The other, the same

I woke up this morning wondering what the best way to die would be. I’d been reading about it in Che Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and Che himself had read about it in Jack London’s To Build a Fire. I’d discovered London’s book a while back being passed around Bogota’s TransMilenio bus stations, bearing the slogan: “This is a ‘libro del viento’ (or ‘book of the wind’); it is for you to read and then pass on for others to enjoy”.

Armando Orozco Tovar

So it was thanks to author Jack London that I discovered the source of this reference. It came from Alegría de Pío, the first of Commander Guevara’s ‘Reminiscences’ (his true accounts of war): Alegría de Pío is a place in Oriente Province, Niquero municipality, near Cape Cruz, where on December 5, 1956, the dictatorship’s forces surprised us…

In that decisive moment in his life as a young adventurer, writing in dramatic prose, he transforms himself into Jack London, the way he had read him, back in distant Buenos Aires through belonging in the bosom of an aristocratic family who, in spite of experiencing some economic decline, were considerably cultured and learned.

Was he influenced by the Oakland writer’s works to some extent? Or perhaps he was like any boy of his age: restless, with an undiscovered continent at his feet tempting him to go and discover it.

Personally, I think that when Guevara de la Serna left the city he carried an image in his mind of his ultimate goal: to return a hero, as Jack London had before him. London was the son of a poor American family, setting sail in search of his fortune at a young age.

No doubt the diaries of the boy who eventually became Che could have been used as material for his chronicles, tales and adventure stories.

Novels, even poems, hidden away in his pockets, scribbled in tiny doctor’s handwriting on the back of the prescriptions he handed out to the sick people he met along the way on his motorbike in search of destiny.

At the start of Jack London’s To Build a Fire the narrator introduces one of the characters: “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances…” When I read the description I was compelled to write in the book’s margin: Poetic imagination is to give surprising significances to the things we discover in reality… and within ourselves.

Guevara certainly possessed an abundance of such imagination. Like London, he had developed it through his writings since childhood: the practice turned them into heroes both in life and their stories. Their lives were forged from their own iron will.

Guevara’s character had also been hardened by suffering, both spiritual and physical: At seventy-five below zero,and with wet feet a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire… All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right.

Young Guevara certainly kept his head firmly on his shoulders, although some who knew him in his youth have described him as wild back then and with little hope for the future. But as it says in To Build a Fire; “Any man who was a man could travel alone.” Off Che went like Jack London, to travel the world with only his thoughts for company.

“The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head. He remembered the tale of the man, caught in a blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled inside the carcass, and so was saved” writes London. In the first of his accounts, Guevara writes: “From the ground I said to Faustino, “They’ve got me” (but I used a stronger expression). I stayed lying on the ground, still firing, following that obscure impulse of the wounded man. I immediately began to wonder what would be the best way to die, now that all seemed lost. I remembered an old story of Jack London’s in which the hero, knowing that he is condemned to freeze to death in the icy reaches of Alaska, leans against a tree and decides to end his life with dignity”.

This time the adventurer is “the other, the same”; preparing to end his journey with the dignity he was accustomed to.

Not on a snowy peak high up above the world, but on a scorching Cuban beach where he would build his fire and set it ablaze. London died aged forty, one year older than Che.

Jack London left an extensive legacy of literary works behind him… Che Guevara left a continent to liberate.