement. … I had to spend a month in this sad uncertainty, awaiting the results of something I could guess at but still hoping there was a mistake, until I received confirmation of my mother’s death. She had wanted to see me shortly before my departure, perhaps feeling ill, but this was not possible as my trip was already far advanced. She did not receive the letter of farewell I left for my parents in Havana; it was to be delivered only in October, after my departure had been made public.†2

  Unable to say good-bye, Che was also denied the chance to grieve in the full measure of his sorrow. The African revolution, merciless tropical diseases, and unending tribal conflicts prevented it. Celia died in Buenos Aires, expelled from the hospital of her choice and torn from her deathbed for having given birth to Che thirty-seven years earlier. He mourned her in the hills of Africa, driven from the successive countries he had adopted as his own. He himself would perish barely two years later: two deaths too closely related.

  The Argentina that saw the birth of Ernesto (soon to be nicknamed Teté) was still in 1928 a dynamic country in full swing, blessed by an economic and even political prosperity which would soon fade. During the twenties it resembled the British domains populated by “white settlers,” rather than the rest of Latin America. On the eve of World War I, its principal sociodemographic indicators made it more like Australia, Canada, or New Zealand than Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, or Mexico.*3 The country had already received three times more direct foreign investment than Mexico or Brazil. The amount of railroad track per thousand inhabitants was three to ten times higher than that of its hemispheric neighbors.4 In 1913, the southern nation’s per capita income was the thirteenth-largest in the world and slightly higher than that of France. The European conflagration and headlong growth of the twenties would not alter this ranking. Argentina’s weak points—its meager industrialization, excessive foreign debt, highly vulnerable export sector—would soon quash the modernizing pretensions of its local elites. But at the time of his birth, Che Guevara’s country still exuded a buoyant and legitimate self-confidence. It aspired to become part of the First World avant la lettre, and was unconcerned by the ominous economic and social signs already looming on the horizon.

  The introduction in 1912 of secret, universal suffrage (for male Argentine citizens) led to the electoral victory, four years later, of the Radical Civic Union and its legendary champion, Hipólito Yrigoyen. He was reelected for a second time a few months after Che’s birth in 1928, following the uninspired interregnum of Marcelo T. de Alvear. Socially minded, democratizing, Yrigoyenism continued to challenge and constrain the old oligarchical, ranching Argentina of the Rural Society. But it did not fulfill the huge expectations it had aroused in the country’s emerging middle sectors and the new working class of Buenos Aires, an eclectic and unstable mixture of immigrants and second-generation Argentines from the interior.†3 Pressure from the right, the disillusionment of the middle classes, and the effects of the Depression put an end to this democratic interval: in 1930 the military took power—the first coup in this century to overthrow a democratically elected Latin American government. In place of the almost blind, ancient Yrigoyen, the armed forces imposed the first in a long series of military rulers and fraudulent elections.

  Ernesto was born in Rosario by accident. After their marriage in Buenos Aires a year earlier, his parents had left for Puerto Caraguatay in the Upper Paraná, in the territory of Misiones. There, Ernesto’s father planned to cultivate some 200 hectares sown with maté, or Argentine tea leaves, the “green gold” so abundant in that part of the country.*4 When Celia was seven months pregnant they traveled to Rosario, the closest town, both for her to give birth and to study the possibility of buying a maté mill. The farming project and maté plantation soon collapsed, as would happen with all of Guevara Lynch’s business ventures. But the other project prospered: Ernesto was born in Rosario, one month premature.

  Soon after Che’s birth, the family left the Misiones area, Guevara Lynch becoming a partner in a struggling shipbuilding firm in San Isidro, near Buenos Aires. This is where Ernesto’s first asthma attack took place, on May 2, 1930, just weeks before his second birthday. According to Guevara Lynch, his wife (an excellent swimmer) often took the child to the Nautical Club at San Isidro, on the banks of the River Plate. The father leaves little doubt as to his wife’s responsibility:

  On a cold morning in the month of May, with a strong wind, my wife went swimming in the river with our son Ernesto. I arrived at the club to look for them and take them to lunch, and found the little boy shivering in his wet bathing suit. Celia was inexperienced and did not realize that the change in weather at that time of year could be dangerous.†4

