The Real Che

Hey, man! You know the guy I mean. You must have seen him in the picture – the photo, taken by old Alberto Korda at the protest rally, when the counterrevolutionaries blew up a freighter in Havana harbour. Standing there – an archangel in a tilted beret with a little star on the front, his eyes on the horizon, noble and defiant. Of course, Andy Warhol had to go and splash a load of colour over it, but then they were strange times and we were all a bit crazy, right? Hey, man! – you know, that's what he used to say – Guevara, I mean, El medico, the good-looking Argenti nean – all the time he used to say it: "Hey, man!" this and "Hey, man!" that. That's why we, the Cubans, gave him the nickname "Che!" – it means "Hey, man!" in his Argentinean dialect, but it sounded odd to us. And he was a bit odd too. Ten years he spent dancing his revolution round Cuba, and it was nothing but "Victoria siempre" – victory, victory, always victory– from bullet to bullet. And he always had a cigar sticking out of his mouth and he was always gasping for breath – the jungle's no health resort for asthmatics! And now? Well, now we're all communists, right? Hey man, we've probably only got one saint on the whole island. Ask anyone and they'll tell you about Santo Ernesto. You must know, who that is? Hey, man, it's our Comandante.

Two Guevaras

Between the man named Ernesto Guevara and the man known as El Comandante Che, the difference is greater than the difference in age. The first was the son of educated, middle-class parents, who was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1928. He held a university diploma as a doctor and was a sportsman, traveller and thinker – in a word, a real live flesh and blood person. The second was a Latin American messiah, a knight without fear or favour, without citizenship and without passion – unless you count the one burning passion for world revolution. This Guevara was impossibly handsome and something akin to a superman. In other words, a mythological character, whom even the astute philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, could call "the most complete human being of our age" – without seeing that the real man himself had been replaced by the spin of the propaganda machine. Ernesto Guevara played the part of Che, like a role in a film. From his childhood he had loved to play the part of the tragic hero, which is not such an unusual thing: in everyday life there are plenty of people who spend their time looking for their own particular auto-da-fé, on to which they can climb in the name of humanity, love, art, faith, science...

But Ernesto Guevara played his hero exceptionally well: sincerely, consistently, temperamentally and fanatically. It was a role chosen by him as his calling – and not, like the majority of the 'tragic actors', assumed for any personal gain. And in keeping with the role he had spent his life working on, he died right there 'on the stage'. This was the moment when the world, which longed for real saints, could finally gasp and fall silent in amazement and admiration – and then burst out in applause. Badges, jeans and Tshirts – the hysterical sixties with student demonstrations, burning phrases of universal love, the passion for self-destruction, and a rapid increase in the numbers of those deemed worthy of worship. Che became a pop-idol – to the greater disgust of the gentlemen of the extreme left, who imagined they held exclusive rights to their heroic comandante.

Pop idols always have their own distinguishing marks, and Che Guevara was no exception. The romantic beret atop the long curls, the inevitable khaki, and the two cigars: one being smoked, the other, in reserve, poking out of his top pocket. But they were not marks by which one could ever recognize little Ernestito.

Rosinant's ribs

Ernestito, as Guevara was called as a child, was once bathed in a very cold river by his progressive parents and, as a result, caught pneumonia, which developed into chronic asthma. Asthma in the tropics is a very serious condition. As the result of his frequent attacks, Ernestito was unable to go to school and spent his days alone breathing the artificial air of the family library and devouring all of its thousands of volumes – from the age of fourteen he seemed to swallow books by the mouthful, one after another.

This continued until his parents decided that the asthma wouldn't get any worse. Then he was set free. Like a bird from its cage. His health improved rapidly, and he began to carve a new self from all those positive heroes he had read about. To his parents horror, he took an active interest in all kinds of sport. Together with the Indian children, he got to know all the forests and hills in the neighbourhood. And he discovered in himself a love for any kind of adventure. At the age of eleven, for instance, together with his younger brother, he clambered secretly into a lorry, and it was several days before the police, who had been covering a five hundred miles radius (!) in search for, the boys returned them to their frantic parents.

