The conquering soldiers fall to blows over his watch, his canteen, his belt, his pipe. Several officers interrogate him, one after another. Che keeps quiet as his blood flows. Vice Admiral U garteche, daring land-wolf, head of the navy in a country without an ocean, insults and threatens him. Che spits in his face.
From La Paz comes the order to finish off the prisoner. A burst of gunfire. Che dies from a treacherous bullet shortly before his fortieth birthday, the age at which Zapata and Sandino died, also from treacherous bullets.
In the little town of Higueras, General Barrientos exhibits his trophy to journalists. Che lies on a laundry sink. They shoot him a final time, with flashbulbs. This last face has accusing eyes and a melancholy smile.
(212 and 455)
1967: Higueras
Bells Toll for Him
Did he die in 1967 in Bolivia because he guessed wrong about the when and the where and the how? Or did he not die at all, not anywhere, because he wasn’t wrong about what really matters despite all the whens and wheres and hows?
He believed that one must defend oneself from the traps of greed without ever letting down one’s guard. When he was president of the National Bank of Cuba, he signed the banknotes “Che,” in mockery of money. For love of people, he scorned things. Sick is the world, he thought, in which to have and to be mean the same thing. He never kept anything for himself, nor ever asked for anything.
Living is giving oneself, he thought; and he gave himself.
1967: La Paz
Portrait of a Supermacho
On the shoulders of Nene, his giant bodyguard, General Barrientos crosses the city of La Paz. From Nene’s shoulders he greets those who applaud him. He enters the government palace. Seated at his desk, with Nene behind him, he signs decrees that sell at bargain prices the sky, the soil, and the subsoil of Bolivia.
Ten years ago, Barrientos was putting in time in a Washington, D.C., psychiatric clinic when the idea of being president of Bolivia entered his head. He’d already made a career for himself as an athlete. Disguising himself as a North American aviator, he laid siege to power; and now he exercises it, machinegunning workers and pulling down libraries and wages.
The killer of Che is a cock with a loud crow, a man with three balls, a hundred women, and a thousand children. No Bolivian has flown so high, made so many speeches, or stolen so much.
In Miami, the Cuban exiles elect him Man of the Year.
(16, 17, 337, and 474)
1967: Estoril
Society Notes
Pinned to the hostess’s gleaming coiffure are some of the world’s largest diamonds. The cross on her granddaughter’s necklace displays one of the world’s largest emeralds. The Patiños, inheritors of one of the world’s largest fortunes, throw one of the world’s largest parties.
To make a thousand people happy night and day for a week, the Patiños collect all the elegant flowers and fine drinks buyable in Portugal. The invitations have gone out well ahead, so that the fashion-designers and society reporters could do their jobs properly. Several times a day the ladies change their dresses, all exclusive designs, and when two similar gowns appear in one salon, someone observes that she will fry Yves Saint-Laurent in oil. The orchestras come by charter from New York. The guests come in yachts or private planes.
Europe’s nobility is out in force. The late lamented Simón Patiño, the anthropophagous Bolivian, devourer of miners, bought top-quality alliances. He married his daughters to a count and a marquis, and his son to a king’s first cousin.
(34)
1967: Houston
Ali
They called him Cassius Clay: He chooses to call himself Muhammad Ali.
They made him a Christian: He chooses to make himself a Muslim.
They made him defend himself: No one punches like Ali, so fierce and fast, light tank, bulldozing feather, indestructible possessor of the world crown.
They told him that a good boxer confines his fighting to the ring: He says the real ring is something else, where a triumphant black fights for defeated blacks, for those who eat leftovers in the kitchen.
They advised discretion: From then on he yells.
They tapped his phone: From then on he yells on the phone, too.
They put a uniform on him to send him to Vietnam: He pulls it off and yells that he isn’t going, because he has nothing against the Vietnamese, who have done no harm to him or to any other black American.
They took away his world title, they stopped him from boxing, they sentenced him to jail and a fine: He yells his thanks for these compliments to his human dignity.
(14 and 149)
1968: Memphis
Portrait of a Dangerous Man
The Reverend Martin Luther King preaches against the Vietnam War. He protests that twice as many blacks as whites are dying there, cannon fodder for an imperial adventure comparable to the Nazi crimes. The poisoning of water and land, the destruction of people and harvests are part of a plan of extermination. Of the million Vietnamese dead, says the preacher, the majority are children. The United States, he claims, is suffering from an infection of the soul; and any autopsy would show that the name of that infection is Vietnam.
Six years ago the FBI put this man in Section A of the Reserved List, among those dangerous individuals who must be watched and jailed in case of emergency. Since then the police hound him, spying on him day and night, threatening and provoking him.
Martin Luther King collapses on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. A bullet full in the face puts an end to this nuisance.
(254)
1968: San Jose, California
The Chicanos
Judge Gerald Chargin passes sentence on a lad accused of incest, and while he’s at it, advises the young man to commit suicide and tells him, “You Chicanos are worse than animals, miserable, lousy, rotten people …”
The Chicanos are the descendants of those who came across the border river from Mexico to harvest cotton, oranges, tomatoes, and potatoes at dirt-cheap wages, and who stayed on in these southwestern and western states, which until little more than a century ago were the north of Mexico. In these lands, no longer theirs, they are used and despised.
