Che Guevara

A Mate Plantation in Misiones
I

The horoscope was confounding. If the famous guerrilla revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born on June 14, 1928, as stated on his birth certificate, then he was a Gemini--and a lackluster one at that. The astrologer, a friend of Che's mother, did her calculations again to find a mistake, but the results she came up with were the same. The Che that emerged was a grey, dependent personality who had lived an uneventful life. There were only two possibilities: Either she was right about Che, or she was worthless as an astrologer.

When shown the dismal horoscope, Che's mother laughed. She then confided a secret she had guarded closely for over three decades. Her famous son had actually been born one month earlier, on May 14. He was no Gemini, but a headstrong and decisive Taurus.

The deception had been necessary, she explained, because she was three months pregnant on the day she married Che's father. Immediately after their wedding, the couple had left Buenos Aires for the remote jungle backwater of Misiones. There, as her husband set himself up as an enterprising yerba mate planter, she went through her pregnancy away from the prying eyes of Buenos Aires society. When she was near term, they traveled down the Parana River to the city of Rosario. She gave birth there, and a doctor friend falsified the date on her baby's birth certificate, moving it forward by one month to help shield them from scandal.

When their baby son was a month old, the couple notified their families. Their story was that they had tried to reach Buenos Aires, but at Rosario Celia Guevara had gone into labor prematurely. A baby born at seven months, after all, is not an out-of-the-question occurrence. If there were any doubts, the couple's story and their child's official birth date were quietly accepted by their families and friends, and remained unchallenged for years.

If that child had not grown up to become the renowned revolutionary Che, his parents' secret might well have gone with them to their graves. He must be one of the rare public figures of modern times whose birth and death certificates are both falsified. Yet it seems uniquely fitting that Guevara, who spent most of his adult life engaged in clandestine activities and who died as the result of a secret conspiracy, should have also begun life with a subterfuge.

II
When, in 1927, Ernesto Guevara Lynch first met Celia de la Serna, she had just graduated from the exclusive Buenos Aires Catholic girls' school, Sacre Coeur. She was a dramatic-looking girl of twenty with an aquiline nose, wavy dark hair, and brown eyes. Celia was well read but unworldly, devout but questioning. Ripe, in other words, for a romantic adventure.

Celia de la Serna was a true Argentine blue blood of undiluted Spanish noble lineage. One ancestor had been the Spanish royal viceroy of colonial Peru; another a famous Argentine military general. Her paternal grandfather had been a wealthy landowner, and Celia's own father had been a renowned law professor, congressman, and ambassador. Both he and his wife died while Celia was still a child, leaving her and her six brothers and sisters to be raised by a religious guardian aunt. But despite her parents' untimely deaths, the family had conserved its revenue-producing estates, and Celia was due a comfortable inheritance when she reached the legal age of twenty-one.

At twenty-seven, Ernesto Guevara Lynch was both moderately tall and handsome, with a strong chin and jaw. The glasses he wore for astigmatism gave him a deceptively clerkish appearance, for he had an ebullient, gregarious personality, a hot temper, and an outsized imagination. He also possessed Argentine surnames of good vintage: He was the great-grandson of one of South America's richest men, and his ancestors included both Spanish and Irish nobility. But over the years, his family had lost most of its fortune.

During the nineteenth century Rosas tyranny, the male heirs of the wealthy Guevara and Lynch clans had fled Argentina to join the California gold rush. After returning from exile, their American-born offspring, Roberto Guevara Castro and Ana Isabel Lynch, had married. Ernesto was the sixth of their eleven children. They lived well, but they were no longer landed gentry. While her husband worked as a geographical surveyor, Ana Isabel raised the children in Buenos Aires. They summered at a rustic country house on her inherited slice of the old family seat. To prepare his son for a working life, Roberto Guevara had sent him to a state-run school, telling him: "The only aristocracy I believe in is the aristocracy of talent."

