Buying the Night Flight (20 page)

In March of 1968, fully six months after his death on October 8, 1967, I took off for Bolivia in a second-best mood with no particular plan. Soon I became deeply involved in what appeared to be the one last really substantial effort to understand what had happened: the battle to get the diary that Che had kept through those strange, lost months.

As soon as I checked into the old Sucre Palace in ethereal La Paz, there appeared Andrew St. George, a free spirit seeking company. Charming, hand-kissing, Hungarian-born, and the type to do every thing in as difficult a manner as possible, Andrew was a person I immediately warmed to. "Look," he whispered, for he always whispered, "we are going to get the diary. You can be in on it." Andrew had put together a consortium representing several European publishers and
Parade
magazine. The Bolivian generals had the diary, however, and with their particular mixture of Indian cunning, sloe-eyed innocence, and market sense, they naturally treated the diary as war booty. We were in it for five thousand dollars, and we were fully aware that the generals would very probably pocket the money.

Down the Prado, eyeing St. George jealously was Daniel James, a suave, Mexican-based American representing other interests. Then in came the delightful Don Schanche of Magnum, and a group of Maoists who kept wringing their hands over paying "blood money." There also duly arrived the French writer-adventurer, Michele Ray, who was soon being swept around the country by the president, Rene Barrientos. Barrientos was to remark dryly when she left, "Miss Ray had such a good time here I doubt she had time to do any investigations."

We should have known that nobody was ever going to get the diary. Perhaps we can blame our foolishness on the fourteen-thou- sand foot altitude. There was the night, at a birthday for one of the generals, that Andrew arrived out of a taxi from one side balancing a huge cake that read
"Felicidades.
" At the precise same moment James appeared from the other direction with a little band of musicians. That night they decided to set aside the rivalry for a night and retired to a striptease together.

The Bolivians, meanwhile, were not in the slightest hurry. As an observer ungallantly put it, "The whole problem is that this is the first time that the Bolivians have had anything to sell." When the whole thing fell apart, a Bolivian journalist, after noting what fools all of us had made of ourselves, noted laconically, "What none of them realized, neither Che nor the generals, is that nothing ever really works in Bolivia."

When it became obvious, after hanging around La Paz for a couple of weeks, that this could go on and on and on, out of desperation I began to search out other things to do. Finally I determined to retrace the footsteps of Che, to talk to those still alive and to try to tell any untold parts of his story that I might find. My first stop was the handsome modern house of René Barrientos, in search of permission to visit the imprisoned Régis Debray.

"I'll give you the permission to go," said Barrientos, a square - jawed, highly Americanized general whose popularity and charisma with the Indians made him a good populist leader. "But we cannot force him to see you. So far, he has talked to no one." The next day I left for Camiri.

Camiri -- another one of those Ends of the Earth. From the barren, windswept, fourteen-thousand-foot-high plain of La Paz, you take off from the most dramatic airport in the world. Winds blow and scream like banshees through the Andes, washing bare the jagged black peaks. Brilliant turquoise jewels of lakes are hidden in the hollows of the peaks and they flash like jewels when the sun hits them. On the Altiplano, where the mountains turn shades of purple and pink or sink into mist depending upon the time of day and wind, the Indians who have changed so little since the Conquest stand on small piles of rocks when the violent squalls sweep past; they are patiently waving palm leaves at the rain to drive it away.

The plane lifted up, up over the black, forbidding Andes, and down to the eastern slopes. Here, the sheer, razor-sharp peaks lower into friendlier mountains, filled first with green forests and then with omnipotent jungle, which stretches out across the belly of the continent almost to the central escarpment of Brazil. Camiri was in the jungle, an outcast oil town that nestled uneasily in the curve of the rough mountains and in the sinuous arms of the muddy rivers. The town itself was a dusty conglomeration of Hollywood stage fronts. In the center was a pathetic raggle-taggle attempt at a park. Camiri's people were brown, poor, friendly, and unpretentious. Rather than hatred for the guerrillas they seemed to feel a certain touching pride in the sudden attention shown their region. The hotelkeeper kept insisting that most of the Camiri girls were "madly in love" with Debray. And one bank clerk remarked of Debray, "He is very intelligent." He paused. "I think he's too intelligent," he added with insight.

