Mexico is of considerable interest and helps fill in the picture of Guevara personally.
(The original title is "Aquel Amigo Ernesto Guevara" and the translation is by World Outlook.]
xe &
Because death strips away the whole shell of pretenses arising out of human passions, leaving ideas, differences and outlooks bare and shorn of emotion, it is possible for me to bridge the distance and reach a balanced and objective judgment of his course; and I can speak of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna with poignant and sincere freedom, without prejudices or ideological digressions.
Besides the bold and energetic comandante of the Cuban militias and the guerrilla fighter struck down in a remote place on the Bolivian altiplano, there was an Ernesto Guevara who was my friend, whom I came to know profoundly at a time when our destinies ran together, a time of affectionate and daily closeness.
I want to remember it today as it was yesterday in my life in that Mexico of our best experiences. I want to rediscover it, since a long time ago I became lost in that intricate labyrinth of differences in which our opposing outlooks -- his, internationally prominent within a system and style I did not share -separated us forever.
I want to say today what Ernesto Guevara was like as a man -- the doctor, the friend, the ideologist, the idealist. I want to say how he lived and how he came to be caught up among the elements that brought about the Cuban revolution. Many people, of course, have their own reasons for speculating about Ernesto or Fidel. Both adversaries and partisans. Many lies have been written about the origin of the Cuban revolution. I was a good friend of both leaders, although I never boasted of this first-hand experience, even during the famous Venezuelan- Cuban honeymoon. Nevertheless, I always felt that one day I would tell many truths about its history.
And I will tell about Guevara; for example, what our first meeting was like. An elegant young man with clear eyes -sad or ironic according to his mood -—surprised me one afternoon stretched out on a couch in the apartment I shared with Dr. Hilda Gadea, an exiled Peruvian econonist. "Who are you?" I said, surprised at finding him comfortably installed among my things. "I am Guevara, a friend of Hilda's." Later, she came in gaily, and bubbling over, introduced me to the man she had been waiting for, whom she had been expecting at any moment to cross the Guatemalan border at Tapachula as she had done two months before, owing to the fall of the Arbenz regime. Guevara was the man Hilda loved with all her heart.
From that time on, he visited us daily, shared our best moments, our meals, our difficulties. He was a vegetarian with an expert understanding of tastes and predilections. He taught me to enjoy raw carrots and potatoes roasted in their skins, to drink mate [the national drink of Argentina] -- which he consumed in great quantities as is the custom in his country -to eat churrasco [barbecued meat], and papayas with lime juice. This was his daily fare. He ate one meal a day, which was at once lunch and breakfast; he had a whole system of dietary discipline.
What to do in Mexico where means of subsistence are not easily found? Guevara sought out professional contacts and managed to get a job as a hospital assistant. He could not freely exercise his profession as a doctor but he worked as the as~ sistant of a Mexican scientist. His modest means finally barely equaled his daily needs. Hilda was his constant and vigilant helpmate. A functionary of a United Nations body, she received a good income which enabled her to share pleasures and comforts with him. Sister, lover, collaborator, her tenacity created a manifold web of needed opportunities, and Guevara married her. Love? Gratitude? Life is as subtle a tangle as it is inextricable; and looking below the surface one would have to say that Hilda needed Ernesto just as much as she was indispensable to him. They shared a profound solidarity.
One time Guevara got a job as a sports correspondent for an Argentine paper: I think it was when the Bolivar Games were held in Mexico City. In this hectic struggle for existence, in December he sold toys on the streets of Santa Maria de la Rivera. Delayed by this, our Christmas dinner had to wait for him until the morning.
The historic meeting between Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara took place in our apartment. We were hostesses to almost
all America's exiles. Our enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and solidarity with all Latin Americans favored bringing people together and helped to provide an opportune meeting ground. Guatemalans, Argentines, Cubans, Venezuelans (including Venezuelan Communists), Peruvians, Nicaraguans, Colombians -- in short, the Latin-American exodus -- shared a moment of sociability with us, a moment of brotherhood. Hilda Gadea plied her "Aprista Indo-Americanism"; I my democratic humanism. In this sense, Hilda was indefatigable.
