Chasing Che (43 page)

I’d drunk enough to loosen my Spanish, and I deployed a thesis that the motorcycle journey of 1952 had awoken Che to the world and led inevitably to his subsequent travels, when Che had set off again to Bolivia and Guatemala, studying revolutionary movements and finally having his fateful encounter with Fidel Castro. One trip begat the next; one journey led to another. He was a traveler to the end.

“This is a well-developed thesis,” Granado replied. “The first voyage was to ask questions. The second was to find answers. I think travel sensitized him to injustice, to the lack of respect for the humanity of Indians, to the poverty. These were the roots of all his Marxist theories.”

I asked if he, Granado, wasn’t something of an influence through his early Marxist beliefs. He scratched his head, sipped, and said, “Not a great influence, but yes.” The main difference between himself and Guevara was one of temperament. “There are two types of people. One thinks he can change the world in small steps. Then there are those who think they can change it in one grand action.”

The bottle was mostly gone now. We’d been talking slowly in the hot night, gradually getting drunk. Granado had a lot of wrinkles, and because he was sitting in a collapsing lawn chair his round head barely came up over the table. I poured another round.
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spoke up now, asking about contemporary Cuba.

“We’re passing through hard times,” Granado answered. “We lost ninety percent of our markets, but the Cuban community has dignity. Fidel knows the people. Many people think Fidel is a grand pastor with a big flock, but the reverse is true. The people lead Fidel. Before, we had one school of medicine and zero centers of medical investigation. Now, thirty-six years later, we have eighteen schools of medicine, fifty thousand doctors, and twenty-five centers of medical research. We don’t offer a Buick. We offer schools, medicine, employment, and work.” He went on for a while about how Cuba had “practically no” political prisoners and only a few
delincuentes
were
sent to jail for causing trouble. Peru and Argentina were both in much worse shape than Cuba. The last time he was in Argentina he’d been shocked—shocked—to find people selling things in the street.

I asked him about Stalin. “We must put it in historical context,” he said, and then did so, talking about World War II and the necessity of defeating the Nazis. Stalin’s only error “was that people had no part in power. That doesn’t happen in Cuba. Here, the people have the last word, not Fidel.”

At the end, when the bottle was nearly empty and we were rising to leave, he signed my copy of his diary, the same one that had come originally from Havana to New York, then passed over the Andes and traveled ten thousand miles, only to return in the end to the hand that had written it. “For Patricio,” he now scribbled across the title page, “dignified emulator of my voyage with El Che. Affectionately, Alberto Granado.”

On the way out he told me that his son and Che’s son had talked for a while about teaming up on a pair of motorcycles to retrace the journey but that nothing had ever come of the idea.

C
he’s final road trip began at dawn the next day. I staggered down to the waterfront with a splitting headache. I’d been partying in a bar full of whores and Germans until 3
A.M
. The city was filled with European and Canadian men who didn’t even know about the funeral. They bought Che T-shirts and listened to trios sing “Guantanamera” and then went off to private houses to screw the girls for twenty dollars. They slept through the mornings and then started over again.

Che’s bones were going to parade out of the city in a motorcade, passing along the length of the Malecón seawall and then heading for Santa Clara, to the east. At 7
A.M
. the tropical sun was already too harsh for my eyes, but a serpentine crowd had assembled along the length of the waterfront and was keeping to a respectful murmur. There were probably ten thousand people waiting, craning their
necks for any sign of the cortege. Children climbed onto the pedestals of street lamps, and some fathers held toddlers on their shoulders. A middle-aged
mulata
named Ana Portela asked me where I was from, and I told her. “Anyone who invaded this country,” she promptly volunteered, “would find blood and sweat and rubble left in Cuba, but not one Cuban.” She was with an older friend, also an Afro-Cuban. I asked this woman what she thought of Che, but she answered another question. “I am eighty-five years old,” she said, “and here we are all equal. There is no racism or discrimination here. We are united.”

At last the little column of vehicles approached, passing first under the shadow of Meyer Lansky’s Riviera Hotel, then by the Nacional, where Capone stayed. The crowd stood straight and silent as a few motorcycle cops passed, and then came seven military jeeps pulling seven glass-topped caissons bearing seven wood boxes under seven flags. When the procession was gone the Cubans disbanded to their schools and places of work.

