Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

by Jon Lee Anderson

“We have to create another Vietnam in the Americas with its ...

Starting the war and spreading it to neighboring nations were the first two stages of his plan. In the third stage, wars in South America would draw in the North Americans. This would benefit the guerrillas by giving their campaigns a nationalistic hue; as in Vietnam, they would be fighting against a foreign invader. And by deploying forces in Latin America, the United States would be more dispersed and, ultimately, weaker on all fronts, in Bolivia as well as in Vietnam. Finally, the spreading conflagrations would lead China an...

To Che, what happened in Bolivia was to be no less than the opening shot in a new world war that would determine whether the plan...

On December 31, Tania accompanied Monje to Ñancahuazú, and at long last the two rivals had their showdown. They sat in the forest to talk. Two very poor photographs have survived as evidence of the encounter. In one, Che lies on the ground, looking archly towar...

Rafael Segarra, a Communist Party official in Santa Cruz, said that Monje stopped to see him on the return trip from Ñancahuazú. “The shit’s going to hit the fan,” Monje warned. “This thing is going ahead and either we bury it or it’ll bury all of us.” He urged Segarra to lie low or to disappear. In the coming days, Monje gave the same advice to Party people everywhere.

Thirty years after the event, Che’s widow, Aleida, still considered Monje—“ese índio feo” (that ugly Indian)—the man who betrayed her husband.

The meeting between Che and Monje had culminated in disaster, and Che’s tactlessness had played as great a part in the unhappy ending as had Monje’s duplicity and indecision. The die was cast. As of January 1, 1967, Che and his two dozen fighters were, to all intents and purposes, on their own.

These details weren’t discussed, but it didn’t sound realistic to Bustos. “It was like something magical,” he said. “Out of this world.”

The Americans were now directly involved in Bolivia. The interior minister, Antonio Arguedas, was already on the CIA’s payroll.* Working closely with him was a Cuban-American agent who operated under the name of Gabriel García García and who was present during some of the interrogations of Debray and Bustos.

After the news of Che’s presence in Bolivia broke, a group of American Special Forces Green Berets arrived in Bolivia to create a counterinsurgency Rangers Battalion, and the CIA began interviewing men on its payroll for a new mission: to find Che and stop him from getting a foothold in Bolivia.

One of those interviewed was Felix Rodríguez, the young Cuban-American CIA paramilitary operative who had been with the CIA’s covert anti-Castro program since the beginning. He had been working for its Mia...

Until the summer of 1967, the CIA had been frustrated regarding the issue of Che’s whereabouts. “As I remember it,” Rodríguez said, “there were some high-ups in the Agency who had reported that Che had been killed in Africa, and so ... when people started saying he was...

When the evidence was confirmed by Debray that he was there, that’s when they really decided to move forward and put out a maximum effort in Bolivia.” (According to Rodríguez, the CIA would have moved more quickly if not for the “Congo” theory, and he attributed this to the fact that the man who def...

Would Rodríguez be willing to go on the mission? Rodríguez immediately said yes. It was the mission of his life, and Rodríguez knew it. He also knew that the Agency had given it a high priority. “It feared [what might happen if] Che grabbed Bolivia,” he recalled.

In a litany of the qualities that would be required for this battle, he cited hatred as a prime element: “a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us above and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to, and transforming him into an effective, violent, seductive, and cold killing machine.

Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ears and another hand may be extended to wield our weapon and other men may be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

Apocalyptic language had been present in Che’s manifestos before, but this one, which synthesized his true convictions implacably, was all the more chilling and dramatic for the fact that everyone knew Che was somewhere in the battlefield, trying to do exactly what he proposed: sparking another—and he hoped definitive—world war.

By August, Che was sick and exhausted, and so were many of the two dozen men still with him. On August 7, the nine-month anniversary of the guerrilla army’s birth, he noted, “Of the [original] six men, two are dead, one has disappeared, two are wounded, and I with a case of asthma that I am unable to control.”

Another time, after capturing a policeman posing as a merchant, who had been sent out to spy on them, Che considered killing him but let him go with a “severe warning.”

Already sick and emaciated, Che had begun suffering from asthma in late June, with no medicine to treat it. Once, he became so ill with vomiting and diarrhea that he lost consciousness and had to be carried in a hammock for a day; when he awoke, he found he had defecated all over himself.

Che had reverted to his nonbathing Chancho days. On September 10, he would record a historic moment. “I almost forgot to mention that I took a bath today, the first in six months. It is a record that many others are attaining.”

They left town with ten soldiers as hostages and, after stripping them of their clothes, left them at the roadside.

Reading these passages, one can’t help concluding that Che had become strangely detached from his own plight, an interested witness to his inexorable march toward death. He was breaking every rule sacred to guerrilla warfare: moving in the open without precise intelligence about what lay ahead, without the support of the peasants, and knowing that the army was aware of his approach.*

“Colonel, I have a very bad memory, I don’t remember and don’t even know how to respond to your question.”

“Are you Cuban or Argentine?” asked Selich. “I am Cuban, Argentine, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc. ... You understand.”

Rodríguez realized that he could stall no longer and went back into the schoolhouse. He entered Che’s room and announced that he was sorry, he had done everything in his power, but orders had come from the Bolivian high command.

Che’s face turned momentarily white, and he said, “It is better like this. ... I never should have been captured alive.”

