The Death of Che Guevara Read online

  “We don’t need leaders,” Fernando repeated emphatically. “We know what needs to be done. We’re on our way to begin it.”

  I tried to rest myself in his certainty.

  Bolivia, 1953

  The Country of Exiles

  Where are our leaders who might say no with the force of their souls?

  I was not the only person of my generation troubled by such questions; and I would soon meet, in the country of exiles, many others willing to speak such grand big things aloud. A national movement had triumphed in Bolivia. The exiles, from Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, came to La Paz; perhaps in the improvisations of this revolution there would be a clue, a task, a map of return. Some, like myself, were exiles by choice; others, the aristocrats of the community, had been forbidden their homes by a dictator’s edict. Democratically, we moved together through the pilgrims’ makeshift way stations—from cafe tables where we asserted hypothetical militancies, to the houses of wealthy sympathizers, to discussions in crowded ministry offices, to sleep at last (tired from so much articulation) on the hard floors of rooms with no furniture (a nail in the plaster held up a stained leather bag filled with all one’s caked underwear and sour shirts). We waited; waited for the plausible leader to declare himself; waited for the situation at home to decay; waited for a course of action we could believe in; waited and talked. One must talk: one’s hope, one’s politics, one’s homeland, was alive now only in one’s mouth, and not to talk of it, its melancholy past, its unhappy current state, its sublime future, was criminal, was to let it die and find oneself wandering in exile forever. (No, not even in exile, which is division, but without even the possibility of a place; not quite here, and without a there anymore.) Talk was the work of exile (talk was the thread through the maze; it could become the maze itself); no other career should be pursued; one’s future was home; one must wait vigilantly—and vigilance was talk—for the hour of return. The Country of Exiles, that land whose science is remembrance, was wider than my parents’ kitchen, but like it, for the world’s epic, the inhabitants insisted, must be apprehended in political terms, and politics was, for the moment, for most of them, mostly talk. “They had fallen with a prince’s fall; they might rise with a new prince’s ascent; no wonder,” my mother might say, “that court gossip was their life.” (She would ignore in her attack how much her own home was her place of exile.)

  But sometimes, Mother, it was better than gossip. A year before in Bolivia, on April 9, something had happened worth talking about. The tin miners of Oruro and the Indians who lived near the mines had joined together against the conscript army of the feudal order, the army paid for by the landowners, the mine companies, and the imperialists. The miners had the dynamite they used in blasting, the peasants had old-fashioned rifles that their fathers had seized in a failed insurrection thirty years before and hidden away for the time of rising. The feudal army had new North American weapons, had machine guns; it was certain of victory.

  On the same day, in La Paz, a force of workers led by the Movement for a National Liberation and joined by rebellious police units attacked the army barracks and the Presidential Palace. Government troops stationed at the military academy fought back. The battle was joined in the center of the city, in the market square of La Paz. But the nation had discovered its unity (I wrote in my notebook, with a copy for the Guevara household).The MNR had found symbols of national regeneration, an Indo-American ideology. It was this unity, not force of arms, that defeated the army. Each conscript, too, was part of the nation; that spark turned against him, shamed him. The market women of La Paz walked out into the square during the battle, and took the guns from the bewildered recruits’ hands. (Cc. Fernando Alvarados & the Guevaras.) The army retreated, leaving its dead in the streets. Cadets from the police academy dismantled the army’s gun batteries on the rim of the plateau overlooking La Paz. The workers had marched beneath guns meant to terrify them into submission, turn them to stone. The revolution became possible not when they were willing to kill, but when they were willing to die. (Cc. Nehru, J. P. Sartre, S. de Beauvoir, and my father.) The miners and Indians from Oruro, victorious also, entered the city. Paz Estenssoro, head of the MNR, became President of Bolivia.

