Chasing Che (42 page)

But for now, beneath the planets and stars of the blue night, the only signs of this excruciatingly slow exhumation were the coffin holes. There were just over a hundred of them in the field. Many had filled with rainwater. Already one child had fallen in, and the villagers were demanding that the government refill the holes before someone got seriously injured.

Jans stood around, peering into some of the holes and taking pictures. After a while he burst into tears again. I sat down, thoroughly uncompassed by this moment of arrival. It was hard to look at the holes and not feel cheated, somehow. I had to accept that the farther I traveled to see him, the less close I got. He was here, certainly, cornered one last time but still holding out a bit longer, as uncompromising as ever. It felt like a fine resting place, and I wished they would just leave him here, but they wouldn’t. They had long ago absconded with his life; now they would take his death, too.

Before coming here, Che had explained his actions—his various wars, departures, and sacrifices—to his children in a careful letter of farewell. He wrote to his three sons and daughter that the revolution was more important than any individual, that service to the cause stood above any one life. “Each one of us, alone,” he told them, “is worth nothing.” Now, sitting in the falling darkness amid the holes that had swallowed all the ideals, all the blood, and all the bodies, this seemed to me exactly backwards. Each one of us, imperfect and little and terribly alone, is worth everything. People are ends, not means.

Like La Higuera with its doctor, however, Vallegrande did get
one inadvertent benefit from Che’s efforts. Because of Che—because Che came here, and then the army came after him, and then the tourists like Jans also after him, and now me, too, after him or whatever was left of him—the government had been shamed into installing electricity in the town. Now up on the hillside, as the black night settled on us, Vallegrande glowed white with streetlamps. The town seemed to bask in this privilege amid so much darkness.

W
e rolled east from Havana after breakfast, missed the exit, and spent the morning wandering back and forth, asking directions, chatting with bicyclists and horsemen and police officers and patiently waiting would-be bus passengers. Eventually we got the rental car pointed in the right direction and sat back for the ride to Che’s funeral.

They had found him, or at least some of him. A year after I passed through Vallegrande the Argentine-Cuban forensic team had returned to the grassy airstrip with new funding. They’d dug and dug some more, and eventually, in June 1997, they had found enough bones to fill a small coffin. The arms lacked hands; these, then, were the bones of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, known at various points in his life as Little Ernesto, the Shaved Head, the Sniper, the Pig, Big Che, Mongo, Fernando, Fernández, Adolfo Mena, El Puro, and El Che. It wasn’t the whole Guevara, only an elusive portion, but it was enough to construct a symbolic extravaganza. The remains of six other guerrillas who fell in the battle at La Higuera were also, at least theoretically, identified.

Che had been bundled off to Cuba just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of his death, in October 1997. The remains of the seven were put on display inside the José Martí Monument at the heart of the vast Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. They put a flag identifying the nationality of each guerrilla on the appropriate box. Che was
draped in the red, white, and blue flag of Cuba. He might have renounced his Cuban citizenship and died an internationalist Argentine fighting in Bolivia, but he was going to be buried a Cuban.

Thousands of people were in line to see the remains when I walked toward the plaza at night in the company of a
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reporter and a bottle of rum. Havana is a dark city; we held hushed conversations at intersections with invisible men who did not identify themselves. The uniformed police deferred to these civilians, who extracted a pull from the bottle and let us pass their outposts in the night.

The line stretched from beyond the edge of visibility, up a long avenue, over a bridge, alongside the plaza, and then curled around the vast parking lot that was the heart of official Cuba. The line passed beneath the electric gaze of a six-story neon Che blazing from a blank wall. The same little groups of mysterious civilians stood around, supervising everything via radio. We approached, seeking permission to poke and prod the public for comment. By the light of Che I could see that these men with their cloaked authority wore tiny lapel pins reading
BRIGADA ESPECIAL
. The special brigades are the enforcers of the revolution, the plainclothes police who specialize in pounding Cuba’s square pegs into round holes. They scolded us for drinking rum while observing the “act of homage.”