She invited Fidel Castro. She had met him at a public meeting for solidarity with the Guatemalans and invited him to visit us. She was to make dinner for him. They were the "Moncada boys" just arrived in Mexico. The Central American writer Edelberto Torres, Dofia Laurita de Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican soprano whose name I don't remember, Ernesto Guevara and I waited one night for the Castro Ruz brothers. The table was set. In the deepening chill, talk died away. Words waiting and waiting for Fidel. Nine o'clock. Ten o'clock. Eleven o'clock. The guest of honor did not come. The night was a long slow impatience which I could not overcome. I went to bed before the "Moncada boys" arrived. Later, I was awakened by the register of the soprano and the loud almost shouting voice of Fidel. "Let the Venezuelan come out, I want to meet her." I did not come out. Perhaps for that reason Dr. Castro Ruz determined to be my friend; he tried from that night on to win me over.
And he returned the next day. At all times, and always, he was at my side in a constant friendship of pleasant times, of moments richly shared. I never had such a gentle and close friend; he was someone who enriched my loneliness with so many glowing walks along the Paseo de la Reforma or by the taco shops of the Avenida Bucareli. We were infected with the same joy of surviving the separation from our homelands, longed for in clenched hands, in impressions, in anxiety. Letters, projects, contacts, all his world of Cuban possibilities was confided to me and shared in sympathy and collaboration. Fond of cooking, Fidel sometimes helped us with this task; he excelled in preparing his favorite dish -- macaroni with clam sauce.
Guevara, Castro, Hilda and I. And sometimes, Rail, the Montanés, a few other friends. Fidel's Cuban passion and Guevara's revolutionary thought came together like striking a spark, with’ an intense light. The one impulsive; the other reflective. The one emotional and optimistic; the other cold and skeptical. One related to Cuba, the other to a framework of social and economic concepts "which had to stand for." One talked about the Batista dictatorship; the other about socialism and imperialism. Meat and the sauce of ideas, a good mixture of circumstances and outlooks which in our house led to working out a course, knitted a solidarity. Without Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro would have never become a Communist; without Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara would never have been more than a Marxist theoretician, an idealistic intellectual. A Bohemian, a rebel, an individualist -- perhaps Guevara's revolutionary ideas would have found expression only in wandering around the world, in an inconstant and constant landing in ports and visiting peoples with realities and problems to witness or denounce. "All I want is to travel around the world with nothing but my knapsack as my comrade," he told me one day when he was arguing with Hilda and I tried to intervene.
When they were married in the most beautiful of Mexican villages, the barroque Tepozotl4n, Rail Castro Ruz and I signed as witnesses. We four took a bus trip together in one of those dilapidated Mexican "camiones" [trucks or buses] which scare you when you get on. On the way back we sang to our hearts' content and deluded ourselves with the idea that we were all happy.
Living together under one roof was an experience of deep fraternity. Ernesto treated me, diagnosed my aches and pains, gave me injections, joked ironically about my supposed illnesses, assumed sardonic poses, catching me with all kinds of inmprovisations of his quick and biting wit. His attacks of asthma often found Hilda and me glued to the head of his bed in the middle of the night. As a preventive measure, Guevara did a lot of walking, made frequent excursions to Popo [Popocatepetl], habitually went on outings.
He was also a determined reader, a man of inflexible intellectual discipline. Together, Hilda and Ernesto read books on economics. She oriented him in this direc~ tion; they spent hours reading and discussing these subjects, putting together data cards and notes. Guevara was a man of solid general culture. He talked about Aristotle as he would about Kant or Marx; about André Gide or Faulkner; he ranged from the poetry of Keats to that of Sara de Ibafiez, his favorite writer. Both he and Fidel pushed the publication of my book Poesia Resiste. I wrote once to Rémulo Betancourt in Puerto Rico: "My friend Fidel Castro Ruz has been my best collaborator in distributing Poesia Resiste." Indeed, Fidel not only helped to sell it with excellent results in the Cuban colony, but sent it to Jorge Mafiach in Havana with his recommendation.
