Buying the Night Flight (22 page)

But it was the last time he was to smile, because, unbeknownst to him, his friend, the "revolutionary" Régis Debray, was in actuality the one who had sealed Che's fate. First, when he was captured, it was he who had told the Bolivians that Che was there. Second, it was his trial, made into a worldwide spectacle for the Left, that had set the Bolivians, who after all had been invaded by these "strangers," wondering what they would do when they caught Che, whose trial could bring forth almost anything. It was decided that Bolivia could not risk bringing Che to trial -- Che would be killed when captured. And he was.

The first story was that he was killed when captured, but there were too many observers for that story to last. The second story was that he was shot in the schoolhouse at La Higuera. But I heard a third story, which I believe to be true.

One of the many people I went to see in Vallegrande was the doctor who had examined Che when he was brought on a litter to Vallegrande and who had pronounced him dead. A slight, dark-haired, serious young man, he invited me to come to his house to see "something peculiar." It was one of those truly fortuitous moments that one comes across as a journalist.

One dark night in Vallegrande I went to his house on a side street. He lived upstairs in a barely furnished room: as austere as everything else in this strange "Spanish" world. Finally he brought out a rumpled shirt, a bloody shirt. "This was Che's shirt," he told me quietly. "I took it off of him." He spread it out on the floor. "Look at these rips." There were bullet holes, yes, but there were also long slashes. He stared at me in the candlelight. I couldn't figure it out. "Che was not killed by bullets," he told me flatly, "he was killed by a bayonet to the back and by a machete." If true, it shed a grim light over the death of this obsessed man. Was it true?

I came to believe it was. First of all the doctor had nothing at all to gain from telling me this. I offered to buy the shirt -- at an exorbitant sum -- but he said he would never sell it for any amount. You could tell by the blood around some of the jagged rips and not around the others which gunshots and knife wounds had been made before death and after. But it was something I never could actually "prove."

Still curious, I began to make my own investigations into the deeper psychological "whys" of the whole Che adventure.

Most important -- absolutely crucial to the entire thing -- was the peculiar mental state of Che. It was a suicidal state, which I sensed from the moment I read about his death so far away in Russia. People who deify revolutionaries -- and this includes many journalists -- miss these things because they see every motive as clean and pure and ideological.

In the thin, parched air of Bolivia that early spring I heard story after story of Che's will to failure. But it was a supposition that I really
knew
to be true only when I read Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal's book
The Cairo Documents,
published in 1971, and then talked to him in Cairo. Egypt's Haykal, Gamal Abdel Nasser's alter ego, had seen Che in the mid-sixties just as he was about to embark upon the first part of his "revolution" adventure in Africa, just before he "disappeared" from the face of the earth. It was, of course, when the African part -- which took him to the Congo, to Brazzaville, and perhaps to other places--failed so miserably that he turned his eyes again to Latin America.

Both Nasser and Haykal were stunned by Che's mood. Well aware that he had failed miserably in Cuba as economic czar in the postrevolution days, when he bought totally useless factories in East Germany and transported them whole to a Cuban economy that had no use for them, Che kept talking about "dying," not as redemption, but, as it seems, a kind of compensation for his failures.

Nasser told him, according to Haykal's book, "If we had only the romance of the revolution without the necessary developments, it would be a catastrophe. If you don't do all those difficult and full tasks, then there will be no revolution."

Haykal writes: "Guevara replied, all his frustration showing, 'But after a revolution it is no longer the revolutionaries who do the job; it is the technocrats and the bureaucrats, and they are anti-revolution.'"

At their last meeting Guevara told Nasser that the only thing he was searching for was "where to go, where to find a place to fight for the world revolution and to accept the challenge of death."

Nasser, Haykal relates, said to him, "Why do you always talk about death? You are a young man. If necessary, we should die for the revolution, but it would be much better if we could live for the revolution."

