On the Trail of Che Guevara, Continued
After leaving Chile, he wanders without a posting. The idea of opening a second PAP bureau in Latin America seems less and less realistic: the agency hasn’t enough money. So Kapuściński should take over the post in Mexico, but the PAP central office in Warsaw is having trouble with the correspondent there, Osmańczyk. He has no intention of leaving his job. (‘He keeps thinking up new excuses – including a thousand incredible diseases – and he writes that he will leave when he wants to’, the enraged Kapuściński writes to the Nowaks.)1
He has no idea what to do. Tired, resigned to continually having to take care of formalities such as visas and accreditation in each new country, and with no time for writing, for gaining knowledge, or for his own development, he wants to return to Poland. But at the agency they say, ‘Be patient – you’ll be going to Mexico soon.’
For the time being, he ends up in Rio de Janeiro. Newly appointed Ambassador Aleksander Krajewski has an ambition to create a dynamic post here, and offers to help the PAP. Kapuściński sighs with relief – but only temporarily.
His benefactor soon turns into a peculiar kind of persecutor. He fetches Kapuściński from the airport, takes him to the ambassador’s residence, and refuses to hear of his guest moving out to live somewhere else. (‘He wanted to keep an eye on me,’ Kapuściński will recall. What for? We don’t know.) He won’t let the reporter use the telex machine. What sort of help is this, what sort of a favour?
Kapuściński declares a hunger strike. He goes to bed, covers his head with a sheet, and lies there without moving. He doesn’t eat, drink, or get up. The housekeeper tries to break him, without success. Then the ambassador himself tries, but his efforts are in vain. With the sheet over his head, Kapuściński doesn’t twitch. His stomach is rumbling, his bones ache from lying down, but he doesn’t give in. It goes on like this for several days. The ambassador comes to the conclusion that his guest is a madman.
‘If you must move out, the door is open.’
He rents a room with a kitchen in the Copacabana district, near the most famous beach in the world. He has a view of the ocean from his windows: it’s the most beautiful place on earth! He falls in love with Rio, and he falls in love with Brazil. In a letter to Jerzy and Izabella Nowak he writes:
This country is truly fascinating, and most importantly, the Brazilians are really great, fine people. They’re extremely nice, and in that respect life here is fantastic. You can travel all over Brazil as if it were your own home. I’ve become very fond of Brazil and I’d like to come back here at any cost.2
These are the years of military dictatorship, but it’s at its mild stage, and so Kapuściński writes in the same letter that ‘the government is very liberal – despite what they write about it in the press’. A month after he leaves Rio, in December 1968, there will be an internal putsch within the army; the hawks will take power; the opposition will grab weapons, and urban guerrilla groups will be formed. From Mexico, Kapuściński will write about the rising influence of fascism in Brazil’s political life.
Here, for the first time, he encounters a movement which becomes one of his fascinations: liberation theology. This is a trend within the Catholic Church that reviles anti-communist dictatorships and demands reform in a revolutionary Marxist spirit (which will soon displease the Holy See). In Brazil, liberation theology has advocates not just among rank-and-file priests and laymen but also the bishops.
Just as in Santiago de Chile, he hardly writes a thing. He leads a care-free life: the beach, the sea, sight-seeing. He belongs to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, thanks to which he receives invitations to dinners with government ministers. He learns Portuguese, though he can’t stand it: ‘an awful, ugly language. I have already mastered it tolerably well, and I can read quite fluently, but there’s an irrational objection to this language at work inside me, so I keep ostentatiously speaking Spanish and refusing to talk Portuguese.’3
He avoids both alcohol and women, which in Brazil demands a good deal of will-power. He knows that as a correspondent from a communist country he could be watched or provoked, and in that way become easily compromised.
Towards the end of October he receives a telegram from Frelek (who returns briefly from his position as Kliszko’s secretary to the PAP, as deputy head of the agency): there is finally a nomination for the job of correspondent in Mexico. The Mexican ministry of foreign affairs has already received a note from the PAP to say that Osmańczyk is ceasing to be the correspondent. There is relief and, once again, anxiety:
I am flying out of Rio next week and I’ll be in Mexico City on 16 November . . . Now I’ve got an awfully hard time ahead of me with Osmańczyk, the most deplorable thing that could happen to me – you know how bad I am at things like that. What’s more I’m going to lose another few months, damn it all, I simply haven’t the strength, it’s too much.4
Mexico City is a great source of fascination and an even greater source of frustration.
Here he has a flat with several rooms in the city centre at 57–503 Amazonas Street (‘a palace’, he writes of it). One room is a spacious study for him alone; this is comfort of a kind he has never had in Warsaw or anywhere else he has worked. Alicja and Zojka come to join him, so he won’t be on his own. Socializing with the Polish embassy staff will also prevent him from suffering the torments of loneliness as he did in Kampala, Lagos, Lima and Rio. But he will be entirely alone with the great continent, which right now is a seething volcano.