Of course, as a Latin American, the young Guevara could not but take an interest in politics and he was just eighteen, when the dictator Peron began his ten years in power. Ernesto's mother was arrested three times for taking part in anti-Peronist demonstrations, while his father together with a number of likeminded people wired homemade bombs to 'protect themselves from the police'. Their son – for the moment –took no part in this, arguing that there was no point in going out on to the streets just to get beaten up with police truncheons, and that the time to get involved in street fighting was when you had a pistol in your hand.

"Once again I can feel my heels digging into Rosinant's ribs and, once again, clad in my armour, I set forth on the journey", such were the words that the prodigal son Ernesto wrote to his parents every time he went out in search of adventure. The Argentinean Don Quixote would advertise bicycles so as to have the use of one on his distant journeys. At one time as a medical student, he visited all the leper colonies in South America with the intention of devoting his life to the healing of leprosy. At another, he signed on as a deckhand on a merchant vessel so as to get to Trinidad and British Guiana. On one occasion he even coached a football team in a Colombian jail in exchange for his own freedom.

And all the while, his parents received letters from him in approximately the following vein: "Alberto and I are travelling on a raft down the Amazon. If you don't get any news from me in a month, either we've been eaten by crocodiles or the Indians have gulped down the edible bits and dried our heads for sale to American tourists. So if you want to see us again, your best bet will be the souvenir shops in New York." Another letter would then arrive a couple of months later.

In March 1953, Ernesto graduated from university and set off straight away for Venezuela. The leper colony at Caracas had offered him a post as a doctor with a monthly salary of US $800. But Ernesto never reached Caracas: he'd learned from someone he'd met on the journey that revolution was in the air in Guatemala, which was then run by the democratic president, Jacobo Arbens.

This was the beginning of his wanderings throughout the 'united banana republics'. Ernest worked as a doctor, did experiments on cats at the institute of cardiology, photographed children in the parks, sold books under the counter, and made a lot of interesting acquaintances. But he soon had to get out of Guatemala – war had started, American planes were bombing, and Arbens was forced out of the presidency. Ernesto ended up in Mexico, married Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian marxist, and – most importantly – met the Castro brothers and other Cuban immigrants, from whom he learned all about their glorious, but so far unsuccessful struggle against the dictator, Batista. It was 1956 and there were quite a lot of Cubans in Mexico. This was the time when they began calling Ernesto 'Che' – from the way he loved to use that Argentinean term in his speech. By now they had licked their wounds and were ready to return home to start the revolution. And yesterday's medical student, Ernesto Guevara, couldn't wait to join them. In a letter home, he wrote that he had joined the Fidel Castro detachment and was on his way to liberate the 'green lizard of Cuba' from bondage, and might never return. For the next two years the only news his parents got about their son came from the newspapers.

Patriot games

The Cubans were valiant soldiers, but amateurs, enthusiasts. Half of them had never even held a rifle, and the rest had absolutely no idea what war was about. Che himself had managed to avoid the draft by taking a cold bath before going to the medical and provoking a powerful asthma attack so as to be declared unfit for military service. So before starting the revolution, the first thing the partisans had to learn was how to shoot.

Their instructor on all military matters was a former colonel in the Spanish Army, Alberto Bayo – and a more colourful personage Fidel Castro could hardly have found. He had fought in the Moroccan war, served in the Foreign Legion, and taken part in the Spanish Civil War (going over to the partisans and fighting against the Franco's forces) before emigrating to South America, where he had occasionally fought in the 'banana revolts'. He had also tried his hand at writing and running a furniture business. But his most important contribution was a textbook, which he entitled: '150 Questions for a Partisan'. This little work threw light on the whole spectrum of underground guerrilla warfare: ambushing, undermining, escaping from prison, blowing up bridges, making bombs and grenades, and even the art of the creative whistle.

To help the future liberators of Cuba, the colonel was ready to hold an introductory training course for eight thousand American dollars, but then got so involved in the business that he agreed to take only half of the money. In the end, he sold his furniture business and gave the proceeds to his pupils so as to help with the success of their enterprise.

