44 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
At age 23, Che
and a friend set
off to explore
South America
by motorcycle
(a replica in
a museum in
Argentina). Che
wrote about the
trip in a memoir
published post-
humously.Castro against the U.S.-backed dic-
tator Fulgencio Batista. The Argen-
tine-born Che (whose real name was
Ernesto; Che is Argentine slang for
“pal” or “buddy”) had joined the up-
rising as a medic, but rose through the
ranks to become Fidel’s most trust-
ed fi eld commander. In the last days
of December 1958, Che led 340-odd
guerrillas—mostly men, but also a few
women, including Che’s future wife—
from the wild Escambray Mountains
into the fl at, exposed sugar country of
central Cuba, to take on some 3,500 of
Batista’s soldiers in Santa Clara.
Pausing at the city’s revered battle
sites, we spotted bullet holes on the
walls of a hotel in the plaza and tried
to imagine the house-to-house fi ght-
ing, when residents made
Molotov cocktails for the
feisty rebels to use against
army tanks and invited them
into their homes to help out-
wit an enemy force ten times
their number. On December
29, Che used a tractor to tear
up rail tracks and overturn an
armored military train, seiz-
ing weapons and dozens of
prisoners. The demoralized
army abandoned Santa Clara
to the guerrillas—and a turn-
ing point in the revolt. When
news of the defeat reached
Havana, Batista made plans
to escape. Early on January 1, 1959, he left a New
Year’s Eve party to climb into a DC-4 aircraft with a
handful of his cronies and fl ed the island for the Do-
minican Republic.
Today, The “Tren Blindado,” or Armored Train,
is preserved as a monument to the revolution, com-
plete with a museum inside the carriages and shops
across the street selling Che T-shirts. Ernesto Jr.
slipped past, trying to avoid attention. Now age 56,
he is a little portly and has silver fl ecks in his hair,
but he is without doubt his father’s son; in fact, he
looks, one imagines, much as Che himself would
have looked had he lived to middle age. He remains
as awed as any other Cuban at his father’s victory
against the dictator’s massive war machine; most of
Che’s men were no older than college kids, and many
were in their teens. “They were all crazy!” Ernesto
said. “They were just a bunch of young guys who
wanted to get rid of Batista at any cost.”
Next we drove to Santa Clara’s other great at-
traction: the Che Guevara Mausoleum, where Che’s
A a o S b ( a A w t p h