Of every ten North Americans killed in Vietnam, six are blacks or Hispanics. And to them they say:
If you’re so tough and strong, you go to the front lines first.
(182, 282, 369, and 403)
1968: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Albizu
Puerto Ricans are also good at dying in Vietnam in the name of those who took away their country.
The island of Puerto Rico, North American colony, consumes what it doesn’t produce and produces what it doesn’t consume. On its abandoned lands not even the rice and beans of the national dish are grown. Washington teaches the Puerto Ricans to breathe refrigerated air, eat canned food, drive long, well-chromed cars, sink up to the neck in debt, and lose their souls watching television.
Pedro Albizu Campos died a while back after almost twenty years spent in U.S. jails for his unceasing activities as an agitator. To win back the fatherland, one should love it with one’s soul and one’s life, he thought, as if it were a woman; to make it breathe again, one should rescue it with bullets.
He always wore a black tie for the lost fatherland. He was more and more alone.
(87, 116, 199, and 275)
1968: Mexico City
The Students
invade the streets. Such demonstrations have never been seen before in Mexico, so huge, so joyous, everyone linked arm in arm, singing and laughing. The students cry out against President Díaz Ordaz and his ministerial mummies, and all the others who have taken over Zapata’s and Pancho Villa’s revolution.
In Tlatelolco, a plaza where Indians and conquistadors once fought to the death, a trap is sprung. The army blocks every exit with strategically placed tanks and machineguns. Inside the corral, readied for the sacrifice, the students are hopelessly jammed together. A continuous wall of rifl
es with fixed bayonets advances to seal the trap.
Flares, one green, one red, give the signal. Hours later, a woman searches for her child, her shoes leaving bloody tracks on the ground.
(299 and 347)
“There was much, much blood,” says the mother of a student,
“so much that I felt it thick on my hands. There was also blood on the walls. I think the walls of Tlatelolco have their pores full of blood; all Tlatelolco breathes blood … The bodies lay on the concrete waiting to be removed. I counted many from the window, about sixty-eight. They were piling them up in the rain. I remembered that my son Carlitos was wearing a green corduroy jacket and I thought I saw it on each body …”
(347)
1968: Mexico City
Revueltas
He has been around for half a century, but repeats daily the crime of being young. Always at the center of any uproar, José Revueltas now denounces the owners of power in Mexico, who, out of incurable hatred for all that pulses, grows, and changes, have murdered three hundred students in Tlatelolco.
“The gentlemen of the government are dead. For that they kill us.”
In Mexico, power assimilates or annihilates, shoots deadly lightning with a hug or a slug, consigns to grave or prison the impudent ones who will not be bought off with a sinecure. The incorrigible Revueltas rarely sleeps outside a cell; and when he does, he spends the night stretched out on some bench in a park, or on a desk at the university. Hated by the police for being a revolutionary and by dogmatists of all types for being free, he is condemned by pious leftists for his predilection for cheap bars. Not long ago, his comrades provided him with a guardian angel to save him from temptation, but the angel had to pawn his wings to pay for the sprees they enjoyed together.
(373)
1968: Banks of the River Yaqui
The Mexican Revolution Isn’t There Anymore
The Yaqui Indians, warriors for centuries, call upon Lázaro Cárdenas. They meet him on a bright sunny prairie in northern Mexico, near their ancestral river.
Standing in the shade of a leafy breadfruit tree, the chiefs of the eight Yaqui tribes welcome him. On their heads gleam the plumes reserved for great occasions.
“Remember, Tata?” Thirty years have passed and this is a great occasion. The top chief speaks: “Tata Lázaro, do you remember? You gave us back the lands. You gave us hospitals and schools.”
At the end of each sentence the chiefs beat the ground with their staves, and the dry echo reverberates across the prairie.
“You remember? We want you to know, the rich have taken back the lands. The hospitals have been turned into barracks. The schools are cantinas.”
Cárdenas listens and says nothing.
(45)
1968: Mexico City
Rulfo
In the silence, the heartbeat of another Mexico. Juan Rulfo, teller of tales about the misadventures of the dead and the living, keeps silent. Fifteen years ago he said what he had to say, in a small novel and a few short stories, and since then he says nothing. Or rather, he made the deepest kind of love, and then went to sleep.
1969: Lima
Arguedas
splits his skull with a bullet. His story is the story of Peru: Sick with Peru, he kills himself.
The son of whites, José María Arguedas was raised by Indians and spoke Quechua throughout his childhood. At seventeen, he was torn away from the sierra and thrust into the coastal area—from the small communal towns to the proprietorial cities.
He learned the language of the victors and spoke and wrote it. He never wrote about the vanquished, rather from them. He knew how to express them; but his feat was his curse. He felt that everything about him was treachery or failure; he felt torn apart. He couldn’t be Indian; he didn’t want to be white. He couldn’t endure both the scorning and the being scorned.