A private military college of somewhat limited ability, but unlimited liability was founded on the Santa-Rosa Ranch, some thirty five kilometres from Mexico City. Here they fired guns, threw grenades, practised camouflage, learned to read maps and make explosives, and went out on gruelling marches. It is hardly necessary to say that Che, the perfectionist, was Don Alberto's star pupil, who never got less than top marks for everything. Furthermore, as a doctor, he undertook to train his soldiers in the basics of first aid and played the part of the guinea pig himself during the practical lessons, as a result of which he had to put up with more than a hundred absolutely unnecessary injections given him by his comrades-in-arms.

But military preparations for the great invasion came to an unexpected end, when rumours of a partisan training camp on the outskirts of the capital reached the police. The ranch was surrounded and the freedom fighters imprisoned.

But being Mexico, where money talked, Colonel Bayo was soon able to do the necessary and the majority faced no serious charges – in less than five months almost the whole detachment of armed revolutionaries, who had been caught bang to rights in the preparation of a military coup, were once again free men.

'Grandma'

The boat that Fidel Castro bought from an American to ferry his troops to Cuba was called the Grandma – and as the Russian story-book hero, Captain Vrungel, used to say, "The way you name a boat is the way it sails!" Apart from which, it was designed for a maximum of twenty five persons and needed a thorough overhauling. But there was neither the time nor the money for any of that.

The story of the sea voyage was full of the sick humour that was characteristic of Che. One dark November night eighty two wannabe partisans clambered aboard an old floating rust bucket with arms, ammunition and a minimum of food. Actually it turned out that they had a minimum of ammunition too – the greater part had been left behind, either through absentmindedness or because there wasn't room for it, so they had to rely on what they could capture. Also left on shore was Che Guevara's asthma medicine, though as the expedition's doctor, he had charge of the medical supplies. To complete the disastrous picture, as the 'Grandma' pulled out into the open sea, a huge storm arose.

They sailed like sardines in a tin. The boat was full to overflowing and the budding guerrillas were literally sitting on each other's shoulders. Che recalled later: "It was like something out of a tragicomedy: people sat there with hangdog faces gripping their bellies with either their heads buried in buckets or sprawled on the deck in unnatural positions. Of the eighty two people on board there were only two or three sailors and about five passengers, who weren't seasick". And on top of everything, Che was stricken with asthma.

But this was only the beginning of their adventures. Not long afterwards the boat began to leak, but worse still, the pump packed up and the engine died the death. The old rust bucket was taking water so fast it looked like the Cuban liberation campaign was about to come to an inglorious end before it had even started. The seasick soldiers used buckets, mugs, even their cupped hands – anything to bail out the boat. To lighten the load, they threw out the ballast – which just happened to include all their tinned food. All night they worked feverishly, rushing round the boat till dawn, when the first rays of the son revealed the cause of the near-catastrophe – an open tap in the heads. By dint of incredible effort, they managed to get the engine working.

During the first three days of the voyage each sad seafarer at least got half a can of condensed milk in his rations, but on the fourth day this was reduced to a small piece of sausage and an equally small piece of cheese. After that there were only rotten oranges. They now began to ache for the tinned food that had been thrown overboard.
The most experienced sailor was Roberto Nuñes. Castro made him navigator. On one of the last days of the voyage he climbed on to the roof of the wheelhouse to see if he could see land – and was washed overboard. The partisans spent several hours trying to get him out of the water.

The 'Grandma' had gradually gone off course. Which meant that the first stage of the overall plan to liberate Cuba was ruined, since Castro could no longer hope to meet up with Franco Pais and his insurrectionists at the agreed time. Only after a week of torment and affliction did the boat finally reach the shores of Cuba. And then it ran aground. The insurgents tried to lower the only rowing boat, but in so doing, they sank it. There was nothing for it but to wade up to their necks in water.

And, just at the wrong moment, up came a fleet of motor launches and a squadron of planes from Batista's army, hosing them with merciless fire. The Cuban campaign was less an invasion, more a shipwreck.