  An Indian people (they bear all, the average wisdom had muttered; they are mute, the cry forever frozen in their bodies) had risen up; an ice age had ended in one Holy Week, drowning out the chatter of the average wisdom in a torrent of new excited voices. The Revolution, a voice released from trees and stones, was freedom to talk, possibility and occasion to speculate. How should the state be built? The new government nationalized the mines and began a land reform. Should the former mine owners be compensated? How large did a landlord’s holdings have to be before his land became national property? Or should each family have only enough land to feed itself, as the Incas had decreed? (It was Gandhi’s favorite question: How much land does a man need? With it, he would sound the depths of the universe. It was such a simple question! How could he be denied?) Should the landlords be paid for their seized plantations? Or was their property no more than theft from the nation? Should the peasant militias be disarmed? Should the military academy be reopened, and the army reorganized under the new middle-class officers? And I, too, had questions to ask in these interchanges: What is my role? What is my real name? Questions too impolite, too urgent, to ask directly. One spoke them by hints, enacted them in the imperious way one asked some other, more innocent, question.

  Fernando and I walked the hot dry streets of La Paz (each breath at this altitude was hard work for low wages) reading the wall posters, surrounded by Indian families. (A man ran his fingertips over the print, forcing bits of stone through the thin newsprint, a hidden text.) I rejoiced; I hopped from foot to painful foot, wheezing with excitement. When I looked up at the mountains where the gun emplacements had looked down on the marchers, I felt as if I’d swallowed a strong warming drink. A test had taken place here that I longed for. When I imagined those battles I felt my hand could exalt itself to stroke the moon. I wanted (but how, in what words?) to declare myself to this man with his striped bundle across his shoulders, his eyes narrowed in thought. For it was in a movement like this that Gandhi had found his place, spoken his saving words. The MNR was bound to hear those words, for they were more than one man’s thoughts; they were the common substratum that dissolved all class differences, the land itself showing through. In the unconscious that is Indian custom, there is a continual memory of the socialism of the Incas. Land then had been allotted according to need. The community worked the land of the old, the sick, of those drafted for the magnificent building projects of the Inca, aqueducts to bring water four hundred miles to desert regions, roads, across the Andes. Surplus crops from a fortunate village were distributed under the Inca’s direction to those areas that had suffered drought, the gods’ displeasure. Fleece from the llamas and alpacas went to the Inca’s storehouses, to be distributed equally to the women’s looms. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Paz Estenssoro would recognize—the Indians would force that recognition—that the peasants should not be made to work for wages and buy manufactured goods, that the farce of Western history, of money economies, of industrialization should be refused. The truth of the Andes was not in manufactured goods and the degraded life of the cities, but in agriculture, in the self-sufficient life of the peasantry, the villages, bound into one nation by land and custom, as once they had been each a word in the Inca’s mouth.

  “Pretty posters,” Fernando said, smiling.

  The MNR posters stated the positions of a generation of Latin American nationalists, of all those parties who searched for an Indo-American solution free of European or North American ideas. The MNR was the national movement of unity among classes against the feudal order. (It was not that Marxism which Gandhi called diabolic, which preached division, as if a nation’s classes were not parts of the same family.)

  This was the democratic Left, parties
like Acción Democratica in Venezuela, the APRA of Peru; and I had thought (for my wisdom was average) that they were without a chance of success; and I was wrong. In the Bolivian Revolution, and in the democratic left, I was certain that I would find the leadership that would begin the struggle against imperialism, that would invent the next, the necessary step to make Latin America independent. I felt that I would find here the cause I could join myself to. For Bolivia was the first of a series of national revolutions bound to triumph; it was a small theater for a large audience (a place to find out what lines I might have it in me to speak). The debates of this revolution were in everyone’s mouth; they were common bread, the food of nationhood; criticism let one chew the spirit of rebellion, assimilate it to one’s own body. These were words I wanted to hear, conversations I wanted to enter. Bolivia, to me, was glorious talk.

