The Death of Che Guevara (5 page)

And perhaps you would discover your blindness; or perhaps his silence was
(in so many ways) too terrifying to be abided—as if you thought he (or someone) was dying. He, the principle of Revolution, was being absorbed into the nonhuman world. You would do what you must to bring him back, to save him (or someone). You would indeed (and why not call your motive concern, loyalty, love for him whether he was right or wrong?). For perhaps there was, you felt, a glacial change going on within that silence, a change that would be irreversible; a mountain was being gouged from the land by the slow progress of a huge silent mass of ice. You were falling away from him, you were falling down that mountain, out of his confidence. He might smile suddenly and end the meeting. We would get up and leave the high-ceilinged room; and it would be far too late. You would find yourself at a distance from him, in a province, in exile, in jail, dead. His silence prefigured an abandonment, an absence, a death. Maybe yours.

But to revive him now, to bring him back up the chain of being from rock to man, required a lot of talk from you. You could not anymore simply acquiesce in his plan. You must indicate thoroughly your hidden motive, now discovered, for disagreement. You must show that you had apprehended the flaw in your character, and so seen your theoretical mistake. You must display your understanding of his idea: economies of scale, creation of a new man, destruction of the petit-bourgeois element. You must elaborate for a while on why you now agreed—hard to do, for he had exhausted most of the means of elaboration himself. Perhaps you could use anecdotes from the war: when we had redistributed expropriated cattle to the peasants they had immediately slaughtered and eaten them, afraid the cows would be taken away again. Only state cooperatives could prevent this. I had seen you, a courageous man, drag a wounded comrade from a field strafed by gunfire, but sweat covered your body now as you showed yourself before your comrades. I could smell it: an acrid unpleasant odor. You clasped your fingers together with strain, in prayer, as I had seen you do when you first tried to learn to read. Again, words were failing to come to you. Comrades stared at the light from the high windows, or the discolored rectangles on the wall where the portraits of Cuba’s betrayers had hung. (I, however, watched you perform. You caught my eye and I smiled and nodded. You hated me ever after.) You went on till he spoke, for his silence was a waste of snow you might have to wander in till your heart froze in confusion and terror.

And often, as the holdout heard himself talk, he found that he now agreed with Fidel, not simply for show, but deeply. (Or was this pride’s ruse to save one’s dignity?) Even as you nervously spoke (I have been told) you found that something recalcitrant in you had melted. Fidel
was
right. Of course he was right. Who better could interpret that exacting god, the Revolution? You
turned about before our eyes; he had turned you; you wanted even to thank him; you saw things freshly. You didn’t feel you had abandoned your position exactly (something you would never have done in a battle, when the enemy was clearly uniformed, when you thought you had known what you were fighting for); rather you simply couldn’t find your old position from your new perspective.

But such silence was an extreme tactic for Fidel. He preferred interpretation and reinterpretation, a reworking of everyone’s arguments that found opposition to be not opposition at all, but an unsuspected fundamental agreement with him (for the moment), that made you feel that your point was subsumed in his, and that the later working-out of things would join you both (till death do you part).

Or, alas, later some other solution would be found.

Fidel’s silence is so powerful because all vitality is in his voice. Once there was. No, this should have a fairy-tale beginning. Once upon a time there was a CIA plot to damage the Revolution by putting lysergic acid in one of Fidel’s cigars. (What appears to them to be a broom is a creature with ears; they have their informed sources, we have ours.) He would smoke the funny cigar before making an important speech to the nation, and become psychotic during the speech, talk all crazy out of his head. This would demoralize the masses.