"War ain't what it used to be"

But there was nothing funny in it at the time. Three days after their luckless landing, no more than twenty of the original eighty two were left alive. The communist-theorists and armchair idealists were now blindly wading through swamps overgrown with a seemingly endless mesh of impenetrable mangrove thickets, and trying to ignore the quivering, semi-transparent shroud of mosquitoes.

War games, it appeared, were rather different in reality than they had seemed in Che's romantic imagination. There was nothing to breathe, nothing to eat, and though there was somewhere to go – they had no idea how to get there. The occasional peasant guides they came across were too scared of the government forces, and every other one turned out to be a traitor. Apart from which, Batista's soldiers could shoot much better and had far more bullets to shoot with. Their feet swelled and they were covered with bloody sores. Che, as doctor, would bandage them up, but it was of little use to anyone, because they had to push on with damaged shoes and wet bandages.
On the third day the partisans stopped at a place with the pastoral sounding name of Alegrio-de-Pio (Holy Joy). Nearby there was a sugar-cane field, and that meant something to assuage their hunger and thirst. Almost all the insurgents collapsed with sleep the moment their bodies touched the ground. It seemed they were at the limits of their endurance. Even when planes appeared overhead in the sky, they paid no attention to them – until they started drenching the fields with machine-gun fire. The only thing they could do was run desperately into the sugar cane and try to hide in the hope of some miracle.

But even there in such dire straits Che managed to use the experience for drawing philosophical conclusions. The soldier running by his side dropped his box of cartridges in a panic. Che grabbed him by the arm, but the man was hysterical, screaming that they would all be killed. Che was carrying the medicine chest and couldn't manage two boxes. Uncertain what to do, he posed the philosophical problem of his own identity: "What am I, a doctor or a soldier?" After a few moments thought, he came to the conclusion that he was a soldier, so he picked up the box with the cartridges and ran on.

In some ways it was a fortunate decision, because although Che was seriously wounded in this attack, it was the cartridges that probably saved his life: a bullet hit the box, which was pressed close to his chest and glanced off catching him in the neck. Only five other partisans emerged with Che from the sugar cane field alive – the others were either killed or separated.

The Man and the cigar

The defeated and harassed insurgents were given some protection by the local peasants. In a mountain village after his first real battle, Che smoked his first real cigar. He only smoked it, because the others were smoking. And because his shattered nerves needed it. And because cigars drove off the incessant mosquitoes. Cigars were the only luxury in their semi-feral lives, and they made them feel human again. They also made the Cubans feel Cuban again. And Che made another very important, but inexplicable discovery about cigars – the tobacco smoke eased his asthma attacks.

This came in very handy, because Che's physical condition was deplorable. One asthma attack followed another – and all his medicine had been left in Mexico. In one battle he had been unable to move at all – backwards or forwards.

But he was lucky enough to have been carried out of the line of fire by a peasant, who took him home. But having rested there a while, he set out once again and, at the speed of a tortoise, tried to catch his men up. He staggered along leaning on the butt of his rifle and the trunks of the trees. Every time he started to cough, his guide was terrified that Batista's soldiers would here them. But gradually his health returned, and Hilda in Mexico received a very optimistic dispatch: "I'm writing you these lines from the thorny Cuban undergrowth. I'm alive and thirsting for blood. It looks like I'm becoming a real soldier – well, I'm certainly dirty, and ragged, and writing on a metal plate instead of a table, and there's a rifle over my shoulder and a cigar in my mouth. That, by the way, is my latest bad habit."

From that time on, his whole body exuded the aroma of the Cuban tobacco he smoked. Wherever Che went, a cigar went with him. In every new partisan camp he set up a little tobacco factory, where cigars were made for the whole detachment. Even much later, at the UN General Assembly, which he attended with diplomatic status, he always wore a military uniform instead of a suit and, as everyone around him could see, instead of a freshly laundered handkerchief in his top pocket, there was always a cigar.

