The Awakening of Latin America

by Ernesto Che Guevara

Dear vieja,

  This time it seems my fears have come true, and the enemy you’ve despised for so many years has fallen. The reaction here did not take long to register: all the daily papers and foreign dispatches jubilantly announced the fall of a sinister dictator; the North Americans breathed a sigh of relief for the $425 million they can now extract from Argentina; the bishop of Mexico City was gloating at Perón’s downfall; and all the Catholic right wingers I’ve met in this country were visibly overjoyed. My friends and I, no. With natural anxiety we followed the fate of Perón’s government and the navy’s threats to shell Buenos Aires. Perón fell as people of his stripe fall, without Vargas’s posthumous dignity or Árbenz’s energetic denunciations, when he named in minute detail those guilty of aggression.

  Progressives here have defined the denouement that has occurred in Argentina as “another victory for the dollar, the sword and the cross.” I know that today you will be happy and breathing the air of freedom. […]

  Not long ago, I suggested in another letter to you that the military would never hand power over to civilians without a guarantee of its caste’s domination. As things stand today, it will only hand over power to a government springing from the Democratic Party, which is to say, one of the recently founded Social-Christian parties, where I imagine [...] is active, a future honorable member of the Chamber of Deputies and perhaps, in the course of time, leader of the Argentine Party, yet to be founded.

  Wherever you are, you’ll be able to say whatever you feel like saying, with the absolute impunity that comes from belonging to the ruling class, although for your sake I hope you are the black sheep in the fold. In all honesty I confess that Perón’s fall has left me deeply embittered, not on his account but because of what it means for the Americas. However much it pains you, and apart from the forced capitulations of recent times, Argentina was a champion for all of us who believe that the enemy lies to the north. To me, having lived through Guatemala’s bitter hours, Argentina was a distant mirror image. When I saw that, together with the loyalist news (strange to call it that), Córdoba’s voice was to be heard—theoretically an occupied city—I began to lose any clear picture of the situation. But afterwards, everything developed along exactly the same lines: the president resigned, a junta, posing as the resistance, began to negotiate but then collapsed, superseded by a military man with a little sailor by his side (the only variation with respect to Guatemala).

  Then Cardinal Copello proudly addressed the nation, calculating how his business would fare under the new junta. The worldwide press—in this hemisphere—launched its well-rehearsed lines; the junta refused to give Perón a passport but declared freedom for everyone. People like you will believe this is the dawning of a new day; I assure you that Frondizi no longer does, since in the possible event that the Radicals come out on top, he won’t be the one who achieves it but rather it will be Yadarola, Santander or someone else with the blessing of the military serving the interests of the Yankees and the clergy. Perhaps there won’t be any violence at first, because it will be exercised in a circle far removed from your own. [...]

  The Communist Party will, in time, be put out of commission, and perhaps the day will come when even Papa might feel he made a mistake. Who knows what will have become of your wandering son in the meantime. Perhaps he will have come back to earth on his native soil (the only one possible), or have begun a life of true struggle [...].

  Perhaps one of the bullets so common in the Caribbean will shorten my life (this is neither idle talk nor a concrete possibility, as there are plenty of bullets flying around here). Perhaps I’ll just continue to wander around for long enough to gain a thorough education and take the pleasures I have assigned to myself for this life, before seriously devoting myself to pursuing my ideal. Life travels at a tremendous speed, and one cannot predict where one will be next year or why.

  I don’t know if you’ve received the formal news of my marriage and the arrival of an heir—from Beatriz’s letter it would seem not. In that case, let me tell you officially, so you can let other people know: I married Hilda Gadea and we will soon be having a child.

  I received the newspapers from Beatriz, which I’m very interested in. I’d like some kind of analysis about recent events, and above all a weekly copy of [the Argentine Communist Party’s] Nuestra Palabra.

  Chau,

  Kisses to all the family. Hilda sends her greetings.

