The Awakening of Latin America Read online

  “The main target of this communist nonsense is myself. Every single Yankee journalist who has come to the Sierra has begun by asking me about my activities in the Communist Party of Guatemala—taking it for granted that I was active in the communist party of that country—simply because I was and am a sincere admirer of the democratic government of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz.”

  “Did you occupy any position in that government?”

  “No, never.” He talks on calmly without taking his pipe from his mouth. “But when the US invasion happened, I tried to get together a group of young men like myself, to fight the [United] Fruit Company mercenaries. In Guatemala it was necessary to fight and hardly anyone fought. It was necessary to resist and hardly anyone resisted.”

  I continued to listen to his account without asking further questions. There was no need. “From there I escaped to Mexico, as the FBI agents had already begun to detain people, ensuring that all those who might represent a danger to the United Fruit government were killed at once. In the land of the Aztecs I once again met up with some of the July 26 [Movement] people, whom I’d met in Guatemala, and became friendly with Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother. He introduced me to the leader of the movement when they had already begun to plan their invasion of Cuba.”

  Since his pipe had gone out again, he paused to light a cigarette and offered me one. In order to show that I still existed behind the dense curtain of smoke, I asked him how he had come to join forces with the Cuban revolutionaries.

  “I passed one whole night talking with Fidel. By dawn I was the doctor of his future expedition. In fact, after the experiences of my travels throughout Latin America and the finishing off of Guatemala, it didn’t take much to persuade me to join any revolution against a dictator, but Fidel impressed me as an extraordinary man. He faced and resolved the most impossible situations. He had the extraordinary faith that, if he left for Cuba, he was going to make it. That, once he arrived, he was going to fight. And that, in the fighting, he was going to win. I shared his optimism. It had to be done, we had to fight, to make it happen. To stop crying about it and to fight back. And to demonstrate to the people of his country that they could trust him, because he did what he said he would do, and he spoke his famous words: ‘In [19]56 we will be free or we will be martyrs,’ announcing that before the year was out he was going to disembark somewhere in Cuba at the head of his expeditionary army.”

  “And what happened with the disembarkation?”

  The conversation had now attracted more than 30 listeners. Sitting on the ground, with their weapons between their knees, their caps protecting their eyes from the reflections of the sun, “Che’s men” smoked and listened attentively, without proffering a single word. A young, bearded doctor set and bandaged a finger perfectly, attending to nothing but what he was hearing. Llibre, a passionate admirer of the leaders of the revolution but a vigilant doctrinarian, analyzed each of Che’s words and scratched at the pimples on his stomach with nails discolored by the clayey earth. Virelles listened as he slept. Guillermito, a beardless youth with very long hair, cleaned his rifle with the same attention that the doctor gave to setting the finger. From somewhere, mingling with the smell of tobacco, wafted that of the pork they were frying in a pan in the open air.

  Guevara went on with his account, with a cigarette in his mouth and his legs comfortably stretched out.

  “When we arrived, we were dispersed [by the army]. We had had an atrocious voyage on the cabin cruiser, the Granma, which carried the 82 members of the expedition plus the crew. A storm threw us off course and most of us were suffering from seasickness. Our water and food had run out and, to make matters worse, when we reached the island, the boat became stranded in the mud. They were shooting at us without let up, from the air and the coast and, before long, only half of us were left alive, or half-alive if you consider the state we were in. All in all, out of the 82, only 12 of us were left with Fidel. And, at the beginning, our group was reduced to seven because the other five had scattered. This was all that was left of the invading army of the audacious July 26 Movement. Lying there on the ground, without being able to fire for fear of giving ourselves away, we waited for Fidel’s final instructions, while we could hear the navy firing and the bursts of the air force machine guns in the distance.”

  Guevara let out a short laugh as he remembered.

  “What a guy, this Fidel: you know, under cover of the noise of the machine guns he stood up and said to us, ‘Listen how they’re shooting at us. They’re terrified. They’re scared of us because they know we’re going to finish them off.’ And, without another word, he picked up his gun and his pack and led our little column away. We were looking for Turquino Peak, the highest and most inaccessible mountain in the Sierra Maestra, where we established our first camp. The peasants watched us go by without any show of friendliness. But Fidel didn’t flinch. He greeted them with smiles and only took a few minutes to start up a more or less cordial conversation. When they refused to give us food, we continued our march without protest. It didn’t take long for the peasants to realize that these bearded ‘rebel’ guys were exactly the opposite of the troops that were looking for us. While Batista’s army laid their hands on everything they fancied in the peasants’ huts—including the women, of course—Fidel Castro’s people respected the peasants’ property and paid generously for everything they consumed. We noted, not without surprise, that the peasants were disconcerted by our behavior. They were used to the treatment meted out by Batista’s army. They were slowly becoming real friends and, as we had more encounters with groups of government troops in the mountains, many expressed their desire to join us. But these first ambushes when we were seeking arms began to bother the troops, and they marked the start of the most ferocious wave of terrorism imaginable.

