More
than forty years after his violent death in the jungles of Bolivia Ernesto ‘Che’
Guevara remains an iconic figure in the world history of the twentieth century.
The man who met his death in a remote corner of the world with cheerful
insouciance would have appreciated the irony that in his death he has become a
figure of inspiration to many in the Capitalist world, a system he despised and
which he was attempting to overthrow in Bolivia using violent, guerrilla
tactics, when he was captured and killed.
The
fascination with the life of Fidel Castro’s first Minister for Industries is endless.
Ten years ago the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a
journey of Latin American countries Guevara undertook with his friend Alberto
Granado, was released to great critical acclaim and, if my memory serves me
right, won an Oscar. (Granado was a life-long friend of Che Guevara, and the
movie was based on his and Che Guevara’s travel diaries. Granado’s diaries, Travelling
with Che Guevara, were published in English for the first time in 2003,
following the success of the film. Granado immigrated to Cuba in 1961, where he
went on to become professor of medical biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine
at the University of Havana).
In
2007 was published, for the first time in English, The Young Che: memories of Che
Guevara. The book is an amalgamation of two books, originally published
in Spanish, in the 1980s. It achieves poignancy (in the minds of readers so
inclined) because it was written by Che Guevara’s father, also called (to
confuse matters a bit) Ernesto Guevara, although he went by the hyphenated
surname, Guevara-Lynch (his mother was of Irish descent). Henceforth, in this
review, to avoid confusion, Ernesto Guevara, the revolutionary, would be
referred to by the nickname with which his revolutionary comrades called him
and he is widely known: ‘Che’ (we learn from the book that ‘Che’ is an
expression generally used in Latin America to refer to people from Argentina,
as it is apparently an interjection with which they often pepper their
conversation); while his father, the writer of the memoirs, will be referred to
as he was probably always known in his life: the hyphenated
surname—Guevara-Lynch.
The
original Spanish memoirs were published in 1981 and 1987 respectively, the
second posthumously.
The
memoir traces young Che Guevara’s life in Argentina to the point where he
departs for Cuba to take part in Castro’s revolution. The epilogue, written by
Che Guevara’s friend from his medical school, Tita Infante, a year after his
death, adds poignancy to the memoir. (Infante toyed with the idea of
immigrating to Cuba after Castro’s revolution, but didn’t, a decision she
regretted in later life; she committed suicide in 1976).
Based
extensively on the personal letters Che Guevara wrote to his parents, the
memoir throws into sharp relief the kind of person the man—who, in 1961,
published Guerrila Warfare—A Method—was in his childhood, teens and
youth.
Guevara-Lynch
probably began writing the memoir in the 1970s (the English language book has a
foreword from him dated 1972-1973.) By that time his son’s place in the cannons
of left-wing revolutionary history was assured. The father seems very aware of
the status of his dead son when he writes the memoir. He informs the reader that
he himself was left-wing leaning in his politics, so it wasn’t as if he had to
do a great deal of ideological acrobatics to accommodate and extol the views of
his son. Where Che Guevara differed, one guesses, from his father was: whereas
the father was content to express his outrage to friends and families at what
he saw as repeated interference by the Capitalist USA in internal affairs of
several Latin American countries, rich in natural resources (where CIA-engineered coups overthrew popular, Socialist governments and put in place
puppet dictators), he did not see as his job to actually do anything about it. His middle-class Socialism was within the
perimeter of his middle-class life-style.
Che
Guevara was not content with merely chattering about the Capitalist outrages.
He joined hands with Fidel Castro and overthrew the Cuban dictatorship of
Batista.
Does
the memoir throw any light on—to put it clichédly—what made Che Guevara Che
Guevara? Not really. Much as you try to understand, there is nothing in
Guevara’s childhood, no one single seminal event that one can say set him on the path which, in 1967, ended in
the Bolivian jungles. If anything, there was everything in his illustrious and
affluent family background that should have set him comfortably in life. And it
wasn’t as if he grew up hating everything that his family stood for. According
to the memoir, Che Guevera had a very secure and happy—you could say
ordinary—childhood; and throughout his brief life he remained very close to his
family.
Che Guevara’s great-grandfather (from his
father’s side), Francisco Lynch, in the 19th century, left Buneos
Aires for Uruguay, along with several of his relatives, because he did not want
to live under the dictatorship of General Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852).
