Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

by Jon Lee Anderson

“Hilda declared her love in epistolary and practical form. I was very sick or I might have fucked her. I warned her that all I could offer her was a casual contact, nothing definitive. She seemed very embarrassed. The little letter she left me upon leaving is very good. Too bad she is so ugly. She is twenty-seven.”

The political pressure on Guatemala was intensifying. In March, at the Tenth Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States held in Caracas, John Foster Dulles had twisted enough arms to obtain a majority resolution effectively justifying armed intervention in any member state that was “dominated by Communism” and that therefore constituted a “hemispheric threat.” Only Mexico and Argentina withheld their votes. Guatemala, the target of the resolution, was the only state to vote against it.

The Eisenhower administration now pressed its advantage. The CIA’s military training of Guatemalan exiles was well under way on one of Somoza’s ranches in Nicaragua. Mercenary pilots and a couple of dozen planes had been smuggled into Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Panama Canal Zone for use in the coming attack. Psychological warfare operatives were busy preparing taped recordings for propaganda and disinformation broadcasts, printing leaflets to be air-dropped over Guatemala, and buying up Soviet-issue weapons to be planted in Guatemala at the right moment as “evidence” of Soviet involvement with Arbenz.

But he couldn’t leave. He had no money.

He paid off part of his pension bill with some of Hilda’s jewelry, but he still owed several months’ rent.

“I pawned my watch, a gold chain, and a ring stone of Hilda’s, and promised a gold ring—also Hilda’s,” he wrote.

Ernesto was thrilled at being under fire for the first time. In a letter to his mother, he confessed to “feeling a little ashamed for having as much fun as a monkey.” When he watched people run in the streets during the aerial bombardments, a “magic sensation of invulnerability” made him “lick his lips with pleasure.” He was awed by the violence.

“Even the light bombings have their grandeur,” he wrote. “I watched one go against a target relatively close to where I was. You could see the plane get bigger by the moment while from the wings intermittent little tongues of fire came out and you could hear the sound of its machine gun and the light machine guns that fired back at it. All of a sudden it stayed suspended in the air, horizontal, and then made a rapid dive, and you could feel the shaking of the earth from the bomb.”

Amid the political upheaval, he and Hilda continued their cat-and-mouse romance. She sent him some verses she’d written in which she spoke “stupidities,” as he called them. “What is happening to her,” he wrote in his diary, “is a mixture of calculation to win me over, fictive imagination, and the sense of honor of a free woman affronted by my indifference. I sent her a little animaloid verse:

Surrender yourself like the birds do, I’ll take you like the bears do, and, maybe, I’ll kiss you slowly So I can feel like a man, I who am a dove.

“I gave her a new ultimatum, but the abundance of these meant that it didn’t have much effect. What did affect her was that I confessed about the fuck with the...

The Dulles brothers were also demanding that Castillo Armas arrest suspected Communists and their suspected sympathizers who remained in the country.

Secretary Dulles insisted that Castillo Armas go after the estimated 700 asylum seekers in the foreign embassies. “Dulles feared that they might ‘recirculate’ throughout the hemisphere if they were allowed to leave Guatemala,” wrote the authors of

Bitter Fruit,

the authoritative account of the overth...

“His fear soon became an obsession. ... Early in July, he told Puerifoy to instruct the new regime to bring ‘criminal charges’ against ‘Communist’ refugees as a way ...

Castillo Armas resisted, apparently feeling that such a breach of international norms would be going too far, even for him.

In early August he began approving safe-conduct visas for most of the refugees at the embassies.

In the end, John Foster Dulles’s instincts about the political exiles would prove correct. Besides Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a host of future revolutionaries had escaped his grasp in Guatemala. In Mexico and elsewhere, they would regroup and, from the ashes of the Arbenz debacle, eventually emerge—often with Guevara’s help—as the Marxist guerrillas who would haunt American policy makers for the next forty years.

