A Reader on Reading

The CIA wanted Che alive, but perhaps their orders never reached the Cuban-born CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, in charge of supervising the operation. Che was executed the next day. To make it appear that their captive had been killed in battle, the executioner fired at his arms and legs. Then, as Che was writhing on the ground, “apparently biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out,” one last bullet entered his chest and filled his lungs with blood. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande, where it lay on view for a couple of days, observed by officials, journalists, and townspeople. Selich and other officers stood at the head, posing for the photographer, before having the corpse “disappear” into a secret grave near the Vallegrande airstrip. The photographs of the dead Che, with their inevitable echo of the dead Christ (the half-naked lean body, the bearded, suffering face), became one of the essential icons of my generation, a generation that was barely ten years old when the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959.

The news of the death of Che Guevara reached me towards the end of my first and only year of university in Buenos Aires. It was a warm October (summer had started early in 1967), and my friends and I were making plans to travel south and camp in the Patagonian Andes. It was an area we knew well. We had trekked in Patagonia most summers throughout high school, led by enthusiastic left-wing monitors whose political credos ran from conservatist Stalinism to free-thinking anarchism, from melancholic Trotskyism to the Argentinean-style socialism of Alfredo Palacios, and whose book bags, which we rifled as we sat around the campfire, included the poems of Mao Tse-tung (in the old-fashioned spelling), of Blas de Otero and Pablo Neruda, the stories of Saki and Juan Rulfo, the novels of Alejo Carpentier and Robert Louis Stevenson. A story by Julio Cortázar that had as its epigraph a line from Che’s diaries led us to discuss the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. We sang songs from the Spanish Civil War and the Italian Resistance, the rousing “Dirge of the Volga Boatmen” and the scabrous rumba “My Puchunguita Has Ample Thighs,” various tangos, and numerous Argentinean zambas. We were nothing if not eclectic.

Camping down south was not just an exercise in tourism. Our Patagonia was not Bruce Chatwin’s. With youthful fervor, our monitors wanted to show us the hidden side of Argentinean society—a side that we, from our comfortable Buenos Aires homes, never got to see. We had a vague idea of the slums that surrounded our prosperous neighborhoods — villas miseria as we called them, or “misery villages” — but we knew nothing of the slavelike conditions, such as those described by Che to Selich, that still existed for many of the peasants on our country’s vast estates, nor of the systematic genocide of the native people that had been officially conducted by the military until well into the thirties. With more or less earnest intentions, our monitors wanted us to see “the real Argentina.”

One afternoon, near the town of Esquel, our monitors led us into a high and rocky canyon. We walked in single file, wondering where this dusty, unappealing stone corridor would lead us, when up in the canyon’s walls we began to see openings, like the entrances to caves, and in the openings the gaunt, sickly faces of men, women, and children. The monitors walked us through the canyon and back, never saying a word, but when we set up camp for the night they told us something of the lives of the people we had seen, who made their home in the rocks like animals, eking out a living as occasional farmhands, and whose children rarely lived beyond the age of seven. Next morning, two of my classmates asked their monitor how they could join the Communist Party. Others took a less sedate path. Several became fighters in the seventies war against the military dictatorship; one, Mario Firmenich, became the bloodthirsty capo of the Montoneros guerrilla movement and for years held the dubious celebrity of heading the military’s most-wanted list.

The news of Che’s death felt colossal and yet almost expected. For my generation, Che had incarnated the heroic social being most of us knew we could never become. The curious mix of resoluteness and recklessness that appealed so strongly to my generation, and even to the one that followed, found in Che the perfect incarnation. In our eyes he was in life already a legendary figure, whose heroism we were certain would somehow survive beyond the grave. It did not surprise us to learn that after Che’s death, Rodríguez, the treacherous CIA agent, suddenly began to suffer from asthma, as if he had inherited the dead man’s malady.