  Letter to his parents

  Mexico State Penitentiary

  July 6, 1956

  Dear viejos [old folks],

  I received your letter (Dad) here in my new and exquisite mansion of Miguel Schultz [prison], along with a visit from Petit who informed me of your fears. To give you an idea, I’ll give you an account of the matter.

  Some time ago, quite a while ago, a young Cuban leader invited me to join his movement, a movement for the armed liberation of his country, and naturally, I accepted. In my task of providing some physical training for the bunch of guys who will be setting foot in Cuba some day, I spent the last months maintaining my cover as a teacher. On June 21 (when I had been away from my home in Mexico City because I was at a ranch on the outskirts), Fidel was arrested with a group of compañeros and the address we were staying at was found in the house, so we all fell into the net. I had with me documents accrediting me as a student of Russian, which was enough for them to regard me as an important link in the organization, and the news agencies that Dad admires so much began to holler all over the place.

  This is a synthesis of what has happened. The future falls into two categories, the medium term and the immediate. With regard to the medium term, let me tell you now that my future is joined to that of the Cuban revolution. [I will] either triumph with it or die there. (This explains the somewhat enigmatic and romantic letter I sent to Argentina some time ago.) As for the immediate future, I have little to say because I don’t know what is to become of me. I am in the judge’s hands and it will be easy for them to deport me to Argentina unless I manage to obtain exile in some intermediate country, which I consider would be good for my political health.

  In any case, I have to leave for my new destination, stay in this prison or leave it a free man. Hilda will go back to Peru, which now has a new government and has declared a political amnesty.

  For obvious reasons, there will be less correspondence from me from now on, and besides, the Mexican police have the charming habit of confiscating letters, so don’t write about anything except family matters or banalities. Give Beatriz a kiss and tell her why I’m not writing and not to worry about sending newspapers for the moment.

  We’re about to declare an indefinite hunger strike because of the unjustified detentions and the torture to which some of my compañeros were submitted. Group morale is high.

  For the moment, keep writing to me at home.

  If for any reason I think that I won’t be able to write anymore, and then I end up among the losers, consider these lines as my farewell, maybe not very grandiloquent but sincere.

  I have spent my life stumbling about seeking my own truth and somewhere along the way, with a daughter to perpetuate me, I have closed the cycle. From now on, I wouldn’t consider my death as a frustration, or only in the sense that [Turkish poet Nazim] Hikmet did: “I shall take beneath the earth only the sorrow of an unfinished song.”

  Kisses for everyone,

  Ernesto

  Letter to his mother

  Mexico

  July 15, 1956

  Vieja,

  […] I’m neither Christ nor a philanthropist, vieja. I’m exactly the opposite of a Christ and philanthropy looks [illegible] to me, but I fight for what I believe in, I fight with all the weapons at my disposal, and I try to lay out the other guy instead of letting myself get nailed to a cross or whatever. As for the hunger strike, you are totally wrong. We started it twice and the first time they freed 21 of the 24 detainees; the second time they announced that they would free Fidel Castro, the head of the
movement, which will happen tomorrow, and if they do what they said, only two of us will be left in prison. I don’t want you to believe, as Hilda suggests, that the two of us who remain have been sacrificed. We are simply the ones whose papers aren’t in order and so we can’t access the resources that our compañeros can. My plans are to leave for the nearest country that will grant me asylum, which might be difficult given the inter-American fame I’ve been lumbered with. From there I’ll prepare myself for whenever my services are required. I’m telling you yet again that it’s likely I won’t be able to write for a quite a while.

