The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  A muleteer with a scarred face came down the dirt track near the river, and we took him prisoner. He was so surprised when I stepped out of the forest I thought the son of a bitch would shit!

  I brought him back to camp for interrogation. He said that eight days ago, when he had stopped by Ispaca’s house, Ispaca hadn’t been home. Ispaca’s wife said he was seeing a doctor in Vallegrande, about a tiger bite.

  “So you had a nice visit with the wife, did you?” Ricardo asked. He and I laughed.

  “You two are beginning to sound alike,” Ponco said. He sounded sad.

  “I saw a fire burning in the house,” I said, certain that the man was lying to us.

  “Maybe he’s there now. I don’t know anything about that. I told you what I heard. Maybe the army is using the house, sir.” Ispaca’s wife had said the army had beaten her husband up, killed all the pigs, and eaten all the food in the house.

  Even as we talked to the peasant we heard shots coming from the ambush. A soldier had approached the house, leading a horse. El Chino saw a figure coming, but couldn’t see it well, and shouted, “A soldier!” as if he were coming out of a reverie, surprised at what he beheld. The soldier shot into the ambush and ran away. Ponco killed the horse.

  Che was furious with Chino. He said that Chino didn’t have either the eyesight or the intelligence to be a guerrilla.

  Now we had to withdraw immediately and move farther down the Rio Grande, to the northwest.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/5/67: The reports from our scouts and the peasants add up to this: The Eighth Division is north-northeast. The Fourth Division is on the other bank of the Rio Grande, to the north.

  From My Journal

  9/6/67: The Bolivian announcer was jubilant with the news that ten guerrillas, led by a Cuban called Joaquin, real name Juan Vitalio Acuna Nunez, had been killed in the vicinity of Camiri, near the junction of the Masicuri River and the Rio Grande. Which is to say: where we were yesterday.

  Che said immediately that the report was a lie. It had given no names other than Joaquin’s, and no details. He said that if there were any truth to it there would have been more details. Joaquin was, he said … then he stopped. “Joaquin is,” he said, “an experienced guerrilla. The whole group, led by an experienced man, could never have been killed all at once, unless they were attacked while they were sleeping.”

  Ricardo looked over at me at this last admission. Che had made it out of that boundless honesty of his, that honesty in which we all might freeze. I looked at Ricardo, but kept my face impassive. The radio glowed green on the forest floor, Benigno hunched above it.

  There have been no recruits. If Joaquin’s group is lost, we too are certainly lost.

  Today there were fewer disputes in the group, the pointless constant haggling about jobs and food that has been our daily meal for the last month. We are twenty-four men. We are all we have now, no life outside the revolution.

  From Coco’s Journal

  9/6/67: Che says it was a lie. The news was on the Voice of America, but none of the other stations. He said that they couldn’t have been killed unless the army came upon them while they slept.

  But what if the army came upon them while they slept?

  From Camba’s Journal

  9/6/67: Che said it was a lie, but there was blood on his tongue when he said it.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/7/67: Now the Voice of the United States reports that a guerrilla named Paco was the only survivor of the clash at the Masicuri. And they speak of one dead near Vado del Yeso, in a new clash where the other group was supposedly liquidated. These contradictions make the information about Joaquin seem like a farce.

  On the other hand, they give all the evidence that El Medico Negro, the Peruvian doctor, has died at Palmarito.

  From Coco’s Journal

  9/7/67: Che says that it was certainly a phony story about Joaquin’s group. If there had been a clash we would have heard something about it. The ground, he said, couldn’t have simply swallowed them up.

  From Camba’s Journal

  9/8/67: I went with Inti and two others to the adobe houses with roofs of curved red tiles, near the Rio Grande, where we were to buy some of the merchandise that makes life more bearable.

  Inti stopped a farm hand making holes in the field, to ask if there was anyone in the biggest of the houses.