The colonel on duty at the military "base" told me to go ahead and try. "Just one thing," he warned me. "We can't make him talk. He's very temperamental. Sometimes he throws his dishes on the floor if he doesn't like the food." The colonel shrugged; it wasn't every day he had an international prima donna as a prisoner.

The military club, where Debray was "imprisoned" in a regular bedroom, was a square stucco building, pleasant enough, with a large sunny patio and rooms opening onto it from all sides. I waited for a minute in the sunlight, and Debray came out of his comfortable "cell." Unshaven and slim to the point of looking gaunt, Debray nevertheless had not lost his air of being the French aristocrat- intellectual inexplicably lost among the savages. When my glance traveled from him to the stout, dark-skinned Bolivian officers, the feeling of unreality grew even sharper. It was as if a peacock had been set down in a watering place for buffalo.

We sat at a little table, the sun pouring in from the patio. He looked at me with a look that was both surly and beseeching, as if he almost wanted to tell me something.

"I live well," he began, sitting in a sunny corner and leaning against a scabrous old wall. "My days are like the days of any prisoner in the world. I get up, eat, read, go to the patio and sleep. It is agreeable here, not really a prison."

Indeed it was not. While the hapless Bolivians who fought for Che were
really
in prison, Debray lived here in relative freedom, getting his meals from the local hotel and having unlimited access to books and papers. In his book, which actually had been dictated to him by Castro in Havana, he had argued the new Castro philosophy of revolution. In guerrilla wars political power should not be in the old-style Communist parties (the Soviet idea) but in the guerrillas' military leadership. What it did was to read the Soviets right out of the revolutionary movements in Latin America. What, then, had gone wrong?

"Was Bolivia a good place to start?" I began.

His thin young face, coated with a few days' beard, broke out into a big smile. "Apparently not," he said, glancing about his "jail." "But only apparently," he quickly interjected. "Failures sometimes show the need for a change of tactic."

During this, our first talk, he switched back and forth constantly -- from puppy-like friendliness to chary reserve to brooding hostility and then back again. He was, after all, only twenty-eight. But eventually he talked openly. The movement had failed because (several million people could have told them this before) they had underestimated Bolivian nationalism against the "foreign invaders." They simply had not recognized -- despite the historic fact that Che had actually
been
in Bolivia in 1952 when they had their revolution, the second in modern Latin America -- that Bolivia was already post-revolution. Now he had time to think about it.

"They put me in an untenable position," he said. "This thing of nationalism is very important. You can't rise above these feelings of nationalism."

I asked him if his ideas about the Latin armies -- the kind his sort so loved to call "gorillas" -- had changed.

He looked startled for a moment, as if he hadn't quite thought this through, then said soberly, "Yes, they have. The armies in Latin America are the major obstacle to revolution. It is the institution as such you have to destroy because it is in the hands of Yankee imperialism." But -- he paused -- "the Bolivian army has several peculiarities. When you get closer to it, you see there was a revolution here. One sees there are revolutionary officers. One notes that the social makeup of the army is very different than in Peru, Argentina, or Brazil." The young man who only a year before had looked at the entire Bolivian military as a fruit so spoiled it could be squeezed to pulp with the first touch, had at last learned. For Che to learn it was too late -- but then he had not come to learn.

"I have not changed the idea that the political power lies in the military leaders," he said, "but you have to say much more. It is one thing to say that all political power is centered in the military chief and another to say that he is the maximum leader." What then was he concentrating on? On "What is internationalism?" On "What is the political apparatus?" On "What is the value of that which is not purely military?"

