Che: A Myth Embalmed in a Matrix of Ignorance

MOMENTS before Che Guevara was executed by Bolivian troopers in a remote Andean village in 1967, he was asked if he was thinking about his own immortality. "No," replied Che, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." On the anniversary of his death three years ago this week, it is clear that the asthmatic. Argentine-born M.D. has become a far more vibrant memory than any of the causes he pursued.

"Che lives!" is the slogan for a generation of restless students and budding revolutionaries the world over. The Black Panthers, who occasionally style themselves "Che-type," have adopted his black beret. Arab guerrillas sometimes name combat operations in his honor. Posters of Che adorn dorm walls from Berkeley to Berlin, and his books have become basic-training manuals for the New Left. Writers from Graham Greene to Susan Sontag have extolled him. West German Playwright Peter Weiss (Marat/ Sade) has even compared him to "a Christ taken down from the Cross."

Mindless Action. Critics with less sympathy attribute much of the present wave of bombings, kidnapings and cop-killings to an obsession with Che's emphasis on immediate, almost mindless action. Others note that it is difficult to determine whether Che is actually a moving force or merely a symbol of a mood. Nobel-prizewinning Biologist George Wald, a staunch pacifist who is one of Harvard's most popular teachers, maintains that for all its magic, Che's memory "is embalmed in a wonderful matrix of ignorance." London mail-order companies report that most orders for Che posters are now coming from teen-age girls who find his unkempt good looks sexy. Asked what he knew about Che, one Arab guerrilla claimed that he was an important fedayeen who came "from Jaffa, I think."

Even so, the process of myth-building is continuing. At present, Che appears each evening in a new play. The Guerrillas, by German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose earlier play, The Deputy, pilloried Pope Pius XII for his failure to denounce the Nazi extermination of Jews. In The Guerrillas, now playing in four German cities, a young New York Senator who is also leader of a Che-style U.S. underground movement pleads with Guevara to abandon his Bolivian battle. Che refuses. "My death here--in a calculated sense--is the only possible victory," he says. "I must leave a sign."

Bolivia was a great test for him. He personally chose to lead the expedition there, determined to prove the validity of his revolutionary theories that had worked so well ten years earlier in Cuba. "The legend of our guerrilla is spreading like seaspray in the wind," Che wrote, "but its true meaning will be lost unless history has a record of what we are attempting to do here." When he reached Bolivia in November 1966, minus his beard and bearing a Uruguayan passport, Che carried a supply of notebooks and diaries to keep such a record. During the next eleven months, Che filled them with the cramped handwriting that Castro once described as "the illegible letters of a doctor."

Autobiographical Bent. Che's Bolivian diaries have since been published, as have portions from the other notebooks. A good deal of the writing, however, has never appeared in print. Andrew St. George, a former LIFE contract reporter who accompanied Che in Cuba's Sierra Maestra, was later invited by the Bolivian government to read and copy parts of Che's papers. From St. George's material emerges a fascinating if fragmentary glimpse of Che Guevara's final days of life.

During the Bolivian campaign, Che roughed out the first draft of a short story whose hero, Pablo, shares important characteristics with the author and illustrates Che's own lifelong obsession with overcoming challenges and seeking social approval. Like Che, who grew up in a middle-class Buenos Aires family and was asthmatic, Pablo is citified, deracinated and afflicted with a physical handicap: poor sight. In the story, entitled Prueba Superada (Passing the Test), Pablo becomes almost overwhelmed by fear, anxiety and doubt after joining a guerrilla column in an unnamed Latin American country. On one terrible march, his shoes give out, his feet become badly blistered, his rifle jams and he breaks his glasses. In despair, Pablo, who is ignored by the other guerrillas, decides to desert at the first opportunity, but a veteran member of the band finally befriends him. Under the influence of the older guerrilla, Pablo stands his ground in a firefight with the guardia.

"Pablo knew now that he would never leave the column," wrote Che. "He had passed the test and become a fighter of the people."

Stalinist Influence. On a more serious plane, Che wrote in a green spiral notebook the outline for a five-part book on the evolution of political thought from the start of human society to the present.

Che noted that Marx perceived "by intuition," but never fully foresaw the great changes that happened to capitalism. "Nowadays," said Che, "the workers of the imperialistic countries are minor associates in the business." Che intended to end the book with a chapter comparing "the personalities of socialism": Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Khrushchev, Tito and Fidel.

Che is often said to reflect the theories of Mao, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. To the extent that he sought to establish a rural, peasant base for revolution, that is true. His Bolivian papers, however, betray a pervasive Stalinist influence. Che sneered at the late Sociologist C. Wright Mills (The Marxists) for his "stupid anti-Stalinism," describing him as "a clear example of North American leftist intellectuals." He dismissed New Left Ideologue Herbert Marcuse because his concepts "are of little relevance in the national liberation struggle and nation-building as it had to be carried out under Stalin."

In another green-covered spiral notebook, Che set down his detailed plans for a supply system for the guerrillas.