And there was a dreamlike truth to their idea. Fidel’s voice is the Cuban Revolution. Not his presence, but his voice. It is as if the island were a narrative of his, a continual improvisation by a master storyteller. He is making them up as we go along; creating characters (was there a proletariat in the way that the revolution required it before he named it, made it know its responsibilities, its power?); and yet one feels at each turn that the story could not be other than it is. He has done this by listening: to hear Fidel speak is to hear a man responding, always; he hears a murmur in the crowd; it becomes a voice inside him; he speaks it; he gives the mass the words it wished but did not know, did not even know that it wished except as an uncertainty, a painful anxiety. The Revolution is the long delirium of Fidel’s speeches. Every citizen is a sentence in that story, as he covers the country with words, makes it out of words, crossing and revising and crisscrossing the island as if it were a giant piece of paper. Fidel gone mad would be the Revolution become farce. They would build big factories to make cookies in the shape of obscene body parts; they would declare war on the Eskimos and load their guns with potatoes and soap; they would dig up sugar cane and plant transistors, waiting patiently for their harvest of radios. And they would become strange to each other, having lost the common term, the common hero, the common language that he is for
them. There is no life in Cuba outside the Revolution, outside of his voice.

Thus the anxiety when he shuts up. In the first year of the Revolution, when we still had to make gestures to the national bourgeoisie, and to the North Americans, we made Judge Urrutia the President. He was an old courageous man, a judge under Batista who had voted freedom for the captured men of the
Granma
. But he would not go along with the First Agrarian Reform Law, mild though it was. He accused Communists—myself among them—of subverting the government, misleading Fidel. (For Fidel had made shadows, allowed the national bourgeoisie to believe what it liked about him.) Fidel resigned. The Cabinet tried to meet in his absence; but nothing could be done without him. Urrutia telephoned Castro and his call was refused. Castro was silent. The Cabinet met again to deal with this crisis; but again they could not agree, they could not calculate his silence, they could not improvise an action. The ministers left the Presidential Palace. Rumors spread. Fidel was silent, neither confirming nor denying. The sugar workers, a union we controlled, called for Urrutia’s resignation, that Fidel might be returned to them. The people waited. Was the Revolution at an end? Would Fidel, indefatigable rebel, take arms against the government? That night Fidel spoke on television. He enumerated Urrutia’s faults, his mistaken appointments, his too-large house, his too-large salary. “Personally,” Fidel said, “I neither have nor want anything. Disinterest is a garment I wear everywhere.” What did he need money for if he trusted the people to provide for him? Urrutia was making up the idea of a Communist plot to provoke aggression from the United States. Urrutia planned to flee Cuba, return after the invasion, and run the country for the North Americans. Urrutia made it impossible for him to work, made him impotent, defenseless, exhausted by Urrutia’s hysterical anti-Communist declarations that caused international embarrassment and conflict with the good people in the United States.
Urrutia made him silent
That was what was intolerable. Cuba had found its hero, its epic, this man who spoke in rhythmic cadenced sentences of audacious plans, of future gaiety, of sublime and necessary cruelty, and this gray-haired old man had shut him up, denied them Fidel’s voice. Crowds gathered around the Presidential Palace demanding the judge’s life. Urrutia fled out the back door. We placed him under house arrest, then let him flee ignominiously to Venezuela. From that time on we ruled Cuba.

I have seen him use his silence as a military tactic too. He would have us wait in ambush, in terrain that we controlled, and watch, watch as the soldiers entered our territory, strung out in a line across a field of tall grass, watch as their bold steps became more hesitant. They had known they were entering our zone, they had steeled themselves for the battle, they had taken the step,
the leap, to face the danger, the firing, their death;
why hadn’t the firing begun?
they couldn’t believe they were safe; how much longer before it began; how much longer would they have to wait? it is terrible to feel in yourself a longing for an attack to begin, a longing for the sight of friends falling around you, perhaps for your own death; so divided, it is difficult to hold your resolve, to hold yourself ready; the line bunched near the front (we always shot the man on point first, so that soon no man would be willing to enter our zone first); you could see the sweat on their faces, under their arms, the terror in their eyes. The silence demoralized them. Then we killed them.

Notes for statement on Vietnam

We cannot remain silent towards Vietnam. We cannot treat the struggles of the Vietnamese people as if they were theater, a show we are audience at, a spectacle, a tragedy to provoke our pity, our tears. We have cried and applauded, but we have done nothing.

We must not abandon Vietnam.

Vietnam, like Cuba, should have been made, irrevocably, and no matter what the cost, a part of the Socialist world, to be defended by the missiles of the Socialist world, even—if the imperialists forced it—to the point of nuclear holocaust. This was not done. She was abandoned to fight alone.