  What really distresses me is your lack of understanding about all this and your advice about moderation, egoism, etc.—in other words, the most execrable qualities an individual could have. Not only am I not moderate, but I shall try never to be so. And if I ever see in myself that the sacred flame has become a timid little votive flicker, the least I can do is to vomit on my own shit. As for your appeal to moderate egoism, which means common and spineless individualism (the virtues of X.X.), I have to say that I’ve tried hard to eliminate him. I don’t mean so much the unfamiliar craven type, but the other one, the bohemian, unconcerned about his neighbor, filled with a sense of self-sufficiency because of a consciousness, mistaken or otherwise, of his own strength. During this time in prison, and during the period of training, I totally identified with my compañeros in the struggle. I recall a phrase that I once thought was ridiculous, or at least strange, referring to such a total identification between members of a group of combatants, to the effect that the idea of “I” was completely subsumed in the concept of “we.” It was a communist moral principle and naturally might look like doctrinaire exaggeration, but it was (and is) really beautiful to have this sense of “we.”

  (The splotches aren’t tears of blood but tomato juice.)

  You are deeply mistaken to believe that moderation or “moderate egoism” gives rise to great inventions or works of art. All great work requires passion and the revolution needs passion and audacity in large doses, things we have as collective humankind. Another strange thing I noted was your repeated mention of God the Father.

  I really hope you’re not reverting to the fold of your youth. I also warn you that the SOSs are to no avail: Petit got the wind up, Lezica dodged the issue and gave Hilda (who went there against my orders) a sermon on the obligations of political asylum. Raúl Lynch behaved well from afar, and Padilla Nervo said they were different ministries.

  They would all help but only on the condition that I abjure my ideals. I don’t think you would prefer a living son who was a Barabbas rather than a son who died wherever doing what he considered his duty. These attempts to help only put pressure on them and me.

  But you have some clever ideas (at least to my way of thinking), and the best of them is the matter of the interplanetary rocket—a word I like.

  Besides, there’s no doubt that, after righting the wrongs in Cuba, I’ll be off somewhere else; and it’s also certain that if I were locked up in some bureaucrat’s office or some allergy clinic, I’d be fucked. All in all, I think that this pain, the pain of a mother who’s aging and wants her son alive, is a feeling to be respected, and I should heed it, and more than that, I want to attend to it. I would like to see you, not just to console you, but also to console myself in my sporadic and shameful homesickness.

  Vieja, I kiss you and promise to be with you if nothing else develops.

  Your son,

  Che

  Letter to his mother

  Mexico

  [Approximately October 1956]

  Dear Mamá,

  Your prickly son of a bad mother is not, on top of everything else, a good-for-nothing; he’s like Paul Muni who said what he had to say in that tragic voice, and disappeared into the distance, his shadow lengthening to the tune of such an evocative soundtrack.

  My current profession means I am always on the go, here today, there tomorrow, etc., and my relatives… well I haven’t been to see them because of this (and also, I confess, because I probably have more in common with a whale than with a bourgeois married couple employed at the kinds of worthy institutions I would wipe from the face of the earth if I got the chance to do so. I don’t want you to think that this is just a passing aversion; it’s real mistrust. Lezica has shown that we speak different languages and have no common points of reference.)

  I have given you this lengthy bracketed explanation because, after my opening line, I thought you might imagine I’m on the way to a becoming a morfa-burgués.3 Being too lazy to start over and remove the paragraph, I embarked on a lengthy explanation that now strikes me as rather unconvincing. Full stop, new paragraph.

  Within a month, Hilda will go to visit her family in Peru, taking advantage of the fact that she is no longer a political criminal but a somewhat misguided representative of the admirable and anticommunist party, the APRA.

  I’m in the process of changing the focus of my studies: whereas previously I devoted myself for better or worse to medicine, and spent my spare time informally studying Saint Karl [Marx], this new stage of my life demands that I change the order. Now Saint Karl is primordial; he is the axis and will remain so for however many years the spheroid has room for me on its outer mantle. Medicine is more or less a trivial and passing pursuit, except for one small area on which I’m thinking of writing more than one substantive study—the kind that causes bookstore basements to tremble beneath its weight.

