Killing Che Read online

  The trail leveled for a hundred yards and he walked steadily until it rose again, carrying him closer to the gloaming sky. Around him in the forest, birds sang and cackled as they settled to roost. The rain stopped and he walked steadily for an hour more, his shirt and pants drying as he moved. Guevara had few emotions about this war, except that it was unavoidable.

  Guevara asked much of himself and often too much of those around him. High expectations came easily to a man who had accomplished nearly everything he attempted. His life meant work, the daily routine of guard rotation, feeding and training the men, reconnoitering the terrain around them, and preparing for the day when combat would open on a broad front. Some might have pitied him over the obligation of this work, the austerity of the reward, but in his heart, Guevara was happy. This life had come to him because he chose it. If he could be young forever, if he could never age beyond this moment, this was the life he would have chosen. His place was in the vanguard, and revolution, guerra extrema, was his profession. His rifle, an American-made M2 carbine, was light in his hand. He carried it as naturally as a businessman would carry an umbrella. His rifle was the lever with which he planned to move the world.

  Once, for him, the tool had been medicine.

  It seemed a million years ago that he had studied to become a physician. The young man who wanted to be a doctor was a stranger to him now. He did not regret leaving medicine; nor did he see that his life had ricocheted through an unending cycle of enthusiasms, disenchantments, and departures. After graduation from medical school, Guevara had sold his few possessions and meandered north, through Chile and Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. As far north as Miami. He wandered south again, crisscrossing Central America. In Guatemala, in the time just before the CIA’s coup d’état in 1954, Guevara became the lover of Hilda Gadea. He thought of her now, a short, curvaceous woman with strong opinions and a quick smile. Hilda was mestiza and an ardent Communist. Guevara remembered Hilda as many things, teacher, nurse, and the architect of his political awakening. It was Hilda who lent him books by Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao. When she became pregnant, Guevara gallantly insisted that they marry. She at first refused, but he would not take no for an answer. Though their marriage would be short and without passion, Guevara had done what he thought was proper. This would be the last act of his life motivated by bourgeois sensibility.

  Guevara recalled an aimless time, and then the couple drifted to Mexico. Hilda bore them a daughter whom they named Hilda Beatríz. The little girl, dark-eyed and serious, had never seemed real to Guevara. Nor had his marriage. At a time when most men would settle into the role of father, he knew that his pilgrimage was just beginning. In Mexico City, he met Fidel Castro, the leader of a ragtag band of Cuban exiles. Even now Guevara felt that their meeting was the most momentous event of his life.

  Guevara was nicknamed Che by the Cubans, from an expression that peppered the Argentine patois—a salutation roughly analogous to “Hey, buddy.” With no military training and little political development, Guevara knew he was an unlikely combatant. He understood that Castro had admitted him into the ranks because he was a physician. Guevara trained and hardened his body. Nine months after he became a father, he bade Hilda and his daughter goodbye, expecting never to see them again. Of the eighty men to land in Cuba with Fidel Castro, Guevara was one of only ten to survive the first month of combat. A reputation for valor soon attached itself to him. He rose to the rank of comandante, the highest distinction given to guerrilla commanders. Ernesto Guevara was then twenty-seven years old.

  It was eight years ago that the dictator Fulgencio Batista had slithered aboard an airplane and ignominiously fled Cuba. The guerrillas had closed on Havana as Batista escaped, and the edifice of dictatorship flew to pieces before them. The joy of the people was indescribable. Guevara entered Havana and rode with Castro in a jeep that was soon filled with flowers. A hundred thousand men and women lined the streets, and their raw joy thrilled Guevara. That afternoon was etched into memory: The revolution had triumphed. No man was more astonished than Che Guevara.

