48 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
The bikers
roll out of
Cienfuegos,
site of a 1957
rebellion by
navy offi cers
against the
Batista
dictatorship.hats and women in snow-white frocks stopped to
stare as we roared through crumbling villages under
the beating tropical sun. At roadside rest stops for
guava juice or fresh coconuts, the patter betrayed lit-
tle reverence for Che’s illustrious bloodline. Ina had
addressed Ernesto as gordito, “little fatty,” a term of
endearment. “Ernestito is not as tall as Che was,” she
explained. “He’s got his father’s face and his moth-
er’s body. She was a bit short and chubby, even when
she was young. You see the photos!” Far from taking
off ense, Ernesto laughed indulgently: “I used to be
handsome, a real Brad Pitt-ito!”
Having written a book about the Cuban Revo-
lution, I was a little star-struck myself and lapped
up shreds of Guevara family gossip. Ernesto talked
about his eff orts to get his mother to retire as direc-
tor of the Che Study Center: “She’s 85 years old and
still working. I say to her, ‘Enough already!’ But that’s
what happens with the generation of the revolution.
They keep working until they literally can’t get out
of bed. They think it’s a mission.” There were stray
references to his father, even about his romantic life.
“The whole world wishes that Che had hundreds of
novias, girlfriends,” he said. “In reality, he only had
two, the poor guy: his two wives.” He then dropped
his voice to off er the opposite view. Che was always
surrounded by female admirers, he noted;
in 1959, dozens of Cuban mothers and their
daughters lined up to meet him every day,
forcing him to barricade his offi ce door to
keep them at a distance. One famous pho-
to shows a trio of French female journalists
hovering around Che, all clearly enraptured.
“When Che fi rst went to Africa, the party of-
fi cials called up Fidel and said, ‘Why did you
send us this womanizer?’ ” he laughs.
Yet Ernesto seemed uncomfortable talk-
ing seriously about his family. He stuck to
generalities, and always referred to his fa-
ther in the third person, “Che.” Then, after
dinner on our fi rst night in Trinidad, an ex-
quisitely intact Spanish colonial town 200
miles southeast of Havana, we repaired to a
nearby open-air bar where two of Ernesto’s
musician friends were playing jazz. Ernesto
immediately relaxed. Soon he was playing
air guitar and scatting to his favorite songs, while he
and Camilo knocked back glasses of aged rum and
chomped cigars.
Ernesto opened up about his singular childhood,
which was shaped by Cold War politics. After the
1959 victory, Che traveled the world constantly, mak-
ing lengthy trips to the USSR, Africa and Asia, and
was away at a leftist conference in Algeria
when Ernesto was born in 1965. At home
in Havana, the austere and disciplined Che
worked long hours, six days a week, fi rst
as the head of the National Bank and then
as minister for industry. On his day off , he
volunteered as a laborer in the cane fi elds,
a nod to Mao’s China. The only time for his
children was late Sunday afternoons. But
the absences were taken to another level in
1965, when Che tired of his offi ce job and
decided to return to the fi eld as a guerril-
la. Ernesto was 6 weeks old when Che van-
ished to the Congo. Aleida wrote off ering
to join him there; he shot back angrily that
she should not play on his emotions: “Love
me passionately, but with understanding;
my truth is laid out and nothing but death
will stop me.” After the uprising in the Con-
go failed, Che slipped back into Cuba. Er-
nesto was just an infant. His mother took
him to meet Che in a clandestine guerrilla
training camp.
The most surreal family gathering came
in mid-1966, when Che had assumed the
disguise of “Ramón,” a bald, aging Uru-guayan businessman, so he could travel the world
incognito, under the nose of the CIA. He was forced
to maintain this fake identity when he met the four
children in a safe house in Havana. The scene was
“especially painful,” Aleida later wrote: Alyusha,
then 6, saw how fondly the “family friend,” Ramón,
looked at her. “Mommy,” she said, “that man is in
love with me!” Che soon left for the Andes. “There
are days when I feel so homesick,” he wrote to Alei-
da, lamenting “how little I have taken from life in the
personal sense.”Tony Perrottet’s latest book is ¡Cuba Libre!,
an anecdotal history of the Cuban Revolution.
This is the fi rst Smithsonian assignment for
Havana-based photographer Lisette Poole.BYLINES