But Ernesto still belonged by birthright to Argentine society. He had grown up on his mother's stories of California frontier life, and listening to his father's own terrifying tales of Indian attacks and sudden death in the high Andes. His family's illustrious and adventurous past was a legacy too powerful to overcome. He was nineteen when his father died, and although he went to college, studying architecture and engineering, he dropped out before graduation. He wanted to have his own adventures and make his own fortune, and he used his father's modest inheritance to pursue the goal.

By the time he met Celia, Ernesto had invested most of his money with a wealthy relative in a yacht-building company, the Astillero San Isidro. He worked there for a time as an overseer, but it was not enough to hold his interest. Soon he was enthused about a new project: A friend had convinced him he could make his fortune by growing yerba mate, the stimulating native tea ritually drunk by millions of Argentines.

Land was cheap in the yerba-growing province of Misiones, twelve hundred miles up the Parana River from Buenos Aires on Argentina's northern border with Paraguay and Brazil. Originally settled by Jesuit missionaries and their Guarani Indian converts in the sixteenth century, annexed only fifty years earlier by Argentina, Misiones was just then opening up to settlement. Land speculators, well-heeled adventurers, and poor European migrants were flocking in. Guevara Lynch went to see it for himself, and caught "yerba mate fever." His own money was tied up in the astillero, but, with Celia's inheritance, they would be able to buy enough land for a yerba mate plantation, and, he hoped, become rich from the lucrative "green gold."

Unsurprisingly, Celia's family closed ranks in opposition to her dilettante suitor. Celia was not yet twenty-one, and under Argentine law she needed her family's approval to marry or receive her inheritance. She asked for it, but they refused. Desperate, for by now she was pregnant, she and Ernesto staged an elopement to force her family's consent. She ran away to an older sister's house. The show of force worked. The marriage was approved, but Celia still had to go to court to win her inheritance. By order of the judge, she was granted a portion of her inheritance, including title to a cattle and grain-producing estancia in central Cordoba province, and some cash bonds from her trust fund--enough to buy a mate plantation in Misiones.

On November 10, 1927, she and Ernesto were wed in a private ceremony at the home of a married older sister, Edelmira Moore de la Serna. La Prensa of Buenos Aires gave the news in its "Dia Social" column. Immediately afterward, they fled Buenos Aires for the wilderness of Misiones bearing their mutual secret. "Together we decided what to do with our lives," wrote Guevara Lynch in a memoir published years later. "Behind lay the penitences, the prudery and the tight circle of relatives and friends who wanted to impede our marriage."

III
In 1832, British naturalist Charles Darwin had witnessed the atrocities waged against Argentina's native Indians by gaucho warlord Juan Manuel de Rosas, and predicted: "The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians. The former being a little superior in education, as they are inferior in every moral virtue."

But even as the blood flowed, Argentina had spawned its own pantheon of civic-minded historical heroes, from General Jose de San Martin, the country's liberator in the independence struggle with Spain, to Domingo Sarmiento, the crusading journalist, educator, and president who had finally wrested Argentina into the modern age as a unified republic. Sarmiento's 1845 book, Facundo (Civilization and Barbarity), had been a clarion call to his compatriots to choose the path of civilized man over the brutality of the archetypal Argentine frontiersman, the gaucho.

Yet even Sarmiento had wielded a dictator's authority to lead the country, and with his death the Argentine cult of the strongman, or caudillo, had not disappeared. Caudillismo would remain a feature of politics well into the next century as government swung back and forth between caudillos and democrats in a bewildering, cyclical dance. Indeed, as if reflecting the sharp contrasts of the great land they had conquered, there was an unreconciled duality in the Argentine temperament, seemingly balanced in a state of perpetual tension between savagery and enlightenment. At once passionate, volatile, and racist, Argentines were also expansive, humorous, and hospitable. The paradox had produced a flourishing culture and found expression in classic works of literature such as Ricardo Guiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra and the gaucho epic poem Martin Fierro by Jose Hernandez.

