• • •
But the stack of books sat on her desk, neatly piled and unread. The only thing that changed in her room once she began classes was the appearance of a framed print of Albrecht Dürer’s Praying Hands. Then a tiny two-hundred-peso-coin-size metal icon, imprinted with the image of the Virgin, appeared on the top right corner of her desk.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Neither Che nor General Santander, a devotee of the radical atheist utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, would have approved. Was it evidence of faith? Or placed there the way someone else might place a horseshoe and aloe behind a door?
More troubling was the class she had started. Integral Human Rights. “I’ll get it out of the way,” she told us. And then, a few weeks later, she told us about her professor, who had been attacked and brutally beaten by a criminal group in Norte de Santander during Uribe’s presidency.
“He showed us a photo of him in the hospital,” she told us over dinner, a note of unmistakable admiration in her voice. “He had one eye covered with a bandage, his whole face was bruised, but there were papers all over his bed! He was working!”
When we didn’t respond to that, she added, “They nearly killed him, and he went on working.”
“Yes,” I said. “That is not particularly uncommon in my job.”
Then she told us about the practical component of the class. Internships with the ARN, the reintegration agency that offered benefits to demobilized fighters. Which was fine. The ARN was not a kindness, but a tool of war, designed to leech FARC manpower.
“And for top students, there’s an independent study he’s offering next year where the practical component will be done with a foundation in La Vigia, this little town in Norte de Santander, working with victims of the war.”
That, I didn’t like. Valencia, the daughter of an officer in the special forces, going to a part of the country that was even more infested with the guerrilla than her university’s campus.
“I probably won’t get it,” she said, seeing my expression. “And I don’t even know if I’d want to do it. More human rights . . .”
But she was my daughter. She’d be at the top of her class, I was sure. And she was more invested in this professor and these ideas than she let on.
I reached out to the lawyer from the region who’d worked with my father in the past. An unsavory man, but useful back in the time when intermediaries with regional paramilitary leadership could be necessary. I made a simple request, and asked him what he knew about the town, La Vigia, and who controlled it. “Don’t go out of your way,” I told him. I didn’t mention my daughter, or the nature of my interest. Foolish of me to think it would end there.
A few days later he told me it was controlled by an urabeño called El Alemán, and he told me there were patriots in the region who hated the Urabeños, men who were eager to share any information that could help the army in its inquiries. This led to the Mil Jesúses, which led to the El Alemán raid, which led to the mess I am currently in, in which both narco lawyers and members of the House of Representatives in the Second Commission know my name and feel I owe them something. The things we do for our children.
• • •
It wasn’t until she finished her first term at Nacional that the books finally moved. The history of Cuba made its way from her desk back to my library. Then the diaries. The CIA report remained on her desk, next to the icon, and though I wanted to press her on it, instead I waited. People must come to their own conclusions.
The report, easily available online these days, is devastating. No more than eight pages long, with telling little chapter headings like “The Failure of the Guerrilla Tactics,” “Ineptitude,” “Morale,” and “The Guerrillas’ Failure with the Peasants,” the writer is clearly having fun with Che’s disaster. He notes smugly, “The guerrilla tactics that Che compiled in his handbook Guerrilla Warfare proved to be empty theoretics.” He goes through the well-known mistakes. How Che arrived in Bolivia with a band of elite guerrilla, almost half of them foreigners. How, unlike Castro, Che’s band rejected the urban, and less radical, Bolivian Communist Party. The report delights in Che’s unwillingness to sully himself with the kind of bargains and power-sharing agreements that were crucial to Castro’s success. It delights in Che’s adherence to his theory, expecting his magnificent and saintly guerrilleros to inspire the people, who in reality were uninterested or hostile. “The peasant base has not yet been developed,” Che wrote in his journal, “though through planned terror we will keep some neutral.”
I love that. “Planned terror.” From would-be liberator to would-be terrorist of the peasantry. But he even failed at brutalizing them into silence. The peasants turned on him, the Bolivians killed him, and his journal ended up in enemy hands. The CIA document concludes, reasonably:
“When the diary is published, the Guevara legend will only be dulled by this account of the pathetic struggle in Bolivia.”
Which is what any sane and rational man would have thought. Did theory ever more conclusively fail in a clash with reality than in the case of the man whose image is painted over the main square of one of Colombia’s best universities? Reason demanded that Che would fade into embarrassed ignominy. And so, the Americans let the journal out into the world.
Castro, however, was a true genius, and true men of genius are never entirely sane or rational. They know when to toss the stuffed dummy of reason overboard, grab the wheel, and navigate by feel through the howling pitch and toss that is the chaos of human life. When Castro got ahold of the journal, he used it.
The Cubans published a free edition