  When death would not embrace him, Guevara again wanted life and its pleasures. Despite a frugal streak, he lived fully. He had charisma, great responsibilities, and power. Everywhere he went, there was the fawning, obsequious attention of women. He was not immune to their charms, and no man is untouched by flattery. Guevara fell in love with a beautiful blond revolutionary, Aleida March. Their affair was passionate, and Guevara wrote her poetry. She would become his second wife. The days and months following the victory were even now a blur to him. He was made military governor of La Cabana prison, where a revolutionary tribunal judged Batista’s henchmen and officials of the old regime. Daily, Guevara saw to it that enemies of the revolution were brought to account. Firing squads plied their trade day and night. Guevara had killed in war, and it was his duty to sit in judgment of the defeated. For the dead, he had no pangs of regret, not for the slain, and none for the criminals who went before the pelotóns in La Cabana. He did not have to be convinced that these criminals had brought justice down upon themselves. Libertad o muerte. Patria o muerte. Justicia o muerte. Guevara returned to his quarters each evening with a fine appetite and a clear conscience.

  When Hilda joined him from Mexico City, Guevara told her that he had fallen in love with someone else. He remembered a night of tears as Hilda said that whatever had happened during the war was now over and that she still loved him. His heart still beat cold when he remembered saying, “It would have been better if I had been killed.” Guevara had a place still in his heart for Hilda, but not love.

  Hilda granted him a divorce, and her patience and devotion put into him a nagging sort of remorse. He married Aleida and did his best not to look back on the wreckage in his heart. Aleida would bear him four children, each as different as days of the week. He did his best as he walked now to forget them, Aleida, Hilda, and the children. Love for his family was a thing too precious and fragile to be carried into the field. He could not stand to think of them, not in this place, not in this time, when there was so much to do. And so many enemies to fight.

  On the trail, it was full dark. The moon had risen behind him in the valley, and as the clouds opened, the night beyond was a thousand shades of indigo. This was the first time in weeks that stars could be seen, and as the moon labored overhead, it threw a complete shadow before him on the trail. Night through the trees was a sustained whisper, and far below, the sound of the river came onto the ridge, a perfect hiss. Guevara moved on a hundred meters, stopped again, and sank down against a boulder beside the footpath. His chest ached, and he rattled out the half tablet from the pill bottle and swallowed it. He sat and listened to the sound of the distant river, his rifle across his lap.

  As the moon shoved between the clouds, Guevara looked down into the valley. The Ñancahuazú was a shining ribbon of silver. The farmhouse was there, a small spark tucked into the apex of a long bend, but when the clouds closed again, the river and valley sank into a void. The blackness descended so suddenly that Guevara sat blinking in perfect wonder. He knew the same shadow had fallen over the Zinc House. And it was there that Comrade Galán now cooled his heels.

  The little fucker, Guevara thought. I should make him wait for a week.

  But with Galán was the woman. Tania. Guevara first reminded himself that he did not love her, then he allowed himself the pleasure of thinking of her. It was six years ago in Berlin when they met. Tania had been for him an unlikely conquest. She had been born in Argentina, Heidi Tamara Vünke, the daughter of a Polish Jew and a German leftist who had fled the Nazis. During the war, Tania’s parents became committed Communists and returned to East Germany soon after the end of the conflict. In East Berlin, Tamara worked as an interpreter and was assigned as a protocol officer when Guevara led a trade delegation there in 1960. She remained at his side through a week of mind-numbing exchange discussions, supervising the work of several interpreters and the translation of diplomatic memora
nda. Guevara noticed that as she interpreted, she would keep her eyes on his, often not breaking the gaze until long after he was answered. When others spoke, she would again look only at him.

  He did not think Tania could be called conventionally beautiful, though she was slim, with dark hair and eyes and an upright, almost military bearing. Her face was slightly long, her jaw pointed daintily, and her cheeks were high. Her nose was aquiline, her lips were thin, and not once in three days did Guevara see her smile. That they had become lovers was more the result of impulse than of infatuation. On his last night in Berlin, Tania arrived at his rooms, late, on the pretext of delivering some documents. As Guevara took them, she stood awkwardly inside the door, and he offered her a glass of wine. She declined politely and said to him, “Hazme el amor.”

  The words electrified him. No woman in his life had ever been so forward. He asked her, “Are you sure?”

  She unbuttoned her blouse and said, “I’m very sure.”

