Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

by Jon Lee Anderson

I hope that soon, or if not soon someday, after knowing these and other really democratic countries, Hilda will think like me.

I can only say that this is the way I’ve lived all my life, my mother having the same weakness. So a sloppy house, mediocre food, and a salty mate, if she’s a true companion, is all I want from life.

Maybe a bullet of those so profuse in the Caribbean will end my existence

By now, his Cuban comrades were getting to know the man they called Che well enough to recognize his idiosyncrasies, and one of the personality traits that rubbed many of them the wrong way, at first, was his self-righteousness.

When Jesús Montané’s new wife, the Moncada veteran Melba Hernández, arrived from Havana, he took her to meet Che at the General Hospital. Che took one look at Melba, just off the plane and still dressed up, and told her bluntly that she couldn’t possibly be a revolutionary with so much jewelry on. “Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the surface,” he declared.

He ran around the ruins excitedly, dragging a weary Hilda along behind him. “Ernesto joyfully wanted to climb every temple,” she wrote. “I gave out on the last one, the tallest. I stopped halfway up, partly because I was very tired, and partly because I was worrying about my pregnancy. He kept urging me not to play coy and join him.”

Finally, feeling “tired, impatient, and thoroughly cross,” Hilda refused to budge another step. Undeterred, Ernesto asked someone to snap their picture. In the photograph, a dowdy-looking Hilda glares angrily out from under a Mexican sombrero. At her side, wearing a dark short-sleeved shirt and a Panama hat, Ernesto looks slim, youthful, and thoroughly preoccupied.

His knowledge of Marxism was maturing. Using his old philosophical notebooks as a base, he streamlined them into a single volume. This final cuaderno filosófico, totaling more than 300 typewritten pages, reflects the narrowing of his interests and shows a deepening understanding of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The last entry in the index, on the concept of “I” (yo in Spanish), is attributed to Freud: “There, where love awakens, dies the I, dark despot.”

On February 25, when she was ten days old, he had written to his mother to announce her birth:

“Little Grandmother: The two of us are a little older, or if you consider fruit, a little more mature. The offspring is really ugly,

Over the years, Fidel occasionally alluded to Che’s declarations to the Mexican police in a tone of fond admonishment, citing them as an example of how his late comrade was “honest to a fault.”

At the time, however, Fidel was understandably furious. While Che prattled on about his Marxist convictions, here he was, billing himself as a patriotic reformer in the best Western nationalistic and democratic tradition.

Che’s remarks were extraordinarily reckless, providing Castro’s enemies with just the kind of ammunition they needed.

Che’s absorption with Marxism and revolution now dominated his life. Even at home on visits, he was unrelenting, either delivering sermons to Hilda on “revolutionary discipline” or burying himself in dense books on political economy.

He was even ideological with the baby. He recited the Spanish Civil War poem by Antonio Machado in honor of General Lister to her, and he regularly referred to her as “my little Mao.”

Once, Hilda watched as Ernesto picked up their daughter and told he...

“My dear little daughter, my little Mao, you don’t know what a difficult world you’re going to have to live in. When you grow up this whole continent, and maybe the whole world, will be fighting against the great enemy, Yankee imperialism. You too will have to fight. I...

According to Yuri Paporov, the KGB official who bankrolled the Instituto Cultural Ruso-Mexicano at the time, the money Fidel received was not Prío’s at all, but the CIA’s.

He did not specify his sources for that assertion, but, if true, it would lend weight to reports that the CIA had tried early to win over Castro, just in case he succeeded in his war against the increasingly embattled Batista.

According to Tad Szulc, the CIA did funnel money to his July 26 Movement, but later on, during a period in 1957 and 1958, via an agent attached to the A...

Che had been lucky. His neck wound was only superficial. Although some of his comrades escaped with their lives, over the coming days Batista’s troops summarily executed many of the men they captured, including the wounded and even some of those who had surrendered. The survivors tried desperately to gain refuge in the mountains and, somehow, to find one another.

Of the eighty-two men who came ashore from the Granma, only twenty-two ultimately regrouped in the sierra.†

Che was now emerging as an audacious, even reckless guerrilla fighter. Evidently eager to prove himself and to make up for his sorely felt error of losing his rifle en route from Alegría de Pío, he routinely volunteered for the most dangerous tasks.

During the aerial bombardment on Pico Caracas, when everyone else—including Fidel—ran away, Che stayed behind to pick up stragglers and retrieve abandoned belongings, including weapons and Fidel’s comandante cap.

He was also developing a deep hatred of cowards, an obsession that was soon to be one of his most renowned and feared wartime traits. He disliked one member of the band in particular, “El Gallego” José Morán, a veteran from the Granma whom he suspected of cowardice and viewed as a potential deserter.

Che sought opportunities to mete out punishment as an example to others. When three army spies were detained by the rebels and confessed their true identities, Che was among those who called for their deaths.

Fidel chose to show mercy by sending them back to their barracks with a warning and a personal letter...

worried about Fidel’s toleration of malingerers and insubordinates, Che was gratified when Fidel finally laid down the law at the end of January. From that moment on, Fidel told his men, three crimes would be punisha...