  As you’ll recall, and if you don’t remember I’ll remind you now, I was working on a book on the role of the doctor, etc., of which I only finished a couple of chapters that whiffed of some newspaper serial with a title like Bodies and Souls. They were nothing more than poorly written rubbish, displaying a thorough ignorance of the fundamental issues, so I decided to study. Again, to write it, I had to reach a series of conclusions that were kicking against my essentially adventurous trajectory, so I decided to deal with the main things first, to pit myself against the order of things, shield on my arm, the whole fantasy, and then, if the windmills don’t crack open my nut, I’ll get down to writing.

  I owe Celia the letter of praise I will write after this if I have time. The others are in debt to me as the last word has been mine, even with Beatriz. Tell her that the papers arrive like clockwork and that they give me a very good idea of all the government’s beautiful deeds. I cut out the articles carefully, following the example of my pater, and now Hilda is emulating her mater.

  A kiss for everyone, with all the appropriate additions and a reply— negative or positive, but convincing—about the Guatemalan.

  Now all that remains is the final part of the speech, which refers to the man, which could be titled: “What next?”

  Now comes the tough part, vieja, the part I’ve never shunned and always enjoyed. The sky has not darkened, the stars have not fallen out of the sky, nor have there been terrible floods or hurricanes; the signs are good. They augur victory. But if they are wrong—and in the end even the gods can make mistakes—I think I’ll be able to say, like a [Turkish] poet you don’t know: “I shall take beneath the earth only the sorrow of an unfinished song.”

  To avoid pre-mortem pathos, this letter will appear when things get really hot, and then you’ll know that your son, in some sun-drenched land in the Americas, is swearing at himself for not having studied enough surgery to help a wounded man, and cursing the Mexican government for not letting him perfect his already respectable marksmanship so he could knock over puppets with better results. The struggle will be with our backs to the wall, as in the hymns, until victory or death.

  Another kiss for you, with all the love of a farewell that still resists being total.

  Your son

  1. Eduardo “Gaulo” García was a friend from Argentina.

  2. Argentine slang meaning “pig.”

  3. Argentine slang for a lazy bourgeois who does nothing but eat.

  Books Read in Adolescence

  The facsimiles reproduced
here are a part of the personal archive Che Guevara left in Cuba. They allow for full appreciation of the formative stage in his life.

  According to his own testimony, he began to write these notebooks on philosophy when he was 17, when he first set himself the task of studying philosophy. He noted in parentheses the nationality of the authors he was reading. Even when his handwriting was still evidently that of an adolescent, he maintained a methodological rigor that evolved as he read more. Che later summarized his first handwritten notebooks with typed versions during his stay in Mexico, eliminating what he considered irrelevant and making a greater emphasis on the study of Marxist economics.

  Che also began preparing reading lists of books in his early youth. The lists included here reveal the depth and breadth of his intellectual curiosity.

  Page 1:

  Ameghino, Florentino, Doctrinas y descubriminetos

  Alarcón, Pedro A. de (Spanish), El Capitán veneno y el escándalo del sombrero de tres picos

  Alighieri, Dante (Italian), La Divina Comedia

  Anuario socialista 1937

  Arkady Anechenko (Russian), Cuentos

  Alekhine, Alexander (Russian), Mis mejores partidas de ajedrez [My Best Games of Chess]

  Amadeo, Octavio R. (Argentine), Vidas Argentinas (biographies)

  Azorín (Spanish), Confesiones de un pequeño filósofo

  Alarcón, Luis de (Spanish), La verdad sospechosa

  Page 2:

  Machiavelli, Niccolo (Italian), El Príncipe (sociology)

  Manyot, El buque fantasma

  John Milton (English), El paraíso perdido (Epopeya mística) [Paradise Lost] ( 2 volumes)

  Moratín, Leandro F. de, El sí de las niñas (comedy)

  Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino (Spanish), Las cien mejores poesías líricas de la lengua castellana [One Hundred of the Best Lyric Poems in Spanish]

  Miró, Gabriel (Spanish), Años y leguas. El libro de Sigüenza