The political and the creative worlds had always intermingled in Mexico City, which had been the site of some infamous assassinations—of the Cuban Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella in 1929 and of Leon Trotsky in 1940. Modotti was Mella’s lover. Kahlo had had an affair with Trotsky. The muralist Siqueiros had led an attack with machine guns against Trotsky’s home before the Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader achieved grisly success with an ice pick.

few events are more emblematic of its passage than the last public appearance made by Frida Kahlo, on July 2, 1954. It was a cold, damp day, and the pneumonia-stricken artist left her bed to join a protest against the overthrow of Arbenz by the CIA. Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, pushed her wheelchair through the streets to the rally, which was held outside the pantheon of Mexican culture, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There, for four long hours, Kahlo joined in the crowd’s cries of “Gringos Asesinos, fuera!” and held aloft her glittering, ring-festooned hands. In her left hand was a banner depicting a dove of peace. Her clenched right fist was raised in defiance. Eleven days later, at the age of forty-seven, she died.

Ernesto was convinced that the American intervention in Guatemala was merely the first skirmish in what would be a global confrontation between the United States and Communism,

She had evidently inquired about job prospects in Mexico, for he wrote, “Stay there without thinking nonsense about other countries, because the storm is coming, and although it might not be atomic it’ll be the other, that of hunger, and Argentina will be one of the less affected because it depends less on the friend to the north.”

Hilda Gadea reentered his life. Just after Ernesto’s departure from Guatemala, Hilda had been rearrested, jailed overnight, and sent under escort to the Mexican border. After a few days, she had been smuggled into Mexico by her own guards, for a fee. After being stranded in the border town of Tapachula for eight days, waiting to be granted political asylum by the Mexican government, she made her way to Mexico City and to Ernesto.

Ernesto’s thoughts and actions since their parting had not been those of a concerned lover. Upon hearing that she was marooned at the border, he commented laconically in his diary, “Hilda is in Mexico in Tapachula and it isn’t known in what condition.”

A month later, in December, he wrote to his mother again, apparently in response to her alarm over his declaration of intent to eventually join the Communist Party.

The way in which the gringos treat America had been provoking a growing indignation in me, but at the same time I studied the theory behind the reasons for their actions and I found it scientific.

What he had seen in Guatemala had added weight to his convictions, he wrote, and at some moment he had begun to believe. “At what moment I left the path of reason and took on something akin to faith, I can’t tell you even approximately because the path was very long and with a lot of backward steps.” There it was. If his family hadn’t had enough prior warning, Ernesto had now declared himself and described his conversion. He was a Communist.

His relationship with Hilda had had its ups and downs but reached a comfortable plateau early in 1955. This appears to have had less to do with any reconciliation over their basic differences than the fact that Ernesto needed her for the occasional loan and, as he wrote in his diary, to satisfy his “urgent need for a woman who will fuck.” By now, he knew her well enough to realize she was always available for both.

Then, in April, over the Easter weekend, the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, visited Havana and met with Batista. Dulles successfully urged Batista to open a special police intelligence bureau to deal with Communist encroachment in the hemisphere. The result, largely funded and advised by the CIA, was the Buro de Represión a las Actividades Comunistas (BRAC). Soon enough, its activities were to earn it a sinister reputation.

Ironically, neither Dulles nor the CIA’s station chief in Havana had Fidel Castro in mind when they proposed the creation of BRAC. In May, Fidel, his brother Raúl, and the eighteen other moncadistas incarcerated with them on the Isle of Pines were granted their freedom. Batista described his ill-advised amnesty as a goodwill gesture in honor of Mother’s Day.

In the summer of 1955, Ernesto noted an event in his diary: “A political occurrence is having met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary, a young man, intelligent, very sure of himself and of extraordinary audacity; I think there is a mutual sympathy between us.”

Their encounter took place a few days after Castro’s arrival in Mexico on July 7. Ernesto met him at María Antonia’s apartment at 49 Calle Emparán. After talking for a while, Ernesto, Fidel, and Raúl went to dinner together at a restaurant down the block. Several hours later, Fidel invited Ernesto to join his guerrilla movement. Ernesto accepted on the spot.

Che, as the Cubans had begun calling him, was to be their doctor. It was the early days—Fidel was a long way from putting together his ambitious scheme—but it w...

Ángel Castro gave his bright, rebellious third son (the offspring of his second marriage, to Lina Ruz, the family’s cook) the best education money could buy. He went to the Marist-run Dolores primary school in Santiago, was a boarder at Havana’s exclusive Jesuit Colegio Belén high school, and attended law school at Havana University. Intensely competitive and hot-tempered, Fidel acquired a reputation as a gun-toting rabble-rouser on the volatile university campus.