Francisco eventually landed in California where he amassed a fortune. Che Guevara’s
other paternal great-grandfather, Juan Anonio Guevara, was a direct descendent
of the founders of the city of Mendoza; his was the ninth generation of Guevaras
born in Argentina, although the family came originally from Chile. Juan Antonio
Guevara, too, was bitten by the gold bug, and travelled to California from
Mexico on a horseback. Unlike Che Guevara’s other great-grandfather, the
Californian venture turned out to be a failure for Juan Antonio Guevara, and he
returned to Argentina with wife and children, amongst them Roberto Guevara, Che
Guevara’s paternal grandfather. Che Guevara’s mother, Celia de la Serna, also came
from an extremely rich family, her father having inherited a vast fortune. Her
father owned several ranches; he was also a successful lawyer and was professor
at the Faculty of Law of the University of Buneos Aires. Guevara remained very
close to his mother until her death (Celia de la Serna had the good fortune of
predeceasing her son by a couple of years, whereas his father outlived him by
several years), and she, in turn, had special affection for her eldest child.
After the successful revolution in Cuba, of which Che Guevara was one of the
architects, Celia learned about her son’s revolutionary politics and ideas, and
came to understand his thinking in depth. She began, in the 1960s, to travel to
Brazil and other Latin American countries, giving lectures on the logic and
justice of the Cuban revolution.
Che
Guevara’s father, Ernesto Guevara-Lynch, was a trained architect. In 1926,
‘quite by accident’, Guevara-Lynch got the opportunity to develop 70,000
hectares in Alto Parana (a happy accident if there was one), in the territory
of Misiones. Che Guevara was born in Misiones and it was there that he spent
the first two years of his life.
As
a child Che Guevara suffered from life-threatening attacks of asthma, which
remained a great cause of concern for his parents throughout his childhood. As
one reads of the endless nights the parents spent, sitting next to young Che,
the various specialist opinions they sought, and the different locations within
Argentina to which the family moved—resulting in considerable interruptions in
his father’s jobs, not to mention financial strains of the frequent moves—in
search of climate which they hoped would suit young Che, a picture emerges of a
closely knit, loving family, with doting parents, who were prepared to do
everything for their child. Years later Che Guevara, while studying medicine,
would develop special interest in allergic conditions, and the interest was
perhaps rooted in the childhood malady.
Che
Guevara was only a boy when the Spanish Civil war started. However, the family
was close to some of the Republican exiles, in particular General Enrique
Jurado, the hero of the battle of Guadalajara. General Jurado visited the
Guevara-Lynch family and often regaled them with stories of the civil war.
Little did Guevara-Lynch realise that the delicate, asthmatic boy, listening
intently to the general’s stories would, one day, command his own troops.
Che
Guevara was an intelligent, precocious child. He was also—his father
recalls—‘deeply attracted to danger’. He actively sought danger and seemed to
enjoy overcoming it. When the family was living in Alta Gracia (in the region
of Cordoba), Che Guevara used to go for walks with his friends, one of them
Alberto Granado. According to a story Granado told Guevara-lynch (after Che
Guevara’s death), a favourite sport of Che Guevara during these walks was to
balance himself on the ledge of a railway bridge, which was about twenty meters
high, above a stream and hang on with his hands, with his legs above his head
and his back to the abyss. If there were girls in the group he would take even
more risks. Knowing as you do the sensational trajectory Che Guevara’s life
took, you wonder whether incidents such as these were harbingers of the things
to come.
As
an adolescent Che Guevara had a wide circle of friends from all social strata.
He was loyal to his friends. He apparently did not enjoy large social
gatherings, as he was reserved by nature. He was also a poor dancer and did not
much care for music; but he enjoyed small parties where young men and women
were present. He had a stubborn streak in him and, even though he continued to
experience violent attacks of asthma—which concerned his father—, participated
regularly in rugby, and excelled.
In
1947 Che Guevara informed his parents that he wanted to study medicine. His
grandmother, to whom he was very close, was terminally ill at the time, and
according to Guevara-Lynch, the decision to join medicine had to do with her
illness. Throughout his years in the medical school, Che Guevara also occupied
himself full-time with various activities, yet he managed to pass all the exams
at first attempt. He did not need to swot for exams; academic achievements, it
would appear, came easily to him. Around this time he also started working in
the laboratory of a specialist in allergies and who had in fact treated him for
his asthma when he was young. After he qualified, Doctor Ernesto—‘Che’—Guevara
presented a couple of papers in international medical conferences. When he
passed his final medical exam and obtained his degree, the first person Che
Guevara phoned was his father. Guevara-Lynch was in his studio when the phone
rang. When he picked up the phone, a voice which he recognised immediately announced
with obvious pride that it was Doctor Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. The emphasis
was on the word ‘doctor’.
