Che Guevara Read Online Free PDF Page B

stocky five-year-old with pale skin and unruly dark hair. He was dressed invariably in short pants and sandals with socks, wearing a variety of hats to shield him from the mountain sun. His expressions were private and intense, his moods not easy to capture on camera. In photos taken two years later, he has thinned out, and his face is sallow and drawn, no doubt as a result of a prolonged bout of asthma.
    When Ernesto was seven, the Guevaras moved from Villa Chichita to a more comfortable house directly across the lane. Their new home, Villa Nydia, was a one-story chalet shielded by a tall pine tree, with three bedrooms, a study, and servants’ quarters. It was set in two and a half acres of land. Their landlord was “El Gaucho” Lozada, the owner of Alta Gracia’s church and mission house. During their years in Alta Gracia, the Guevaras would live in several seasonally rented villas, but Villa Nydia was where they lived longest, and it was the place they most considered home. The rent was low, only seventy pesos a month, the equivalent of about twenty dollars. Even so, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, who was broke much of the time, frequently found himself unable to pay it. He was in a real bind. Because of Ernestito’s health, he couldn’t return to Buenos Aires, but he hadn’t been able to find work locally. His main hope for an income had been the Misiones plantation, but the market prices for
yerba mate
had plummeted, and a prolonged drought had adversely affected the revenues from Celia’s
estancia
in southern Córdoba province.
    Over the coming years, the Guevaras would continue to depend upon the revenues from their farms, but climate and market conditions fluctuated, and the income the farms produced was erratic and generally small. According to both family and friends, it was Celia’s money, presumably what remained of her cash bonds, that carried the family through the 1930s. “They were really bad times for us,” Ernesto Guevara Lynch wrote in his memoir. “So full of economic difficulties. The children were getting bigger; Ernestostill had his asthma. We spent a lot on doctors and remedies. We had to pay for domestic help, because Celia couldn’t manage alone with the kids. There was school, rent, clothes, food, trips. It was all outgoing costs, with little coming in.”
    But at least some of their economic woes were due to the fact that neither Ernesto nor Celia was practical with money. They insisted on maintaining a lifestyle that was far beyond their means. They gave dinner parties, owned a riding trap and an automobile, and employed three servants. Each summer, depending on the condition of their pocketbook, they spent time at Mar del Plata, the exclusive Atlantic seaside resort favored by Argentina’s wealthy, or at Ernesto’s mother’s
estancia
at Santa Ana de Irineo Portela.
    The Guevaras became fixtures of the social scene at the Sierras Hotel. They may not have had money, but they belonged to the right social class and had the right bearing and surnames. The Guevaras had “style.” They were blessed with the innate confidence of those born into affluence. Things would turn out all right in the end. When they didn’t, friends and family bailed them out. Carlos “Calica” Ferrer, the fun-loving son of a well-to-do lung physician in Alta Gracia who treated young Ernesto’s asthma, recalled going on a holiday with the Guevaras one summer. Ernesto Guevara Lynch had brought no money with him, and he asked Calica to lend him the pocket money
his
parents had given him for the vacation.
    It was some time before Ernesto senior made good on his newfound social connections in Alta Gracia and obtained paying work. In 1941, using his brother Federico’s credentials as an architect and his own as a “master of works and general contractor,” he won a contract to expand and improve the Sierras Golf Course. Money came in while the job lasted, but apart from this enterprise there is no record of Ernesto