UNITED STATES—The coup in Guatemala was a double-hinged moment, a great event that first had the appearance of a resounding success. A door swung open on a rosy new path for the Isthmus, but in time it turned out to be a terrible misfortune. At the time of the coup, in mid-century, Allied Fruit led its industry by every measure: in profits, market share, volume. Within two decades, it would lag behind Standard Fruit in nearly every area.
The overthrow of Gascón contained many ironic elements. It had been designed to contain a Red Communist beachhead in the Western hemisphere. Instead, it would help establish just such a beachhead – the perfect nightmare of the Dewey Bros.— in the very long and elegant isle of Cuba, which completes the Caribbean circle just south of the Florida Keys.
The coup was intended to make the nation friendly for the Company, and let it prosper as it always had. The Guatemalan affair would spark such hostility that the company was ultimately forced to abandon the isthmus altogether. The jungle swallowed up the rusty machines, the tennis courts where the management daughters played in their tennis whites, became veined by cracks and crabgrass sprouted through the earth.
Guatemala would be rich in lessons for an up-and-coming revolutionist. Che Guevara volunteered to fight soon after the first silver U.S. plane appeared in the sky over Guatemala City. Turned away by the Army, he tried unsuccessfully to organize a group of friends to travel to the front. Nobody wanted to go. The first lesson was: the cowardice of the people, by the people and for the people figured in the equation of Sam the Banana Man. In Guatemala it was necessary to fight, but hardly anybody fought. It was necessary to resist, but hardly anybody wanted to do that. Guevara spent the war patrolling Guatemala City as part of a civilian guard, checking doors, making sure all lights were out during air raids. Shells fell most nights. It was the first time Che came under fire. The next lesson: he loved it. In a letter to his girlfriend, he wrote that, “He was ashamed to be having so much fun.” Of course, the overthrow was a short and sweet war, and times of war and upheaval always bring a release of personal responsibility and the euphoria of being part of history. All you had to do was be on the right side of history.
Colonel Guerra and his army reached the chaotic and confused streets of the Guatemalan capital in June 1955.
“I considered that President Gascón would retreat to the hills with loyalists. He’s a guy with guts and ready to die in his post. He is a man,” Guevara told everybody. Nobody was more shocked and disappointed than he when the President hopped aboard airplane to Mexico.
Che spent many weeks staggering drunkenly throughout Guatemalan capital and the countryside, defeated and depressed, unsure what to do or where to go next. He had been there many times in this purgatory, and he knew perfectly well to keep moving, and he could always write a letter to a girlfriend. Che Guevara at bottom could not say whether he was in love with love, but there were so many of them and the distance of roving revolutionary impeded all but the mystical copulation of correspondence.
Guevara now reached an apex of loathing for Gascón, whom he thought unmanly and a coward. The nature of the next revolution was born in these vital hours. The Guatemalan spanking would be well remembered five years later in La Habana. It is dangerous to weaken, the chimera of compromise (a stage that befits civilian government), the obligation to kill the enemy when they are on their knees. Annihilate the vestiges of power, finish the job. The Gringos had to believe that they meant business and were crazy enough to go all the way, go beyond.
That was how it had to be.
To be continued…