When
you read Guevara-Lynch’s memoir, the one impression that is left on your mind
is that his son was a restless soul. It was not in his nature to sit back and
enjoy the comforts that surely his profession (and possible inheritance) would
have made it possible. Novelty seeking was a deeply ingrained in his
temperament and if that meant facing hazards and danger, then it was a small
price to pay for the thrill and enjoyment the derring-dos offered. In the
memoir we learn that before his motorcycle journeys across Latin America with
his friend Alberto Granado (made into the film The Motorcycle Diaries),
Che Guevara bicycled across 14 provinces of Argentina.
If
the family had any hopes that Che would settle into medical practice after
obtaining his medical degree, they were dashed when he announced that he was
embarking on another trip, this time, to Bolivia and Peru. This is how
Guvera-Lynch records his emotions when Che informed him of his forthcoming
trip:
‘He [Che
Guevara] was no longer a child, he was Dr
Guevara de la Serna, and he would do as he pleased. All we could do now was
learn to grin and bear it and try to help him as much as possible—something
that he nearly always turned down.’
Guevara-Lynch
arranged a big farewell party for Che and on a cold afternoon in July 1953, Che
Guevara boarded the train for Bolivia. The family would not see him for the
next seven years. When they finally met him in 1960, Che Guevara was Minister
of Industries in Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba.
As
the train pulled off, Che Guevara shouted at his waving parents and friends:
‘Here goes the soldier of the Americas’. At the time Guevara-Lynch did not pay
any attention, believing it to be another eccentricity of his son. Little did
he know.
Che
Guevara travelled to Bolivia because he wanted to witness, first-hand, the
revolution that was allegedly in progress and which was expected to topple the
government of Paz Estenssoro. The memoir directly quotes from the diaries Che
Guevara kept during this period. (It would appear that although Che Guevara
never actually practised medicine, concerning himself, instead, with toppling
governments, he was very doctor-like in at least one respect: his handwriting
was indecipherable.) Che Guevara’s letters to his father from Bolivia show that
the sharp-minded future revolutionary needed only a few days to understand the
socio-political problems faced by Bolivia. He also immersed himself in
Argentine politics by lively discussions with the exiles (opposed to the rule
of Peron). From Bolivia Che Guevara travelled to Peru (disappointed that he did
not have time to stay back and witness the armed revolt he was certain would
take place against Estenssoro).
The
country, the stay in which probably firmly pushed Che Guevara towards
Communism, was Guatemala. Che Guevara arrived in Guatemala via Panama and Costa
Rica, in 1954. A letter Che wrote to his maternal aunt (to whom he was very
close), from San Jose, Costa Rica, gave his family for the first time an idea as
to his political thoughts. He declared that the capitalists were ‘terrible’ and
went on to inform the aunt (who was not at all a Communist sympathizer) that he
had ‘sworn in front of an image of old and much-lamented Comrade Stalin’ that he
would not ‘rest until I see these capitalists crushed.’ According to
Guevara-Lynch, Che Guevara enjoyed a close and informal relationship with his
aunt and the tone of many of his letters to her was deliberately alarming, but
also written in a manner that was almost tongue-in-cheek. However, in the same
letter came a sentence, towards the end, which the family took no notice of at
the time, but which seemed portentous to Guevara-Lynch as he sifted through
Che’s letters when he began writing the memoir after his death. Che Guevara
wrote:
‘I will perfect my skills in Guatemala and I
will achieve what I still lack in order to be an authentic revolutionary.’
This
was also the first letter of the time in which Che no longer mentioned
medicine; instead the letter was full of his observations on the social and
political situation of the poor and oppressed peoples.
In
Guatemala Che also met the woman who became his first wife. Her name was Hilda
Gadea. She was a Peruvian economist, a political exile (for her left wing
views) following the military coup in Peru by General Manuel Odria. Gadea worked
at Guatemalan Institution for the Promotion of Production.
Gadea
would be Che Guevara’s companion (and wife) for a few years; the marriage would
produce one daughter; and they would part on friendly terms.
