The Death of Che Guevara by Jay Cantor Read Free Book Online

would be taken away again. Only state cooperatives could prevent this. I had seen you, a courageous man, drag a wounded comrade from a field strafed by gunfire, but sweat covered your body now as you showed yourself before your comrades. I could smell it: an acrid unpleasant odor. You clasped your fingers together with strain, in prayer, as I had seen you do when you first tried to learn to read. Again, words were failing to come to you. Comrades stared at the light from the high windows, or the discolored rectangles on the wall where the portraits of Cuba’s betrayers had hung. (I, however, watched you perform. You caught my eye and I smiled and nodded. You hated me ever after.) You went on till he spoke, for his silence was a waste of snow you might have to wander in till your heart froze in confusion and terror.
    And often, as the holdout heard himself talk, he found that he now agreed with Fidel, not simply for show, but deeply. (Or was this pride’s ruse to save one’s dignity?) Even as you nervously spoke (I have been told) you found that something recalcitrant in you had melted. Fidel
was
right. Of course he was right. Who better could interpret that exacting god, the Revolution? Youturned about before our eyes; he had turned you; you wanted even to thank him; you saw things freshly. You didn’t feel you had abandoned your position exactly (something you would never have done in a battle, when the enemy was clearly uniformed, when you thought you had known what you were fighting for); rather you simply couldn’t find your old position from your new perspective.
    But such silence was an extreme tactic for Fidel. He preferred interpretation and reinterpretation, a reworking of everyone’s arguments that found opposition to be not opposition at all, but an unsuspected fundamental agreement with him (for the moment), that made you feel that your point was subsumed in his, and that the later working-out of things would join you both (till death do you part).
    Or, alas, later some other solution would be found.
    Fidel’s silence is so powerful because all vitality is in his voice. Once there was. No, this should have a fairy-tale beginning. Once upon a time there was a CIA plot to damage the Revolution by putting lysergic acid in one of Fidel’s cigars. (What appears to them to be a broom is a creature with ears; they have their informed sources, we have ours.) He would smoke the funny cigar before making an important speech to the nation, and become psychotic during the speech, talk all crazy out of his head. This would demoralize the masses.
    And there was a dreamlike truth to their idea. Fidel’s voice is the Cuban Revolution. Not his presence, but his voice. It is as if the island were a narrative of his, a continual improvisation by a master storyteller. He is making them up as we go along; creating characters (was there a proletariat in the way that the revolution required it before he named it, made it know its responsibilities, its power?); and yet one feels at each turn that the story could not be other than it is. He has done this by listening: to hear Fidel speak is to hear a man responding, always; he hears a murmur in the crowd; it becomes a voice inside him; he speaks it; he gives the mass the words it wished but did not know, did not even know that it wished except as an uncertainty, a painful anxiety. The Revolution is the long delirium of Fidel’s speeches. Every citizen is a sentence in that story, as he covers the country with words, makes it out of words, crossing and revising and crisscrossing the island as if it were a giant piece of paper. Fidel gone mad would be the Revolution become farce. They would build big factories to make cookies in the shape of obscene body parts; they would declare war on the Eskimos and load their guns with potatoes and soap; they would dig up sugar cane and plant transistors, waiting patiently for their harvest of radios. And they would become strange to each