The seven jeeps were headed for Santa Clara, the scene of Che’s great victory over that armored troop train carrying more than four hundred government reinforcements. That was in late December 1958. After Santa Clara surrendered to Che, the dictator Batista fled the country within days. While Castro loitered in the east, Che formed a convoy of commandeered vehicles and rolled up the highway with his guerrillas toward Havana, greeted by cheering throngs along the route. In those days history was flowing in the opposite direction.

After breakfast and aspirin, we hired a white Subaru with the smallest tires I had ever seen and fled the city. It took an hour of wandering to find the country’s major highway, which turned out to be behind a tree, totally unmarked. We headed east and then south, and came by mid-afternoon to the Bay of Pigs. Our rooms were in a bungalow built on the spot where the Cuban exiles had come ashore in 1961, hoping to overthrow Castro. We went across the street to the small museum where detritus from the battle was on display. We signed in and put “USA” in the nationality column of the guest book,
which generated a satisfying jolt in the eyes of the elderly attendants. The exhibits were filled with hectoring denunciations of the invasion, the exiles, and United States imperialism. After an hour in this hothouse climate of martyrs and villains, I needed a drink.
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and I went back to the hotel and sat down in the bar. We ordered piña coladas, and I tried to pay with Cuban pesos, but the bartender waved them away. “Dollars only,” he said.

There was a documentary about Che on television. “All Che,”
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said, “all the time.”

S
anta Clara was where my own journey had begun. Just like six years before, you could still see the bullet holes from Che’s shootout on the façade of the Santa Clara Libre hotel. We drove in past the plaza, past the benches where the
gusano
with his home-brewed beer had expressed the conviction, “If he were still alive, none of this would be happening.”

Now that statement was literally true. The funeral was already under way, and the side streets near the plaza were packed with pedestrians walking out toward the new mausoleum. I wove the Subaru gently through the bodies, tooting the horn like imperialism personified. On the radio we could hear the speeches beginning, and just around the time I found a parking space Fidel Castro came on. I could hear his voice on the car radio; looking down the hill, I could see a crowd of perhaps fifty thousand people and on the far side a tiny green figure addressing us from the podium. The mausoleum dominated everything. It was capped with a twenty-two-foot-tall bronze statue of Che striding forward, rifle in hand. The statue rested on a high stone pedestal that was hollow. At the end of the ceremony they were going to stick him inside it.

We pushed through the crowd, but with the event already under way it was impossible to get near the front. Policemen manned fences that cut us off from the press gallery. The sound system was breaking down, and Castro’s voice boomed in a kind of unintelligible abstraction.
In the car, I had heard his every word; in person, I couldn’t understand anything he was saying. It didn’t matter; when I read it in the paper I saw that he had declared that Marxism was advancing across the globe and that Che and the other six guerrillas in the funeral were “a reinforcement brigade” come home to bolster the revolution.

I began to panic. I had come all this way to watch Che buried, but I couldn’t see or hear anything but a crowd of tens of thousands of sweaty regime loyalists. We slogged around the outside of the event looking for the press center, hoping for access to the bandstand, but had to settle for a spot behind the event and to one side, along a fence. The mood was tense, and even though I don’t smoke, I wanted a smoke. There was an old man with a cigar box standing mutely to one side, and I bought two cigars that he had rolled himself for twenty-five cents. I hadn’t yet struck a match when two New Men approached. They wasted nothing but a sour look on a foreigner, but the old man was treated to a cruel harangue about denigrating the occasion with buying and selling. I could see how thin the old man was, how hungry, but the revolution was an absolute. Even a twenty-five-cent flaw had to be squashed.

The words
imperialism
and
immortal
floated over us from time to time, and eventually Castro stopped talking and some cannons rattled off a salute. I saw a group of soldiers march past, turn sharply, and disappear over the little rise that separated us from the reviewing stand. More groups marched by; different types of soldiers, a phalanx of policemen in blue, more green, and finally a group of model workers who wore their own clothes and could not march in step, although they tried. Over they went, doing their best to keep together as they passed the rise and went down the other side, dropping into invisibility.

Slowly, the field emptied out. The crowd became thin, and then there were just isolated clusters of people, and after an hour all that was left was a muddy expanse of trampled grass. At long last we were all done. El Che stood alone against the tropical sky.