  In fact, the infant suffered his first pulmonary crisis—from pneumonia— forty days after birth, from which “he almost died,” according to his aunt Ercilia Guevara Lynch.5 This early illness casts some doubt on the father’s explanation; an earlier history of lung ailment preceded the cold. In any case, through June 1933 Ernestito’s asthma attacks were an almost daily occurrence. They caused terrible anxiety for both parents, but especially Celia, who besides tending to the child was overburdened by guilt. To that, instilled by her husband over the river incident, she piled on hereditary factors, which at the time were only suspected, though
they are now known to be the single most significant cause of asthma. Celia herself had suffered from this respiratory ailment as a child; the probabilities of one of her offspring contracting the disease were nearly one in three, and everything indicates that that is what occurred with Che. The early episodes of pneumonia and colds were only triggers for a high-risk candidate; they did not provoke Che’s asthma.

  The three years between the first appearance of the illness and its stabilization seem to have left a profound mark on parents and child alike; accounts by relatives, friends, and the parents themselves are deeply moving.*4 It was doubtless during this time that Celia built with her son a relationship infused with obsessiveness, guilt, and adoration. This bond soon translated into a home-based education, which would instill in Che Guevara a lifelong love of books and an insatiable intellectual curiosity.

  The family wandered throughout Argentina for five years, seeking a site that would help, or at least not aggravate, the boy’s condition. They finally found it in Alta Gracia, a summer resort town 40 kilometers from the city of Córdoba, at the foot of the Sierra Chica and almost 600 meters above sea level. A neat, clean, well-laid-out town of white middle-class Argentines, it catered to vacationers and the infirm, not unlike the mountain or hot-springs health spas of Western and Central Europe. The thin, dry air, which attracted tourists and tuberculosis patients, attenuated Teté’s asthma attacks—though it did not eliminate or even space them to any significant degree. The illness gradually became more manageable, thanks to the better climate, medical care, the child’s personality, and his mother’s exceptional devotion.

  Ernesto Guevara was raised, then, on this magic mountain at the foot of the Córdoba Sierra. His father built houses in the small town, while his mother devoted herself to raising and educating Ernesto, his two sisters, Celia and Ana María, and a brother, Roberto, born in those years; another brother, Juan Martín, would arrive in 1943. The Guevara home was an oasis of security in a country that was fast leaving its golden years behind. Like the rest of the world, Argentina was entering the hardships of the Depression and its unexpected political consequences. The Crash of 1929 not only ruined the maté hopes of Che’s father, it also shattered in a few short years the myth of a peaceful and prosperous Argentina. The 1930 coup ushered in a long period of political instability. A collapse in prices and in international demand for the country’s major exports brought about an unending economic slowdown, interrupted only by a brief boom in raw materials during the immediate postwar period. But the crisis also led to social mobilization, ideological polarization, and cultural changes affecting even Alta Gracia and the sheltered, enlightened elites of Córdoba.

  Because its main exports—beef and wheat—were less vulnerable to European demand, Argentina was initially less affected by falling international prices than were other Latin American nations. Still, Argentina’s export revenues fell by almost 50 percent between 1929 and 1932, a plunge ultimately as devastating and laden with consequence as it was for other countries in the region. It had a twofold effect on Argentine society. First, there was a steep rise in agricultural unemployment, as myriad foreclosures hit the pampas. Second, import restrictions due to a lack of hard currency and foreign credit promoted the development of domestic manufactures, in both consumer and some capital sectors. This in turn caused an accelerated growth in the Argentine working class. By 1947, 1.4 million immigrants from rural areas had relocated to Buenos Aires, and half a million workers found jobs in industry, doubling the ranks of labor in barely a decade. These migrants would become the famous cabecitas negras (literally, “dark heads”). A new working class was emerging, darker-skinned and less immigrant-based, and located more in domestic industry than in processing goods for export. The gap between the middle-class, educated, and traditional sectors on the one hand, and the new industrial class on the other, would be reflected ten years later in the distance between a Socialist, intellectual, and petit-bourgeois left and a populist, irreverent Peronism.

