Chasing Che (37 page)

There was no coffee left in my cup. I stared at the grounds, uncomprehending. According to Che’s own Marxist analysis, Bolivia was a tinderbox awaiting a spark. I asked Néstor how it was possible that the tin miners—a ripe socialist force, organized for action and fueled by the “objective conditions” of poverty—had been indifferent to the arrival of the world’s most famous revolutionary.

He searched again, uncomfortable, for something to say. Finally, quietly, in tones of disgust, he said, “The miners had never heard of
him.” He repeated himself, slowly and precisely: “The miners had never heard of him.”

Never heard of Che Guevara? By 1967 Che was in the crosshairs of history. He was condemned by
both
superpowers, labeled the man “most feared” in Washington, and denounced as an “infantile adventurer” by the Soviets. He was the founder and keynote speaker at the Tricontinental Congress, an attempt to unify all the revolutionary governments of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He’d appeared on
Face the Nation
and conducted secret negotiations with John F. Kennedy. He was venerated in speeches that compared him to San Martín, the South American liberator; he was imitated and worshipped by young rebels the length of the Americas; he was even celebrated in a poem (“Thus, Guevara, strong-voiced gaucho, moved to assure/his guerrilla blood to Fidel”) by Nicolás Guillén, the Cuban poet laureate.

But the Bolivian tin miners had still never heard of him. “Remember,” Néstor explained, “this was an area where never had come a single publication, not one magazine or newspaper. Nothing. Che was known only by university types.”

The page was now littered with half-forgotten acronyms and arcing lines of retreat, with dates and names and places that had dropped into the rearview mirror of life. The outline of South America was obscured by the crowded field of events; Peru itself had disappeared beneath repetitive circles of insurgency, zones of operations drawn and drawn again, dots of blue ink where graves now lay. History was merciless with the mistaken, cruelly indifferent to our illusions, more ruthless in its verdict than even the dialectical Marxists had assumed.

“Now all those heroes are being replaced,” Néstor said, scanning the list of names on his clouded map. “Poverty continues in Peru. Misery still exists.” He said nothing for a while, and I took his map, folded it in half, and pocketed it. He watched the paper disappear and still said nothing, but his hand was furiously rapping the ballpoint pen against the linoleum tabletop, a drumbeat of disillusion, death, and disaster.

“We failed,” he said at last.
Rap rap rap
. “He sent us, and we failed.”
Rap rap rap
.

“We were young,” Néstor said.

E
arly in the morning the gravel road ran up the
altiplano
with the mountains pushing farther and farther away to east and west. Dust dropped through the airless void like powered lead. After a few hours I grew feverish and my hands trembled on the throttle. By noon I was vomiting in a cheap hotel in a town daubed with Shining Path graffiti. I spent the afternoon and evening imprisoned in my bed by a catastrophic fever. As I twisted with agony and soaked through my sheets, Peru’s worst rock band rehearsed right outside the window, playing through a set list of classic rock at deafening volumes for five hours straight. The mattress became a puddle.

At one point two children broke into my bungalow through the bathroom window. When they came out of the bathroom and saw me lying in bed, so racked with muscle spasms that I could neither sit up nor speak but merely stared at them with wall-eyed fury, they turned and ran for it.

The morning after that the road rolled up the plain and topped, at a gentle rise, 14,176 feet. Herds of llamas broke and ran at the sound of my engine. The air was too clear at this altitude. You could see Lake Titicaca in the distance, blue and cold down at 12,000 feet. Beyond that were all the great towering peaks of Bolivia, some of them 20,000 feet tall. The light bent with the curve of the atmosphere, and you could see all the way to where the world fell away from itself.

T
he plateau shattered and died at last. After crossing the border at a wretched little post, I floated across the narrowest part of Lake Titicaca on the last barge of the day. The ferryman asked me if it was true there was salt in the ocean, and why.

