Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson Read Free Book Online

eldest son. Ernesto Guevara Lynch, meanwhile, who admitted to being “overly cautious,” was fretful, and forever worrying about the dangers and risks in life. In some ways, he was the more maternal of the two parents, while Celia was her son’s confidante and coconspirator.
    Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s friends from Alta Gracia all had memories of his tantrums, especially when he perceived an affront to a member of his family. This was something he passed on to his eldest son. Ernestito became uncontrollable with rage if he felt he had been unjustly reprimanded or punished, his father wrote, and he got into frequent fistfights with his
barra
rivals. His temper never left him, but by the time he reached college he had learned to bring it under control, usually substituting a razor-sharp tongue for the threat of physical violence. Only on rare occasions did he strike out physically.
    Ernesto senior was an intelligent man, but he looked across a perceptual divide at his wife and son, who were far more intellectually akin. Although he read books of adventure and history, and passed on his love for these works to Ernestito, he had little scholarly patience or discipline. Celia, on the other hand, was an avid reader of fiction, philosophy, and poetry, and it was she who opened their son’s mind to these interests.
    They would evolve and mature in the coming years, but the character traits that later acquired legendary proportions in the adult Ernesto Guevara were already present in the boy. His physical fearlessness, inclination to lead others, stubbornness, competitive spirit, and self-discipline—all were clearly manifest in the young “Guevarita” of Alta Gracia.
III
    Between 1932 and 1935, Paraguay and Bolivia fought an intermittent, bloody conflict over control of the parched
chaco
wilderness shared by the two countries. Ernesto Guevara Lynch followed the Chaco War closely in the newspapers,and because he had spent time among Paraguayans in Misiones, he sided with their country. At one point, he declared that he was willing to take up arms to help defend Paraguay. Caught up in his father’s enthusiasm, the eldest son began following the war’s progress. Before long, Ernesto senior later recalled, the conflict had found its way into the local children’s games, with one side playing at being Paraguayans, their opponents at being Bolivians.
    Ernesto Guevara Lynch later sought to portray his son’s interest in this war as influential in shaping his political consciousness. This seems unlikely, since Ernesto junior was only seven years old when the war ended. But the adult Che did recall his father’s passion for the conflict and, in tones that were both affectionate and sarcastic, told Argentine friends about his father’s bombastic threats to join the fighting. For the son, it summed up one of the bittersweet truths about his father, a well-intentioned man who spent his life coming up with schemes, but who rarely managed to achieve anything concrete.
    The Spanish Civil War was probably the first political event to impinge significantly on Ernesto Guevara’s consciousness. Indeed, its effect was inescapable. Beginning in 1938, as the war in Spain turned in favor of Franco’s Fascists, a number of Spanish Republican refugees began arriving in Alta Gracia. Among them were the four González-Aguilar children, who showed up with their mother. Their father, Juan González-Aguilar, the republic’s naval health chief, had remained behind at his post but joined them after the fall of Barcelona in January 1939. The children of the two families were roughly the same ages, attended the same school, and sat out religion classes together. For a time the Guevaras shared their home with Celia’s eldest sister, Carmen, and her two children while their father, the Communist poet and journalist Cayetano “Policho” Córdova Iturburu, was in Spain covering the war for the Buenos Aires newspaper
Crítica
. When Policho’s letters