Rodríguez asked if he had any messages for his family, and Che told him to “tell Fidel that he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America. ... And tell...

At that, Rodríguez said, he stepped forward to embrace Che. “It was a tremendously emotional moment for me. I no longer hated him. His moment of truth had come, and he was conducting himself like a...

man had already responded to Major Ayoroa’s request for an executioner, a tough-looking little sergeant named Mario Terán, who waited expectantly outside. Rodríguez looked at Terán and saw that his face shone as if he had been drinking. He had been in the firefight with Che’s band the day before and ...

“I told him not to shoot Che in the face, but from the neck down,” Rodríguez said. Che’s wounds had to appear as though they had been inflicted in battle. There was to be no evidence of an execution when the body was displayed to the press. “I walked up the hill and began making notes,” Rodr...

“I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.” Terán hesitated, then pointed his semiautomatic rifle and pulled the trigger, hitting Che in the arms and legs. As Che writhed on the ground, biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out, Terán fired another burst. The fatal bullet entered Che’s thorax, filling his lungs with blood. On October 9, 1967, at the age of thirty-nine, Che Guevara was dead.

Rodríguez was back in the United States for debriefings with his bosses at the CIA. He had brought some relics from his trip, among them one of several Rolex watches found in Che’s possession, and Che’s last pouch of pipe tobacco, half-smoked, which he had wrapped in paper. Later, he would put the tobacco inside a glass bubble set into the butt of his favorite revolver.

The strangest legacy of all, though, was the shortness of breath he developed soon after arriving in Vallegrande. “As I walked in the cool mountain air I realized that I was wheezing, and that it was becoming hard to breathe,” Rodríguez wrote twenty-five years later. “Che may have been dead, but somehow his asthma—a condition I had never had in my life—had attached itself to me. To this day, my chronic shortness of breath is a constant reminder of Che and his last hours alive in the tiny town of La Higuera.”

To counter the initial reactions of disbelief coming out of Havana, General Alfredo Ovando Candía wanted to decapitate Che and preserve the head as evidence. Felix Rodríguez, who was still in Vallegrande when this solution was proposed, claimed to have argued that it was “too barbaric,” and suggested that they just sever a finger.

Ovando Candía compromised: they would amputate Che’s hands. On the night of October 10, two wax death masks were made of Che’s face, and his fingerprints were taken; his hands were sawed off and placed in jars of formaldehyde.

A pair of Argentine police forensic experts arrived to compare the fingerprints with those on file in Buenos Aires for Ernesto Guevara de la ...

After his brother’s death, Roberto was radicalized, and both he and Juan Martín became active in a “Guevarist” Argentine guerrilla movement.

The den of his house in suburban Miami was filled with the necromantic talismans and ornaments of his long career as a CIA hireling: framed in glass, the brassiere he confiscated from a Salvadoran female guerrilla comandante he once captured; grenades; rifles; honorary plaques and diplomas from numerous counter-insurgency forces; a letter from the first President Bush thanking him for services rendered.

The largest space on Rodríguez’s crowded wall was occupied by the framed portrait of him standing next to the wounded, doomed Che Guevara. He also showed me a photo album filled with gruesome pictures of dead bodies, including those of Che and Tania.

Che’s unshakable faith in his beliefs was made even more powerful by his unusual combination of romantic passion and coldly analytical thought. This paradoxical blend was probably the secret of the near-mystical stature he acquired, but it seems also to have been the source of his inherent weaknesses—hubris and naïveté.

Gifted at perceiving and calculating strategy on a grand scale, yet at a remove, he seemed incapable of seeing the small, human elements that made up the larger picture, as evidenced by his disastrous choice of Masetti to lead the Argentine foco.

“Toward the end, Che knew what was coming, and he prepared himself for an exemplary death. We would have preferred him to remain alive, with us here in Cuba, but the truth is that his death helped us tremendously. It’s unlikely we would have had all the revolutionary solidarity we have had over the years if it weren’t for Che dying the way he did.”

The preponderant role of North America in Chile’s economy continued until 1970, when Salvador Allende became the hemisphere’s first popularly elected socialist president. One of Allende’s first acts was to nationalize the mines. North American influence in Chile did not lessen, however. Within three years, Allende’s government was overthrown in a military coup backed by the United States.

It appeared to be largely unabridged, except for several sexually graphic passages that she acknowledged having deleted in the interest of preserving the “propriety” of her late husband’s image.

In August, Castillo Armas finally allowed Arbenz to leave for Mexico, but reserved a special humiliation for him at the airport, where he was jeered and then, at customs, forced to strip off his clothing in public.

In fact, Ernesto’s position was more precarious than he realized, since the CIA had already begun a file on him. As Peter Grose, the author of a courteous biography of the CIA director Allen Dulles (Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, Houghton Mifflin, 1994), wrote:

“Sorting through the files of the fallen Arbenz regime in Guatemala a few weeks after the coup, David Atlee Phillips came across a single sheet of paper about a twenty-five-year-old Argentine physician who had arrived in town the previous January to study medical care amid social revolution. ‘Should we start a file on this one?’ his assistant asked. The young doctor, it seemed, had tried to organize a last-ditch resistance by Arbenz loyalists; then he had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy, eventually moving on to Mexico. ‘I guess we’d better have a file on him,’ Phillips replied.

Over the coming years the file for Ernesto Guevara, known as ‘Che,’ became one of the thickest i...