This lonely wayfarer walked at the edge of an abyss, between two enemy worlds that divided his soul. Many an avalanche of anguish swept down on him, worse than any landslide of mud and rocks, until finally he was overwhelmed.
(30 and 256)
1969: Sea of Tranquillity
The Discovery of the Earth
The space ship from Houston, Texas, puts down its long spider legs on the Moon. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin see the Earth as no one has seen it before, an Earth that is not the generous breast that gives us milk and poison to suck, but a handsome frozen stone rotating in the solitude of the universe. The Earth seems to be childless, uninhabited, perhaps even indifferent, as if it didn’t feel a single tickle from the human passions that swarm on its soil.
Via television and radio, the astronauts send us preprogrammed words about the great step that humanity is taking, while they stick the flag of the United States of America into the stony Sea of Tranquillity.
1969: Bogotá
The Urchins
They have the street for a home. They are cats made for jumping and slapping, sparrows for flying, little cocks for fighting. They go about in packs, in gangs. They sleep in clusters, bunched together against the freezing dawns. They eat what they steal or the leftovers they beg or the garbage they find; they have grey teeth and faces burned by the cold.
Arturo Dueñas, of the Twenty-second Street gang, leaves his pack, fed up with offering his bottom to be spanked just because he’s the smallest, the bedbug, the tick. He decides he’ll fare better on his own.
One night, a night like any other, Arturo slips under a restaurant table, grabs a chicken leg, and brandishing it like a flag, scoots off down an alley. When he finds some obscure nook, he sits down to have supper. A little dog watches him and licks its chops. Several times Arturo pushes it away, but the dog returns. They examine each other: The two are equals, sons of nobody, beaten, pure bone and grime. Arturo resigns himself and shares.
Since then they’ve gone together on winged feet, sharing the danger, the booty, and the lice. Arturo, who has never talked to anybody, opens up, and the little dog sleeps curled up at his feet.
One accursed day the police catch Arturo robbing buns and haul him to the Fifth Precinct for a tremendous beating. When, in time, Arturo returns to the street, all battered, the little dog is nowhere to be seen. Arturo runs back and forth, searching wildly everywhere, but it doesn’t appear. A lot of questions, and nothing. A lot of calling, and nothing. No one in the world is so alone as this child of seven who is alone on the streets of the city of Bogotá, hoarse from so much screaming.
(68 and 342)
1969: Any City
Someone
On a corner, by a red light, someone swallows fire, someone washes windshields, someone sells Kleenex, chewing gum, little flags, and dolls that make pee-pee. Someone listens to the horoscope on the radio, pleased that the stars are concerned about him. Walking between the tall buildings, someone would like to buy silence or air, but doesn’t have the cash. In a filthy barrio, amid swarms of flies above and armies of rats below, someone hires a woman for three minutes. In a whorehouse cell the raped becomes the rapist, better than making it with a donkey in the river. Someone talks to no one on the phone, after hanging up the receiver. Someone talks to no one in front of the TV set. Someone talks to no one in front of a one-armed bandit. Someone waters a pot of plastic flowers. Someone climbs on an empty bus, at dawn, and the bus stays empty.
1969: Rio de Janeiro
Expulsion from the Slums
They refuse to go. They have been the poorest of the poor in the countryside and now they’re the poorest in the city, always the last in line, people with cheap hands and dancing feet. Here, at least, they live near the places where they earn their bread. The inhabitants of Praia do Pinto and the other slums covering Rio de Janeiro’s mountains have turned stubborn. But the military has long eyed these tracts, highly salable and resalable and well-suited for speculation, and so the problem will be solved by means of an opportune fire. The firemen never turn up. Dawn is the hour of tears and cinders. After fire destroys the houses made of garb
age, they sweep up the people like garbage and take them far away for dumping.
(340)
1969: Baixo Grande
A Castle of Garbage
Old man Gabriel dos Santos does what his dreams tell him to do. He dreams the same crazy dreams in Brazil that Antonio Gaudí dreamed decades ago in Catalonia, in far-off Barcelona, although old Gabriel has never heard of Gaudí or seen his works.
As soon as he awakes, old Gabriel starts modeling with his hands the marvels he sees in his dreams, before they get away from him. Thus he has built the House of the Flower. In it he lives, on the slope of a hill beaten by the ocean wind. From dream to dream, through the years, old Gabriel’s home keeps growing, this strange castle or beast of bright colors and sinuous forms, all made of garbage.
Old Gabriel, worker in the salt mines, never went to school, never watched television, never had money. He knows no rules, has no models. He plays around, in his own free style, with whatever leftovers the nearby city of Cabo Frío throws his way: fenders, headlights, splintered windows and smashed bottles, broken dishes, bits of old iron, chair legs, wheels …
(171)
1969: Arque Pass
The Last Stunt of Aviator Barrientos
Cardinal Maurer says that President Barrientos is like Saint Paul, because he roams the Bolivian countryside handing out truths. Barrientos also hands out money and soccer balls. He comes and goes, raining banknotes by helicopter. Gulf Oil gave the helicopter to Barrientos in exchange for the two billion dollars’ worth of gas and one billion of petroleum that Barrientos gave Gulf Oil.