Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

by Jon Lee Anderson

They observed that, while Ernesto conducted himself admirably on top of the pliant maid, he periodically interrupted his lovemaking to suck on his asthma inhaler. The spectacle had them in stitches and remained a source of amusement for years afterward. But Ernesto was un-perturbed, and his sessions with La Negra continued as a regular pastime.

“He read voraciously, devouring the library of his parents,” Aguilar recalled. “From Freud to Jack London, mixed with Neruda, Horacio Quiroga, and Anatole France, even an abbreviated edition of Das Kapital in which he made observations in tiny letters.” Ernesto found the dense Marxist tome incomprehensible, however. Years later, he confessed to his wife in Cuba that he “hadn’t understood a thing” in his early readings of Marx and Engels.

At one lunch, between servings, Saravia watched in astonishment from his place in the dining room as Ernesto had quick sex with the mucama on the kitchen table, which was visible through open doors directly behind their unsuspecting aunt’s back. When he was finished, Ernesto returned to the dining room and continued eating, his aunt none the wiser. “He was like a rooster,” Saravia observed. “He mated and then continued with his other functions.”

Apart from his moneymaking enterprises, Ernesto began conducting medical experiments at home. For a time, he kept on his bedroom balcony caged rabbits and guinea pigs, which he injected with cancer-causing agents. He also practiced, although with less lethal ingredients, on his friends. Carlos Figueroa allowed himself to be injected by Ernesto one day, and when he swelled up in reaction to the shot, Ernesto happily exclaimed, “That was the reaction I was expecting!” and then gave him another injection to alleviate the symptoms.

María del Carmen “Chichina” Ferreyra

“Education is the capacity to confront the situations posed by life.”

“I fall on my knees, trying to find a solution, a truth, a motive. To think that I was born to love, that I wasn’t born to sit permanently in front of a desk asking myself whether man is good, because I know man is good, since I have rubbed elbows with him in the country, in the factory, in the logging camp, in the mill, in the city. To think that he is physically healthy, that he has a spirit of cooperation, that he is young and vigorous like a billy goat but he sees himself excluded from the panorama: that is anguish. ... To make a sterile sacrifice that does nothing to raise up a new life: that is anguish.”

In the jailhouse of the ski resort of Bariloche, Ernesto opened a letter from Chichina informing him that she had decided not to wait for him. A storm raged outside. “I read and reread the incredible letter. Just like that, all my dreams ... came crashing down. ... I began to feel afraid for myself and to write a weepy letter, but I couldn’t, it was useless to try.” The romance was over. Evidently she had begun seeing someone else.

The gullible doctors told them about Chile’s only leper colony. It was on Easter Island, which was also, the Chilean doctors assured them, home to hordes of sensuous, pliant women. Ernesto and Alberto immediately resolved to add the leper colony to their ambitious itinerary, and they extracted a letter of recommendation to the Society of Friends of Easter Island in Valparaiso.

While waiting for a ride in the arid desert mountains halfway to the mine, Ernesto and Alberto met a marooned couple. As hours passed and the Andean night fell in all its harsh coldness, they talked. He was a miner, just released from prison, where he had been held for striking. He was lucky, he told them. Other comrades had disappeared after their arrests and had presumably been murdered. But as a member of the outlawed Chilean Communist Party, he was unable to find work, and so, with his wife, who had left their children with a charitable neighbor, he was headed for a sulfur mine deep in the mountains. There, he explained, working conditions were so bad that no questions about political allegiances were asked.

Ernesto wrote at length about this encounter. “By the light of the single candle which illuminated us ... the contracted features of the worker gave off a mysterious and tragic air. ... The couple, frozen stiff in the desert night, hugging one another, were a live representation of the proletariat of any part of the world. They didn’t even have a miserable blanket to cover themselves, so we gave them one of ours, and with the other, Alberto and I covered ourselves as best we could. It was one of the times when I felt the most cold, but it was also the time when I felt a little more in fraternity with this, for me, strange human species.”

