Che Guevara Read Online Free PDF

decisions,” he recalled in his memoir. “Each day imposed new restrictions on our freedom of movementand each day we found ourselves more at the mercy of that damned sickness.” Doctors recommended a dry climate to stabilize the boy’s condition, and the Guevaras traveled to the central highlands of Córdoba province. For several months, they made trips back and forth between the provincial capital of Córdoba, Argentina’s second-most important city, and Buenos Aires, living briefly in hotels and temporarily rented houses, as Ernestito’s attacks calmed, then worsened again, without any apparent pattern. Unable to attend to his affairs or get a new business scheme going, Ernesto senior became increasingly frustrated. He felt “unstable, in the air, unable to do anything.”
    Doctors urged them to stay in Córdoba for at least four months to ensure Ernestito’s recovery. A family friend suggested they try Alta Gracia, a spa town in the foothills of the Sierras Chicas, a small mountain range near Córdoba. It had a fine, dry climate that had made it a popular retreat for people suffering from tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. Thinking of a short stay, the family moved to Alta Gracia, little imagining it would become their home for the next eleven years.

2
The Dry Climate of Alta Gracia
I
    In the early 1930s, Alta Gracia was an appealing little resort town of several thousand people, surrounded by farms and unspoiled countryside. The mountain air there was fresh, pure, and invigorating. At first, the family stayed in the Hotel de La Gruta, a German-run sanatorium on the outskirts of town. The Hotel de La Gruta took its name from a nearby chapel and grotto built to venerate the Virgin of Lourdes. Most of its clients suffered from lung ailments.
    Life in Alta Gracia was an extended holiday for Celia and the children. She took them on hikes to swimming holes or on mule rides and began meeting the locals. Her husband didn’t go with them. As their funds began to dwindle, his sense of frustration at being unable to work deepened to despair. He felt isolated, hemmed in by the surrounding hills. He suffered from insomnia. During the long nights awake in the hotel, he grew increasingly depressed.
    Young Ernesto’s asthma improved in Alta Gracia, but he still had attacks, and the Guevaras’ concern for his health would continue to chart their path as a family, dominating their lives to an extraordinary degree. Before long, they had decided to stay on in Alta Gracia indefinitely. The attacks had become intermittent rather than the chronic affliction they had been in Buenos Aires. Ernestito was now a lively, willful five-year-old who joined in the
barras
, the gangs of local children who played games of trench warfare and cops and robbers and rode their bicycles pell-mell down Alta Gracia’s hilly streets.
    Ernesto Guevara Lynch found an unoccupied villa to rent, on Calle Avellaneda, in the neighborhood of Villa Carlos Pellegrini, only five minutes’ walk from the town’s social hub, the opulent Sierras Hotel, an imitation of a landmark Raj hotel in Calcutta. The family’s new home was called Villa Chichita. It was a two-story Gothic chalet that Ernesto senior likened to a lighthouse. Virtually surrounded by overgrown fields, it looked out to the sierras on one side and the open yellow plains spreading toward Córdoba on the other.

    Ernesto Guevara de la Serna with his parents, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia Guevara de la Serna, in Alta Gracia, Argentina, in 1935.
    In January 1934, Celia gave birth to her fourth child, a girl they named Ana María after her paternal grandmother. Although he fought frequently with his sister Celia and his brother, Roberto, young Ernesto would become solicitous of his youngest sister, taking her for walks when she was still a toddler and telling her stories. When his wheezing fatigued him, he rested his weight on her shoulder.
    Family photographs show Ernestito as a full-faced,