  “Every peasant was considered a potential rebel and was killed. If they found out that we had gone through a particular zone, they burned down the huts that we might have reached. If they came to any property and didn’t find any men there because they were working or in the village, whether they imagined or not that they had joined our ranks, which were swelling every day, they shot everyone who remained at home. The terrorism practiced by Batista’s army was, without a doubt, our most effective ally at that time. It was the most brutally eloquent demonstration for the peasant communities that it was necessary to bring down the Batista regime.”

  The sound of a motor claimed the attention of us all.

  “Plane!” some of them shouted and everyone ran inside La Otilia. In a matter of seconds, the animals’ harnesses and the packs disappeared from the coffee drying floor, and nothing could be seen around the camp except the sun-bleached trees, the cement drying floor and the red clay track.

  A dark gray plane appeared from behind the ridge and made two wide sweeps over La Otilia, quite high, but without firing a shot. Minutes later it disappeared.

  We came out of the house as if we had been locked up for hours.

  I reminded Guevara of my intention of meeting Fidel as soon as possible, to record my report and then return to the transmitter plant to try to get it directly to Buenos Aires. In a few minutes they found me a guide who knew the Jibacoa area, where Fidel was probably operating, and a more or less strong mule without too many sores.

  “You’ll have to leave now,” Guevara told me, “to reach the first camp before it gets too late, and tomorrow morning you go on to Las Mercedes. They might be able to tell you there where to find Fidel. With luck, you’ll locate him in three days.”

  I mounted the mule and said goodbye to them all, arranging to meet Guevara in La Mesa some days later when I would return with my recorded report. I gave Llibre several rolls of exposed film and two recorded tapes so that he could keep them for me in the transmitter plant.

  It was about midday and the pork was frying again now that the plane scare was over. The smell of fat that had previously made me so nauseous, now seemed delicious. The incredibly pure Sierra
Maestra air was a great tonic for my stomach. Sorí Marín brought me half a dozen bananas that this time—and I never understood why—were called malteños.

  Guevara urged the guide to be very careful as we approached Las Minas.

  “He’s the first compatriot I’ve seen in ages,” he shouted, laughing, “and I want him to survive at least until he can send the report to Buenos Aires.”

  “Chau,” I called from the distance.

  And about 30 voices answered, laughing and shouting, as if it were the funniest farewell they could imagine.

  We branched off the path leading to La Otilia and crossed a coffee field. The beans were still green and gave off the pure aroma of fresh plants. While I was distracted—trying to peel malteños some 40 centimeters long—the branches sometimes tried to snatch my cap. But the proximity of Las Minas, although it didn’t remove my appetite, captured my attention much more than the question of guiding the mule or peeling the bananas. My guide, with a nickname more fitting for a leggy French showgirl than for a bearded and almost toothless peasant (“Niní”), was a few meters ahead, mounted on a small, short-legged mule. Suddenly he dismounted and slid noiselessly toward me over the cushion of leaves. Before he got to me I had also dismounted and we moved away from the animals at once. The sound of branches hitting something like the steel helmet of a soldier could now be heard clearly. Niní released the safety catch of his pistol.

  “Hey, compay!” he suddenly shouted.

  A peasant advanced with difficulty through the coffee trees trying, as much as he could, to prevent the branches from hitting the light rectangular box of white wood that he carried on his shoulder.

  “What’s news?” he replied, gasping for breath. […]

  1. Mexican comic film actor, famous for his portrayal of the impoverished Mexican peasant.

  1959

  Article

  This article by Che Guevara was published in Humanismo magazine (September-October 1959) after Che toured the Bandung Pact1 countries in 1959.

  Latin America from the Afro-Asian Perspective

  For Asians, to speak of our unredeemed Latin America is to speak of an ill-defined region about which they know as little as we do about that immense part of the world whose desire for freedom found its appropriate means of expression in the Bandung Pact.

  In the past, they knew nothing about Latin America except, perhaps, that it was a huge sector of the world inhabited by dark-skinned natives with loincloths and spears, where someone named Christopher Columbus had arrived more or less at the same time that someone else named Vasco de Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and ushered in a terrible period in the cultural, economic and political life of those peoples—one that lasted for centuries.

  Nothing specific has been added to that knowledge except for something called “the Cuban revolution,” which is practically an abstract concept for them. For that distant world, Cuba is an abstraction which stands for an awakening, the base from which that mythological being called Fidel Castro arose. Beards, long hair, olive-green uniforms and some mountains whose exact location is unknown, in a country about which they know only its name—and not all of them even know it’s an island—that is what the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro are. And those bearded men, “Castro’s men,” who come from an island that can’t even be found on the map, moved by the magical pull of a mythological being, stand for the new Latin America, which draws them from their knees—numbed from so much kneeling—to their feet.

  Now, the other Latin America is disappearing—the one in which unknown men work in miserable conditions in tin mines, a material in the name of which the Indonesian tin miners are being exploited to death; the Latin America of great rubber plantations in the Amazon, where men plagued by malaria produce rubber further lowering the rubber workers’ wages in Indonesia, Ceylon and Malaya; the Latin America of fabulous oil deposits, because of which the workers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran earn less; the Latin America of cheap sugar, which means that Indian workers earn less for doing the same bestial work under the same inclement sun of the tropics. That Latin America is disappearing.