  He pulled her into his arms, and they made love on the floor. In the morning they drove to the airport, and he shook her hand as he boarded the plane. He did not expect to see her again.

  A short time later, she was assigned to interpret for the East German Ballet and turned up in Havana. When the dancers left Cuba, Guevara asked her to stay. This was arranged through some friends at the East German embassy, and he found her a job at the Ministry of Education.

  Guevara was scrupulously well behaved in public, but he was aware of the rumors. He did his best to ignore them, but Aleida did not. Guevara saw Tania as often as he could, and they spent nights together in a government guest house in San Cristobal. Always she was there for him, always direct, earnest in the way she listened, passionate in her lovemaking, and in time she fell hopelessly in love. There was another night of tears and anguish when he explained to her that he would never leave Aleida or his family. She told him that he had won her heart, and Guevara said, “I did not ask for it.”

  Guevara did not love Tania, but his trust in her was unconditional. In 1964 he dispatched her to Bolivia as a deep-cover operative. She had been ordered to ingratiate herself with the highest levels of Bolivian society. This she did, with a determined charm and a generous stipend paid by the Cuban intelligence service. As Tania made her arrangements for Guevara’s arrival in Bolivia, he would fall precipitously from the Cuban hierarchy.

  There were disagreements with Castro, and with his brother, Raúl, some of them theoretical and all of them increasingly personal. Guevara’s communism had crystallized, and he became ever more unwavering in his opinions. The break came after he made a particularly incendiary speech in Algeria, referring to the Soviet Union as “an accomplice to imperialism” and tweaking the Russians as “bourgeois Communists” who were unwilling to fight a worldwide revolution. Castro was enraged. Returning from Africa, Guevara was met by Fidel at the airport and whisked to a thirty-six-hour confrontation. Guevara remembered it as an all-night shouting match. Once or twice his own bodyguards had entered the room ashen-faced, as distressed as children listening to their parents fight. Neither Fidel nor Raúl ever publicly spoke of what was said in that long night. Guevara’s memories of it even now were tinged with anger, betrayal, and hurt. In one bitter passage of their quarrel, Raúl had reminded Guevara that he was an Argentine, not a Cuban, and that the Cuban revolution could have only one jefe máximo, and that leader was Fidel. It was Castro who was in a position to judge what was best for the Cuban people. If Guevara wanted to start the world on fire, Raúl shouted, he could go do it—on his fucking own.

  The fight ended many hours later, the men hoarse, exhausted, and further apart than they had ever been. The next day, in a confidential letter to Castro, Guevara resigned his posts with the Cuban government. The break between the two men was complete. Fidel accepted his letter, telephoned him at home, and told him to choose a destination.

  It was then April 1965. A Cuban military task force was preparing to deploy to Congo, one of several internationalist missions being dispatched to active insurgencies. Guevara now thought it impulsive, and a great mistake, but decided to join and head this contingent. Castro maintained secrecy as Guevara prepared his force. After their fight, rumors swirled that Guevara had been executed, that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, that he had been killed in a plane crash. He no longer spoke on the radio and did not appear on Cuban TV or in the newsreels. Castro remained sphinxlike, answering only that “Comrade Guevara was alive and well and serving the revolution.”

  Guevara bade his family goodbye and departed for Congo. To cover his departure, the Cuban intelligence service floated rumors that he was in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, even Vietnam.

  Traveling incognito via Cairo and Dar es Salaam, Che Guevara stepped from a boat on the Congolese side of Lake Tanganyika in the early evening of April 24, 1965.

  Even through the glass of hindsight, he realized how ill advised his expedition had been. The rebels he had gone to aid were illiterate, untrained militarily, and relied as much on tribal magic, dawa, as they did on their weapons. They were fighting an equally buffoonish, if vicious, enemy, the armed forces of the Western-backed dictator Joseph Kasa-Vubu. The rebel leaders, among them Maurice Kabila, were accustomed to luxury, prone to high-sounding speeches, and spent their time at conferences in Paris and Cairo. Guevara came to learn, bitterly, that the Congo war was not a revolution, it was a vastly immoral and brutal farce, one of ten thousand tragedies that would befall Africa in the twentieth century.

