You can still see the bullet holes from that day, scattered across the façade of the hotel they now call the Free Santa Clara. It was December 28, 1958, when a column of scruffy, bearded guerrillas with mismatched uniforms and outdated weapons entered this city in the flatlands of central Cuba. There was a sharp firefight with some military snipers hiding in the upper stories of the hotel; the guerrillas had more enthusiasm than skill and shot up the place pretty badly.
In the midst of the battle, the guerrilla commander, to confront a fearsome armored troop train bristling with weapons and loaded with government reinforcements, grabbed eighteen of his men and rushed to the outskirts of the city. The guerrillas commandeered a D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer, ripped up the train tracks, and hid on rooftops, behind trees, and on a small hill overlooking the site. It was a classic enfilade ambush: the train ground to a halt and the guerrillas opened fire from all directions. Pinned and disoriented, the government troops cowered where they could, unwilling to die for a regime they themselves despised. It was over in a few hours. With only one platoon of men, the commander—an enigmatic Argentine doctor known as Che—had captured 408 government soldiers and shattered the last resistance. Within days, Cuba’s military dictator, Fulgencio Batista, had fled to Florida with a million dollars in his suitcase. The government collapsed, and Fidel Castro rode into Havana and the history books with a rosary around his neck and his handsome young Argentine commander at his side.
When I first came to Santa Clara in 1991 as a freelance magazine journalist, I was searching for Cuba’s curiously powerful grip on the axis of history. And it was here, at the place that marked the apogee of Che Guevara’s life, that I first glimpsed the true dimensions of his myth and the power and meaning it holds for millions of Latin Americans. I had already been exposed to the official version of Che’s life: according to the museums in Havana and the books on sale everywhere, he was born Ernesto Guevara in Argentina; became a doctor and then a revolutionary; came to Cuba and won the battle of Santa Clara; then died fighting to emancipate the poor in Bolivia in 1967. The details were like shadows that did not bear scrutiny in the tropical brightness of Cuban orthodoxy.
I took a seat in the central plaza on a bench facing the battle-scarred hotel. At the other end of the bench was a young Cuban man drinking beer. He was short, thickly muscled, and his eyes were red. While we talked about Cuba he nipped at a large plastic jug of home brew—in Cuba you drink home brew or you don’t drink—and complained. His father had gone to East Germany years before, the fellow explained, but now East Germany no longer existed. When his father had refused to come home, preferring the new, unified Germany to the old, isolated Cuba, he had been labeled a gusano, or worm, Castro’s term for anyone who betrays his version of the revolution. The government had now cut off the son’s mail and phone service, he claimed. He waited, hoping that his father would somehow extract him from history. He studied German at night and dreamed of Munich beer halls. The new world taking shape outside the island was one that this man, like many Cubans, could neither see himself nor imagine. TV carried only speeches by Castro and old cartoons. Russian magazines advocating democracy had been banned. Cuba now soldiered on alone, without a Soviet Union issuing fraternal subsidies. The official rhetoric of sacrifice rang defiantly in the quiet plazas of an economically destitute nation.
My friend looked right and left, and then reached for his wallet. He opened it and picked through the crowded interior until he found a small square of cardboard, faded and wrinkled. He handed it to me. It was a picture of Che, laughing, his beautiful face turned up toward some hopeful thought.
“If he were still alive,” the man on the bench said, “none of this would be happening.”
That line has stuck with me now for many years, a statement of sentimentality and faith that I have been unable to bury or forget. I have encountered one version or another of the young man’s belief in every country I have visited in Latin America. Nor is the devotion he felt toward a cardboard picture of a dead man limited to our hemisphere—Che is an official hero in lands as diverse as Vietnam and Hungary, and an unofficial one in many other places.
Despite the best efforts of biographers to set down a factual account of Che’s life—and the efforts of the Cuban government to curate an alternative, more palatable history—the myth of Che is essentially a living, oral tradition, an amalgam of a thousand fables, some of them true, others invented to suit the needs so clearly expressed on the bench in Santa Clara that day. I have been collecting shards of these stories ever since, writing down the tales passed through the dark of Havana nights—“I met him once,” someone would begin. I have bought up the icons of his face, pure imagery reworked for other ends. Dead for more than thirty years now, Che has become ever more useful. His image has been appropriated for political, economic, and even spiritual purposes. He is the symbol of communist destiny, and yet also beloved of anticommunist rebels; his face is used to sell beer and skis, yet an English church group recently issued posters of Jesus Christ himself recast as Che. The affluent youth of Europe and North America have resurrected Che as an easy emblem of meaningless and unthreatening rebellion, a queer blending of educated violence and disheveled nobility, like Gandhi with a gun or John Lennon singing “Give War a Chance.”
Against a tide of so many competing interpretations, I have found it necessary here to retreat toward something approaching bedrock. Although this story has begun and will end in contemporary Cuba, it is mostly concerned with retracing the journey across South America that Che Guevara made in 1952, before he was famous, before he was known as Che, before he was anyone’s myth except his own. I have followed where his own search for stories took him, and have sought an origin point of the man as he himself understood it.
You can never know where your journey begins, nor where it will take you in the end. That day in Santa Clara I tried to return the picture of Che my new friend had handed to me. He insisted that I keep it, and then we talked for a while more, and finally he asked me to promise him something. “Promise me,” he said before we parted, “that you will tell people how it really is.”