Che did not want to "live for the revolution." I talked with the elegant, ironic Haykal in his apartment over the Nile during the Cairo Conference of 1977 and he told me that, yes, the entire talk with Che had been along these morbid lines. Che wanted to die for the revolution. Or did he? Did he perhaps want to die for himself?

***

The Cubans -- and one aristocratic Frenchman -- went to Bolivia to prove their new ideas of the "continental revolution" and of the seat of political power within the military guerrilla forces. What they did was to
disprove
them.

The Cubans did not understand their own revolution. They believed it was waged by only a handful of courageous men in the mountains who mounted the fight against Batista. Indeed, they were the revolution's symbol. But the revolution was really waged in the cities--by the middle classes who came to despise Batista. Nor did the Cubans really care about Bolivia, that funny, beautiful little Indian country where all the tables have three legs. They looked at it in the way that the United States so often has looked upon little throwaway countries -- not as nations of intrinsic value, but strategically, manipulatively.

Bolivia was simply a stepping-stone to new, Bolivarian-Castroite glory. The first domino. Bolivia was a means and not an end to them, just as Vietnam was--at the same time -- to the United States, and both paid a steep price for such dangerous oversights.

All of the Cuban leaders came from well-to-do families, in contrast to the Bolivian army and peasants. All were the kind of déclassé intellectual who fits in so well with the world-view New Left. In all of them revolution began in the cerebrum, not in the stomach, and so the most natural step was to theorize revolution to death -- to be governed by ideas, rather than the more practical tyranny of need.

At the end Che was in a rage against the Bolivians for not obeying him; he was going to "force" them, to kill them for their independence and recalcitrance, even though they were just fulfilling his own death wish. The entire experience only reinforced what was coming to be my basic skepticism of revolutionaries and their motives and their concern for people. Being from the South Side of Chicago, where life was real, the romance of "revolution" and "liberation" never captured me.

In 1970 Castro adopted not only the Soviets' economic overseeing of his disastrous economy but also their ideological concepts. Now he backed their slow road to revolution and, in places like Chile, even warned Allende against moving too fast. The diary got to Cuba and was printed there. Debray eventually was released and faded into obscurity for a while before coming back in 1981 as an adviser to the new French Socialist government. A series of deaths of the Bolivians involved, including President Barrientos in a mysterious helicopter accident, added a last touch of drama to the saga.

The epitaph for this tale of revolution-in-our-time was told to me later by a Bolivian colonel. One day Debray received a Christmas card from a little French girl. "She said she was praying for him," the colonel related. "It was very sweet. I asked him to translate it and he threw it to the ground." The colonel shook his head. "How can you kill for the new generation and not care about that child?"

USSR: The Well-Fed Wolf

"The well-fed wolf does not become a lamb."
--Old Russian proverb

By the spring of 1967, although still very much in love with Latin America, I was also ready for a change: ready to move on, geographically and professionally. I had lived in Latin America for three years and had covered the continent from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. As always I had to do my own planning, for editors everywhere seem perfectly happy for you to stay where you are.

I decided it was time to go to Russia, time to be completely (not, as in Cuba, peripherally) drawn into the dialectic of our era between democracy and totalitarianism.

The ostensible reason was the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The paper immediately agreed to the trip, and I began planning. This time -- in contrast to what it would be when I went back in 1971 -- planning was relatively easy. The government wanted to impress foreigners and was even (unheard of!) working with foreign journalists, instead of against them. Novosti, the government's press agency, was willing to work with foreign journalists for a price and to arrange interviews. I set as my major task the investigation of Soviet youth. At this critical juncture in Soviet history I would attempt to see what the next fifty years would bring.

The trip there was filled with expectation. Years before I had fallen in love with Russian history and literature, had cried over Turgenev's young and idealistic heroines, had dreamt of the barren vastness of the steppes and the wild darkness of the forests. Now it was all within my grasp. Henry Gill, the same fine photographer I had gone to Guatemala with, and I were planning an elaborate and seductive approach -- from Japan by ship to Vladivostok's port of Nahodka, then across all of Siberia, down through Central Asia and up to Moscow and the cities of the north.