Vietnam is the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism. We must aid her with our hands.

This morning I sat at the table in the main room with Walter, keeping him company during breakfast. My asthma has been very bad the last few days, and I can’t make myself eat much. There is a dank smell for me everywhere that takes away my appetite and my strength. I sipped a cup of mate, mostly for the warmth on my hands.

Walter said, chewing some bread and jam, “Why are we here?”

“A metaphysical question?” I said. I knew what he meant; it was odd, I thought, that he hadn’t asked before. But often he waits patiently for situations to unfold themselves, to reveal their meanings; he is a watchful man. “I’m here,” I said, “waiting to find out what Fidel will do. He can help my plans; he could damage them greatly. I’m here to write my self-criticism, to make myself sure of my next step. I am writing a message about Vietnam, a call to arms.” Walter looked at me, and said nothing. “But I’m not writing.” My last words came in a wheeze; but I couldn’t use the epinephrine, again, yet.

“What happened?”

“You’re a poem, Walter. I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Between you and our leader.” He
was
a poem—it was difficult ever to know if he were ironic.

“We talked. We fought. We sat silently.”

“What did he say?”

“A great deal. At the end he said that perhaps I wanted to sacrifice myself and my closest comrades to appease my guilt. He said that I had sent many people to prove my theories, and they had died; and now I felt troubled. I couldn’t stand to live when they were dead on my account. I had to prove that my theories were good—they were
my
theories during this conversation—that they had died from mistakes of their own. Or I had to die myself, and appease my guilt. Maybe, he said, I wanted to die.” Talking like this made an anxious flutter in my chest; my lungs ached. “I think it’s nonsense, a way for him to avoid the question facing us. But I must wait for his help.”

Walter stared at me, as I had at him a few days ago. Do I want him to die? I returned his look. He has large brown watchful eyes. His small face tilts backward from his chin to the brow. The last week he has grown a wispy black mustache. I wheezed more deeply. The outline of his face wavered in the bad air.

“Very metaphysical,” he said. “Very psychological. Not like him. Not like you. Things must have gone very far between you.”

“We had been looking at each other a long time, up on that platform he has. Neither of us had spoken. We’d exhausted our arguments. He had known
of my plans. He had to decide what he would do. We sat. Then he spoke that … nonsense—very slowly, his voice was hoarse, far away, a low murmur—there were pauses between his sentences, not his style at all. He knew he was avoiding the question. But I must wait. I said I would come here and think about what he had said.”

“What happened before?”

“The rise and decline of the Roman, Spanish, and British Empires. The whole history of imperialism. The Cuban Revolution.” I wheezed out a laugh. I laughed alone; Walter said nothing; Walter watched, his eyes melancholy, quiet. My laugh exhausted me. I gasped for breath. “Don’t stare at me,” I said, and sipped some tea. “I repeated to him what I’d said in Africa about the trade agreements, what I had said to him, to you, before: We’d be dependent on the Soviets for oil. We’d produce sugar, they’d trade us manufactured goods. Industrialization would come to an end. Everything would be the same as before.”

“And?” The harshness of his voice made his words peremptory, almost a command.

“And he said, Fine. Cuba was an agricultural country, should be an agricultural country. The cities were corrupt. Havana was the most corrupt, a whore to tourists, a white vampire that had sucked the wealth of the rest of the island. It had to wander in the wilderness forty years, return to wilderness until it was fit for freedom. Havana should be allowed to die; its sewers to break; its streets to decay; grass would grow between the paving stones. The peasants, he said, are the only trustworthy ones in the country. Farming was a beautiful thing, to work the land was a beautiful thing, the land itself was a beautiful thing. His hand reached out then and patted the air, as if he were stroking the island. The world, he said, was hungry, and growing hungrier. There would always be many hungry nations to buy our crops. The Soviets were right about some things, even if their reasons were crude. We had no internal market for industrial products. But we had a gift for breeding things. He talked about cows, about the different kinds of cows, about cross-breeding of cows, about raising new kinds of cattle on the state farms, about kudzu.”