Driving across the last miles of the
altiplano
, I bought gas that an attendant swore was 71 octane—lower than anything I’d ever heard of. Then the earth died and fell off the map. There was nothing much to warn you, just a scattering of brown adobe houses and some stores like in any little village, and then the road became a divided highway and abruptly fell over the edge.

La Paz was at the bottom. The city was built into the side of a crater, shielded from the cold wind of the
altiplano
a thousand feet above. It looked like a child’s invention, tiny and fragile. I took a big highway down, an elevator-drop ride that made my ears pop and delivered me into the heart of the city at an inadvisable speed, and quickly I found an enterprising hotel full of Israelis that allowed me to ride La Cucaracha up the front steps and into the lobby.

I set off for a walk down the steep streets, past the hanging carcasses of the butcher shops and the old women in bowler hats everywhere, and soon I came down onto the flat floor of the city. The main avenue changed names every dozen blocks or so, but was mostly called the Prado. It ran like a vein down the central arm of the city,
slowly dropping as the city moved away from the
altiplano
and becoming more and more modern with younger buildings. I began at the top of the avenue, near the Basilica of San Francisco, a lovely old stone church and monastery dating from 1549, just a few years into the conquest. The façade of the church was a brilliant mestizo pastiche in which the usual baroque vines of European styling were adorned with the Andean touches of carved fruits, plants, birds, and little animals. The plaza was full of interesting faces, but I moved on because there was shopping to do.

La Paz is a city of vendors, and walking steadily downhill I began with a set of batteries at one stand and a newspaper a block later. Down a few more blocks I found a blue stall selling flag pins, and I was reaching for Bolivia’s little red, yellow, and green tricolor when my hand passed over him. There he was: tiny, pressed into tin, the same iconic face as always. The pin was well made for something small, capturing all the necessary elements: his eyes burning up into the distance, his hair in disheveled rebellion, the little star clearly visible on the beret. The background was red enamel, of course. It was a reduction of an impression of a memory of a photograph, not the image of the young Ernesto but that of a fiery Cuban major on the cusp of middle age, a legend in his own time. I bought two pins. A block later I found a stall selling a crummier version, where his face was slightly melted and the star had been blunted into a dot. But it was still him, no matter how badly they pressed it.

Another block and his face was peering from book and magazine covers. Two competing vendors took up the challenge of selling me their Che books, but there were more than I cared to read. There was a special on
My Son El Che
, written by his retroactively adoring father. I picked up a copy of
My Friend Che
, an exaggerated account by Ricardo Rojo, an Argentine who spent some months traveling with Che in 1954 and had never stopped talking about it. Still, I couldn’t resist seeing what Rojo had to say and began haggling with the two men, each more determined than the next to sell me a copy. Finally I struck a complex but inexpensive deal: the Rojo book and a
copy of
Che’s Letters of Farewell
from the uphill stall, and from the downhill one a cheap paperback called
The Diary of Che in Bolivia
. This was Che’s battle diary from the 1967 campaign.

Che had not made it to La Paz on his 1952 trip. He’d kept his promise to return home and finish his medical degree, but in 1954 he was on the road again, searching. Rojo met him in the confines of La Paz and Che warned him that traveling companions had to bear the total absence of money, walk everywhere, and have no concern for clean clothes.

In a restaurant, I ate potato soup and read. The newspaper was silent about Vallegrande, Che’s resting place, but I saw there had been a ten-day strike at Chuquicamata, back in Chile. From there I turned to the Rojo book. Like Alberto Granado, Rojo had to be taken with a grain of salt, but he knew Che when Che wasn’t cool. When they first met, Che described what had happened to him while traveling South America before. Che referred to the 1952 journey as a “serious trip,” as opposed to previous skylarking adventures, and Rojo believed it was rugged travel that made the man:

There it was: that lost moment when he knew what he was against but not what he should be for.