  But other concerns were more important for Ernesto during those years. The habits of his personal and family life were becoming more clearly defined. The first was his parents’ continual roving, now limited to the perimeter of Alta Gracia. According to Che’s younger brother, after living six months in the Grutas Hotel in Alta Gracia, they drifted from Villa Chichita in 1933 to Villa Nydia, then to the Fuentes chalet in 1937, the Forte chalet, the Ripamonte and Doce chalets between that year and 1940, and, in 1940–41, back to Villa Nydia. Each time the lease ran out—a frequent occurrence—the family had to move.6 It would be far-fetched to attribute the roaming spirit of Che Guevara to this endless wandering by his family. But the constant comings and goings of his childhood years could not help but become a sort of second nature. From city to city until the age of five, and house to house until he turned fifteen: the Guevaras’ norm was movement. It also served to spice an otherwise monotonous existence, and to rekindle the illusion of starting anew and overcoming the family tensions— affective and financial—which were hardly lacking in the growing household of Ernesto and Celia.

  It was during this period that the relationship between Celia and Teté became central to both their lives. It extended far beyond the intensity and closeness of Ernestito’s link with his father, or that of the other children with their mother. Che’s illness largely explains this: there is nothing like a mother’s anguish and guilt to create in her a boundless devotion to her child. The symbiosis between Celia and her son, which would nourish their correspondence, their emotional bond, and their very lives for more than thirty years, began during that placid time in Córdoba when Ernesto learned, on his mother’s lap, to read and write, to see her and, above all, be seen by her. Celia’s gaze distinguished and “constituted” him to such an extent that those who knew Ernesto in his youth were astonished by the physical contrast between him and his siblings. It was notorious long before the eldest son became famous, inevitably casting a shadow over the other members of the family. Why was there such a difference? One may assume that it derived largely from Ernesto’s relationship with his mother; the other children probably received a simpler kind of maternal affection.7

  Another distinctive sign became apparent in this prelude to adolescence: a certain definition, and confirmation, of the head of the household’s role in the family. Guevara Lynch was simultaneously a bon vivant, a marvelous friend to his children, a mediocre provider, and a distant father. He did devote hours to his son, swimming, playing golf, and talking with him. But he remained aloof and remote the rest of the time, often indifferent to the needs of his child and family. While the mother served as teacher, household organìzer, and nurse, Guevara Lynch was sporadically building houses in partnership with his brother and lingering at the Sierras Hotel, a haven of rest and relaxation for the wealthy society of Alta Gracia.*6

  His illness continued to afflict Ernestito, preventing him from having a “normal” primary education. Celia took up the slack:

  I taught my son his first letters, but Ernesto was unable to go to school because of his asthma. He only attended the second and third grades on a regular basis; the fifth and sixth grades, he attended as much as possible. His siblings copied the schoolwork and he studied at home.8

  Ernesto’s father played a central role, however, in transmitting to the asthmatic child a voracious love of sports and exercise, and the conviction that through willpower alone he could overcome the limitations and hardships imposed by his illness.*7 Both Ernesto’s father and mother were athletic; they loved nature and the countryside, and instilled that inclination in their son. Since any enjoyment of exercise or the outdoors implied enormous effort for him, Ernesto developed uncommon willpower from his earliest years. It was Che’s parents who discovered the only possible remedy for what became a chronic affliction. They quickly concluded that the only reasonable solution for their son’s bronchial asthma was to continue medicating him and to strengthen him through tonics and swimming, climbing hills, and h
orseback riding.9

  Ernesto’s fierce determination to overcome his physical shortcomings was thus a major factor in the development of his personality from early years. Another was his easy contact with a broad range of people. The children’s circle was varied and gregarious; they were in constant touch with friends from different social classes, including caddies from the Alta Gracia golf club, serving boys from hotels, the children of construction workers from the sites run by Ernesto’s father, and poor families from the emerging slums near the family’s rented villas. Some of Che’s little friends were middle-class, others of low income; some were white like him and his siblings, others, dark-skinned morochos like Rosendo Zacarías, who sold candy in the streets of Alta Gracia. Half a century later, Zacarías still remembers (perhaps aided by the mythical idea that “Che was a perfect child, without any defect”10) how they all played together without distinctions or hierarchy, and how easily Ernesto related to people from different social and cultural milieux.

  The asthmatic boy also spent long hours in bed, developing an intense love of books and literature. He devoured the children’s classics of the time: the adventure novels of Dumas père, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Jules Verne, and Emilio Salgari. But he also explored Cervantes and Anatole France, Pablo Neruda and Horacio Quiroga, and the Spanish poets Machado and García Lorca. Both his parents transmitted to him their passion for reading during this period of home education: Ernesto Guevara Lynch his penchant for adventure novels, and Celia for poetry and the French language.