The line of mourners continued around the plaza, moving at a quick march and never stalling for even a moment. After passing beneath the illuminated Che it snaked right and ascended a gentle, lengthy staircase into the base of the monument itself, a tasteless stupa erected by the Soviets. The uniform line that entered in a compact, speedy thread emerged from the other side as a disordered throng. Little clumps of families and dots of solitary people wandered out of the viewing chamber, moving at different speeds in various directions, as though lost. In death, Che converted the Cuban masses back into individuals.

I thought about joining the hour-long line and marching up the stairs and into the monument to see the box holding his bones, but I didn’t. It was all too much. Loudspeakers overhead blared with
Socialist-Realist music that seemed, at a distance, indistinguishable from the liturgical tones of a Holy Mass. The disembodied voice of Fidel Castro echoed from the heavens, reading Che’s farewell letter to the Cuban people in an endless loop interrupted only by Che songs (“Hasta Siempre”) and Che poems (“Thus, Guevara, strong-voiced gaucho …”). Forty-four years ago, a young Ernesto had scribbled a final warning in his notebook that revolution is impersonal, that it consumes the innocent and guilty together, and then manipulates the memory of the dead as an instrument of control.

The Cubans in the queue did seem deeply moved. A lean black man told me that Che was “one of the men of the twentieth century, of the twenty-first century.” He pointed to his twelve-year-old son. As the boy skipped about, the father said, “He was born to come here.” A woman with her two daughters said, firmly and steadily, “This is not just an act of homage to Che but an expression of solidarity with the revolution by the entire nation as the eyes of the world are upon us,” and went on in that vein for another two minutes.

But away from the plaza, my Cuban friends only groaned when I described the crowds at the event as “spontaneous.” I knew two brothers who lived in the old Chinatown, and they had been skewered neatly on the horns of a Cuban dilemma. Their problem was simply that they had two funerals to attend, that of Che here in Havana and that of a grandmother who had just died in Cienfuegos. The brothers were smart young men, products of the revolution, educated and hardworking and dedicated to Cuba, if not necessarily to those who ran the island. At their job sites, the brothers explained, those who “volunteered” to go to the plaza to see Che received a checkmark in their files. Those who didn’t, didn’t, and the consequences were clear, if unspoken. Cuban communism is a system for micromanaging every aspect of life, and failure to earn enough of these checkmarks indicates a “poor attitude” toward the revolution in a society where your attitude affects what you eat, where you live, and how much gasoline and education and pay you receive. Caught between family and state, they had divided the consequences. One
brother had dutifully gone to see Che—and he showed me his pay slip with a notation of his attendance. The other brother had gone to Cienfuegos.

Unlike in the rest of Latin America, where Che was a symbolic outsider, in Cuba he was the Establishment, stripped of his rebellious appeal by the coercive government demand underpinning his postmortem existence. Toddlers literally napped under his gaze in day-care centers. Children promised en masse to “Be Like Che.” There were portraits of him in every school, and the officially sanctioned lessons of his life were taught on every blackboard. Anything he had done or touched was sacrosanct. He’d once spent four hours operating a cigar-boxing machine; the machine was now retired, decorated with placards, and painted silver because Che had used it. All Che’s books were available in Cuban bookstores, and there were always new books about him—Granado’s diaries, memoirs by others who knew him or claimed to, plus profiles of Che the guerrilla fighter, Che the economist, Che the journalist, Che the doctor, Che the Argentine, Che the photographer, and Che the traveler.

Che was everywhere, not just as political propaganda but as profitable consumer good: there were Che posters and lapel pins, Che refrigerator magnets, Che T-shirts, Che cigarette lighters and Che nail clippers, Che postcards and Che photo albums. The Swiss watch company Swatch put out a Che Swatch bearing his photo and the slogan “Revolución!” The Cuban government bought the entire production run and begun flogging the watches at José Martí International Airport, outside Havana, for fifty dollars apiece.

