Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

the socialist utopia 255
bloodshed but confi rmed Che’s conviction that in politics only those willing
to shed blood make a difference.
In late 1954, Guevara arrived in Mexico, and he spent two years there
that would have been listless and inconsequential but for two events. He
made an unhappy marriage to a Peruvian radical he had fi rst met in Guatemala,
Hilda Gadea, and he had a child with her. (Guevara and women is a
nasty subject. Anderson, ever attentive to his subject’s sex life, quotes from
Guevara’s unpublished diary on the courtship: “Hilda declared her love in
epistolary and practical form. I was with a lot of asthma, if not I might have
fucked her. [. . .] The little letter she left me upon leaving is very good, too
bad she is so ugly.”) 14 And he met Fidel Castro, who arrived in Mexico in
1955, fresh from a two-year imprisonment in Cuba following his disastrous
assault on the Moncada army barracks.
There is no record of Ernesto Guevara’s ever before, or subsequently, expressing
unrestrained admiration for a fellow being. Fidel, with his natural
bonhomie, energy, and boundless faith in his own leadership, was the
exception. The chemistry was mutual: Fidel trusted him, relied on him,
and, on the evidence, loved him more than any of his other comrades, with
the possible exception of Celia Sánchez (Fidel’s closest companion until
her death, in 1980). Guevara’s relationship to love, whether it involved his
parents, his comrades, or his women, was uneasy, but his love of Fidel was
wholehearted and transforming, because it opened the path to the life he
was seeking. Within hours of their fi rst meeting, Guevara signed on as a
medic for Fidel’s harebrained plan to land an expedition on the eastern end
of Cuba and start an insurrection against the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
In No vem ber of 1956, the creaky yacht Granma set sail from Veracruz,
bound for Cuba and glory. By then, the Argentine Guevara, who, like all
his countrymen, interjected the word che—roughly, “man” or “you”—at
least once in every sentence (as in “Hey, che, is that the way to clean a
rifl e, che?”), had been rebaptized. He would be, forevermore, el Che—the
Argentine. It was a term that underlined not only affection and respect his
comrades felt for him but also their intense awareness of his differentness,
his permanent standing as a foreigner in the revolution he had adopted as
his own.
He was keenly aware of his outsider status as he sailed for Cuba. Other
portents must have been harder for him to see. There was his medical training,
for example, which had drilled into him the universality of the principle
of the scientifi c cure (that is, that penicillin, say, will get rid of pneumonia
in both a French peasant and a Mexican socialite). A central fl aw
in his thinking for the rest of his life was to assume that what he learned