On arriving in San Cristóbal, a fight broke out between the owners of the transport company and ourselves, who wanted to travel in the most economic way possible. For the first time in our trip, “their” thesis regarding the advantages of two days’ traveling by van, rather than taking three days in a bus, won out. Eager to resolve our immediate futures and find proper treatment for my asthma, we decided to part with an extra 20 bolívares, sacrificing them in honor of Caracas. We occupied ourselves until evening, wandering around the neighborhood and reading a little about the country in quite a good library that’s there.
At 11 p.m. we set off northward, leaving behind us all traces of asphalt. In a seat where three people were already squeezed in, they crammed in four of us, so there was no chance of sleeping. Even worse, a flat tire lost us an hour and my asthma was still bothering me. Wearily climbing toward the summit, the vegetation became scarcer, although in the valleys you could see the same types of crops growing as in Colombia. The roads were in a terrible state, causing many punctures; on our second day on the road we had several. The police have control points thoroughly checking all vans and we would have found ourselves in dire straits without the help of the letter of recommendation one woman passenger had — the driver claimed all the luggage was hers, mission accomplished. The price of a meal had risen and one bolívar per head became more like three and a half. We decided to save as much money as we could, so we fasted at the stop in Punta del Águila, but the driver took pity on our indigence and gave us a good meal, at his expense. Punta del Águila is the highest point of the Venezuelan Andes, reaching 4,108 meters above sea level. I took my two last remaining tablets with which I was able to get through the night. At dawn, the driver stopped for an hour to sleep. He had been driving for two days without a break. We expected to arrive in Caracas that night but flat tires delayed us again, as well as faulty wiring which meant the battery couldn’t charge and we had to stop to fix it. The climate had become tropical and there were aggressive mosquitoes and bananas on all sides. The last stretch, during which I dozed, trying to cope with a decent asthma attack, was asphalted properly and seemed to be quite pretty (it was dark by then). As we arrived at our destination the sky was lightening. I was absolutely wrecked. I fell into a bed we rented for half a bolívar and slept like a tiger, aided by the substantial adrenalin injection given to me by Alberto.
ESTE EXTRAÑO SIGLO VEINTE
his strange twentieth century
The worst of my asthma attack has now passed and I feel almost well, though sometimes I resort to my new acquisition, a French inhaler. I feel Alberto’s absence so sharply. It seems like my flanks are unguarded from some hypothetical attack. At every other moment I’m turning around to share an observation with him only to realize he’s not there.
It’s true, there’s not really much to complain about: thoroughly looked after, good food and a lot of it, and the anticipation of returning home to start studying again and to complete the degree which will enable me to practise. Yet the idea of splitting up definitively doesn’t make me completely happy; the many months we’ve been side by side, through good and bad, accustomed to dreaming similar dreams in similar situations, have brought us so much closer together. With these ideas constantly turning over in my mind, I find myself drifting away from the center of Caracas. The homes in the suburbs are spaced much further apart. Caracas extends along the length of a narrow valley, enclosing and restraining it on its edges, so that on a short walk you’ll be climbing the surrounding hills, and there, with the progressive city laid out before your feet, you’ll begin to see a new aspect of its multifaceted makeup. The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: the black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.
At this elevation the concrete houses have totally disappeared and only adobe huts reign. I peer into one of them. It is a room half separated by a partition, with a fireplace and table and a heap of straw on the ground, apparently serving as beds. Various bony cats and a mangy dog play with three completely naked black children. Rising from the fire, acrid smoke fills the room. The black mother, frizzy hair and sagging breasts, is cooking, assisted by a girl of about 15, who is dressed. At the door of the hut we get into a conversation and after a while I ask if they will pose for a photo, which they categorically refuse to do unless I give it to them straight away. In vain I try to explain that I have to develop it first, but no, they want it then and there, or no ball game. Eventually I promise to hand it over straight away, but now they are suspicious and don’t want to cooperate. One of the kids escapes to play with his friends while I continue chatting with the family. In the end, I stand guard at the door, camera in hand, pretending to snap anyone who pokes out their head. We play around like this for a while until I see the little kid returning carefree on a new bicycle; I focus and press the button but the effect is disastrous. To elude the photo, the kid swerves and falls to the ground, bursting into tears. Immediately they all lose their fear of the camera and rush out to hurl abuse at me. I withdraw somewhat apprehensively because they are excellent stone throwers, followed by the insults of the group — including the height of contempt: “Portuguese.”
Littered along the edges of the road are containers for transporting cars, used by the Portuguese as dwellings. In one of these, where a black family lives, I can just glimpse a brand new refrigerator, and from many of them radios blare music which their owners play at maximum volume. New cars are parked outside the most miserable “homes.” All kinds of aircraft pass overhead, sowing the air with noise and silver reflections and there, at my feet, lies Caracas, city of the eternal spring. Its center is threatened by the invasion of red tiled roofs that converge with the flat roofs of modern buildings. But something else will allow the yellowy color of its colonial buildings to live on, even after they have disappeared from the city maps: the spirit of Caracas, impervious to the lifestyle of the North and stubbornly rooted in the retrograde semi-pastoral conditions of its colonial past.
ACOTACIÓN AL MARGEN
a note in the margin
The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was — I don’t know how to explain it — as if everything solid melted away into the ether, eliminating all individuality and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky. Less than a few meters away the dim light of a lamp lost its power to fade the darkness.
The man’s face was indistinct in the shadows; I could only see what seemed like the spark of his eyes and the gleam of his four front teeth.
I still can’t say whether it was the atmosphere or the personality of that individual that prepared me for the revelation, but I know that many times and from many different people I had heard those same arguments and that they had never made an impression on me. Our interlocutor was, in fact, a very interesting character. From a country in Europe, he escaped the knife of dogmatism as a young man, he knew the taste of fear (one of the few experiences which makes you value life), and afterwards he had wandered from country to country, gathering thousands of adventures, until he and his bones finally ended up in this isolated region, patiently waiting for the moment of great reckoning to arrive.