Here were the shivering flesh-and-blood victims of capitalist exploitation. Ernesto and Alberto had momentarily shared their lives—equally cold and hungry, equally tired and stranded. Yet he and Alberto were traveling for their own pleasure, while the other two...

The next day, July 17, they reached Caracas, a bustling city rich from the country’s oil boom and swollen with migrants. Ernesto had rarely been around black people. They were a rarity in Argentina but common on South America’s Caribbean coast, and after meandering through a Caracas barrio, he made observations that were rather stereotypical and reflected white, especially Argentine, arrogance and condescension.

“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: the Portuguese,” he wrote. “The two races now share a common experience, fraught with bickering and squabbling. Discrimination and poverty unite them in a daily battle for survival but their different attitudes to life separate them completely: the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”

Ernesto senior offered to call Dr. Pisani. Ernesto refused. Some time passed; his father waited by his side, watching his son closely. “All of a sudden he made me a sign and, when I drew near, he told me to call a hospital to bring him a cardiac stimulant immediately, and to call Dr. Pisani,” Ernesto Guevara Lynch recalled.

Within minutes of Ernesto senior’s call, Pisani and a nurse arrived, and Pisani took charge of the situation, staying alone with Ernesto for several hours. When he left, he told the family to buy certain medicines and ordered complete rest for the paitent.

“Something undulating and with a maw has crossed my path,” he wrote in his diary. “We’ll see.”

Marta Pinilla,

However, he told her jokingly, in the eight days they were there, Ernesto “bathed once and by mutual agreement, for health purposes only.”

Some comic relief came at a rest stop where he and Calica climbed down the hillside for a swim in the cold waters of the Río Abancay. Stark naked, Ernesto took a special delight in leaping up and down to wave to the shocked female passengers on the road above.

“I stayed outside with a negrita, Socorro, whom I’d picked up, more whorish than a hen with sixteen years on her back.” Seasoned mariner that he was, Ernesto was unaffected by seasickness, and spent the next two days romping with the pliant Socorro.

After docking at Puntarenas, he said good-bye to her, and he and Gualo headed inland for the Costa Rican capital of San José.

This firm had a client, the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, which acted as the financial adviser to the International Railways of Central America (IRCA). Most of Guatemala’s railways were owned by IRCA before they were sold to United Fruit in a deal handled by John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles had been a director of the Schroder Bank, which was used by the CIA to launder funds for covert operations. There were other cozy relationships with United Fruit. For instance, the family of the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, John Moors Cabot, owned interests in United Fruit. President Eisenhower’s personal secretary was the wife of the company’s public relations director. With such friends, United Fruit could afford to throw its weight around.

Although it remained mostly concealed beneath his aloof exterior, by the time he arrived in Guatemala, Ernesto seems to have undergone a political conversion—

Ernesto writes that he was in “a mountain village under a cold star-filled night sky.” A great blackness surrounded him, and a man was there with him, lost in the darkness, visible only by the whiteness of his four front teeth.

Then, with the same rascally boy’s smile which always accompanied him, accentuating the disparity of his four front incisors, he let slip:

“‘All of them, all the unadaptable ones, you and I, for example, will die cursing the power they, with enormous sacrifice, helped to create. ... In its impersonality, the revolution will take their lives, and even use their memory as an example or a domesticating instrument for the youth who will come after them. My sin is greater, because I, more subtle and with more experience, call it what you wish, will die knowing that my sacrifice is due only to an obstinacy which symbolizes the rotten civilization that is crumbling.’”

“‘You will die with your fist clenched and jaw tense, in perfect demonstration of hate and of combat, because you are not a symbol (something inanimate taken as an example), you are an authentic member of a society which is crumbling: the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves in your actions; you are as useful as I am, but you don’t know how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.’”