  Different, and still surprised by their audacity in wanting to be free, the people of Africa and Asia are beginning to look beyond the seas. Doesn’t that other storehouse of grains and raw materials also have a culture inhibited by the colonial power and millions of people with the same simple, deep desires as the Africans and Asians? Doesn’t our brotherhood challenge the breadth of the seas, the barriers of different languages and the absence of cultural ties, to bring us together in an embrace of compañeros in struggle? Should we consider ourselves more the brothers of the Argentine workers, the Bolivian miners, the employees of the United Fruit Company and the Cuban sugarcane-cutters than of the proud descendants of Japanese samurai who are now Japanese workers? Rather than an isolated instance, does not Fidel Castro represent the vanguard of the Latin American peoples in their growing struggles for freedom? Isn’t he a man of flesh and blood? A Sukarno, a Nehru, a Nasser?

  The people in the freed nations are becoming aware of the enormous hoax that was worked on them, in which they were convinced that they were racially “inferior.” They know they could be mistaken, too, in their assessment of peoples in other continents.

  Cuba has been invited to send representatives to the new conference of Afro-Asian peoples. They will show the august meeting of their Afro-Asian brothers the truths and the pain of Latin America. Their participation is no happenstance event; it is the result of the historic convergence of all the oppressed peoples in this hour of liberation. They will go to say that it is true that Cuba exists and that Fidel Castro is a man, a popular hero, not a mythological abstraction. But they will also explain that Cuba is the first sign of Latin America’s awakening, not an isolated event.

  When they tell of all the unknown heroes of the masses, all the nameless people who have died on the great battlefield of this region; when they speak of the Colombian “bandits” who fought in their homeland against the alliance of the cross and the sword; and when they speak of the Paraguayan mensús who, unwittingly representing the oil interests of Britain and the United States, fought against the Bolivian miners, each side killing off the other, they will see astonished looks—not the looks people have when they are told something that is unheard of, but looks showing that they are hearing a new account the development and consequences of which are identical to those of the old colonial story that they have experienced and suffered from over the course of centuries of ignominy.

  Latin America is taking shape and acquiring a sense of itself. Latin America—represented by Cuba and Fidel Castro (a man who, with his guerrilla beard, personifies an entire region)—is becoming more real and alive. In the African and Asian imagination, it is populated with real men and women who are suffering and struggling for the same ideals they are.

  With my new perspective, I see the full value of what I participated in, from the sublime moment when there were only 12 of us left, and I see that the small differences among us which were exaggerated have dissolved, showing the true importance of that Latin American people’s feat. With this perspective, I treasure the childlike, naive and spontaneous gesture of men from far-off lands who touch my beard and ask in foreign languages, “Fidel Castro?” adding, “Are you members of the guerrilla army that is leading the struggle for Latin America’s freedom? Are you, then, our allies from the other side of the ocean?” And I tell them, and all of the hundreds of millions of other Africans and Asians who, like them, are advancing toward freedom in this new and uncertain nuclear age, “Yes, we are.” I am another brother, one of the multitude of brothers in that part of the world who are waiting with infinite eagerness for the moment when we can consolidate the bloc that will destroy the anachronistic presence of colonial rule once and for all. […]

  1. The Bandung Pact was the initial step toward the creation of the Movement of Nonaligned Countries.

  Speech (1959)

  Speech
to the College of Medicine, Havana

  This speech is one of the first Che Guevara gave in Havana just weeks after the triumph of the revolution. It is important because it develops his earlier work on the role of doctors in social transformation and emphasizes the legacy of José Martí. It was presented to a meeting held in his honor, sponsored by the College of Medicine, on January 16, 1959.

  I haven’t brought a written speech that I’m hiding under my arm like the guy who didn’t want to be unprepared and so brought one just in case, so he wouldn’t have to decline the undeserved honor of being asked to address the meeting. I came here to fulfill my rather neglected duty as a doctor and to greet you—that’s all.

  Really, I’m not very accustomed—I’m not at all accustomed—to being among those presiding over or on the dais of a meeting of professionals, and I think that, if my life had followed the channels of science, I still wouldn’t be here. The fact that I’ve been invited to be here to say a few words shows that warriors are still considered important in Latin America.

  I don’t think there is anything special about a foreigner’s having come to fight for Cuba. Martí lived, spoke and taught in Cuba, and his main goal was to unite Latin America. I’ve never felt myself to be a foreigner, either in Cuba or in any of the other countries in which I’ve traveled, and I’ve had a rather adventurous life.

  I felt like a Guatemalan in Guatemala, like a Mexican in Mexico and like a Peruvian in Peru; now, I feel like a Cuban in Cuba—and, naturally, I also feel like an Argentine, both here and everywhere else, because it’s a part of my personality: I can’t forget mate and Argentine BBQs.

  Now let’s talk about something more important: the contribution that doctors can make to our revolution—not what you’ve already done, which everybody acknowledges, for your profession may well be the one that has given the most blood and men to the revolution. (I can’t remember any of our columns that didn’t have the services of at least one doctor.)