Poems
This selection of some of the poems Che Guevara wrote as a young man reveals the impact of his experiences in his travels around Latin America as well as a remarkable poetic sensibility.
To the Bolivian Miners
On an April 91
The thunder bolts
with a matchless roar.
A hundred thousand thunderbolts,
and the song is deep.
The miners are coming,
the people’s miners,
men who stir
when they rise for the sun,
who dominate thunder
and love its mighty roar.
Men harvested by shrapnel
and dynamite
bursts,
whose bodies disintegrate
into shards of horror,
when a bullet reaches
their igneous belt.
IT DOESN’T MATTER!
The thunder bolts
with a matchless roar.
A hundred thousand thunderbolts,
and the song is deep.
From thunder’s mouth,
the sound of courage on the wing.
Miners of steel,
the people, their pain.
They emerge from a cavern
clinging to the mountain.
Clusters of burrowing creatures
who come to die
fearless against the shrapnel.
To die, that’s the word,
true North of their days;
die torn apart,
die of silicosis,
die of anemia,
die slowly, in agony,
in a collapsed cave.
Who Cares?
María Bárzola is their guide
and there are springs that push
these fighting tunnelers:
Those who sleep in their beds
are non-women women,
skeletal children
suckling at their breasts;
hunger and misery,
the human thirst for justice,
drives this fierce armed flock
to combat.
They launch Bolivia
from her death ignored,
promising her a future
at the cost of their life.
“When the tin barons fall
and the people say, ‘these are mine,’
these guns will be silent,
and the thunder too,
on the barren fields,
the pututu will not sound
nor will new cries be heard,
and joyful backs
will bend under the weight
of all that is ours.”
M.I.O.
Spain in America
Guatemala, do you remember
Those July days in 1936?
Of course you do.
In your rocky skeleton,
in your singing veins,
your green hair,
your volcanic breast,
you remember it.
Like me,
with my child’s memory
sucking at the past,
your invertebrate memory blooms,
of democracy in its infancy,
the distant rattle of childhood.
Your old poets remember it,
your young poets guess at it:
in Granada and at a night without dawn,
where lead poured from the hands
as crying bullets drowned
the voice of the Gypsy King.
All your singers remember it.
Granada, Banana,
fresh names for saccharine fruits.
Granada, Banana,
tragic symbols of man at twilight.
Over there, in Europe, the ones “with
—that’s why they don’t cry—
skulls of lead.”
Here, in America, those who sell themselves
—for what they’re given—
a fruit company dollar.
They couldn’t shred poets,
but with grenades they opened
—like saccharine pomegranates—
the breasts of your people’s sons.
The crime of being free led them to the cemetery.
The crime of being men put them among the dead.
And the puppets shouted,
killed, mocked,
with the voice and action
of “mama” Fruit Company.
Castillo Armas here
there he was called Franco.
Two names and a bloodstained people,
cementing the old embrace with a cry.
And Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini?
All dead, but their children thrive.
The large sapling where the Axis persists
is a venerable grandfather with a lustrous dome,
an evangelical word and treacherous dagger.
With religious unction he worships ancestors
and lights candles to the head of the clan,
the mythical slaver;
Mr. Monopoly.
And Chamberlain, didn’t he have children?
Oh, he did!
Oh, his putrid sperm
germinated in America.
The traitors are called Vargas and Pinillas
who the peoples’ face
stained with shame.
(Not to speak of Somoza or Gálves,
old shit receptacles)
American blood on their hands,
spit on their faces
from the children of Brazil, Colombia,
Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
“I assure you the defense of the Western world.”
“I will never forget the glorious general.”
How the jackals howl at night!
How the grandfather sics his coyotes!
But the story consumed decades
showing just how far fear would drive one.
No graves for Hitler or Mussolini
Not even flowers to tug at memory.
Open half the world’s eyes,
the other half is already awake.
Guernica, Chiquimula,
bombs linking sister democracies.
Sisters in innocents dead,
sisters in blood shed,
sisters in desperate powerlessness.
Guatemala, your people awake,
as they awoke in Madrid and
from Mexico to Argentina,
your Latina sisters
hail you as their champion.
Guatemala, Guatemala,
hope of America!
Call to the people, they will shout “Here.”
Together we will punish the nuclear dagger
and light their own powder keg,
and the entire continent will smile in admiration
at the red flare awaited by the people.
M.I.O.