Even before the attack on the Moncada barracks he had been linked to two shootings—one of a policeman—but had successfully avoided arrest in both cases.

Fidel had probably always thought of himself as Cuba’s future leader. At school, he fought to become the undisputed leader of his peers, whether by coming in first in a poetry competition in grade school, becoming captain of the basketball team at Colegio Belén, or winning recognition in student politics at Havana University. At the age of twelve, he sent a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to congratulate him on his third inauguration as president and to ask him for a dollar.

These traits pointed up a major distinction between him and the man who would later stand at his right side. For Ernesto Guevara, politics represented a mechanism for social change, and it was social change, not power itself, that impelled him. If he had insecurities, they were not social. He lacked the chip on his shoulder that Castro wore and had converted into a source of strength. His own family were blue bloods, however bankrupt, and he had grown up with the social confidence and sense of privilege that come from knowing one’s heritage. The Guevaras may have been black sheep within Argentine society, but they were still society. However much Ernesto sought to reject his birthright and to sever his family links, he was indelibly imprinted by them.

Although Ernesto certainly had a robust ego, it did not compare to that of Fidel Castro. In large groups, where Ernesto tended to hang back, observe, and listen, Castro was compelled to take over and be recognized as the authority on whatever topic was under discussion, from history and politics to animal husbandry.

Taller than average, with Brylcreemed hair and a small mustache that didn’t suit him, Fidel had the well-fed look of a man used to pampering himself. And he was. He loved food and liked to cook. When he was in prison he wrote letters to friends describing in detail and with relish the meals he had whipped up. Ernesto, who was two years younger, was both shorter and slighter, with the pallor and dark dramatic eyes associated with a stage actor or poet. In many ways, their physiques reflected their personality differences.

Despite their many differences, Ernesto and Fidel shared some traits. Both were favored boys from large families, extremely spoiled, careless about their appearance, and sexually voracious. For both of them, relationships came in second to personal goals.

Both were imbued with Latin machismo. They believed in the innate weakness of women, were contemptuous of homosexuals, and admired brave men of action. Both possessed an iron will and a larger-than-life sense of purpose. And finally, both wanted to carry out a revolution.

And if Fidel was not yet as convinced as Ernesto that socialism was the correct course to follow, he exhibited sympathy for the same goals. It would be up to those close to him, including Ernesto Guevara, to ensure that Fidel Castro’s revolution followed a socialist course.

“Ñico was right in Guatemala when he told us that if Cuba had produced anything good since Martí it was Fidel Castro,” Ernesto told Hilda not long after meeting Fidel. “He will make the revolution. We are in complete accord. ... It’s only someone like him I could go all out for.”

He admitted that Fidel’s scheme of landing a boatful of guerrillas on Cuba’s well-defended coasts was a “crazy idea,” but he f...

Ernesto asked Hilda and Lucila to prepare a dinner for Fidel, and to invite Laura de Albizu Campos and Juan Juarbe as well.

That night, Castro displayed three of the traits he was to become famous for: his propensity to keep others waiting interminably, his tremendous personal charisma, and his ability to pontificate for hours on end.

Lucila took offense at the long delay and went to her room, but Hilda waited patiently and was suitably impressed. “He was young, ... light of complexion, and tall, about six feet two inches, and solidly built,” she wrote. “He could very well have been a handsome bourgeois tourist. When he talked, however, his eyes shone with passion and revolutionary zeal, and one could see why he could command the attention of listeners. He...

It seems much more likely that he was pondering the dilemma he faced with her. He had decided to marry her—it was, after all, the honorable thing to do—but he wrote in his journal, “For another guy it would be transcendental; for me it is an uncomfortable episode. I am going to have a child and I will marry Hilda in a few days. The thing had dramatic moments for her and heavy ones for me. In the end, she gets her way—the way I see it, for a short while, although she hopes it will be lifelong.”

Marriage could not have come at a worse moment for a man who had always resisted domesticity and who had just found a cause and a leader to follow. Nonetheless, Ernesto went through with it, and on August 18, he and Hilda were married at the civil registrar’s office in the little town of Tepozotlán on the capital’s outskirts.