  Comrades

  Mornings, Fernando and I walked near the Camacho market, listening to the town, buying fruit from the market women for our lunch. Early afternoons, we went to the cafes of the 16 de Julio Avenue, bought the newspapers that had bloomed in the heat of the Revolution (Intransigencia—from the Trotskyite Peasant Union; El Ferroviario—the railroad workers’ paper; La Nacion, the right-wing Ultimo How, and El Diario; the psychotic smudged mimeographed sheets of the outlawed Falange). The papers and the cafes resonated almost to shattering with rumors of war. The Trotskyites threatened revolutionary violence against the enemies of the Revolution. The Falange cursed (and killed) those “agents of international conspiracies who betrayed the sacred soil of the Bolivian nation.” There were rumors that opponents of Paz Estenssoro had been taken to empty fields and shot, that the CIA (perhaps in collaboration with Paz Estenssoro himself, perhaps with the Falange) had sent its murderers to La Paz. Prominent leftist leaders, and obscure militants, had been found dead in the back of La Paz’s pathetic Model T taxis (one way of getting a taxi, the saying went). There was talk of cars without license plates paying calls at night, of men in long black jackets. The Archbishop of Bolivia advised parishioners to store food—for the crisis would surely deteriorate into armed struggle. Civil war was days away—the final convulsion, and triumph, of the revolution. This constant staccato talk of violence (all that I disapproved of, which fragmented the nation like the body of an anxious man) gave a solemnity and consequence to one’s words. It was dangerous in La Paz if the wrong parties overheard you. It was fatal to speak the wrong opinions in certain places. Bolivian talk, like the words the priest spoke over the wafers, had mortal consequences, and just to speak (and I didn’t yet know what else to do) was an act.

  Throughout the day, wherever you were in the city, you heard the sound of automatic weapons. Probably an Indian emptying his clip into a wall somewhere. Probably no one was standing in front of the wall.

  Fernando and I were joined at the cafe by our new friends, “Chaco” Francisco, the child, like Fernando, of Spanish refugees, a countryman of ours (and so twice exiled); and Ricardo Gadea, a heavyset Peruvian, an activist of APRA.

  We spread the papers out on the round white cafe tables, discussed the announcements of the Ministry of Peasant Affairs (the most progressive wing of the MNR), the week’s rate of inflation, the food shortages in the capital and their effect on the national will, the blank demand of Milton Eisenhower on behalf of the U.S. “aid” mission: the former mine owners must receive more money or U.S. aid, food, and technology would be “terminated.”

  The MNR, Ricardo said, would never allow this interference in its national sovereignty. He spoke solemnly, as if reading from stone tablets. Ricardo’s words were heavy; you could walk around them and they would show the same from any side. “The people,” Ricardo said, “would rather accept any sacrifice than be dictated to by North Americans.”

  Chaco laughed and pounded his feet up and down like an excited child. But who, or what, was he laughing at? The masses? Ricardo’s faith? The United States? One never knew with Chaco. A second-year medical student, he would (he swore) never return to school. “Doctors,” he told me, “are all Mr. Me’s. Bloated ‘I’s in green leotards with big fat bellies. They’d be just as happy inflicting pain as curing it, if they could see the patient jump.” Chaco had no positive idea of what he should do. So he spoke his search in irony and skewed whimsy. The world of our fathers, his words said, is a facade, a joke. He wanted to slander it, to push it down, to trample it. But, his tone said, wait, there’ll be nothing behind it! Good! his gestures snickered, he longed for that emptiness. And feared it.

  We were versions of each other, Chaco and I: a generation that had lost faith in its fathers’ world. And I admired Chaco’s intelligence. He had a deep feeling, an almost connoisseur’s admiration, for the convoluted duplicities of this world. His every paragraph was an atonal concerto of conflicting voices. But he also got on my nerves. For the MNR had won. Impossible event! Another world had become possible, a world besides our fathers’. Chaco must make his voice single, surrender his self-lacerating irony, find other work than crafting complicated riddles with no answers.

  Two Indian men carrying automatic rifles with long clips walked by on the avenue, in front of our table. They didn’t speak, and moved with determination, as if under orders. The style of their rifles said that they had taken part in the battles near Oruro, had seized their weapons from dead soldiers. (The country surrounds the city. The Indians had come into their city.)

  Chaco shuddered, a long uncontrollable tremor, like a fever.

  We stared at him.

