Remembering El Che

Eduardo Galeano, recalls an interview with Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

He believed, all right: in Latin America’s revolution, in its painful evolution, in its destiny. He had faith in the new human condition that socialism ought to engender. When he talked about such subjects, one got the impression that the temperature of his blood rose, but whenever I started jotting down notes he kept his enthusiasm on a short rein. Then, his eyes fixed on the Bic dancing on the paper, he’d blow out two or three dense lungfuls of blue smoke between thick moustache and scraggly beard, and, smiling, he’d make some mischievous and cutting comment. Being a journalist was awful. Not because I had to go to work after so many incoherent nights and days of vertigo without sleep, nor because of how nervous all that made me, but because the flow of communication that burst forth spontaneously every so often would always get cut off. "We’re talking among Cubans and Uraguayans," Che would then lie , to avoid an indiscreet question. Yet everything about him had broken down the borders invented for Latin America, and that he of course did not believe in. Talking with that man you could not forget that he had come to Cuba after a pilgrimage throughout Latin America. He had been - and not just as a tourist - in the whirlwind of the nascent Bolivian revolution, and in the convulsive agony of the Guatemalan revolution. He carried bananas in Central America and took photos in the plazas of Mexico, to earn a living; and to risk life, he threw himself into the adventure of the Granma (the yacht that carried Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and eighty other revolutionaries from Mexico to the coast of Cuba to begin the guerrilla war).

"One day they came by," he wrote in his farewell letter to Fidel, "asking who they should notify in case of death, and the real possibility that it could happen hit us all. Later on we discovered that it was true, that in a revolution ( if it’s real) either you win or you die." In search of new victories, or of his own end, he left Cuba. Yes, there in the middle of the tempest and the fight, you win or you die: " under other skies" now. Others, friends, so many firends, had fallen along the way: they would continue to fall. El Patajo, for example, who had been on the run with him in Mexico and ended his days shot full of lead in the Guatemalan jungle. (Don’t trust, don’t trust, Che had advised hm: he died betrayed by a high school friend.) Another one was the Argentine Masseti who got lost, badly wounded, in the wooods of Salta.

Che was not made for a desk job: he was a creator of revolutions, and it was obvious; he was not, or he was in spite of himself, an administrator. In his words and gestures under his apparent clam, you could sense the tension of a caged lion that would have to spring free.

From We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991, a collection of Galeano’s journalitic writings, published by WW Norton & Company, New York, 1992. Galeno is being invited to visit Ireland for Latin America Week in March 1998.