In
Guatemala, Che wasted little time in getting intimately involved in the political
turmoil in the region. At the time United Fruit, a powerful banana company,
dominated the Guatemalan economy. As Che Guevara saw it, the company, backed by
the power of the United States had ‘total power’ over people. Che, who was not
a native Guatemalan, positioned himself, politically, with the Guatemalan
government of President Arbenz, of which the Communist party of Guatemala (it
called itself Workers’ Party of Guatemala) was a member. He wrote long letters
to his parents about his assessment of what was going on in the country. What
was going on was a coup. Coup was in the air. Castillo Armas, with the support
of the USA, invaded Guatemala from Honduras, toppling the Socialist government
of Jacobo Arbenz. Che was in Guatemala when the coup took place and briefly
asked for an asylum at the Argentine embassy. He left the country after the
fall of Arbenz, for Mexico, convinced in his mind that there was only one way
to resist what he saw as America’s aggressive capitalism in the region; and
that was not Gandhi’s peaceful non-cooperation. Hilda, whom Che Guevara
referred to as his companera (companion)
in his letters to his parents (and only towards the end of his stay in
Guatemala), stayed back and was jailed. She was eventually released because of
her Peruvian nationality, but only after a lot of suffering.
During
his stay in Guatemala, Che Guevara met with many important people, one of whom
was Dr Arnesto Bauer Paiz, who at the time was President of the National
Agrarian Bank of Guatemala. Years later, this is how Professor Bauer remembered
Che Guevara:
‘He was a young
doctor, but did not look like one, but rather like a student, restless and
cheerful . . . The meeting was animated not just because of Ernesto’s
conversational skills, but because of the subjects broached as well. . . . If I am to speak with total candour . .
. Ernesto and I, although quite influenced by Marxist ideology, still had certain
political ideas that were populists . . .’
When
he left Guatemala for Mexico, Che Guevara sent his parents a box that contained
more than 100 of his books. The majority of the books dealt with the social and
political aspects, but there were also books on subjects such as statistics,
economics and geography.
Going
through the scores of letters Che Guevara sent to his family from this period,
years after his death, his father was struck by the jaunty, chatty and amusing
tone of them. He (the father) was also forced to conclude, with the benefit of
hindsight, that his son, deliberately or otherwise, had not given his family
any indication of the turn his life was about to take. The family continued to
fondly believe—rather hope—that Che’s interest in the politics of the Central
and Latin Americas would not take over his life and that he would return to
Argentina in due course to start his medical practice.
The
subterfuge would continue in Mexico.
Che
Guevara arrived in Mexico in September 1954 and, to make ends meet, became a
street photographer. This section of the memoir includes some letters Che wrote
to his friend from his medical school, Tita Infante. He concludes one of the
letters as follows, which gives you an idea of the kind of person he was:
‘Going back to the
uncomfortable subject of advice I will give you my last: always throw fears
overboard because they complicate matters. It is always better to have the
bitter-sweet taste in your mouth of a frustrated yearning than an unfounded
image of what might have been.’
In
his letter to his parents Che wrote that he was getting involved in two pieces
of medical research. He also declared his intention to write a book. He had
thought of the title of this book: The
Function of the Doctor in Latin America. He then remarked, tongue in cheek,
that he could speak with some authority on the subject because, although he did
not know a lot about medicine, he had Latin America well sussed out. Che
Guevara never wrote the book on the functions of a doctor in Latin America;
instead he wrote a book on the guerrilla warfare.
The
letters from Mexico were full of rant against the USA. Che Guevara had concluded
that the Mexican government was in the pocket of the Americans. There were
grave prognostications for Mexico’s future. (‘In
Mexico there are practically no independent industries and even less free
trade. This country is heading for total disintegration and I am not
exaggerating; the only way you could make any money here would be by being a
pimp for the Americans.’)
There
was also some admittance, albeit indirect, in these letters, that he had
probably been a disappointment to his parents. Che concluded one of the letters
to his father with the observation: ‘I
have grown tired of talking nonsense and you of reading it.’ In another letter, this time to Tita Infante,
he called himself ‘a first class failure, scientifically speaking’.
Then
the tone and content of Che Guevara’s letters to his parents changed, giving hope
to them that perhaps all was not lost. He informed them that he had won a
scholarship at the General Hospital of the Mexico. This was followed by another
letter which told the parents that his hospital post was going well and that he
was working in the laboratory of the hospital doing allergy research. He was
now working with the ‘top man of allergy in Mexico’, Dr. Salazar Malan. He
indicated to his parents that more exciting research projects were in the
pipeline.
Che’s
Peruvian wife, Hilda, now working for the United Nations, joined him in Mexico.
Hilda was pregnant and Che wrote to his aunt:
‘Life goes on with
bourgeois sloth, without anything to cloud my daily work, not even the
proximity of the baby, which will apparently arrive between the last week of
February and first week of March.’
What
little cause for concern the family might have had was removed when Che
announced in one of the letters that there was a very good chance that he
would become a professor of physiology at the National University Mexico.