  “No,” he said, not able to look at our faces—they were so terrifyingly bright—but staring up into the sun. “It’s empty. There aren’t any soldiers here, and the boss is away.”

  But when we entered the big house a group of forty soldiers sprang up in the field outside. Inti killed one of them, shooting him in the mouth, and the other soldiers took up positions in the empty field in front of the house. The man making holes was gone. He hadn’t really been scared of us; he was a specter luring us to our death.

  But Inti speaks for Che. He told us to make a loud noise and fire off our guns as quickly as we could. I aimed for the tender parts of the soldiers, where love also occurs, for Inti had shown that those parts, like their mouths, are sweet and unprotected. The noise of our shouting and firing turned the soldiers into rabbits, and they ran away. We escaped back to the river, taking a mule on the way.

  From My Journal

  9/8/67: Inti returned from his expedition with a mule. The peasants told him that they had seen guerrillas, a group that went to Perez’s house before the carnival. But that was us.

  That afternoon I felt Joaquin’s presence lingering in the area, hiding among the leaves and bushes. He was the space between the leaves.

  In the evening they played a tape on the radio, a scratchy thing that they considered a great prize, recorded, they said, on the day of the battle at Vado del Yeso. It sounded like Paco’s voice.

  “That was our chief,” he said, “Joaquin. And the black man is what’s left of Braulio. That one is Alejandro, a Cuban. That is Polo. That is Ernesto. That is Moises Guevara.”

  “You mean Che Guevara,” a Bolivian voice said.

  “No, Moises Guevara, the union leader.” (The sound of firing: high, false, like the tinny sound of pebbles against a window.)

  “And that was Freddy, our doctor.”

  Paco was identifying corpses.

  9/9/67: Che sent eight men, under Ricardo, to establish an ambush in the forest between our camp and the river. It was possible, he said, that the army would see the footprints that Inti had left, if the cattle hadn’t wiped them out. And Inti had spilled a lot of corn by the roadside.

  At twelve midnight Che sent Benigno to tell Ricardo to suspend the ambush. Benigno moved down the trail into the darkness.

  A few moments later we heard shots, and a burst of automatic fire. Benigno, all legs, came running back into camp. He had clashed with a patrol that was already bringing dogs down the path through the forest, towards our camp.

  Che looked desperate. There were nine of our men on the other side of the patrol, and we didn’t know exactly where they were.

  The macheteros cut a new path to the river, and four men were sent ahead that way with some of our things. Che’s plan was to transfer the knapsacks near the river, and keep contact, if we could, with the rear guard, until they could be reincorporated into the group.

  At that moment Ricardo returned leading all his men, having cut a path of his own that went around the patrol.

  I was very glad to see him.

  Ricardo, that stupid asshole, had led his group off to find cattle without leaving a sentry on the path. When he heard the dogs barking, and the firing from Benigno’s clash, he realized what had happened, that the army had set up an ambush ahead of him. So they cut a new way back through the woods.

  Che was so relieved that he forgot to think of a suitable punishment for R.’s obvious gross criminal stupidity.

  As we withdrew we heard the soldiers machine-gunning the place where we had camped.

  Under a full moon, we marched all night to
get away from the soldiers. The era of running away has begun. Che is certain that the army will think that we insist on the Masicuri region for supplies, or will wait for us farther south, towards the Nancahuazu.

  On the radio, near morning, Jorge testified that Debray carried a gun. Debray said it was only because he sometimes went hunting.

  “We will have to punish Jorge,” Che said, “as an example.”

  Ricardo laughed.

  9/10/67: Voice of America: The Bolivian Army today found the body of a woman guerrilla fighter called Tania, part of the band killed at a battle near the Rio Grande on August 31. Her real name was Haydee Tamara Bunkebider. Her body had apparently floated downstream and onto the shore, and was in an advanced state of putrefaction when it was finally discovered.