  The entire front collapsed in October. Demoralized and sickened by tropical diseases, the Cubans had no choice but to retreat. Guevara’s force scattered back to Cuba, extracted by Soviet aircraft, and he traveled cross-country to the Cuban embassy at Dar es Salaam. There he went to ground. For six weeks he remained hidden in a small room above the embassy guesthouse, dictating his account of the debacle, Passajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria (Congo), to a secretary. He recalled feeling as bad as he’d ever felt; physically, he was exhausted, and his will to live had nearly left him. Then fell a thunderbolt.

  While Guevara was in Dar es Salaam, he learned that Castro had broken his silence. Without informing Guevara, Castro had gone on national television and read Guevara’s letter of resignation to the astounded people of Cuba. The letter had been written in anger, and for six months Castro had kept it secret. He seemed perfectly somber when he told the Cuban people that Che Guevara had surrendered his posts, his military rank, and even his Cuban citizenship. In a three-hour speech, Fidel heaped praise on Guevara but did not give the reason for the resignation. That he could so calmly sell out Guevara astounded even the crafty Raúl.

  At a stroke, Che Guevara had become a man without a country.

  For an entire day, he could not believe it—even now Fifo’s cunning amazed him. He sat in his small suite of rooms, racked by fever, rereading the cable over and over, cursing himself, then Castro, and finally accepting the fact that he had been cast adrift. His asthma became acute, and the malaria and dysentery that had plagued him during the campaign again took its toll. His health, like his fortune, was in precipitous decline.

  Incredibly, Castro sent emissaries to Dar es Salaam, summoning Guevara to Havana. Guevara refused. He arranged instead to fly to Prague with a small cadre of bodyguards. He was taken to a safe house in the Czech countryside and settled in. There he received treatment for his asthma and slowly began to recover his health. And he began to plan.

  Guevara had previously dispatched a revolutionary cadre into Argentina, the expedition led by Jorge Masetti. This effort had rapidly come to grief, but Guevara was convinced his own fate would be different. He’d tried to push forward preparations for a second Argentine expedition, but they went nowhere. In March 1966 Castro proposed another destination, a place where the prospects of a properly led insurrection were promising. That place was Bolivia.

  Castro was enthusiastic, and Guevara was gradually won over by his arguments. A successful insurgency in Bolivia
would allow Guevara to export revolution across the border into Argentina. This, Castro knew, was Guevara’s ultimate goal, the liberation of his homeland. Castro was convincing.

  Guevara summoned Tania to Prague, and her preparations within Bolivia were reviewed. As spring came over the dull brown countryside, they renewed their affair. Tania still loved him, and in that he took some consolation. He did not love her, and he had told her. She was an intelligent woman. She understood. But it is a literal mind that equates understanding with comprehension, and it was with a broken heart that Tania returned to Bolivia to continue preparations and await word of his arrival.

  Guevara was flown to Cuba, arriving at Rancho Boyeros Airport at night. He was whisked to an isolated house outside of Havana. Aleida and the children were brought to him, but their reunion was short-lived. Guevara plunged immediately into plans to leave them again.

  Guevara allowed himself scarcely five months to train, equip, and deploy his force. He pronounced the mission ready, assumed a disguise, said goodbye to his family, and headed by a wildly circuitous route to Bolivia. Again, his plans were immense. Guevara dreamed of nothing short of a modern reprise of the liberation wars fought by Simón Bolívar and San Martín in the 1800s. Now, as he readied his Bolivian cadres, Cuban advisers were already serving with guerrilla armies in Venezuela and Colombia. Guevara envisioned these forces pushing south while his own group liberated first Bolivia, then Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru. Nor was this some idle fantasy. He had studied and written extensively on guerrilla warfare. He was fascinated by the work of the Chinese Communist general Lin Biao, who postulated that peasant armies, led by revolutionary cadres, could lay siege to the bastions of capitalism and their degenerate cities. Mao had employed this strategy in China and brought the revolution to one billion people.