Chasing Che

PATRICK SYMMES
CHASING CHE

Patrick Symmes writes about Latin American politics, globalization, and Third World travel for a number of magazines, including
Harper’s
(where he is a contributing editor),
Outside, Wired
, and
GQ
. This is his first book. He lives in New York City.

Special thanks to my mother, who actually said, “You’re going to do it on a motorcycle, aren’t you?” Also to Clara Jeffery, Ben Metcalf, and Lewis Lapham, to Dawn Davis and Marty Asher, to Richard Parks, and to Annie Dillard.

Regular thanks to Mr. Rojo and the pineapple people, to Isabel, Pascal, and Julie of Moquegua, Tito, and whoever it was that pulled me out of that ditch.

Much of this manuscript was written while on a Harper’s-McLaughlin teaching fellowship at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; I am also indebted to the Eight Oaks Foundation for the support which made this project possible.

You can still see the bullet holes from that day, scattered across the façade of the hotel they now call the Free Santa Clara. It was December 28, 1958, when a column of scruffy, bearded guerrillas with mismatched uniforms and outdated weapons entered this city in the flatlands of central Cuba. There was a sharp firefight with some military snipers hiding in the upper stories of the hotel; the guerrillas had more enthusiasm than skill and shot up the place pretty badly.

In the midst of the battle, the guerrilla commander, to confront a fearsome armored troop train bristling with weapons and loaded with government reinforcements, grabbed eighteen of his men and rushed to the outskirts of the city. The guerrillas commandeered a D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer, ripped up the train tracks, and hid on rooftops, behind trees, and on a small hill overlooking the site. It was a classic enfilade ambush: the train ground to a halt and the guerrillas opened fire from all directions. Pinned and disoriented, the government troops cowered where they could, unwilling to die for a regime they themselves despised. It was over in a few hours. With only one platoon of men, the commander—an enigmatic Argentine doctor known as Che—had captured 408 government soldiers and shattered the last resistance. Within days, Cuba’s military dictator, Fulgencio Batista, had fled to Florida with a million dollars in his suitcase. The government collapsed, and Fidel Castro rode into Havana and the history
books with a rosary around his neck and his handsome young Argentine commander at his side.

When I first came to Santa Clara in 1991 as a freelance magazine journalist, I was searching for Cuba’s curiously powerful grip on the axis of history. And it was here, at the place that marked the apogee of Che Guevara’s life, that I first glimpsed the true dimensions of his myth and the power and meaning it holds for millions of Latin Americans. I had already been exposed to the official version of Che’s life: according to the museums in Havana and the books on sale everywhere, he was born Ernesto Guevara in Argentina; became a doctor and then a revolutionary; came to Cuba and won the battle of Santa Clara; then died fighting to emancipate the poor in Bolivia in 1967. The details were like shadows that did not bear scrutiny in the tropical brightness of Cuban orthodoxy.

I took a seat in the central plaza on a bench facing the battle-scarred hotel. At the other end of the bench was a young Cuban man drinking beer. He was short, thickly muscled, and his eyes were red. While we talked about Cuba he nipped at a large plastic jug of home brew—in Cuba you drink home brew or you don’t drink—and complained. His father had gone to East Germany years before, the fellow explained, but now East Germany no longer existed. When his father had refused to come home, preferring the new, unified Germany to the old, isolated Cuba, he had been labeled a
gusano
, or worm, Castro’s term for anyone who betrays his version of the revolution. The government had now cut off the son’s mail and phone service, he claimed. He waited, hoping that his father would somehow extract him from history. He studied German at night and dreamed of Munich beer halls. The new world taking shape outside the island was one that this man, like many Cubans, could neither see himself nor imagine. TV carried only speeches by Castro and old cartoons. Russian magazines advocating democracy had been banned. Cuba now soldiered on alone, without a Soviet Union issuing fraternal subsidies. The official rhetoric of sacrifice rang defiantly in the quiet plazas of an economically destitute nation.

My friend looked right and left, and then reached for his wallet. He opened it and picked through the crowded interior until he found a small square of cardboard, faded and wrinkled. He handed it to me. It was a picture of Che, laughing, his beautiful face turned up toward some hopeful thought.

“If he were still alive,” the man on the bench said, “none of this would be happening.”

That line has stuck with me now for many years, a statement of sentimentality and faith that I have been unable to bury or forget. I have encountered one version or another of the young man’s belief in every country I have visited in Latin America. Nor is the devotion he felt toward a cardboard picture of a dead man limited to our hemisphere—Che is an official hero in lands as diverse as Vietnam and Hungary, and an unofficial one in many other places.