  Her pocket diary, though, had been protected from the water by a leather pouch that she wore at her waist. According to the diary, the guerrillas had gotten lost and, unfamiliar with the Bolivian countryside, had been wandering aimlessly for months, hoping to stumble on the group led by the Argentine adventurer Che Guevara.

  Tania was suffering from a fever, probably malaria, and complains in her diary that the other guerrillas refused to stop their ceaseless marching so she might rest. They held her responsible for their separation from Guevara. Tania writes of how they tormented her, waking her in the middle of the night, even threatening to rape her. She, in turn, said she would inform Guevara of the men’s treatment of her so that they might be suitably punished, and each of their offenses is carefully noted in her diary.

  The Bolivian Army has been patrolling the Rio Grande since the foreign guerrillas were first spotted in the area, more than eight months ago. According to the captain in command at Vado del Yeso, Tania had been trying to surrender when she was accidentally killed by one of the soldiers. Her yellow striped blouse, the only piece of feminine clothing that she wore, made her an easily visible target, even from a distance. She was killed while standing in the river, and her body floated downstream to its resting place, not to be discovered for many days.

  Documents found in the small leather bag attached to her belt, and information now in possession of the Bolivian Investigatory Agency, reveal a tale about Tania that the other guerrillas must never have suspected. She was a double, perhaps even a triple agent. A colonel of the East German secret police who defected to the West only this year revealed that he himself had originally recruited Tania into his spy force, to keep watch on the Argentine Guevara, who was then a high-ranking official in the Cuban government. The Russians, the colonel says, were often at odds with Guevara about his planned military adventures in Latin America.

  It is possible, the Bolivian Minister of Information announced today, that it was Tania’s mission here to betray Guevara, and to make sure that his expedition ended in defeat. This, the Minister said, would explain many otherwise very mysterious facts about Tania’s conduct. In Camiri, Bolivia, where Tania based her undercover work, she often strutted about the town with two Bolivians, the Peredo brothers, announcing jokingly to shopkeepers that she and her companions were guerrillas. In those days no one even dreamed of guerrillas in Bolivia. Why would she so needlessly draw attention to herself? Of course the Bolivian Army began to watch them. Tania must have known, too, that the movement of jeeps on the road from Camiri to the farmhouse where the guerrillas were located had drawn the neighbors’ attention, and that the police suspected them of being cocaine smugglers. Yet she conspicuously drove one of those jeeps about the town, and then simply abandoned it there.

  The jeep was soon discovered by the Bolivian authorities, and a thorough search was made of its contents. The authorities found a number of incriminating documents, among them a list of the names and addresses of many of Tania’s urban contacts, parts of her spy network and those of a Cuban guerrilla, an agent of Guevara’s called “Ricardo.”

  This discovery led the army to investigate further, reconnoitering in the vicinity of the Nancahuazu River on March 13 of this year. Ten days later another patrol, of thirty-two men, marched towards the suspected location of the guerrilla camp. The guerrillas laid an ambush and killed seven of the unwary soldiers, leaving their unburied bodies for vultures to eat.

  But this ambush alerted the Bolivian High Command to the magnitude of the danger. General Barrientos, the President of Bolivia and Commander in Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, said today that the war began long before the guerrillas were ready. All the guerrilla bases are now in army hands. The final defeat of the foreign mercenaries, General Barrientos announced, will come in a matter of days.

  Credit for this complete defeat of the foreign-led guerrilla movement, President Barrientos added, belongs not only to the Bolivian Army, which has battled so tirelessly and so courageously, but also to the Bolivian people, who have rallied to the cause of liberty and once again demonstrated their faith that social progress can be made without recourse to violence, through Bolivia’s own democratic institutions.

  From Coco’s Journal

  9/10/67: Che says that it is all crap about Tania. He had had a thorough investigation of her made, in Cuba, and we can be sure of her complete integrity. It may be that she was killed at the Rio Grande, but the rest of it is just crap.

  I had never heard him say “crap” before.