In
April 1956, Che informed his parents in a letter that his baby girl was born
and in good health. The professorship in Physiology, however, had not
materialised, because Che had ‘realised’ that Physiology was not his ‘forte’.
He ended this letter with:
‘A big hug for
everyone . . . from this misunderstood champion of freedom.’
The
above letter, sent from Mexico in April 1956, arrived in Argentina in July
1956. The same month the international telegraph, as Guvera-Lynch recalls in
the memoir, ‘went mad’: Fidel Castro had been taken prisoner with a group of
Cuban revolutionaries and some foreign ones, amongst whom was Dr Ernesto
Guevara de la Serna.
The
news went through the family like a wildfire. Guevara-Lynch, going mad with
worry, tried every means to find out what was going on with his son in Mexico.
Che Guevara was, by this time, in jail in the city of Mexico. It began to dawn on the family that all the
news Che had fed them in his earlier letters about possible professorships and
assignments was simply a smoke-screen to deceive the family as well as the
Mexican and American Information Service, which, at that time, were on the
lookout for any clues that would enable them to frustrate the invasion of Cuba.
Guvera-Lynch
wrote a letter to his son, incarcerated in the municipal prison, Mexico, asking
him to explain ‘without beating about the bush’ his [Che Guevara’s] position
within the 26 July Movement that until then, he [Guevara-Lynch] ‘was not aware
of’.
He
received a reply the same month. In the letter, transcribed in the memoir in
its entirety, Che Guevara gave a full account of his association with ‘a young
Cuban leader’. He informed his parents that he had decided to join Castro’s
movement for the armed liberation of his [Castro’s] land. He accepted (but did
not apologize) that for the previous few months he had been keeping up the lie
to the family about his professional activities. He had never had any
scholarship; he was not involved in any research; he was busy in physical
training of the ‘boys’ who ‘must one day set foot in Cuba’. He informed his
father categorically that his future was linked to the Cuban revolution. ‘Either I succeed with it or I die there.’
In
the memoir, this is how Guevara-Lynch records his reaction when he received his
son’s letter.
‘. . . letter fell like a bomb on our family.
Our hopes that Ernesto would one day become a scientist, following his medical
career, melted like snow in the sun. . . Now the truth was out in the open. We
could no longer harbour any doubts. He [Che] had just exchanged all his studies
and medical career . . .for something much more dangerous, in which he had
placed all his faith: armed struggle against the American Imperialists who were
exploiting the underdeveloped peoples of Latin America.’
The
memoir ends with another long letter Che wrote to his mother in October 1956,
when he was out of jail. He begins the letter by calling himself his mother’s
‘filthy son’ with ‘profession of a grasshopper—here today, there tomorrow etc.’
He ends the letter thus:
‘Now all that is
left is the final part of the speech with reference to the little man himself [Che
Guevara] and which could be titled: ‘And
now what?’ Now comes the difficult thing that which I have never avoided and
which I have always liked. The sky has not turned black, the constellations
have not been affected, nor have there been any nasty floods or hurricanes. The
signs are good. They augur victory. But if they were mistaken, since even the
gods make mistakes, I believe that I will be able to say like the poet you do
not know, “I will only take with me to the grave the sorrow of an unfinished
song.”
I kiss you again
with all the affection of a parting that refuses to be the final one.’
The
Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara is one of the most
moving and affecting character portrait I have read in many years. Che Guevara
who emerges out of the memoir, assembled by his father from several letters Che
wrote to his family (several years after his death), is a vivacious and
cheerful young man, full of joy for life; an idealistic man who felt an
overriding empathy for the oppressed and the downtrodden; a man who was
prepared to jettison comforts of his comfortable family background; a man who
had a great sense of humour and derived enjoyment from small things in life; and
a man, above all, who, no matter which corner of the world he was in, remained
close to his family.
The
memoir is as much about Che Guevara’s family as him; and the father Ernesto
Guevara-Lynch, emerges out of it with shining colours, not least because of the
honesty with which he records his emotions, as his son leads—as he himself puts
it in his last letter—the life of a grasshopper. The family’s anxieties, the
concerns, and the uncertainties—all linked to the path down which Che Guevara
was going—and the frustration that this intelligent, highly qualified young man
was wasting his talents (as the parents saw it at the time) are all recorded
with endearing honesty.
The
Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara is also a very
scholarly book. Through Che Guevara’s letters to his family and his parents’ to
him, the reader is provided with more than a glimpse of the socio-political
history of the South Americas (albeit with a strong ideological left-wing
bias).
An
excellent read. A book to be savoured again and again.