Cuba liberated

The Cuban revolution was ultimately victorious, and the Argentinean Che Guevara was the national hero of a foreign country. Of those that survived the landing from the 'Grandma', Che was the first to get the small golden star of a comandante.

In early 1959, his unit numbering a hundred and thirty nine men, was the first to enter Havana after Batista's forces had fled following the final battle for the dictator's main fortress, SantaClara. And the only obstacles he faced on the road from Santa-Clara to the Cuban capital were the thousand-strong crowds of peasants that clogged up the roadways, as they came down on foot and by mule to greet the insurgents and express their thanks personally to Che.

But Che's fame was not only due to his military prowess. In the mountains of the Sierra-Maestra, where he had spent two years fighting as a partisan, the peasants looked upon him as something of a wizard: white-skinned, speaking a funny foreign dialect, gasping for breath every so often like a fish out of water, and a physician to boot! He taught them to read, listened to what they had to say, explained the complexities of politics in a way they could understand, and joked with them and let them make jokes at his expense. The mountain folk loved him so much that many volunteered to join the partisans purely out of respect for Che. In almost any circumstances he could be guaranteed to act in a non-standard way – so much so that it was not long before a whole string of stories, myths and jokes sprang up about him. And these made him even more popular.

Stories about Che

The Dentist
Somebody brought some dentist's instruments to the partisans. As soon as they reached the next stopping place, Che started looking feverishly round for someone to try them out on. Some of the braver men volunteered – and bitterly regretted their bravado. Che had never pulled out teeth before and, of course, there were no anaesthetics.

How Che became the minister of industry
At a meeting of the Cuban leaders, Fidel Castro asked if there was an economist in the hall. Che Guevara, dreaming as always of world revolution, thought Castro had said 'communist' instead of 'economist', so he put up his hand and was appointed minister of industry on the spot.

Authentic stories about Che, the economist
Che Guevara was a model communist, but no economist at all. His economic ideas were, to put it bluntly, not far short of lunacy. But that was the good news; the bad news was that he actually tried to put them into practice. For instance, he thought that the National Bank should not provide loans for enterprises set up to make a profit. Then he thought that the profitability of an enterprise should have nothing to do with whether or not it was offered credit. Amazingly, he believed that wages should be determined not by the amount of work done, but by the needs of the worker; and that, in any case, it was better to do away with wages altogether and replace them with payment in kind on the grounds that "communist consciousness does more to develop production than material incentive". One of the greatest disappointments for Che, the economist, was to learn that even socialist countries do not give 'nonreturnable' loans and actually expect repayment with interest.

Che, the hard worker

Ernest Che Guevara de la Serna, Cuban minister of industry, usually spent his weekends working as a docker in the port or a cutter in the sugar plantations. Employees at the ministry of industry secretly admitted that Che was always the last to collect his wages and was usually short of money.

Che, the driver

A Soviet journalist happened to be in a car that was driven around Havana by Che Guevara. Right in the centre of Havana they crashed at full speed into an oncoming car. Immediately a whole crowd of Che’s fans gathered round to try and help, and the driver of the damaged car was literally glowing with joy, swearing that he would never repair the dent to his car as a memory of his personal meeting with el Comandante.

Che, the pilot – a frightening story

On the day after the car crash, the same journalist was supposed to fly from Havana to the province of Oriente. But when he saw Che Guevara sitting at the controls, he suddenly came over ill. But Che made as if to calm him down, saying: “Don’t worry, there aren’t many planes in Cuba yet, so there’s minimal chance of bumping into one.” Fortunately, the real pilot was right there in the copilot’s seat to make sure nothing untoward happened.

Che, the chess-player

Che Guevara frequently dropped into the Soviet embassy to find a worthy opponent at the chessboard. And, as a rule, he beat the diplomats, and was extremely proud of beating the representatives of a nation famed for its chess-playing.

