Latin America Diaries by Ernesto «Che» Guevara Read Free Book Online Page B

with a black woman, Socorro, who had picked me up and was as horny as a toad, having spent 16 years on her back.
    Quepos is another banana port, now pretty much abandoned by the company, which replaced the banana plantations with cocoa and palm-oil trees that gave less of a return. It has a very pretty beach.
Costa Rica
    I spent the whole day between the dodges and smirks of the black woman, arriving in Puntarenas at 6 in the evening. We had to wait a good while there, because six prisoners had escaped and couldn’t be found. We visited an address Alfredo Fallas had given us, with a letter from him for a Sr. Juan Calderón Gómez.
    The guy worked a thousand miracles and gave us 21 colones. Arriving in San José we remembered the scornful words of a joker back in Buenos Aires: “Central America is all estates: you’ve got the Costa Rican estate, the Tacho Somoza estate, etc.”
    A letter from Alberto, evoking images of luxury trips, has made me want to see him again. According to his plan, he’ll go to the United States in March. Calica is destitute in Caracas.
    We’re firing blanks into the air here. They give us mate at the embassy. Our supposed friends don’t seem to be good foranything. One is a radio director and presenter, a hopeless character. Tomorrow we’ll try to get an interview with Ulate.
    A day half wasted. Ulate was very busy and couldn’t see us. Rómulo Betancourt has gone to the countryside. The day after next we’ll appear in El Diario de Costa Rica with photos and everything, plus a big string of lies. 26 We haven’t met anyone important, but we did meet a Puerto Rican, a former suitor of Luzmila Oller, who introduced us to some other people. Tomorrow I might get to visit the Costa Rican leprosy hospital.
    I didn’t see the leprosarium, but I did meet two excellent people: Dr. Arturo Romero, a tremendously cultured man who due to various intrigues has been removed from the leprosarium board; and Dr. Alfonso Trejos, a researcher and a very fine person.
    I visited the hospital, and just this morning, the leprosarium. We have a great day ahead. A chat with a Dominican short-story writer and revolutionary, Juan Bosch, and with the Costa Rican communist leader Manuel Mora Valverde.
    The meeting with Juan Bosch was very interesting. He’s a literary person with clear ideas and leftist tendencies. We didn’t talk literature, just politics. He characterized Batista as a thug among thugs. He is a personal friend of Rómulo Betancourt and defended him warmly, as he did Prío Socarrás and Pepe Figueres. 27 He says Perón has no popular influence in Latin America, and that in 1945 he wrote an article denouncing him as the most dangerous demagogue in the Americas. The discussion continued on very friendly terms.
    In the afternoon we met Manuel Mora Valverde, who is agentle man, slow and deliberate, but he has a number of tic-like gestures suggesting a great internal unease, a dynamism held in check by method. He gave us a thorough account of recent Costa Rican politics:
    â€œCalderón Guardia is a rich man who came to power with the support of the United Fruit Company and through the influence of local landowners. He ruled for two years until World War II, when Costa Rica sided with the Allies. The State Department’s first measure was that land owned by local Germans should be confiscated, particularly land where coffee was cultivated. This was done, and the land was subsequently sold, in obscure deals involving some of Calderón Guardia’s ministers. This lost him the support of all the country’s landowners, except United Fruit. The Company employees are anti-Yankee, in response to its exploitation.
    â€œAs it was, Calderón Guardia was left with no support whatsoever, to the point where he could not leave his house for the abuse he was subjected to on the streets. At that point the Communist Party offered him its support, on