  “I can’t help it.” He put his head down towards the table, and glanced up at us, looking for sympathy. “They terrify me, those Indians with their guns. I can’t tell what they’re thinking. They’re like a bad dream. Someone holds up a potato in your face, and you know that if you say the word ‘potato’ you’ll die, and you know you’re going to say it. I feel like they might not like the way I hold my coffee cup, and just turn and shoot me.”

  There had been stories of such things. Men dragged out of bars by groups of Indian militiamen, their bodies found half burned. Why burned? Why them? No one could say why they had been taken, what law violated. Perhaps it was just the way they looked? What way? Who understands the darkness of the Indian’s thoughts, corridors of shadows you might be lost in, to emerge transformed, unrecognizable to yourself. (Half burned.) It didn’t bear too much thinking. (Is this what it meant for an Indian people to take possession of their city?)

  But there were all kinds of stories.

  The Battle of the Hotel Austria Bar

  In the late afternoon we left our cafe for the bar of the Hotel Austria, a fancy place with a good view of the Plaza Murillo and the Presidential Palace. This week the government would give out certificates for land to any citizen who would devote his life to farming. Thousands of Indians walked around us as we made our way across the plaza. They lived in the streets, waiting for the processing of applicants to begin, built their charcoal fires on the conquistadors’ stones, unrolled their blankets at night, and slept, village by village, in different areas of the hard wide place, a tribal quilt, a quilt of tribes. Each village even kept its separate feast days.

  Around the high stone column in the center of the square, women sat in long wide skirts, piled one over another, red over blue, fold following fold. Heaped on blankets in front of them, like tiny ruins, were piles of cooking charcoal, coca leaves, little brown metal tins.

  A woman with a round face grabbed my hand and pulled me backward. She wore a gray felt stovepipe sort of hat with an embroidered band around the crown.

  “You have trouble breathing,” she said. Her lower lip was mottled, partly eaten away. She rose from her blanket, still holding my hand. Her hand was dry.

  How could she have known of my difficulty? It had begun just that moment, as I passed her blanket, the smoke from the cooking fires choking me.

  She held her right hand towards me. In the lined palm there was a small round tin, stamped with the comical-looking profile of
a wigged man. It held my attention as a hypnotist’s object might (but my trance had begun the moment she had named me).

  I opened my shirt, immediately, in the middle of the plaza. A few Indians smiled at me. The salve slid across my chest, a useless temporary warmth; I still couldn’t breathe; I was still myself. My chest hairs stuck together in little clumps, like the beards of mussels. I looked up towards the sun.

  “This doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s just some manufactured garbage, mentholated vaseline.”

  She turned away from me when I spoke.

  I touched her shoulder; I wanted to turn her towards my instruction.

  The Indians near us, the other women by their blankets, grew suddenly still, a forest after a shot has been fired. My hand rested on the rough wool of her black poncho. I couldn’t move, pinned there by their eyes. It seemed as if a thousand people hushed. An anger beyond noise.

  “Damn you,” Chaco said, “get your hand off her! They’re going to kill us!” His body shook again.

  She turned her face towards me. “You don’t know who I am.”

  I stepped backward, stumbling over Alvarados.

  We retreated into the doorway of the bar. “Why did she say that?” I asked Ricardo. Her words had undone me. I felt faint from that condemnation.

  “Say what?” he said. “It was Quechua, wasn’t it? I don’t speak Quechua.” He looked towards Fernando.

  “Me neither.” Fernando looked worried about me.

  “But she spoke Spanish. She told me I have trouble breathing.”

  “No,” Ricardo said. “She spoke Quechua.”

  There was no curse. There was no magic naming. It all never happened. I stood in the doorway, feeling my relief and my loss; my eyes adjusted to the darkness. This bar was a fancy place. Bow windows overlooked the square, but the topmost panes were frosted; the harsh light of the afternoon became something creamier, gentler. Red plush banquettes ran along the sides of the room. The bourgeois of the city, Austrian engineers (waiting for the mines to be returned to those who knew how to run them), Bolivian construction company owners, North American aid officials, UN personnel, talked quietly, drank.