June 1954
A Tear for You
Oh, Guatemala,
I prepared my blood in red battalions
to be fully spilled on the holy land.
I kept it intact
in my purple rank of unharmed soldier!
My insomnia glimpses the silences of defeat.
I feel them, in aftertastes of bitter honey,
greasing my actions with suspicion.
Fallen sheaf, Guatemala.
Day, hope, example of America, fallen sheaf.
Titan of ashes!
Disintegrated image of defeated faith!
The dust announced by ruin
forms clouds in the grayish air.
On the horizon they mingle
with the dark clouds kicked up by the hooves
of centaur-octopuses of blonde lineage.
They come thirsting for your fresh sap;
They will sip it, “for democracy.”
My eyes cannot stay dry forever
when those of your people are so moist.
People
cry, Guatemala, but they believe.
They cry but know the future is faithful.
For the one who didn’t die at the time of battle
(the same who dies now without heaven as a witness);
for the one who escaped death and found it again;
for the pain of losing you and of having lost you;
for the enormous tear that people cry;
for the future;
for you and me;
Guatemala, now that I go away,
I send this hopeful and sorrowful tear
to talk about the future with your unarmed people.
M.I.O.
September 1954
Invitation to the Road
To Helena Leiva Sister, victory is still a long way off
Sister, victory is still a long way off.
The road is long and the present uncertain;
tomorrow is ours!
Don’t stand at the roadside.
Quench your feet with this eternal dust.
I know your weariness and great anxiety;
I know that in combat your blood will oppose you
and I know that you will die before harming it;
Come to the reconquest, not to the massacre.
If you despise the rifle take up faith;
if faith fails you, cast a sob;
if you can’t cry, don’t do it
but move ahead, friend,
even without weapons and the North denied to you.
I don’t invite you to regions of illusion,
There won’t be gods, paradise, or devils
—perhaps dark death without a cross to mark it—
Help us sister, don’t let fear stop you,
Let’s put heaven in hell!
Don’t look at the clouds, the birds or the wind;
our castles have roots in the soil.
Look at the dust, the earth contains
the hungry injustice of the human essence.
Here that same hell is hope.
I don’t tell you there, behind that hill;
I’m not saying there, where dust is lost;
I’m not giving you a fixed timeline...
I say: come, give me your warm hand
—the one that has felt my wiped away tears—
Sister, mother, compañera... COMPAÑERO!
This road leads to the battle.
Forget your tiredness, forget your fears,
forget your minor daily anxieties.
Who cares about the acrid dust, about the pitfalls?
Who cares if your sons do not hear the call?
We’ll go and find them in their green-back prison.
Compañero, follow me, it’s time to go...
December 1954
Uaxactún... Sleeps
To Morley, an unknown and respected friend
Uaxactún, she of gray dreams,
hidden voice behind the mystery;
sleeping beauty of our forests!
I came to kiss your girth,
the green tangle of hair,
the air that measures silence.
Uaxactún, Uaxactún.
I know that your death is the white man’s invention:
tired of walking through the centuries, you slept,
solitary compañera of an infinite mountain.
I imagine sleep overtook you,
When you reached your brown blood
— bronze shoots— flowing with the winds,
Uaxactún, Uaxactún.
Mimicking through atavistic gesture
the dispersion that brought
an Asian ancestor across the seas.
And when you shouted your cry of farewell
paying last respects to the grandfather’s grandfather,
a Quetzal Tekun.
Uaxactún, Uaxactún.
And when you closed your temple eyes,
And crossed your arms made of trails
(stopped watches that put time to sleep).
All the more your haunted stillness and silence
will yield to the influence of a handsome prince
than to his kissed command to “rise and walk.”
Uaxactún, Uaxactún.
It is heard in your dream of signs
the song of dawn’s larks,
announcing the end of the night
when your new bronze shoots
bathe in the sun that lights THEIR lands.
UAXACTÚN
UAXACTÚN
It is the end of the dream:
the prince is here;
he becomes the people
with fifes and drums,
sowing red examples
in the heart of America.
M.I.O.
1. This poem was inspired by the April 9, 1952, Bolivian miners’ uprising that overthrew the military dictatorship in that country.
Selected Letters (1953–56)
These letters are taken from Che Guevara’s Latin America Diaries (or Otra Vez) and the book by Che’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Aquí va un soldado de América [Here Comes a Soldier of the Americas]. Written during his second trip through Latin America (between October 21, 1953, and his departure for Cuba in December 1956), despite their intimate, very personal tone, they clearly express Che’s emerging political ideas and the seeds of his future trajectory.