In spite of his words, I now knew ... I will be with the people, and I know it because I see it etched in the night that I, the eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or trenches, will bathe my weapon in blood and, mad with fury, will slit the throat of any enemy who falls into my hands.

“And I see, as if an enormous tiredness shoots down my recent exaltation, how I die as a sacrifice to the genuine revolution of individual will, pronouncing the exemplary mea culpa. I feel my nostrils dilated, tasting the acrid smell of gunpowder and of blood, of the dead enemy; now my body contorts, ready for the fight, and I prepare my being as if it were a sacred place so that in it the bestial howling of the triumphant proletariat can resonate with new vibrations and new hopes.”

This passage reveals the extraordinarily passionate—and melodramatic—impulses at work in Ernesto Guevara at the age of twenty-five. Powerful and vio...

On December 10, while still in San José, he had sent an update of his journey to his aunt Beatriz.

For the first time, his ideological convictions made a marked appearance in his personal correspondence.

“My life has been a sea of found resolutions until I bravely abandoned my baggage and, backpack on my shoulder, set out with el compañero García on the sinuous trail that has brought us here. Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible the capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capita...

Ernesto argued back that given present circumstances in Latin America, no party that participated in elections could remain revolutionary.

For a revolution to succeed, a head-on confrontation with Yankee imperialism was unavoidable.

At the same time, he was critical of the Communist parties, which he felt had moved away from the working masses by engaging in tactical alliances with the right.

Ricardo Rojo was also involved in the discussions, and he and Ernesto argued incessantly. “Guevara would tell about his great sympathy for the achievements of the revolution in the Soviet Union, while Rojo and I frequently interposed objections,” Hilda wrote.

“But I admired the [Soviet] revolution, while Rojo deprecated it with superficial arguments. Once after one of these discussions, while they were taking me home, the discussion started again and promptly became bitter. The subject was always the same. The only way, said Ernesto, was a violent revolution; the struggle had to be against Yankee imperialism and any other solutions ... were betrayals.

Rojo argued strongly that the electoral process did offer a solution. The discussion became more heate...

While Ernesto and his friends debated political theory, the Central Intelligence Agency was well along in its plans to bury Guatemala’s b...

At the end of January, the covert campaign was unmasked when correspondence between Castillo Armas, Trujillo, and Somoza detailing their machinations in alliance with a “government to the North” was leaked. The Arbenz government promptly made the news public and demanded an explanation from the “government to the North” (the United States).

In a letter of February 2 to his father, Ernesto wrote, “Politically, things aren’t going so well because at any moment a coup is suspected under the patronage of your friend Ike.”

Hilda called upon Ernesto at his boardinghouse. She found him waiting for her in the downstairs lobby, in the grip of an asthma attack. “It was the first time I had seen him or anyone else suffering from an acute attack of asthma, and I was shocked by the tremendous difficulty with which he breathed and by the deep wheeze that came from his chest. I hid my concern by insisting that he lie down;

I did as he said and watched him as he applied an injection of adrenaline.

Trying to conceal how much I had been touched by all this, I conversed about everything and anything, all the while thinking what a shame it was that a man of such value who could do so much for society, so intelligent and so generous, had to suffer such an affliction; if I were in his place I would shoot myself. I decided right there to stick by him without, of course, getting involved emotionally.”

Julia Mejía.

The Petén puts me face-to-face with my asthma problem and myself, and I believe I need it. I have to triumph without help and I believe I can do it, but it also seems to me that the triumph will be more the work of my natural aptitudes—which are greater than my subconscious beliefs—than the faith I put in them.”

The Petén was a humid jungle region that would undoubtedly be terrible for his health, yet it was also the right setting for him to implement his plan to be a revolutionary doctor.

His asthma had come to symbolize the malignant shackles of heredity that he was in the process of rejecting. He wished to form a new identity, to reforge himself as a revolutionary, to vanquish once and for all the limitations he had been born with.