Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

products, Argentina was devastated by the wartime blockade. In return for supporting the Allies, the Ortiz administration had sought guarantees for its surplus exports from the United States, which supplied most of Argentina’s manufactured goods. But Ortiz was unable to get what the Argentinians considered a fair deal from the United States, and during the Castillo regime Argentina’s ultranationalists looked to Germany as a potential new market for Argentine exports and as a military supplier.

    Ernesto (on the front fender, third from left) with fellow students. The bus took them from Alta Gracia to the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, their high school, in Córdoba.
    In Ernesto Guevara Lynch’s rendition of his wartime activities, there is an inescapable sense of the Walter Mitty in him. He desperately wished for a life of adventure and daring, but he was destined to be, for the most part, at the periphery of the large events of his time. He had trumpeted his willingness to fight for Paraguay, but he had not gone. The Spanish Civil War and World War II gave him new issues to champion, and later he would take up others, but he did so from the sidelines. In the end, it was not theseactivities he would be remembered for, but his role as the father of Che Guevara.
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    Young Ernesto Guevara became a teenager while war raged abroad and Argentinian politics grew increasingly volatile. Although his physical development was slow—he remained short for his years and didn’t experience a growth spurt until he was sixteen—he was intellectually curious, questioning, and prone to answering back to his elders. His favorite books were the adventure stories of Emilio Salgari, Jules Verne, and Alexandre Dumas.
    In March 1942, just before his fourteenth birthday, Ernesto began attending high school, or
bachillerato
. Since Alta Gracia’s schools offered only primary school education, he traveled by bus each day to Córdoba, twenty-three miles away, to attend one of the best state-run schools, the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes. One morning someone took a photograph of Ernesto posed on the front fender of the bus. Impishly grinning into the camera, wearing a blazer and tie but still in shorts and crumpled kneesocks, he is surrounded by older students attired in button-down collars, suits, ties, and trousers.
    During the summer holidays in early 1943, the Guevaras moved to Córdoba. Ernesto Guevara Lynch had found a partner there to launch a building firm. With Ernesto already commuting to school, and his sister Celia about to enter a girls’ high school in Córdoba, the move from Alta Gracia seemed a practical choice.

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The Boy of Many Names
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    The Guevaras’ move to Córdoba was buoyed by a brief upswing in their economic fortunes, although it was also the beginning of the end of their days as a united family. Ernesto and Celia’s attempt at a reconciliation resulted in the birth, in May 1943, of their fifth and last child, Juan Martín, who was named for Celia’s father, but the strains between them deepened, and by the time they left for Buenos Aires four years later, their marriage would be finished.
    As before, according to family friends, the problem was Ernesto’s chronic womanizing. “The father had pretensions of being a playboy,” Tatiana Quiroga, a friend of the Guevara children, recalled. “But he was a disorderly playboy, because when he worked and earned money, he spent it all ... on going out with ‘young ladies,’ on clothes, on stupidities, nothing concrete ... and the family would get nothing.”
    Ernesto’s business partner in Córdoba was an eccentric architect who was known as the Marqués de Arias because of his extreme height and aloof, aristocratic air. The Marqués came up with the building contracts, usually houses, and Ernesto oversaw their construction. “We lived divinely, and all the money just went; they never thought in terms of investments,” Ernesto’s elder daughter, Celia, recalled. But