Since the 1870s, the country had become more stable. And, when the conquest of the southern pampas was finally secured after an officially sponsored campaign to exterminate the native Indian population, vast new lands had opened up for colonization. The pampas were fenced in as grazing and farming lands; new towns and industries sprang up; railroads, ports, and roads were built. By the turn of the century, its population had tripled, swollen by the influx of over a million immigrants from Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, Russia, and the Middle East who had poured into the rich southern land of opportunity--and still they came.

A dismal colonial garrison on the vast Rio de la Plata estuary only a century before, the city of Buenos Aires now had a melting pot's combustive quality, epitomized by the sensuous new culture of tango, its dark-eyed crooner Carlos Gardel giving redolent voice to a burgeoning national pride. Its population spoke their own creole street dialect called lunfardo, an Argentine cockney rich in double entendres, cribbed from Quechua, Italian, and local gaucho Spanish.

The city's docks were bustling: Ships carried Argentina's meat, grains, and hides off to Europe while others docked bringing American Studebakers, gramophones, and the latest Paris fashions. The city boasted an opera house, a stock exchange, and a fine university; rows of imposing neoclassical public buildings and private mansions; landscaped green parks with shade trees and polo fields, as well as ample boulevards graced with heroic statues and sparkling fountains. Electric streetcars rattled and zinged along cobbled streets past elegant, bronzed-doored confiterias and wiskerias with gold lettering on etched glass windows. In their mirrored and marble interiors, haughty white-jacketed waiters with slicked-down hair posed and swooped like vigilant, gleaming eagles.

But while Buenos Aires's portenos, as they called themselves, looked to Europe for their cultural comparisons, much of the interior still languished in nineteenth-century neglect. In the north, despotic provincial caudillos held sway over vast expanses of cotton- and sugar-growing lands. Among their workers, diseases such as leprosy, malaria, and even bubonic plague were still common. In the Andean provinces, the indigenous Quechua- and Aymara-speaking Indians known as coyas lived in conditions of extreme poverty. Women would not be given the vote for another two decades, and legal divorce would take even longer. Vigilante justice and indentured servitude were features of life in much of the hinterland.

Argentina's political system had not kept pace with its changing society and had stagnated. For decades, two parties, the Radical and the Conservative, had ruled the country's destiny. The current Radical president, Hipolito Yrigoyen, was aging and eccentric, a sphinxlike figure who rarely spoke or appeared in public. Workers had few rights, and strikes were often suppressed by gunfire and police batons. Criminals were transported by ship to serve terms of imprisonment in the cold southern wastes of Patagonia. But, with immigration and the twentieth century, new political ideas had also arrived. Feminists, socialists, anarchists, and now Fascists began making their voices heard. In the Argentina of 1927, political and social change was inevitable, but had not yet come.

IV
With Celia's money, Guevara Lynch bought two hundred hectares (about five hundred acres) of jungle along the banks of the Rio Parana. On a bluff overlooking the coffee-colored water and the dense green forest of the Paraguayan shore, they erected a roomy wooden house on stilts, with an outdoor kitchen and outhouse. They were a long way from the comforts of Buenos Aires, but Guevara Lynch was enraptured. With an entrepreneur's eager eye, he looked into the jungle around him, and he saw the future.

Perhaps he believed he could, as his grandfathers had done before him, "restore" the family fortunes by intrepidly striking out into new and unexplored lands. Whether or not he was consciously emulating his forefathers' experiences, it is clear that for Guevara Lynch, Misiones was his own "Wild West" adventure. To him, it was not just another backward Argentine province, but a thrilling place full of "ferocious beasts, dangerous work, robbery and murders, jungle cyclones, interminable rains and tropical diseases."

He wrote: "There, in mysterious Misiones ... everything attracts and entraps. It attracts like all that is dangerous, and entraps like all that is passionate. There, nothing was familiar, not its soil, its climate, its vegetation, nor its jungle full of wild animals, and even less its inhabitants.... From the moment one stepped on its shores, one felt that the safety of one's life lay in the machete or revolver...."

