Smithsonian Magazine - 11.2019

(Joyce) #1
November 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 45

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ALAMY; BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES; EMILIANO RODRIGUEZ / ALAMY; JHPHOTO / ALAMY; ALAIN NOGUES / SYGMA / GE

TTY IMAGES

Below left, Che with his
second wife, fellow reb-
el Aleida March, in an
undated photo. Below,
the pair in Santiago de
las Vegas, Cuba, on
June 2, 1959, as they
begin their honeymoon.
Bottom, Che, Aleida
and their four children;
their son Ernesto rests
in his father’s lap.


remains are interred. The setting has a vaguely So-
viet feel. Looming over the blocklike concrete struc-
tures is an enormous bronze statue of Che, instantly
recognizable in his loose-fi tting fatigues, beret and
scrappy beard. He is holding a rifl e and gazing impla-
cably into the future—an ever-youthful, ever-hand-
some image that is echoed on propaganda posters in
every corner of Cuba, usually accompanied by Che’s
revolutionary slogan, ¡Hasta La Victoria Siempre!
“Always Towards Victory!”
After the group parked their Harleys, Ernesto led us
past the crowd of tourists and
through a side entrance. A fl us-
tered attendant, clearly dazzled
by Ernesto’s celebrity, showed
us into a salon to sit on brown
vinyl sofas beneath a painting
of Che on horseback. The group
under Ernesto’s wing—four Ger-
man bikers, one Swede, an En-
glish couple and one American,
a retired schoolteacher from
Connecticut , as well as myself—
were all brought sweet Cuban
coff ee and given a crisp political
briefi ng: “This memorial was
built as a tribute from the people
of Santa Clara to the man who
set them free,” the attendant
said. “The mausoleum opened in 1997, the 30th anni-
versary of Che’s murder,” she said, and added that the
date of his last battle, October 8, is still celebrated every
year in Cuba as “The Day of the Heroic Guerrilla.”
She asked us to sign the guest book. I penned a
note in Spanish for the whole Harley group, sign-
ing it La Brigada Internacional, “The International
Brigade,” a joking reference to leftist foreign volun-
teers in the Spanish Civil War. Ernesto, however, had
grown increasingly somber. When it came time to
enter the mausoleum itself, he made his apologies.
“I’ll wait for you outside,” he muttered. “Es demasia-
do fuerte. It’s too charged.”
The bikers entered the dark, temperature-con-
trolled shrine, where an eternal fl ame was fl ickering
over Che’s tomb. One of the walls was taken up by the
crypts of Che’s fellow guerrillas who died with him in
Bolivia, each one remembered with a red carnation,
replaced daily. A reverent silence fell over the group as
the attendant told the gloomy saga of the “three doz-

en compañeros” who fought
alongside one another in the
cold, faraway Andes. “Che
could not rest while there was
injustice still in the world,”
she said—a platitude, maybe,
but there was some truth in it.
We fi led into an attached
museum, which told the story of Che’s extraordinary
life, starting with his childhood in the Argentine city
of Rosario in the 1940s and his move as a medical stu-
dent with matinee idol good looks to Buenos Aires. On
display were his favorite books, including Don Quix-
ote; his bombilla, the bulb-shaped pot from which he
drank his Argentine tea, maté; and an asthma inhal-
er. There were also images from Mexico City in 1955,
where the peripatetic Che met Fidel, an idealistic
young lawyer-turned-revolutionary, at a dinner party.
The two had opposite personalities—Che a soulful,
poetic introvert, Fidel a manically garrulous extro-
vert—but possessed the same revolutionary zeal. Che
signed on as medic for Fidel’s mad project of “invad-
ing” Cuba to overthrow Batista. On December 2, 1956,
he, Fidel and 80 armed men landed on the island se-
cretly by boat—a near-disastrous experience that Che
later described as “less an invasion than a shipwreck.”
And yet, within 25 months, the odd couple were in
control of Cuba, with Che given the job of overseeing
the execution of Batista’s most vicious thugs.
Alongside the images of Che the conquering war-
rior were startling snapshots from his lesser-known
existence in the 1960s—as a family man in Havana.
Soon after the 1959 victory, he divorced his fi rst wife,
a Peruvian activist named Hilda Gadea, to marry his
wartime sweetheart, Aleida March. The couple had
four children: Aleida (who was given the Russian
nickname Alyusha), Camilo, Celia and Ernesto. The
last photograph, blown up to poster size, was the
most startling and intimate. It showed Che cradling
a month-old baby with a bottle of milk as one of
his daughters looks on. The offi cial saw me staring.
“That’s Ernestito,” she said quietly: “Little Ernest.”

THE VISION OF CHE the revolutionary is so famil-
iar—his raffi sh, beret-clad visage reproduced on cof-
fee cups and college dorm silk-screen prints around
the world—you forget he had any other existence.
“The most striking thing about Che is that he had a
private life at all,” says Jon Lee Anderson, author of
Che: A Revolutionary Life. Che would write tender po-
etry for his wife, and when he departed for the Congo
in 1965, left tape recordings of his favorite romantic
verse, including Pablo Neruda’s Goodbye: Twenty
Love Poems. He also left a letter for his four children
to be opened and read only in the case of his death.
Such domestic details have no part in the of-
fi cial Che iconography, Anderson adds, because

The disarmingly frank opus also revealed Che’s
inner journey from a shy, lovelorn and self-absorbed
middle-class student to a passionate sympathizer with
oppressed people all over Latin America.
Free download pdf