The Venezuelans who frequented our apartment, among them many Communists, passed by Fidel and Ernesto without sus-
ERNESTO GUEVARA IN THE DAYS WHEN WE WERE FRIENDS
By Lucila Vel&squez
[The following reminiscences of Ernesto "Che" Guevara appeared in the Caracas weekly, El Nacional (the third issue in October). Although the author is utterly opposed to Guevara's revolutionary Marxist views, as she makes clear at the end of her article, her account of the days she knew him in Mexico is of considerable interest and helps fill in the picture of Guevara personally.
(The original title is "Aquel Amigo Ernesto Guevara" and the translation is by World Outlook.]
xe &
Because death strips away the whole shell of pretenses arising out of human passions, leaving ideas, differences and outlooks bare and shorn of emotion, it is possible for me to bridge the distance and reach a balanced and objective judgment of his course; and I can speak of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna with poignant and sincere freedom, without prejudices or ideological digressions.
Besides the bold and energetic comandante of the Cuban militias and the guerrilla fighter struck down in a remote place on the Bolivian altiplano, there was an Ernesto Guevara who was my friend, whom I came to know profoundly at a time when our destinies ran together, a time of affectionate and daily closeness.
I want to remember it today as it was yesterday in my life in that Mexico of our best experiences. I want to rediscover it, since a long time ago I became lost in that intricate labyrinth of differences in which our opposing outlooks -~ his, internationally prominent within a system and style I did not share -separated us forever.
I want to say today what Ernesto Guevara was like as a man -- the doctor, the friend, the ideologist, the idealist. I want to say how he lived and how he came to be caught up among the elements that brought about the Cuban revolution. Many people, of course, have their own reasons for speculating about Ernesto or Fidel. Both adversaries and partisans. Many lies have been written about the origin of the Cuban revolution. I was a good friend of both leaders, although I never boasted of this first-hand experience, even during the famous Venezuelan- Cuban honeymoon. Nevertheless, I always felt that one day I would tell many truths about its history.
And I will tell about Guevara; for example, what our first meeting was like. An elegant young man with clear eyes -sad or ironic according to his mood -surprised me one afternoon stretched out on a couch in the apartment I shared with Dr. Hilda Gadea, an exiled Peruvian economist. "Who are you?" I said, surprised at finding him comfortably installed among my things. "I am Guevara, a friend of Hilda's." Later, she came in gaily, and bubbling over, introduced me to the man she had been waiting for, whom she had been expecting at any moment to cross the Guatemalan border at Tapachula as she had done two months before, owing to the fall of the Arbenz regime. Guevara was the man Hilda loved with all her heart.
From that time on, he visited us daily, shared our best moments, our meals, our difficulties. He was a vegetarian with an expert understanding of tastes and predilections. He taught me to enjoy raw carrots and potatoes roasted in their skins, to drink mate [the national drink of Argentina] -- which he consumed in great quantities as is the custom in his country -to eat churrasco [barbecued meat], and papayas with lime juice. This was his daily fare. He ate one meal a day, which was at once lunch and breakfast; he had a whole system of dietary discipline.
What to do in Mexico where means of subsistence are not easily found? Guevara sought out professional contacts and managed to get a job as a hospital assistant. He could not freely exercise his profession as a doctor but he worked as the assistant of a Mexican scientist. His modest means finally barely equaled his daily needs. Hilda was his constant and vigilant helpmate. A functionary of a United Nations body, she received a good income which en-~ abled her to share pleasures and comforts with him. Sister, lover, collaborator, her tenacity created a manifold web of needed opportunities, and Guevara married her. Love? Gratitude? Life is as subtle a tangle as it is inextricable; and looking below the surface one would have to say that Hilda needed Ernesto just as much as she was indispensable to him. They shared a profound solidarity.
One time Guevara got a job as a sports correspondent for an Argentine paper: I think it was when the Bolivar Games were held in Mexico City. In this hectic struggle for existence, in December he sold toys on the streets of Santa Marfa de la Rivera. Delayed by this, our Christmas dinner had to wait for him until the morning.