Their homestead was in a place named Puerto Caraguatai, named in Guarani after a beautiful native red flower, but its puerto was just a small wooden jetty. Caraguatai was reached by a two-day river journey up from the old trading port of Posadas on the Ibera, a venerable Victorian paddle-wheel steamer that had done prior service carrying British colonials up the Nile. The nearest outpost was the small German settlers' community of Montecarlo, five miles away, but the Guevaras found they had a friendly neighbor who lived a few minutes' walk through the forest. Charles Benson was a retired English railway engineer and an avid angler, and just above the river he had built himself a white, rambling bungalow with its own internal "water closet" imported from England.

For a few months, the Guevaras spent an enjoyable time settling in and exploring the area. They sportfished, boated, and rode horses with Benson, or else drove into Montecarlo on their mule-drawn buggy. To eight-year-old Gertrudis Kraft, whose parents ran a little hostel on the Montecarlo road, the Guevaras were admirable, "rich and elegant people," whose rustic home by the river was "a mansion."

The Guevaras' honeymoon idyll, such as it was, did not last long. Within a few short months, Celia's pregnancy was well advanced, and it was time to return to civilization, where she could give birth in greater comfort and security. The couple set out downriver and ended their journey in Rosario, an important Parana port city of three hundred thousand inhabitants. There, Celia went into labor, and their son Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born.

His doctored birth certificate, drawn up at the civil registrar's office on June 15, was witnessed by a cousin of Guevara Lynch's who lived in Rosario and a Brazilian taxi driver evidently drafted at the last minute. The document says the baby was delivered at 3:05 A.M. on the morning of June 14, in his parent's "domicile" on Calle Entre Rios 480.

The Guevaras remained in Rosario while Celia recovered from the delivery of "Ernestito." They rented a spacious, three-bedroom apartment with servant's quarters in an exclusive new residential building near the city center, at the address given on the birth certificate. Their stay was prolonged when, shortly after his birth, the baby contracted bronchial pneumonia. Ernesto's mother, Ana Isabel Lynch, and his spinster sister Ercilia came to help out.

If the couple's families suspected anything, they kept quiet about it. Che's younger brother Roberto says that his mother told him that "Ernesto was born in a clinic in Rosario on the 14 of June 1928. The address that appears on the birth register is where he lived the first days, but not where he was born. Possibly it was the house of a friend, or that of the taxi driver who was a witness...."

Of course, the truth, as Celia later told Julia Constenla de Giussani (who had arranged for Che's astral chart to be drawn up by their mutual astrologist friend), was that she had actually given birth in May, on the same day, and at the same hour as a striking dockworker nicknamed "Diente de Oro" (Gold Tooth) died of gunshot wounds.

The yellowing archives of Rosario's daily newspaper La Capital confirm the story. In May 1928, a strike by Rosario's dockworkers had escalated into violence. Almost every day, stabbings and shootings had taken place, most of them carried out by strikebreaking armed scabs working for the stevedores' hiring agency, the Sociedad Patronal. At 5:30 P.M. on Tuesday, May 13, 1928, a twenty-eight-year-old stevedore named Ramon Romero, alias "Diente de Oro," was shot in the head during a fracas at the Puerto San Martin. At dawn the next day, May 14, he died in the Granaderos a Caballo Hospital in San Lorenzo, about twenty kilometers north of Rosario.

V
After a whirlwind round of visits with their families in Buenos Aires to show off their infant son, the Guevaras returned to their homestead in Misiones.

Guevara Lynch now made a serious attempt to get his plantation off the ground. He hired a Paraguayan foreman, or capataz, named Curtido, to oversee the clearing of his land and the planting of his first crop of yerba mate. But when it came to hiring laborers, he had to confront the system of labor bondage, still practiced widely in the untamed region.