I called Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, the photographer known as Korda, who’d snapped that most-famous picture of Che one overcast day in March 1960. He demanded money for an interview but gave a short rant free of charge about all the royalties he was owed. He offered to sell me a signed original of the shot—cropped or uncropped, it was my choice—for three hundred dollars, but I already knew that you could knock the price in half if you went to his house with a bottle of rum and convinced him you were a friend of the revolution.

On October 9, 1997—thirty years to the day after Che died in La Higuera—the Cuban daily newspaper
Granma
ran the headline
CUBA WILL NOT ENCOURAGE TOURISM WITH THE FIGURE OF CHE
and quoted vice-minister of tourism Eduardo de la Vega as he assured the nation, “We don’t believe the figure of Che should be commercialized.” I bought a pair of Che maracas and tapped out my rhythmic applause for the vice-minister.

H
aving thus praised Alberto Granado, I went to bury him. The
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guy and I hired an old Cadillac and rumbled through the pitch-dark city and then into the suburbs on the broad Quinta Avenida. Granado had sent me a couple of letters explaining that he couldn’t talk with me because he’d sold his life story to an Italian movie company. His address was on the envelopes, though, and we found the street in a neighborhood of luxurious American-style homes from the 1940s. Granado’s turned out to be one of the largest. The house was unlit, but in Havana that meant nothing, and I banged on the front door and waited and banged again. After a while a child answered, we were let inside, and there was a lot more waiting and then discussions and movement upstairs. Some relatives were in the backyard watching a pyramid of wood burn down to the proper condition for an Argentine barbecue. It takes a lot of meat to make one of those
asados;
the official ration in Cuba is the equivalent of two hamburger patties a month.

Alberto Granado received us upstairs, on the balcony. He wore a green shirt and shorts, was almost bald, and had a small mustache. We sat on lawn furniture and I presented the bottle of Havana Club that had gotten us into trouble at the plaza. His wife went in search of glasses; she didn’t talk during the interview but stayed within reach of the bottle, which we all began to consume neat. I was so stunned to finally meet Granado that I did not know where to begin, but he did, and he started into his story with easy familiarity.

“The journey was my idea,” he began. The purpose was “to
know the world, but first Latin America. We read books about Chile and Peru, but we needed to see it to really know it.” The phrasing sounded familiar and indeed was almost word for word what he had written in the introduction to his diary. Granado made a lot of appearances now and gave scripted remarks about his friendship with Che to international groups. He’d been in Venezuela addressing unionists, and went to Temuco in Chile to speak at a university. He was allowed a passport, one of many benefits of being an official Friend of Che. I’d seen a photo of him in a Spanish newspaper recently, part of an article about tourism to Cuba. The caption said, “Alberto Granado, an old friend of Che, tests the golf links at Varadero.”

We started with Patagonia, listing towns we’d both visited decades apart, and then progressed to Chile. “Temuco has changed tremendously,” Granado said. I suggested that they had had a lot of fun in Chile. “Che was very attractive,” he said, nodding. “He was always interested in women, but he was also interested in reading, in travel, in thinking. We didn’t have so much time for girls.” He agreed that the name “Che” had stuck to Ernesto for the first time in southern Chile, although: “We Argentines are known as Ches in all Latin America, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, wherever.” The conversation went easily for a while, as long as we stuck to geography and our mutual motorcycle memories. But there was one odd detail that had been bothering me for a long time. It was so obscure that I was almost reluctant to mention it, but I told Granado that there was a curious discrepancy between the two diaries, a small matter about th—

“Who rescued the kitten?” Granado said. He didn’t need reminding. “It was him who rescued the kitten from a little roof. He attributed it to me and I to him.” When I wondered aloud how this could happen, he gave only a vague answer—“It was an endearment we shared”—and took a pull of rum.
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and the wife were sitting quietly, sipping at the sweet, fiery liquor. I drank the last of my glass and poured refills for everyone. Even in the dark the rum was golden. I asked him about the final chapter in Che’s diary, the strange declaration of martyrdom around a campfire. “I can’t locate where it was,” he answered. Still thinking literally rather than literarily, he
insisted that it must have been a real episode, or at least “a synthesis of many people we knew.”