  I said that Inti and Tania and I did not “strut” around Camiri, but were always circumspect. I looked over at Inti who was seated cross-legged on the ground, staring at his own lap. Could he have done something I didn’t know about?

  No! Their propaganda corrodes even my faith in my own brother! I must not let it.

  When we began to march again, Camba gestured at Che. “There’s blood running down your leg,” he said, trying to point at Che’s tattered pants. But he couldn’t keep his arm steady, and his finger moved up and down Che’s body, from his feet to his neck, and then off to the trees and vines and sky. “She was a witch. There was blood running down her leg. That’s why there’s blood dripping from your prick. Her blood smelled. The army smelled it. That’s how they got Joaquin. Now it will smell you, Che.”

  Before he could say any more my brother took him aside and slapped him. I would like to knock the bones of his nose back into his brain myself and shut him up for good.

  From My Journal

  9/11/67: General Barrientos himself honored us with a speech on the radio tonight. Tamara Bunke—who was called Tania by the guerrillas—will get a Christian burial despite her murderous past, for she was pregnant when she died.

  I looked about and several men—Coco and Ricardo among them—were counting out the months on their fingers. We parted in April. Could it be true that she was pregnant? Could it have been … No. It couldn’t. (We counted again.)

  The enemy, Che said slowly, forming his words in pain, wants to turn the revolution into a romance called Betrayed by a Woman. A Hollywood movie instead of the miners’ massacre; imperialism; and the class struggle.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/11/67: How did Wolfe know we were in the country so long before the first battle? Certainly someone had spoken too loosely.

  But most of this nonsense will work for us. The people protected us but we were betrayed by one of our own, perhaps killed by one of them—killed after death, like a bandit by the police.

  [July 3rd: Killed after death! He imagined himself already dead! “This will work for us”—he means after we’re dead. He already imagined our empty space filled by a story. He meant that the “nonsense” about Tania would be good for our story.

  His story!

  We could still have gotten away.

  But it would have ruined his ending. He sacrificed us to his story, the one he thought he could write in the minds of the peasants, his new theology of Heroes and Giants.]

  From My Journal

  9/12/67: Each day we move farther from the river. The landscape has changed as we have moved north into the mountains. Reddish-colored hills, nearly bare, with small clumps of woods wh
ere we camp. Most of the trees are twisted and half withered from lack of nourishment. The dusty rock-filled soil kicks into clouds as we move.

  Maybe he has come to his senses now that Joaquin’s group is lost and is leading us towards Paraguay or Chile and away!

  9/13/67: Today Che couldn’t march and rode the pack mule. Everyone has the same thought, though no one has wanted to speak it, as if saying it meant that one was responsible for what had happened.

  Finally Moro spoke. “We are leaving the zone.” He meant: This is admitting Joaquin’s group has been killed. A simple sentence; a death sentence.

  “Yes,” Che said, from muleback. “We are slipping. But we are entering a new stage of intensified contact with the army. Our victories will bring new recruits.”

  So we are not going towards the border. We tasted the red dirt on our tongues, in our throats.

  “Still,” he said, as if talking to the mule itself, “they couldn’t have wiped out the whole group. There will be survivors, and they will find us.”

  In hell, I thought.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/13/67: A Budapest daily—Radio Moscow says—criticized Che Guevara as a pathetic and irresponsible figure. It hails the truly Marxist attitude of the Chilean Party, which assumes practical attitudes in the face of objective conditions. Guevara is a new Nechayev, who dreams of covering his continent in blood.

  How I would like to take power, if only to unmask the cowards and lackeys of every kind, and rub their noses in their own dirty tricks!

  9/14/67: A bad day. As we crossed one of the rivers not on any of our maps, my shoes fell from my hand and were carried away. I have bound up my feet as best I can with a bunch of rags and papers tied with pieces of string. This is not the sort of world yet where a man can take off his boots!

  Isle of Pines, July 1968