The historic meeting between Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara took place in our apartment. We were hostesses to almost
all America's exiles. Our enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and solidarity with all Latin Americans favored bringing people together and helped to provide an opportune meeting ground. Guatemalans, Argentines, Cubans, Venezuelans (including Venezuelan Communists), Peruvians, Nicaraguans, Colombians -- in short, the Latin-American exodus -- shared a moment of sociability with us, a moment of brotherhood. Hilda Gadea plied her "Aprista Indo-Americanism"; I my democratic humanism. In this sense, Hilda was indefatigable.
She invited Fidel Castro. She had met him at a public meeting for solidarity with the Guatemalans and invited him to visit us. She was to make dinner for him. They were the "Moncada boys" just arrived in Mexico. The Central American writer Edelberto Torres, Dofia Laurita de Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican soprano whose name I don't remember, Ernesto Guevara and I waited one night for the Castro Ruz brothers. The table was set. In the deepening chill, talk died away. Words waiting and waiting for Fidel. Nine o'clock. Ten o'clock. Eleven o'clock. The guest of honor did not come. The night was a long slow impatience which I could not overcome. I went to bed before the "Moncada boys" arrived. Later, I was awakened by the register of the soprano and the loud almost shouting voice of Fidel. "Let the Venezuelan come out, I want to meet her." I did not come out. Perhaps for that reason Dr. Castro Ruz determined to be my friend; he tried from that night on to win me over.
And he returned the next day. At all times, and always, he was at my side in a constant friendship of pleasant times, of moments richly shared. I never had such a gentle and close friend; he was someone who enriched my loneliness with so many glowing walks along the Paseo de la Reforma or by the taco shops of the Avenida Bucareli. We were infected with the same joy of surviving the separation from our homelands, longed for in clenched hands, in impressions, in anxiety. Letters, projects, contacts, all his world of Cuban possibilities was confided to me and shared in sympathy and collaboration. Fond of cooking, Fidel sometimes helped us with this task; he excelled in preparing his favorite dish -- macaroni with clam sauce.
Guevara, Castro, Hilda and I. And sometimes, Rail, the Montanés, a few other friends. Fidel's Cuban passion and Guevara's revolutionary thought came together like striking a spark, with-an intense light. The one impulsive; the other reflective. The one emotional and optimistic; the other cold and skeptical. One related to Cuba, the other to a framework of social and economic concepts "which had to stand for." One talked about the Batista dictatorship; the other about socialism and imperialism. Meat and the sauce of ideas, a good mixture of circumstances and outlooks which in our house led to working out a course, knitted a solidarity. Without Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro would have never become a Communist; without Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara would never have been more than a Marxist theoretician, an idealistic intellectual. A Bohemian, a rebel, an individualist -- perhaps Guevara's revolutionary ideas would have found expression only in wandering around the world, in an inconstant and constant landing in ports and visiting peoples with realities and problems to witness or denounce. "All I want is to travel around the world with nothing but my knapsack as my comrade," he told me one day when he was arguing with Hilda and I tried to intervene.
When they were married in the most beautiful of Mexican villages, the barroque Tepozotl4n, Rail Castro Ruz and I signed as witnesses. We four took a bus trip together in one of those dilapidated Mexican "camiones" [trucks or buses] which scare you when you get on. On the way back we sang to our hearts' content and deluded ourselves with the idea that we were all happy.
Living together under one roof was an experience of deep fraternity. Ernesto treated me, diagnosed my aches and pains, gave me injections, joked ironically about my supposed illnesses, assumed sardonic poses, catching me with all kinds of inprovisations of his quick and biting wit. His attacks of asthma often found Hilda and me glued to the head of his bed in the middle of the night. As a preventive measure, Guevara did a lot of walking, made frequent excursions to Popo [Popocatepetl], habitually went on outings.