En route to Hawaii I arranged to stop in San Francisco to see Eric Hoffer, the famous longshoreman philosopher and author of
The True Believer.
I had written ahead of time and, among other things, told him how shamelessly I had "plagiarized" him. Apparently that caught his fancy because he invited me to dinner. His answering note consisted of four lines written in a small cramped hand, crowded up on the top of a piece of lined schoolbook paper. He wrote that he would be happy to see me and where should he call for me? Then, when I arrived at the hotel, there was a similar note saying, "Welcome to San Francisco. Please call and let us know you are here."

By five o'clock, the San Francisco fog was slipping down from the tops of the hills and then cowering in the valleys. Between these two layers, I saw a brown-gabled house with windows looking out from under eyebrows of sagging vines like great eyes. It was a gentle house -- a kind house -- and when I rang the bell there was a friendly bedlam.

"Come into the kitchen, we'll have some Scotch, we'll have a nice time, don't you like the kitchen best?" The kitchen, indeed, was one of the wannest and most hospitable I'd ever seen. As I looked at Hoffer, a big man, almost bald, he seemed to me like a person in whom all the good qualities of the workingman--the man whom he writes about and believes in--were personified. He was a warm and passionate man, nothing about him was quiet or restrained; his voice boomed; his laugh was proclamation. If we had Capitalist Realism statues, he would be our model of a workingman. Lily, his friend, was a beautiful woman of Italian descent, her dark hair falling naturally into curls, her eyes silky and her mouth slow and sensuous. They were all big, vital people--bigger than life really, a lot like my own family. He, particularly, reminded me of my father.

Hoffer's book,
The True Believer,
had become a bible for many people, particularly in the fields of revolution I was working in. In it Hoffer had characterized, analyzed, and theologized about the "weak" of the earth--immigrants, women, workers, but people who worked out and through their weakness in the American, democratic mode instead of the Russian, totalitarian mode which I was soon to see firsthand.

He saw, in short, that America had been settled and peopled and given its peculiar character by the weak, by people who had been torn out of their communal European societies and tossed adrift -- physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Later he would fashion his philosophy of the weak -- the misfits, the outcasts -- as the catalyst of history, and he would write:

"People torn out of communal societies become isolated and afraid unless they have abundant opportunities for self-realization. The only way to acquire confidence and self-esteem is to make individual existence bearable." But, he went on, the "shock of change"--to be successful in releasing vast human energies, like those of the uprooted immigrants who came to America -- must occur simultaneously with a tradition of self-reliance and the opening up of abundant opportunities for action. These factors, however, are not present in much of the underdeveloped world. Hoffer saw weakness as corrupting if it did not have these "abundant opportunities," and wrote: "Weakness, too, corrupts. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from a sense of their own inadequacy and impotence."

For, he went on to contend, if the uprooted were not permitted to work off their desperate and lonely energies in unceasing activism, the only other answer to their gnawing insecurities was faith: absolute faith in which they could ease the burden of their suddenly freed selves and avoid the terrible consequences of freedom without purpose or form. How well this fit the Third World revolutionaries I'd known and particularly the Marxists I was constantly covering! "Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self .... The passionate state of mind is an expression of inner dissatisfaction." Such people, moreover, could easily switch from one passion to another, for what they really sought was not truth but faith. And so Communists could turn easily to become violent anti-Communists. Hoffer also had his own notion of what the uprooted of the world desired. This was generally thought of by Washington analysts as material things and economic development, to start with. No, said Hoffer, their needs were not primarily material, their needs were psychological. "Give the people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters and even die for them. You do not win the weak by sharing your wealth with them. It will but infect them with greed and resentment. You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, hope or hatred with them."