Che’s eventual answer was sitting only a few inches away:
The Diary of Che in Bolivia
was
documental
, the cover helpfully declared. Back home I had two copies on better paper, a Cuban version called
The Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara
and an American version called
The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara
, which included the
passages Castro had edited out. All of them told, in one way or another, edited or not, cleaned up for posterity or elaborated with photographs and supporting documents, the sad story of Che’s final days, written in his own hand. From his first diary I had now progressed to his last.

This was a Che who knew what he was for. The pulper began with a balanced introduction by the editors (“For millions of young people, Guevara is a romantic revolutionary, a martyr in the struggle against oppression. But older people believe he symbolized anarchy …”), passed through the windy and unnecessary “Necessary Introduction by First Minister Fidel Castro,” and then began on November 7, 1966, with Che’s first entry: “A new stage begins today.”

In fact, the “new stage” had begun almost a year before. The man who once swore in public that “not one rifle” would leave Cuba now directed an enormous, cross-continental logistical effort to export a revolution to Bolivia. The operation had been under way since January 1966, when Castro had met with communist leaders from South America to discuss the establishment of a guerrilla base in South America. In February, Cuban agents in Bolivia began constructing a support network; in March several Bolivians began training at a guerrilla camp in Cuba; in June the Cuban advance team purchased a farm in southern Bolivia, close to Argentina, and began stockpiling arms and food; in July the Bolivian Communist Party leader, Mario Monje, agreed to supply twenty local fighters, and the Cubans made an overture to one leader of Bolivia’s militant miners. There were endless disputes over where to locate the
foco
, or “focus” of guerrilla action. In his books, Che had outlined a theory of guerrilla warfare in which a small vanguard element could pin down large numbers of conventional troops; by gradually dragging out the war, hitting the enemy wherever he was weakest, the guerrillas would force the government to use repressive measures. This deepening of the contradictions would, in turn, increase popular support for the guerrillas, and eventually the rotten regime would collapse. He hoped to draw the United States into open combat in South America, creating a new Vietnam war. But Bolivia was merely a pawn in this international
struggle; Che the Argentine dreamt of using Bolivia as a platform to reach his homeland. The Peruvian recruits wanted to fight in Peru; the Bolivians were willing to sacrifice their lives and country in this cause but were internally divided between the Maoists, who supported Che’s strategy of fighting in some remote place, and the Muscovites, who had ties to the miners and wanted to be close to the urban support networks. The farm in southern Bolivia was originally supposed to be a rear-area camp for training and resupply, but Che issued contradictory orders about locating a new base, and in the end no other camp was set up. A kind of deadly inertia began to take over the mission. Che let the real-estate market partly determine one of his most important decisions.

Finally, on November 3, Ernesto Guevera de la Serna landed at the airport above La Paz, exhausted by an aerial odyssey from Havana to Prague to São Paulo to here, a journey designed to conceal his tracks. The plan worked, and the arrival of what my new pulper referred to as “the world’s No. 1 guerrilla” went unnoticed, thanks to a brilliant disguise: Che was now bald. He shaved not only his famous beard for the trip, but the center of his head, too. Cuban disguise experts then highlighted his remaining hair with silver. In a black suit and tie he was the perfect image of “Adolfo Mena,” the bald, bespectacled, middle-aged Uruguayan businessman his fake passport claimed to present. He strolled through customs, an invader in wingtips.

Disoriented by jet fatigue and the thin air, Che took long walks around the city, visiting tourist sites and playing with his camera. He snapped photos of himself in a hotel mirror and had himself snapped buying a newspaper in front of the train station. This was an early indication of the fatal flaw that would undermine and eventually destroy his mission and the men and women in it: Che was now obsessed with his own place in history. He had himself photographed in La Paz and then in the field. He urged others to document the campaign on film and in diaries. The guerrillas even posed for a group shot in the jungle, arrayed like a class photo. Che took many of the photographs himself, but this was not simply the innocent shutterbug
of 1952 clicking away. Back then Che had taken all the pictures, which were therefore mostly of Alberto Granado or those they met on their route. Now, as his snap of a hotel mirror showed, Che had to be the
subject
of the pictures.