50 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019
Che regarded
the Molotov
cocktail, on dis-
play at the mu-
seum of the Tren
Blindado Battle
in Santa Clara,
as “a weapon of
extraordinary
eff ectiveness.”Children leave
for school in
Santa Clara. In
late December
1958, the city
saw intense
fi ghting in what
would turn out
to be the fi nal
battle of the
revolution.Supporters rallied around the children, with many
of Che’s family and friends from Argentina moving
to Havana. They were also looked after by “Uncle”
Fidel. In some ways, growing up within a Socialist
system meant they were treated like other kids. “We
went to the same schools as everyone else, we had
contact with everyone,” Ernesto insists. In the 1970s,
with the Sovietization of Cuba, Ernesto attended the
Escuela Ciudad Libertad (“Liberty City School”) and
the Lenin Vocational School. Nonetheless, he was
something of a celebrity. “Teachers said we looked
exactly the same, Che and I,” he admitted later to me.
“It was a bit complicated. I had a diff erent experience
to the other school kids, for good and for ill,” he adds.
“I was a bit isolated. If I was good, one group hated
me, if I was bad, another group hated me.”
“All of the [Guevara] children had a hard time,”
Anderson says. “They struggled to escape from their
father’s shadow.” It’s a situation that Che himself
had anticipated in an eerily prescient short story ti-
tled “The Stone,” which he had written in the Congo
in 1965 after learning about his mother’s death. In
it, Che ponders his mortality and even imagines his
corpse being displayed, as it was in Bolivia. He also
predicts that his sons would feel a “sense of rebellion”
against his posthumous fame: “I, as my son, would
feel vexed and betrayed by this memory of I, the fa-
ther, being rubbed in my face all the time.”LIKE MANY HABANEROS in the golden age of Sovi-
et support, when sugar subsidies propped up Cuba’s
economy, Ernesto traveled to Moscow for college. “I
arrived in winter,” he recalls of his time there in the
1980s. “The cold was punishing! When I fi rst saw snow,
I was like: What the hell? Some days it was minus 40 de-
grees, and the darkness seemed to last for three or four
months. But I liked the idiosyncrasy of Moscow. The
city was full of Cubans, and we got together for fi estas.”
Ernesto studied law but never used his degree. Re-
turning to Cuba at age 25, he joined the armed forces