He proposed that sympathizers buy supermarkets in the major Bolivian cities to insure the guerrillas a source of food and profit. Wrote Che: "A truck rolling anywhere along the desolate Bolivian roads could unload five or ten metric tons of supplies for a guerrilla column without arousing the slightest suspicion."

He also wanted the guerrillas to control a shoe factory, a clothing factory and shopping outlet and a sporting-goods store.

Such ideas were hardly original. During his Sierra Maestra days, Che carried in his knapsack the Spanish edition of an obscure two-volume Soviet manual called The Clandestine Regional Committee in Action. Written by Aleksei Fyodorov, a World War II Russian guerrilla leader, the book spells out methods for establishing sources of supply as well as discussing such everyday guerrilla problems as how to handle a hard-drinking subordinate, how to check out a supply runner suspected of double-dealing, and how to use propaganda. "You see?" Che would say of Fyodorov's ideas. "It's all come true!"

Apparently Che copied passages from Fyodorov's book as a source of comfort and instruction.

General Decline. As some of Che's other notebooks poignantly show, he needed all the comfort he could get in Bolivia. Che's band, which never numbered more than 51, included 17 Cubans, who held nearly all the command positions. The Cubans were unable to speak the Quechua language of the Indians, who, Che noted, are "as impenetrable as rocks."

In a brown leather notebook, Che kept track of the conduct and efficiency of his chief lieutenants. At first the notations were sprinkled with encouraging evaluations. "Very good," wrote Che of one of his troop leaders, the former director of the Cuban special warfare center whose code name was Joaquin. But three months later, Che noted that Joaquin was "decaying physically and morally," and with his physician's eye, he diagnosed lymphangitis (inflammation of the lymph vessels). Of Tuma, a Caban who was Guevara's executive officer, Che noted that after six months in Bolivia, he suffered "an almost general decline, but he has overcome it." Seven weeks later, however, Tuma was fatally wounded in an ambush, and Che penned a red cross by his name. He wrote: "It is a considerable loss for the guerrilla force, but most of all for me in that I lose the most loyal of my companions."

The hardships and sense of isolation demoralized Che's men. The Bolivian army, which proved to be much better than Che imagined, relentlessly pursued the guerrillas, forcing them to abandon most of their supplies, including Che's asthma medicine. Wandering aimlessly within an ever-tightening perimeter, the guerrillas fell to quarreling and fighting one another. During this time, Che wrote a poem called "A Memory," which Bolivian authorities allowed St. George to copy from one of his notebooks:

Now that we are few, we move almost

like brothers, and like brothers, we

quarrel, sulk and groan.

The struggle is a painful path of

curses But victory a white road glittering

with politeness, with white smiles

on empty white faces with flattery

oiled by endless white lies.

Why, then, in the glittering midst of

triumph, Do we remember these sweaty sullen

faces So painfully--why does their

memory shine sweeter than all

those white smiles?

Comfort from the KGB. During the months of wandering, Che was comforted by perhaps the strangest and most elusive character of the entire drama. Code-named Tania, she was a dark, beautiful young woman in her mid-20s. She told Che that she was from Argentina. Actually, she was an East German girl named Tamara Bunke, who was sent to Havana in the mid-1960s by the Soviet KGB to keep tabs on Guevara.

Che, who at that time was married to his second wife, fell in love with Tania, whom he trained and sent to Bolivia as his advance agent. In La Paz she got a job in the presidential press office and helped arrange the secret arrival of Che and the other Cubans. Then, violating Che's orders, Tania, who was an amateur musicologist and collected tape recordings of Bolivian folk music, went to the hills to live with him. On August 31, 1967, Tania and nine men walked into a Bolivian army ambush. All but one of them were killed. An autopsy showed that

Tania was then four months pregnant.

After Che finally accepted Bolivian radio reports of Tania's death, his diary entries reflected no remorse. But, St. George says, he later found a poem that Che dedicated to Tania.

To T:

There is dark silence in the jungle's

heart of darkness The people's songs are silent.

She fingers and repacks The little plastic tape rolls. They too

are silent.

What sings in her heart? Perhaps I

shall never know it.

Nor hear the music of the songs that

brought her here.

The jungle bush has yielded her no

rhythms Except the Morse code and the rapid

beating of hearts

Waiting for the answering signal. She

never sings Nor hums these tunes she loves.

And yet she hears them. They

carry her Forward, across the jungle's deathly

silence, toward A triumphal chant only she can hear.

One month after Tania died, Che's band was trapped in a ravine by pursuing Bolivian rangers, who had been trained by U.S. Special Forces experts On Oct. 8, 1967, as the guerrillas attempted to fight their way out of the encirclement, Che was hit in the left thigh by a bullet and his M-l carbine was shot out of his hands. Taken alive to a nearby village, Che was executed the next day. After his hands were cut off for further fingerprinting, Che's body was burned beyond recognition and buried in a secret grave.

The man was dead, the myth born.

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