were sent in to hunt down the guerrillas, and Masetti’s foco was quickly routed. Jouvé was the last man to see Masetti alive. He said that he suspected that Masetti had either starved to death where he had left him stranded or become lost, in the cloud forest, or else had committed suicide.
Jouvé spoke fondly of Bustos, whom he called ‘el Pelao’ – Baldy – and described him as Che’s point-man in Salta, someone who could shed a great deal of light on its long-buried history. He suggested I talk first to Henry Lerner, another Salta survivor, who was living in Spain.
In Madrid, I learned that Lerner had also been marked for execution by Masetti. Lerner had been spared at the last minute. It seemed less than coincidental, however, that Lerner, as well as the two other men Masetti had executed, Pupi and Nardo, were Jewish. Lerner was keenly aware of this fact but said he had always resisted the notion that Masetti’s enmity might have been motivated by anti-Semitism. But as we dug up the past, old suspicions returned. Like many of Argentina’s radicals of Lerner’s time, Masetti had come out of the Peronist movement, which had bewilderingly managed to straddle the political spectrum from the ultraright to the ultraleft. As a younger man, Masetti had belonged to the Tacuara, a virulently anti-Semitic Catholic group modelled on Spain’s Francoist Falange. Although he had since become a man of the Left, it seemed possible Masetti never reconciled his two extremes, and once in the jungle, the power he had acquired that brought out the worst in him.
After my meeting with Henry Lerner, Bustos told me to come see him in Sweden.
In Malmo, Bustos confirmed what Jouvé, Castellanos and Lerner had told me and added a great deal of important additional detail. He confirmed the connection between Salta and Che’s subsequent expedition to Bolivia, and revealed that Che had been planning an armed revolution in Argentina as early as 1962. Bustos, who had arrived in Cuba as an enthusiastic revolutionary volunteer in 1961, had been quickly recruited for Che’s Argentine project by Alberto Granados, Che’s old Motorcyle Diaries buddy. Granados had moved to Cuba after the revolution and had lived there ever since.
Bustos disclosed that he and the other members of the Che’s Argentina team had received their initial training in spycraft and the use of weapons in Cuba and then, following the Missile Crisis, had gone to Czechoslovakia and onto Algeria for more training. He acknowledged Masetti’s harshness and confirmed the brutal executions Massetti had ordered, as well as his own part in one of them. In the case of Pupi, the first victim, the execution was botched, he explained, and he had been forced to fire the coup de grace, shooting a bullet into the mortally wounded man’s head.
Bustos had survived the Salta catastrophe otherwise unscathed and made his way back to Cuba. There, Che had asked him to return to Argentina as his liasion with the leftist underground there, and had eventually summoned him to Bolivia, where fate awaited them both.
In the end, history is complicated. In the story of Che Guevara’s bloody demise in Bolivia, there has long been a tendency by survivors, as well as historians and analysts, to seek out culprits for what happened. The Bolivian army and the CIA agents, who secretly executed Che and many of his comrades, didn’t expound a great deal about what they had done after the fact. They didn’t need to, because they had won a battlefield victory, but they also had their war crimes to keep quiet about. For the Cubans, meanwhile, Che’s defeat was casually attributed to the faults of ‘others’, a potage that included the betrayals of some of the captured Bolivian deserters, as well as Bustos, for the drawings he had made in captivity. Others blamed the Bolivian Communist Party leadership, which had withdrawn its support for Che once he was in Bolivia, leaving him exposed and vulnerable. The area chosen for Che’s base camp at Ñancahuazú had been selected by the Party leadership and clearly had been highly unsuitable; many believed this was no accident. Any mistakes that had been made by members of Cuba’s secret services, meanwhile, not to mention the decisive role played by Fidel Castro himself, who had chosen Bolivia as the theatre for Che’s foco, were swept aside. The story that Ciro Bustos tells here is a candid one in which we can see that the final chapter in Che’s life was the result of a complicated alchemy that included all of the above, not to mention luck, or the lack of it, and, not least, Che’s own decisions. In the end, we are reminded, the outcomes of the mightiest of human enterprises are dependent on human nature.
Che Wants to See You is also the account of an extraordinary period in contemporary history in which thousands of young men and women around the world, inspired by Che Guevara and his Cuban comrades, believed they could change the world through armed revolution. They mostly failed, but left behind a remarkable legacy of shared idealism and sacrifice.
This book is ultimately part of that legacy, the journal of a life lived to the limit in pursuit of an ideal, with all of its consequences. There are many memories here, some of which are bittersweet jewels. Here is Bustos recalling how horseflesh, which he was forced to eat in order to survive in Bolivia, reminded him of the smell of Pupi at the moment he shot him dead. And there is the time when he overheard Che recite aloud verses from the Spanish poet León Felipe as they marched together through the Bolivian bush. It was one of the worst of times, but for Bustos, it is a most cherished memory of Che Guevara and of their shared revolutionary life.
This is a book about remembering, in two senses of the word. It is a memoir, not a biography, nor a book of history, political theory, or essays. It is the story of a stage in my life that goes off at tangents, into the future and into the past, when need be. The important thing is not my life, but what happened around it and what I witnessed. So writing in the first person singular is inevitable, because I am only recounting what I saw, heard, felt, listened to and read, as well as what I did, thought, and occasionally said. Nothing is presumed, added or invented. It is not a fictional account, these are real events, some of them small, and others transcendental, and they have all come together one by one to form my identity. There was no other way to tell this story than by looking frankly and openly inside myself; it is personal and unique. I am present throughout the book not for self-glorification, but to testify through all my senses to what was happening around me.
It is also a book written from memory. The avalanche of information I collected over the years overwhelmed my lack of writing experience, and I found that although I had such and such a detail to hand somewhere, I couldn’t get at it without wasting days and weeks in a fruitless search. I eventually reached such a state of uncertainty, each doubt multiplied by hundreds of versions, that I chose to abandon all the material I had accumulated – cuttings, photocopies of articles and other kinds of documentation – and rely solely on my memory. A quote from García Márquez, which I read opportunely, supported me in my decision: ‘Truth is only what memory remembers.’
For dates and names, I have used about six books on the subject. The rest of the information was there, more or less organized for reference purposes, but always wrong, like coins hidden under tumblers in a magician’s trick. Memory, in any case, is like a coiled spring, waiting to be released. Sometimes fascinating things occur, comparable to the fishing technique of Laplanders who spend hours sitting beside a hole in the ice, with a fishing line rolled round their finger disappearing into the invisible waters, tugging on it gently from time to time, unperturbed, nothing happening, until, suddenly, a magnificent specimen emerges from the ice. I spent days and weeks with my mind blank, tugging the line a little and letting it go, until the whole spool unravelled unexpectedly. Sometimes it seemed as if someone was sitting inside my head dictating to me or, rather, that they were manipulating my fingers. Images appeared that I had not thought of since those days: meals, places, vehicles, situations, even music and smells. Naturally, not all the millions of moments that form a life are there. I read somewhere that the psyche filters bad memories that could harm the spirit, just as the body heals wounds.
It might seem as though some things are missing from the historical context, such as, for example, the nature of revolutions, and