In Misiones, loggers and owners of yerbatales usually hired itinerant Guarani Indian laborers called mensu, who were given binding contracts and cash advances against future work. Paid low wages according to how much they produced, mensu received not cash but private bonds, valid only to purchase basic essentials at the overpriced plantation stores. The system virtually ensured that they could never redeem their original debts. Armed plantation guards called capangas kept vigilant watch over the work crews to prevent escapes, and violent deaths by gunshot and machete were frequent occurrences. Fugitive mensu who escaped the capangas but fell into the hands of police were inevitably returned to their patrones. Guevara Lynch hired mensu himself, but he was no yerba baron, and, horrified at the stories he heard, he paid his workers in cash. It made him a popular patron, and many years later, he was still remembered by local workers as "a good man."

As Guevara Lynch worked his plantation, his young son was learning how to walk. To help train him, his father used to send him to the kitchen with a little pot of yerba mate to give the cook for boiling. Invariably stumbling along the way, Ernestito would angrily pick himself up and carry on. Another routine developed as a consequence of the pernicious insects that infested Caraguatai. Every night, while his son lay sleeping in his crib, Guevara Lynch and Curtido crept quietly into his room. While his patron trained a flashlight on his son, Curtido carefully used the burning tip of his cigarette to dislodge the day's harvest of chiggers burrowed into the baby's flesh.

In March 1929, Celia became pregnant again. She hired a young Galician-born nanny to look after Ernestito, who was not yet a year old. Carmen Arias proved to be a welcome new addition to the family; she would live with the Guevaras until her own marriage eight years later, and remain a lifelong family friend. Freed from child-minding, Celia began taking daily swims in the Parana. She was a good swimmer, but one day when she was six month's pregnant, the river's current caught her. She would probably have drowned if two of her husband's axmen clearing the forest nearby hadn't seen her and thrown out liana vines to pull her to safety.

Guevara Lynch reprovingly recalled many such near-drowning episodes involving Celia in the early years of their marriage. Already, Celia and Ernesto's very different personalities had begun to collide. She was aloof, a loner, and seemingly immune to fear, while he was an emotionally needy man who liked having people around him, a chronic worrier whose vivid imagination magnified the risks he saw lurking everywhere.

But while the early signs of their future marital discord were already in evidence, they had not yet pulled apart. The Guevaras took family excursions together, either horse rides on the forest trails, with Ernestito riding on the saddle mount in front of his father, or river excursions aboard the Kid, a wooden launch with a four-berth cabin that Guevara Lynch had built at the Astillero San Isidro. Once, they traveled upriver to the famous Iguazu falls, where the Argentine and Brazilian borders meet, and watched the clouds of vapor rise from the brown cascades that roar down from the virgin jungle cliffs.

In late 1929, the family packed up once more for the long trip downriver to Buenos Aires. Their land was cleared and their yerbatal had just been planted, but Celia was about to give birth to their second child, and Guevara Lynch's presence was urgently needed at the Astillero San Isidro. During his absence, business had gone badly, and now one of its investors had withdrawn. They planned to be away only a few months, but they would never return as a family to Puerto Caraguatai. It was the end of what Ernesto Guevara Lynch recalled as "difficult but very happy years."

VI
Back in Buenos Aires, Guevara Lynch rented a bungalow for his family on the grounds of a large colonial residence owned by his sister Maria Luisa and her husband, located conveniently near his troubled boatbuilding firm in the residential suburb of San Isidro.

They had not been there long when Celia gave birth, in December, to their second child, a little girl they named Celia. For a time, while Guevara Lynch went to work at the astillero, family life revolved around outings to the San Isidro Yacht Club, near the spot where the Parana and Uruguay Rivers join to form the Rio de la Plata estuary.

Guevara Lynch found the shipyard on the edge of bankruptcy, purportedly due to the lack of business sense of his second cousin and business partner, German Frers. For Frers, independently wealthy and a sailing regatta champion, the astillero was a labor of love. Such was his enthusiasm to create nautical works of art that he had poured money into fine craftsmanship and expensive imported materials, which often cost the company more than the agreed-to selling prices of the boats it produced. Guevara Lynch's investment was in serious risk of evaporating. Then, soon after his return, a fire destroyed the shipyard. Boats, timber, and paint all went up in flames.