Che’s punctuality

Che Guevara, the minister of industry, came on a visit to Moscow with a Cuban delegation. The Cubans stayed at the hotel ‘Sovietskaya’. In the evening before the talks, Che told the delegation that they would meet the next day at nine thirty in the morning in the hall. But when he came down from his room at the appropriate time, he found he was alone. He waited exactly one minute, then got into his car and drove off to the Ministry of Trade – where instead of the expected group of Cuban delegates they were amazed to see el Comandante alone quietly entering the place like anyone else and then proposing to start the talks. Soon the others arrived, but in ones and twos, panting heavily and thoroughly embarrassed.

The joke about the three communists

The Apostle Peter decided to check whether there was any truth in the rumours that sinners had been secretly getting into the Kingdom of Heaven, that is communists getting into the Cuban government. He summoned Che Guevara, Fidel and Raoul Castro and ordered them to cross a swamp, saying that the sinners would drown, but the righteous would walk on the water. The Apostle then went off. When he returned, he was amazed to find that there was no sign of Che, that Raoul was up to his beard in water, but that Fidel was only up to his knees. Unable to believe his eyes, he asked Fidel, who was reputed to be the chief communist, how he had managed to survive. Fidel told him it was easy – he was standing on Che Guevara’s shoulders.

The death of Che Guevara

But the most glorious myth about Che was connected with his death. He disappeared from Cuba in March, 1965 – quite suddenly and telling no one where he was going. His mother tried to get hold of him by telephone, but his second wife, Aleida, sounding bewildered, said: "He should be out somewhere harvesting sugar cane..." Soon afterwards, an announcement was made in which the contents of an open letter were made public. In the letter, Che Guevara renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship and told the world that he was off to continue the task of world revolution.

Only later did the true facts of what happened come out. At first, Che headed for Africa and spent six months trying to finish the revolution in the Congo. But the Congolese weren't much good at freedom fighting: they were afraid of rifles, took no action whatsoever without first consulting the witchdoctors and soothsayers, and basically had no idea what the Cubans wanted them to do. It was not long before Che Guevara's services were declined. So off he went in search of some other country, where they would let him make a revolution – and ended up in Bolivia with every intention of making one himself.

When he learned that there was a Cuban partisan detachment on his doorstep ready to start a war, the head of the Bolivian communist party, Mario Monche, did his best to dissuade Che from this reckless undertaking. He pointed out that the Bolivian army was very strong; that the Bolivian peasants were quite satisfied with recent agrarian reforms and would not support the partisans; that the Bolivian communists did not want any help from foreigners; and that in the event of hostilities, President Barrientes would call in help from the American special services. But Che took not a blind bit of notice. All he wanted to do was to "get stuck in – and shake the country up a little" – after that, everything else would go smoothly. His detachment consisted of forty men – and never got any bigger.

It's hardly worth going into the details of the disastrous Bolivian campaign. Impassable mountains and impenetrable swamps, hunger and superior enemy forces... On October 8, 1967 two companies of rangers and a troop of Bolivian soldiers finally crushed the remainder of the partisans and Che, slightly wounded, was taken prisoner and locked in the empty classroom of a village school in La Iguera.

The precise details of what did and what did not happen next are now no longer possible to establish. The story goes that on the day after his arrest, the US Ambassador in La-Pas told President Barrientes that the United States considered Guevara's physical termination imperative. The sentence was to be carried out by a junior officer named Mario Teran. He looked at Che and, shaking all over, couldn't pull the trigger. Che, who had spent ten years in partisan warfare and for whom executions were an everyday occurrence, is said to have told him not to be a coward and shoot. Even so, Teran still needed Dutch courage from the bottle, after which he cut Guevara down with a burst of machine gun fire. The body was then displayed for all to see.

Then – again, according to the story – Che Guevara's hand was cut off the body and sent to the CIA for a finger-print check. Apparently, this proof was required before the details of his death would be believed, and Che might have had a double. Then... well, all the rest – the long search for Che's grave, the reburial in Cuba, the marble monuments, and the communist slogans – no longer had any meaning for the image of el Comandante. By then, the Man with the Cigar existed in the consciousness of the masses quite independently of the man who played his part.

Cigar Clan 1, 2004 vol.1. Yelena Karpukhina