None of the eyewitnesses to Eutimio Guerra’s execution—the first traitor executed by the Cuban rebels—has ever said publicly who fired the fatal shot. It is easy to see why. The answer is to be found in Che’s private diary,

“The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio],” Che wrote, “so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 [-caliber] pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch that was tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: ‘Yank it off, boy, what does it matter. ...’ I did so and his possessions were now mine. We slept badly, wet and I with something of asthma.”

If Che was bothered by the execution, there seemed little sign of it by the next day. In his journal, commenting on the arrival of a pretty July 26 activist at the farm, he wrote: “[She is a] great admirer of the Movement who seems to me to want to fuck more than anything else.”

“The chivato was executed,” Che wrote. “Ten minutes after giving him the shot in the head I declared him dead.”

On the morning of July 22, a rebel accidentally fired his gun and was brought before Fidel, who was in a newly hardened, unforgiving mood, and he summarily ordered the man to be shot. “Lalo, Crescencio, and I had to intercede with him to reduce the sanction,” wrote Che, “because the unfortunate didn’t deserve a punishment as drastic as that.”

As his troops started moving in that direction, one of the men Che had sent after the deserter returned on his own, claiming that his companion had also tried to desert and that he had killed him and left his body unburied.

“I gathered the troop together on the hill facing the spot where this grim event had taken place,” Che wrote later. “I explained to our guerrillas what they were going to see and what it meant. I explained once again why desertion was punishable by death and why anyone who betrayed the revolution must be condemned. We passed silently, in single file, before the body of the man who had tried to abandon his post. Many of the men had never seen death before and were perhaps moved more by personal feelings for the dead man and by political weakness natural at that period than by any disloyalty to the revolution. These were difficult times, and we used this man as an example.”

In his diary at the time, however, Che expressed misgivings. “I am not very convinced of the legality of the death,” he wrote, “although I used it as an example. ... The body was on its stomach, showing at a glance that it had a bullet hole in the left lung and...

Che’s penchant for strict discipline was notorious among the rebels, and there were those who asked to be transferred out of his column.

The last man to die was none other than El Maestro, Che’s skittish companion during his asthma-plagued trek to meet the new volunteers from Santiago. Claiming illness, El Maestro had since left the guerrillas and “dedicated himself to a life of immoralities.” His real crime was passing himself off as Che “the doctor” and attempting to rape a peasant girl who came to him as a patient.

Fidel later talked about these executions with the July 26 journalist Carlos Franqui.

“We lined up very few people before firing squads, very few indeed. During the entire war we did not shoot more than ten guys in twenty-five months,” Fidel said. But as for El Maestro, “He was an orangutan; he grew a huge beard. He was also a born clown and carried loads as though he were Hercules, but he was a bad soldier. ... What stupidity to pretend he was Che, in that area, where we had spent a long time, where everyone knew all of us. ... And now, with the new beard, El Maestro was passing himself off as Che: ‘Bring me women. I’m going to examine them all!’ Did you ever hear of anything so outrageous? We shot him.”

Just as he was preparing the advance, Che received a note from Fidel: “February 16, 1958. CHE: If everything depends on the attack from this side, without support from Camilo and Guillermo [García], I do not think anything suicidal should be done, because there is a risk of many casualties and failure to achieve the objective. I seriously urge you to be careful. You yourself are not to take part in the fighting. That is a strict order. Take charge of leading the men well; that is the most important thing right now. Fidel.”

Later, speaking about Che’s recklessness in battle, Fidel mused that “In a way, he even violated the rules of combat—that is, the ideal norms, the most perfect methods—risking his life in battle because of that character, tenacity, and spirit of his. ... Therefore, we had to lay down certain rules and guidelines for him to follow.”

One he did not accept was Lafferte’s idea that recruits should “swear by God” in their oath of allegiance.

“When the comrades come to the Sierra,” Che told him, “we don’t take into account whether they believe in God or not, so we can’t oblige them to swear by God. For example, I don’t believe, and I am a fighter of the Rebel Army. ... Do you think it’s right to force me to swear an oath to something I don’t believe in?” Lafferte was convinced by Che’s argument: “I was Catholic,” he said, “but I understood the correctness of what he was proposing, and I took God out of the oath.”

Some of the reporters who met Che in the Sierra Maestra came away as admirers and disciples.* One of these was the Uruguayan Carlos María Gutiérrez,

Over the next few days, as he was shown around the base hospital and the shoe factory, Gutiérrez took note of the unusual warmth and camaraderie among Che’s men.

“There were no orders given, nor permissions granted, nor military protocol,” he said. “The guerrillas of La Mesa reflected a discipline that was more intimate, derived from the men’s confidence in their leaders.

Fidel, Che, and the others lived in the same places, ate the same, and at the hour of combat fired fr...

There was another reason why Hilda’s presence in the Sierra Maestra would not be opportune. In the spring of 1958, Che had taken a lover, a young guajira named Zoila Rodríguez.

Che’s adolescent protégé, Joel Iglesias, observed the lightning courtship. “In Las Vegas de Jibacoa, Che met a black girl, or better said a mulata, with a really beautiful body, called Zoila, and he liked her a lot,” Iglesias said.