Free Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson Page A

rectoral order, for acts of indiscipline and for having entered and left the establishment outside of hours, without the corresponding permission.”
    His grades, on the whole, were good. They continued to reflect his interest in subjects such as mathematics, natural history, geography, and history, although with each year he showed a gradual improvement in French, Spanish, writing, and music. His extracurricular reading was unabated. His friend Pepe Aguilar noticed, as had Alberto Granado, that Ernesto’s tastes were eclectic and often advanced for his years. “He read voraciously, devouring the library of his parents,” Aguilar recalled. “From Freud to Jack London, mixed with Neruda, Horacio Quiroga, and Anatole France, even an abbreviated edition of
Das Kapital
in which he made observations in tiny letters.” Ernesto found the dense Marxist tome incomprehensible, however. Years later, he confessed to his wife in Cuba that he “hadn’t understood a thing” in his early readings of Marx and Engels.
V
    In the 1945 school year, a more serious side of Ernesto began to emerge. He took a course in philosophy. It engaged his interest, as his “very good” and“outstanding” grades reveal. He also began writing his own “philosophical dictionary.” The first handwritten notebook, 165 pages in length, was ordered alphabetically, and carefully indexed by page number, topic, and author. Consisting of pocket biographies of noted thinkers and a wide range of quoted definitions, its entries include such concepts as love, immortality, hysteria, sexual morality, faith, justice, death, God, the devil, fantasy, reason, neurosis, narcissism, and morality. The quotations on Marxism were culled from
Mein Kampf
and featured passages revealing Hitler’s obsession with a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy. For his sketches of Buddha and Aristotle, he used H. G. Wells’s
Short History of the World
. Bertrand Russell’s
Old and New Sexual Morality
was the source on love, patriotism, and sexual morality. But Sigmund Freud’s theories also obviously fascinated him, and Ernesto quoted Freud’s
General Theory of Memory
on everything from dreams and libido to narcissism and the Oedipus complex. Jack London provided the gloss on society and Nietzsche on death. For revisionism and reformism, Ernesto drew definitions from a book written by his uncle Cayetano Córdova Iturburu.
    This notebook was the first in a series of seven that he continued to work on over the next ten years. He would add new entries and replace older ones as his studies deepened and his interests became more focused. Future notebooks reflected his reading of Jawaharlal Nehru and also his intensified reading on Marxism, quoting not Hitler but Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
    Ernesto’s choice of fiction began to shift to books with more social content. Indeed, in the opinion of his friend Osvaldo Bidinost Payer, “everything began with literature” for him. Around this time, Osvaldo and Ernesto were reading Faulkner, Kafka, Camus, and Sartre. In poetry, Ernesto was reading the Spanish Republican poets García Lorca, Machado, and Alberti, and the Spanish translations of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. But his overall favorite remained Pablo Neruda. Among Latin American writers, he had also delved into Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza, Rubén Darío, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. Their novels and poetry often dealt with Latin American themes—including the unequal lives of marginalized Indians and mestizos— ignored in fashionable literature and virtually unknown to Ernesto’s social group. Bidinost believed that such literature gave Ernesto an inkling of the society he inhabited but did not know firsthand. “It was a kind of advance glimpse of what he wanted to experience, and what was around him was objectively Latin America and
not
Europe or Wyoming.”
    As Ernesto’s friends in Alta Gracia had been, Bidinost was bewitched by the Guevara household’s informality and by the influence