He was also a determined reader, a man of inflexible intellectual discipline. Together, Hilda and Ernesto read books on economics. She oriented him in this direction; they spent hours reading and discussing these subjects, putting together data cards and notes. Guevara was a man of solid general culture. He talked about Aristotle as he would about Kant or Marx; about André Gide or Faulkner; he ranged from the poetry of Keats to that of Sara de Ibafiez, his favorite writer. Both he and Fidel pushed the publication of my book Poesia Resiste. I wrote once to Rémulo Betancourt in Puerto Rico: "My friend Fidel Castro Ruz has been my best collaborator in distributing Poesia Resiste." Indeed, Fidel not only helped to sell it with excellent results in the Cuban colony, but sent it to Jorge Maflach in Havana with his recommendation.
The Venezuelans who frequented our apartment, among them many Communists, passed by Fidel and Ernesto without sus-
pecting that they were the leaders of a movement.
The "Moncada boys" were just other exiles, bold valiant boys, and nothing more. The exile political groups, including the Communists, did not perceive the signs of their future course. The imprisonment of Castro and Guevara in the Miguel Schultz jail in Mexico City (where they were visited by Ildegar Pérez Segnini, who was a friend of both and had an objective vision of the militant spirit that was theirs); and finally the Granma expedition and invasion that led to the Sierra Madre had to occur before the world learned how to gauge them.
Such was the man whom I knew intimately, a man of highways, adventures and reflection -- Ernesto Guevara, Marxist, Bohemian, a near stoic, and fundamentally a solitary personality, a romantic, an eternal rebel. A name, a destiny, an idea which we can keep on fighting. An adversary of whom it must be said that he was nistaken in his violent and subversive way of confronting the Latin-American reality but whom we could never -- with the profound respect ideas inspire -call an opportunist.
REGIS DEBRAY SENTENCED TO THIRTY YEARS
Régis Debray was sentenced to thirty years in prison November 17 by a drumhead military court in Camiri, Bolivia. The severity of the sentence came as no surprise after the caricature of judicial procedure that passed under the name of a trial.
Ciro Bustos, the Argentine artist, who, like Debray, had spent time with the guerrillas in March, was also sentenced to thirty years.
The four other defendants, deserters from the guerrilla movement who testified for the prosecution, were "“absolved."
Debray and Bustos were convicted of "rebellion, murders, assault and robbery." No evidence was produced in the entire course of the trial that either had ever fired a shot. Debray had come to Bolivia as a journalist to interview Che Guevara; Bustos to make sketches of the guerrillas.
; The two were arrested with an Englishman named Roth, unarmed and in civilian clothes, at Muyupampa, April 20.
Throughout the trial no defendant was allowed to speak. Debray was given a court-appointed lawyer who neither sympathized with nor understood his revolutionary views, although it was precisely Debray's politics rather than his actions that were on trial.
Foreign correspondents were expelled from Bolivia by the military for daring to write dispatches critical of the irregular procedures in the trial.
Private meetings between Debray and his lawyer were secretly recorded and introduced into the trial.
The only testimony against Debray came from deserters from the guerrillas, men completely at the mercy of the court and creatures of the army. Other guerrillas who were captured and would not give false evidence were murdered in cold blood by army officers.
Finally, on November 13, after both prosecution and "defense" had made their final summaries, the court read selected extracts, allegedly from Che Guevara's diary, into the record. There was no opportunity for Debray to examine then, verify their authenticity, or see the entire context from which they were taken.
Debray has protested the refusal of the court to allow a presentation of the political views for which he was tried. In an interview with Juan de Onis of the New York Times the day before the verdict was handed down he declared:
"What I will never tolerate is that a political conviction for an ideological crime be allowed to stand as a criminal conviction. I am not a murderer or a thief."
As the trial closed, Jaime Mendizabal, a Bolivian lawyer for Bustos, tried to argue before the court that the proceedings had been irregular. Col. Efrain Guachalla, president of the court, shouted, "This trial has ended," and brought down his gavel with such force that the head broke off and flew into the first row of spectators.
Juan de Onis reports that there was a scramble to recover the souvenir.
Debray and Bustos plan to appeal -to a higher military court.
It was not announced where Debray would be imprisoned, but the New York Times reported that “military sources" had indicated he would be sent to a military prison in the Beni Department, a hot lowland region in northeast Bolivia.