Then he paused and said, "The Bolivian government was very intelligent. They posited the Bolivian nation against strangers.
They made me the stranger."

After my first session with Debray I walked slowly through the oppressive heat back to the little, waterless Hotel Marietta, where the redoubtable Madame Farfari, wife of the former Italian fascist officer who escaped here to open a hotel, liked to reminisce of the guerrillas who had originally stayed here in disguise. "And Tania stood right there ..." she would say. "And Pombo stood there by the stairs."

I sat that night eating baked lamb in the patio and thinking. I'd had a fine exclusive interview with this "revolutionary" idol of so many of the young. But the process -- the part of journalism I perhaps love most of all -- had just begun. It is a little like love or faith or making love.
You
begin it, then
it
carries
you
along like the river that Isaiah said would bring peace to Israel. You become caught up in it, you add to it, it forms you. It is a beautiful and invigorating process, even though it never brings peace. I decided then not to leave immediately, as I had planned, but to stay in Camiri for several days. The next day I returned to the "club" and asked the officers to see the other, Bolivian, prisoners from Che's strange escapade. To my surprise they agreed.

Meanwhile I looked back over my notes from two years before in Cuba. I went over my '66 interviews with Fidel Castro in Havana, and suddenly, with a kind of chill passing through me, came across something Fidel had said in an apparently offhand manner about Bolivia. "But that is a revolution that has died," he had said, with an intensity that should have indicated something to me at the time.

"I think you're wrong, Fidel," I had said. "It has had trouble, but it
is
a revolution that still inspires the masses of Indians."

He shook his head. He wouldn't believe it. Then we mused together over the country's exotic beauty. "How I would love to go there," Castro said in an almost dreamy way, "but I would like to go as you go -- anonymously." I nodded -- being a journalist, moving everywhere without fanfare, to every corner of the earth, was far better than being a dictator, with all those tiresome powers and all those endless fears. Besides, we were anonymous; we blended in, we were at one with the universe, interpreting it and loving it, instead of confronting it always and fighting it.

At that precise moment, of course, Fidel knew that Che was already in Bolivia trying for the "continental revolution."

***

When I arrived at the casino the next morning, there was a ragged, scrawny lineup of poor chaps waiting for me in the sunlit courtyard -- the officers had brought forth all of the Bolivians who had fought with Che. I had that marvelous feeling of excitement and curiosity that is journalism at its best. It was the first time they were to tell
their
story.

José Castillos "Paco" Chavez, a tall, gaunt Bolivian, was at first hesitant and distrustful. He sat on a simple wooden chair next to me. Then, under gentle questioning, for these men had been through too much for me to badger them, he opened up like a wounded but eager flower. "The Bolivian Communists offered me a trip to Cuba and I was very interested," Paco related. "Then they told me the Cuba trip was off and instead we were going to the Soviet Union. So we left one night and I found myself up in the mountains at this farm. I soon came to realize what had happened. I was very resentful that they weren't honest with me, and told me they couldn't tell me more for security. Che told me he didn't believe my reasons for feeling resentful. He said that I wanted to leave because of cowardice."

It was, I thought but didn't say, the same thing he had said to Debray -- and later
about
Debray in his diary.

A picture soon began forming in my mind: a grisly picture of an utter stupidity that was so profound that it had somehow to be deliberate. From the beginning it was clear that something was very, very wrong. Paco was not the only one. Others, too, the unemployed and the adventurous and the inspired and the desperate -- all were lured from La Paz with a week's advance salary and promises of high adventure, only to find themselves in a run-down ranch, Nancahuazu, which Che bought with $1,250 on the empty eastern slopes of the Andes. Belatedly they discovered they were "guerrillas" fighting under autocratic Cuban leaders: men who wore beards (Indians do not have beards and distrust them ever since the Spanish Conquest) and men who did not even try to speak the Indian language, Quechua.