Every day he reads piles of newspapers, listens to the radio, selects, copies, writes up and reports. In Brazil the guerrillas have kidnapped an ambassador, in the centre of Montevideo the corpse of a student has been found with the marks of torture, in Buenos Aires the Montoneros have shot an important general, some Soviet diplomats have been expelled from Mexico, Fidel says we won’t give an inch, Venezuelan guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo says he’s had enough of Fidel, in Chile Allende wins the elections, Nixon tightens his policy line . . . How can he master, explain and describe it all?
[T]he longer stay here is a psychological burden for me, mainly because of my writing, which I cannot do here at all. The PAP has forced me onto the treadmill of daily information services, total idiocy that takes up all my time and energy and leaves nothing behind – no achievement or satisfaction. And I’ve got a few things to write up my sleeve: all locked away in files and dreams. The days and weeks go trickling through my fingers without a trace – dispatches typed out over and over, some ridiculous press conferences, the endless fiestas you can’t avoid. On top of that an altitude of 2,500 metres, which I find tiring and very distracting. Enough, enough.5
Now sunshine, now rain, to quote a Latin American hit.
My dears, I haven’t written for ages, for what I would call psychological reasons, i.e., a very long-lasting feeling of total disaster on the Latin American front, a feeling that I’d never get anything done here and that I’d be wasting a couple of years. Luckily it seems this panic-stricken fear of mine and my breakdown were not quite so entirely justified, because after returning from Poland I sat down at my typewriter and a week ago I finished a sixty-page text called Latin America 1969; today a PAP dispatch arrived from Zwiren [an agency editor] saying ‘perfect, stunning, congratulations’, etc. But what matters most is that I felt something unblocking inside me, my mind becoming clear, and my plans for the future starting to form, and in a nutshell, I was right on my way.6
And on a downer again:
Right now I’m sitting at home alone, the noise from the street is awful, it’s sunny, but cold. Mexico City is tiring, oppressive, with ten million people, pollution, smog, two bank raids today, and yesterday – I read in the paper – a drunk was riding the bus, it reached the end of the route, so the driver tried to wake him up, the drunk was annoyed at having his sleep disturbed, so he pulled out a gun, killed the driver on the spot and went back to sleep. Then, wondering what on earth they wanted him for, he explained at the police station: es que me molestaba, hombre [‘he disturbed me’].
And on that image I shall end. I promise to write again soon.7
Company from the embassy includes the ambassador, Ryszard Majchrzak, and his wife, Irena, and secretaries Eugeniusz Spyra and Henryk Sobieski (several decades later, his acquaintance with these two men will have consequences). They meet socially and as comrades at Party cell meetings at the embassy. Alicja Kapuścińska takes part in the meetings too. Kapuściński sometimes takes the minutes and is sometimes a speaker, delivering analytical reports – on Nixon’s policy towards Latin America, for instance.
Irena Majchrzak, who later settled in Mexico and worked as an educator and anthropologist among Indian communities, remembers Kapuściński as a man living under ‘tremendous inner tension’: ‘Never before or since have I ever met anyone so focused. There was something shamanic about him.’
They do not talk about politics at home or about the anti-Semitic witch-hunt, the echoes of which have not died down yet (Mrs Majchrzak is a Holocaust survivor). At that time everyone took cover, they were all on their guard, she says. They are in close contact, but in her view Kapuściński is self-contained: ‘He conducted his own secret game with the world.’
What was that ‘tremendous inner tension’ like? Here is an example:
Armed conflict is just beginning between Honduras and El Salvador, a conflict which thanks to Kapuściński’s reportage will go down in history as ‘the soccer war’. A group from the embassy goes off to the ocean, to Acapulco, where the capital’s middle class relaxes at weekends. The Majchrzaks have rented a house and are waiting for the Kapuścińskis to arrive.
Meanwhile, since early that morning Kapuściński has been at home, listening to news on the radio about the developing conflict. Finally he says: ‘I’m not going, I have work to do.’
Once the Majchrzaks have already started to give up hope of their friends’ arrival, they appear. Both of them have come. Kapuściński is upset, tired by the long journey, and streaming with sweat. He keeps tapping his foot, and repeating: ‘I’m going back in a moment. I have to return.’
‘Where to?’ asks Majchrzak.
‘I’m going home, I have to go to Honduras.’
‘Sit down, have a rest, jump in the pool. Let’s have a drink.’
‘No, no, no. I’m off.’
Finally he sits down, but only for a short while, of course. Majchrzak pours the whisky. An hour later, the bottle is empty. Kapuściński gets up.
‘Now I really am off.’
‘Where on earth to? You can’t, you’ve been drinking!’
‘I’m off, and that’s final!’
At the Majchrzaks’ stern request, Alicja almost forcibly pushes her staggering husband into the car and takes him to a nearby hotel. Let him sleep it off, he can go in the morning, they say. The ambassador and his wife breathe a sigh of relief.
A quarter of an hour later, Alicja turns up again.
‘He’s gone. I got out to unload the bags, he grabbed the steering wheel and was off.’