If the shipyard had been covered by insurance, the fire might have seemed a fortuitous event. But Frers had forgotten to pay the insurance premium, and Guevara Lynch lost his inheritance overnight. All he had left from his investment was the launch Kid. As partial compensation, Frers gave Guevara Lynch the Ala, a twelve-meter motor yacht.

All was not lost. The Ala was worth something, and they still had their Misiones plantation, which Guevara Lynch had placed in the hands of a family friend to administer in his absence. Hopefully, they would soon see annual revenues from its harvests. In the meantime, they had the annual income from Celia's Cordoba estate. Between them, they had plenty of family and friends; they weren't going to starve.

In early 1930, Guevara Lynch certainly didn't seem unduly worried about the future. For some months he lived the sporting life, spending weekends cruising with friends aboard the Ala, picnicking on the myriad islands of the delta further upriver. In the hot Argentine summer (November to March), the family spent the days on the beach of the San Isidro Yacht Club, or visited rich cousins and in-laws on their country estancias.

One day in May 1930, Celia took her two-year-old son for a swim at the yacht club, but it was already the onset of the Argentine winter, cold and windy. That night, the little boy developed a coughing fit. The doctor who attended him diagnosed him as suffering from asthmatic bronchitis and prescribed the normal remedies, but instead of subsiding, the attack lasted for several days. As the family soon realized, young Ernesto had developed a chronic asthma condition that would afflict him for the rest of his life and irrevocably change the course of their own.

Before long, the attacks returned and became worse. Ernesto's asphyxiating bouts of wheezing left his parents in a state of anguish. They desperately sought medical advice and futilely tried out every known treatment available. The atmosphere in their home was soured. Guevara Lynch recriminated with Celia for her imprudence that day at the beach and blamed her for provoking their son's affliction.

In fact, Guevara Lynch was being less than fair. Celia was a highly allergic person and suffered from asthma herself. In all likelihood, she had passed the same propensity to Ernesto genetically. Later, a couple of his brothers and sisters also developed allergies and asthma, although none were to suffer from it as severely as he would. Ernesto's exposure to the cold air and water had probably only activated symptoms that were already latent in him.

Whatever its cause, Ernesto's asthma ruled out a return to the damp climate of Puerto Caraguatai. It was also evident that even San Isidro, so close to the Rio de la Plata, was too humid for their son. In 1931, the Guevaras moved again, this time into Buenos Aires itself, to a fifth-floor rented apartment near Palermo Park. They were close to Ana Isabel, Guevara Lynch's mother, and his spinster sister Beatriz, who lived with her. Both women showered affection on the sickly boy.

Celia gave birth for the third time in May 1932, to another boy. They named him Roberto after his California-born paternal grandfather. Little Celia was now a year and a half old, taking her first steps, and four-year-old Ernesto was learning how to pedal a bicycle in Palermo's gardens.

But the move didn't cure him of his asthma. For Guevara Lynch, his son's illness was a kind of curse: "Ernesto's asthma had begun to affect our decisions. Each day imposed new restrictions on our freedom of movement and each day we found ourselves more at the mercy of that damned sickness."

On the advice of doctors recommending a dry climate to stabilize Ernesto's asthma, the Guevaras traveled to the central highlands of Cordoba province. For several months, they made trips back and forth between Cordoba and Buenos Aires, living briefly in hotels and temporarily rented houses, as Ernesto's attacks calmed, then worsened again, without any apparent pattern. Unable to attend to his affairs or get a new business scheme going, Guevara Lynch became increasingly frustrated. He felt "unstable, in the air, unable to do anything."

Their doctor now urged them to stay in Cordoba for at least four months to ensure Ernesto's recovery. A family friend suggested they try Alta Gracia, a small spa town in the foothills of the Sierras Chicas, a small mountain range near Cordoba, with a fine, dry climate that had made it a popular retreat for people suffering from tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. They took his advice. Thinking of a short stay, the family moved to Alta Gracia, little imagining it would become their home for the next eleven years.

(C) 1997 Jon Lee Anderson All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8021-1600-0



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