After exchanging a few meaningless words and platitudes, each of us marking territory, the discussion began to falter and we were
about to go our separate ways, when he let out his idiosyncratic, childlike laugh, highlighting the asymmetry of his four front incisors:
The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country.
The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after. They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives. Or perhaps not, maybe those lives will not have been innocent because they will have committed the huge sin against nature; meaning, a lack of ability to adapt. All of them, those unable to adapt — you and I, for example — will die cursing the power they helped, through great sacrifice, to create. Revolution is impersonal; it will take their lives, even utilizing their memory as an example or as an instrument for domesticating the youth who follow them. My sin is greater because I, more astute and with greater experience, call it what you like, will die knowing that my sacrifice stems only from an inflexibility symbolizing our rotten civilization, which is crumbling. I also know — and this won’t alter the course of history or your personal view of me — that you will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw, the epitome of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol (some inanimate example) but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed; the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and motivates your actions. You are as useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.
I saw his teeth and the cheeky grin with which he foretold history, I felt his handshake and, like a distant murmur, his formal goodbye. The night, folding in at contact with his words, overtook me again, enveloping me within it. But despite his words, I now knew… I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches, will take my bloodstained weapon and, consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands. And I see, as if a great exhaustion smothers this fresh exaltation, I see myself, immolated in the genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa. I feel my nostrils dilate, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, the enemy’s death; I steel my body, ready to do battle, and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope.
APPENDIX: SPEECH TO MEDICAL STUDENTS
a child of my environment
August 20, 1960
Eight years after writing The Motorcycle Diaries, Ernesto Che Guevara had become a central figure in Cuba’s revolutionary government. After his journey with Alberto Granado, he had traveled again through Latin America, experienced the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala and joined the Cuban revolutionary movement that eventually took power in 1959. In this speech to Cuban medical students and workers, Che reflects on his own development from medical student to political activist.
Almost everyone knows that I started my career as a doctor a number of years ago. When I started out as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.
I wanted to succeed, as everybody wants to succeed. I dreamed about being a famous researcher. I dreamed of working tirelessly to achieve something that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that, at the same time, would be a personal triumph. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment.
Through special circumstances, and perhaps also because of my character, after receiving my degree I began to travel through Latin America and I came to know it intimately. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I have visited — in one way or another — all the other countries of Latin America. In the way I traveled, first as a student and afterward as a doctor, I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant incident, as often happens among the hard-hit classes of our Latin American homeland. And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people.
But I continued being, as all of us always continue being, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help those people through my personal efforts. I had already traveled a lot — I was then in Guatemala, the Guatemala of [democratically elected Jacobo] Árbenz — and I had begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of a revolutionary doctor. I began to look into what I needed to be a revolutionary doctor.
The attack came, however: the [1954] coup unleashed by the United Fruit Company, the U.S. State Department, [CIA director] Foster Dulles — in reality, they are all the same thing — and the puppet [they replaced Árbenz with], Castillo Ármas. The aggression was successful, given that the people had not yet reached the level of maturity the Cuban people have today. And one fine day, I, like so many others, took the road to exile, or at least I took the road of fleeing from Guatemala, since that was not my homeland.
Then I realized one fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution. The isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals means naught if that effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that do not permit progress. A revolution needs what we have in Cuba: an entire people mobilized, who have learned the use of arms and the practise of combative unity, who know what a weapon is worth and what the people’s unity is worth.
Then we get to the heart of the problem that today lies ahead of us. We already have the right and even the obligation to be, before anything else, a revolutionary doctor, that is, a person who puts the technical knowledge of his profession at the service of the revolution and of the people. Then we come back to the earlier questions: How does one work for social welfare effectively? How does one reconcile individual effort with the needs of society?
We again have to recall what each of our lives was like, what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any other public health function, prior to the revolution. We have to do so with profound critical enthusiasm. We will then conclude that almost everything we thought and felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and that a new type of human being should be created. If each one of us is their own architect of that new type of human being, then creating that new type of human being — who will represent the new Cuba — will be much easier.
It is good for you — those present, the residents of Havana — to absorb this idea: that in Cuba a new type of human being is being created, which cannot be entirely appreciated in the capital, but which can be seen in every other corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on July 26 must have seen something very important… You must have seen children who by their physical stature appear eight or nine years old, but who nevertheless are almost all 13 or 14. They are the genuine children of the Sierra Maestra, the genuine children of hunger and poverty in all its forms. They are the creatures of malnutrition.
In this small Cuba, with four or five television channels, with hundreds of radio stations, with all the advances of modern science, when one night those children arrived at school and for the first time saw electric light, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. Those children, whom some of you would have seen, are now learning in the collective schools, from the ABCs right up to learning a trade, right up to the very difficult science of being revolutionaries.
These are the new kinds of human beings born in Cuba. The
y are being born in isolated places, in remote parts of the Sierra Maestra and also in the cooperatives and workplaces.
All that has a lot to do with the topic of our talk today: the integration of the doctor and other medical workers into the revolutionary movement. Because the revolution’s task — the task of training and nourishing the children, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the old absentee landlords among those who sweated every day on that same land without reaping its fruit — is the greatest work of social medicine that has been done in Cuba.
The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body — not through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism — but creating a robust body through the work of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.
One day medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire public toward their medical obligations, and which only has to intervene in cases of extreme urgency to perform some surgical operation or to deal with something unusual in that new society we are creating… For that organizational task, as for all revolutionary tasks, what is required, fundamentally, is the individual. The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.