Letter to his mother
Guayaquil, Ecuador
[October 21, 1953]
I am writing you this letter (who knows when you’ll read it) about my new position as a 100 percent adventurer. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the news in my last epistle.
The gist is: As Calica García (one of our acquisitions) and I were traveling along for a while, we felt homesick for our beloved homeland. We talked about how good it was for the two members of the group who had managed to leave for Panama, and commented on the fantastic interview with X.X., that guardian angel you gave me, which I’ll tell you about later. The thing is, [“Gaulo”] García1 — almost in passing—invited us to go to Guatemala, and I was disposed to accept. Calica promised to give his answer the next day, and it was affirmative, so there were four new candidates for Yankee opprobrium.
But then our trials and tribulations in the consulates began, with our daily pleas for the Panamanian visas we required and, after several psychological ups and downs, he seemed to decide not to go. Your suit—your masterpiece, the pearl of your dreams—died heroically in a pawnshop, as did all the other unnecessary things in my luggage, which has been greatly reduced for the good of [our] trio’s economic stability—now achieved (whew!).
What this means is that if a captain, who is a sort of friend, agrees to use an old trick, García and I can travel to Panama, and then the combined efforts of those who want to reach Guatemala, plus those from there, will drag along the straggler left behind as security for the remaining debts. If the captain I mentioned messes it up, the same two partners in crime will go on to Colombia, again leaving the security here, and will head for Guatemala in whatever Almighty God unwarily places within their reach. […]
Guayaquil, [October] 24
After a lot of coming and going and many calls, plus a discreet bribe, we have the visa for Panama. We’ll leave tomorrow, Sunday, and will get there by the 29th or 30th. I have written this quick note at the consulate.
Ernesto
Letter to his Aunt Beatriz
San José, Costa Rica
December 10, 1953
Auntie-auntie-mine,
My life has been a sea of conflicting decisions until I bravely abandoned my baggage and, pack on my back, set off with my compañero García on the winding road that has led us here. In El Paso, I had the chance to travel through the realms of United Fruit [Company], which once again convinced me of how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and lately lamented Stalin not to rest until I see these capitalist octopuses wiped out. In Guatemala, I shall improve myself an
d achieve what I lack to become a true revolutionary.
I must tell you that, apart from being a doctor, I am also a journalist and lecturer, activities which bring (though only a few) US dollars.
Along with all the rest, hugs, kisses and love from your nephew, he of the iron constitution, empty stomach and shining faith in a socialist future.
Ciao,
Chancho2
Letter to his Aunt Beatriz
Guatemala
January 5, 1954
…In any case, money doesn’t mean much to me because I’m following the burro’s example (I keep going for six pieces of straw a day). This is a country where you can breathe deeply and fill your lungs with democracy. The United Fruit Company controls all the newspapers, and if I were Árbenz, I’d close them down in five minutes because they are shameless; they say whatever they want and are creating the kind of atmosphere that the United States wants, painting this as a den of thieves, communists, traitors, etc. I won’t tell you that this is a country that breathes abundance or anything like it, but there are possibilities for working honestly on interesting things. And, if I manage to cut through the somewhat troublesome bureaucracy, I’ll stay here for a while.
Letter to his Aunt Beatriz
Guatemala
February 12, 1954
My very dear, always adored and never duly praised aunt,
I was really pleased to receive your last letter, the culmination and complement of the two previous “capitalist” ones, of which I only received one, meaning that the democratic post office employee made a just distribution of wealth.
Don’t send me any more money as it will cost you all the silver in Peru. I can find all the dollar bills I need here paving the ground, and I can tell you I ended up with lumbago after so much bending over to pick them up at the beginning. Now I only take one in every 10, just to maintain public hygiene standards because so much paper flying about and on the ground is a hazard.
My plan for the coming years: at least six months in Guatemala, if I don’t find anything that is well enough paid to permit me to stay for two years. In the first case, I’ll go and work in another country for a year, which might mean, in diminishing order of probability, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba and the United States.
If the two-year plan comes off, after a visit to the three latter countries, along with Haiti and Santo Domingo, I’m off to Western Europe, where I’ll stay until I’ve blown the final monetary cartridge. If there is time and cash in the meantime, I’ll come and pay you a visit by some bargain-basement means, a free flight or boat or working as a doctor.
The Awakening of Latin America Page 17