Alicja and the Majchrzaks spend the whole night awake, waiting for him to let them know he arrived safely. The next day, he calls to complain that Alicja let him go. When he stopped on the way for petrol, he fell out of the car. It’s a miracle that he got there and is alive.
‘The whole time, his duties to his family and friends were battling inside him with his professional duties and the most important thing – his passion.’
If he had chosen the sunshine and the ocean, the ‘soccer war’ would never have happened. If Alicja had held him back, maybe it wouldn’t have either.
He loves these reporting trips, the short expeditions – whether to Honduras, Colombia or Chile. He always goes, the post’s budget permitting. Even though it is difficult and sometimes dangerous work, the journeys are a breather from the daily routine, from the ‘total idiocy that takes up all my time and energy and leaves nothing behind – no achievement or satisfaction’.
Dispatches from PAP special envoy R. Kapuściński:
TEGUCIGALPA: On Thursday morning, with the consent of the Honduran army’s general staff, we went straight to the front of the war which has been going on for several days between El Salvador and Honduras. From Tegucigalpa to the town of Nacome . . .
Beyond that, we have to make our way forward under heavy artillery and mortar fire . . . It is a blazing hot tropical afternoon. At five we are on the front line among soldiers firing on enemy positions.
They are young lads, well armed. Around us there is evidence of prolonged, intensive fighting. This is a tough, fierce war, conducted in difficult, heavily wooded terrain. The fighting is happening almost face to face. There are a lot of human victims and significant material losses. Late at night we come back from the front.8
LIMA: I spent five days in the central and southern regions of the Peruvian Andes, where teams from the Ministry of Agriculture are conducting agricultural reform, confiscating landed estates. Depending on the circumstances, these latifundia are either being divided up among individual farmers, or transformed into production co-operatives created by the serfs and farm-hands from the relevant estate.
The Peruvian agricultural reform was initiated in June last year [1969] by a decree of General Velasco Alvarado’s government and has already made enormous progress. This month the first, extremely important stage of the reform was completed: all the large sugar-cane plantations and the sugar factories and rum producers situated on their terrain, which are the property of foreign capital and the local oligarchy, have been transferred to the ownership of the work-force. These plantations, which are currently called ‘agricultural production co-operatives’, are managed by workers councils selected at meetings of the work-force.9
MEXICO CITY: The latest reports coming in from Miami indicate that reactionary Cuban emigrés are preparing an armed invasion of Cuba. This Sunday, Mexican television’s Channel 8 broadcast a sensational report from Miami about preparations for this invasion . . . The viewers could see American landing crafts with groups of extremely well-armed men. A small unit of mercenaries was also shown, commanded by Vicente Méndez, who on 17 April this year [1970] made an attempt to land in Cuba to initiate guerrilla operations. Méndez’s group was probably entirely wiped out by Cuban army units.10
SANTIAGO DE CHILE: [L]ast preparations are underway for a session of Congress which will meet on Saturday to complete the final vote for a president for the republic . . . no one has any doubt that the Congress will elect . . . the Popular Front representative, 62-year-old doctor Salvador Allende . . .
Throughout Chile there is an atmosphere of peace and civic discipline. The forces of reaction have failed to incite rebellion within the army, which remains loyal to the constitutional order. Nor has an attempt to terrorize society succeeded by organizing bomb attacks . . . In all, the extreme right wing has more and more evidently been pushed into defensive positions. Its history is gradually coming to an end.11
SANTIAGO DE CHILE: [T]he Chilean Congress has ratified the election of Salvador Allende as president . . . Joy at the triumph achieved has been overshadowed by the tragic fate of General Schneider, on whom the forces of reaction carried out an attack on Thursday, because as a loyal soldier he had prevented the oligarchies from provoking a military coup . . .
As I transmit this report, Santiago city centre is filled with crowds of people who have come in from all districts to celebrate their triumph. However, a big popular demonstration forecast to take place today has been called off at Allende’s request because of the grave condition of General Schneider.12
Thirty years later, I question Kapuściński about the events described in these and other dispatches from Latin America, about how he sees the continent three decades afterwards and about his first observations. He replies that his Latin American experience is bracketed by two symbolic events: the death of Guevara in 1967 and the peaceful march of Subcomandante Marcos into Mexico City in 2001:
Thirty years ago – the slaughter of people who wanted to change the world for the better, who fought in the name of justice; now – the entrance into the Mexican capital of their heirs, who can fight by peaceful means and voice their demands in the city’s main square, next to the presidential palace . . .
The death of Guevara, and then the entire protest movement of 1968, closed an era of incredibly violent and bloody confrontation between the forces of the opposition, which took the form of armed conflict, guerrilla movements with the participation of the peasantry, and the ruling élites, to a large extent dominated by the military. Because the 1960s in Latin America were a time of military dictatorships. In those days, some with hope, others with fear, people were expecting that two, three or four Cuban revolutions would recur, that there would be a domino effect and the whole region would become Castroist.13
The hope that this would happen was, at the time, also Kapuściński’s hope.