February 13, 2025

Aleida and Che, Santa Clara, December 1958

Your Revolutionary Love: On Aleida March
Nonfiction by Katy Burnett

Nobody will believe it without evidence, and the French photographer is allowed to load his camera with high-speed film. Che Guevara’s body is stretched out across a slab of concrete. A group of Bolivian soldiers, press, and at least one CIA agent gather around his body. Some in the tableau look down at him, some into the camera, some smoke cigarettes. Che is displayed as a trophy.

“When I look at the photograph now, I can only reconstruct my first incoherent emotions,” writes John Berger six months later, in spring 1968. The tone of Berger’s essay is dazed and heartbroken. In death, Che becomes physical and specific, like a beloved person: “blood, the smell of formaldehyde, the untended wounds on the unwashed body, flies, the shambling trousers: the small private details of the body rendered in death as public and impersonal and broken as a razed city.”

Typically, Berger’s impulse is to note the way the photograph rhymes with two paintings, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp and Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ. Bodies violated in death that death itself cannot keep. Bodies surrounded by audience, mourners. Miles away in Cuba, Che’s wife Aleida, a history student, is conducting research in the Escambray Mountains, as yet unaware of her loss. Fidel waits until the terrible news is confirmed before telling her himself.

Engaging with Che the person feels like looking into a bright light, then looking away. His life was lived with such strict adherence to certain codes that any attempt to separate the man from his work collapses easily. “Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome,” he wrote in his 1966 “Message to the Tricontinental,” composed shortly before his departure to Bolivia, “provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear [.]”

Similar overdetermination lingers over Che’s 1965 essay for the Uruguayan magazine Marchas, now known as “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” In it he describes, in an abstract tone and with material clearly drawn from his own memories, the social experience of the revolution in Cuba. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous,” reads one much-quoted passage, “let me say that the revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the places where ordinary men put their love into practice.

Che’s revolutionary has a disciplined and flinty demeanor. But in interview footage, Che leans back, relaxed, slightly smiling, with a meaningful look. Love is very serious, but he’s set something of a puzzle, and is curious himself how his interlocutor will parse his words.

Maybe we can understand Che’s “great feelings of love” by calling them “solidarity.” Unlike the specific, interpersonal, relational love between two people, revolutionary love depends on shared commitment among many. Che downplays the love that emerges in mundane personal life – love that moves regardless of principle, or, in a more troubled reading, the social reproductive work that emerges in love. This includes the often gendered daily tasks – cooking, cleaning, child rearing, small, loving gestures and rituals, remembering – that make work outside the home possible. Che writes about love several years before Marxist feminists launch the International Wages for Housework campaign in 1972, putting words to the banal struggle and sacrifice that characterizes work and love within a household.

Che’s entire adult life was guided by the pursuit of revolutionary love, but it did not exclude ordinary love. Aleida March married Che in 1959 and published her account of their relationship, Evocación: mi vida el lado del Che, in 2008. In 2012, small Australian publisher Ocean Press printed a translation of the memoir by Pilar Aguilar, and in 2024 Seven Stories published a new edition in partnership with Ocean. Aleida, a pragmatic voice and not a person of excessively romantic temperament, writes with purpose. “We wanted new generations to be able to know Che and understand what he fought for,” she writes of her work founding the Che Guevara Studies Center, “to help young people feel close to him, not just as a symbol but as a real person.”

*

She lets him describe her first. Writing to her from the Congo in 1965, he remembers meeting a “little blonde, slightly chubby teacher.” It’s November 1958, and Aleida has smuggled 50,000 pesos to Che’s guerilla camp in the Escambray Mountains. Bundles of cash have been taped to her torso, and she’s in pain, struggling to remove the adhesive. When he sees the marks on her waist, he feels “an internal struggle between the (almost) irreproachable revolutionary and the other—the real one—overcome by shyness, while pretending to be the untouchable revolutionary.”

A sudden feeling splits Che into real and pretend. The struggle between personal feelings and revolutionary duty remain an animating tension throughout his life. In “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” he would write passionately about the value of participation, which allows individuals to “reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human being, once the chains of alienation are broken.” To participate is to recognize your own duty to the communist project and to act on it. It is work in the world, not belief or anything internal, which turns a person into a revolutionary. A revolutionary resists distractions from work. So where does his shyness fit in?

After this first encounter, Aleida’s friend Marta comments on his beautiful hands, asks what Aleida thinks of him. “I replied somewhat casually that I thought he wasn’t bad, and that I found his penetrating gaze rather intriguing. I saw him as an older man.” Che is thirty. She notes that the photo on his wanted posters looks nothing like him.

Aleida is a committed militant of Santa Clara’s urban underground and Fidel’s July 26 Movement. She meets her eventual comrades through university, and in September 1956, at age twenty, begins smuggling weapons and running messages. In her own account, she comes across as a serious and engaged young woman. “We were in a car transporting arms and provisions,” she writes. “I went to Havana for the first time. I remember very little of that trip because I was so focused on the task at hand. That is how we all were: dedicated and focused on what we were doing.” She has been sent to the mountains because the Santa Clara police have become aware of her activities, searching her house on a few occasions, and finally a warrant has been put out for her arrest.

There are weeks of back-and-forth as leadership tries to find a role for her. In mid-December, Aleida finds herself in the liberated town of El Pedrero, dispirited, waiting for something to do. One day at dawn, she’s sitting in the street and Che passes in a jeep. He spontaneously invites her to come with him to shoot a few rounds. “Without a second thought, I accepted. Che was at the wheel and I jumped in beside him, instinctively sitting close to him, seeking his protection.” She feels his warmth, something shifts, she writes that she never got out.

Aleida’s narrative does not separate her own personal life from the revolution because at this moment there is no personal life. “Of course my perspective is colored by our shared experiences and our shared political commitment,” she writes in the first pages. This is a commitment that she made before meeting Che and that they shared, naturally, from the time of their meeting, even as it grew and changed. “I made that commitment willingly and, as I have stressed, in many ways I had to abandon my individuality to become less of an ‘I’ and more of a ‘we.’ I have never regretted this.” And so she frames her text neither as a complaint nor as a lament, but rather as straightforward a record as she can reproduce.

Everything else unfolds over a few weeks and all at once. She becomes Che’s assistant. Their unit liberates Cabaiguán on December 23rd. In an old tobacco factory outside town where they establish their temporary base, Che stands behind Aleida and begins to recite a poem. “I suspected he wanted me to notice him, not as a leader or a superior but as a man.” She’s uncertain about seeing him that way, unsure how to reconcile his vulnerability and his authority. He fractures his arm in battle and she gives him a black silk scarf to wear as a sling. On December 25th, the troops take Caibarién and make final preparations to move into Aleida’s hometown, Santa Clara.

On the outskirts of the city, alone in the jeep, Aleida and Che haven’t eaten or slept for days. They are heading back from a scouting mission and the sun is setting. He awkwardly tries to tell her about his existing marriage to Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian economist, and the child they share. He’s trying to communicate that his marriage is over. Aleida is confused and a little defensive on Hilda’s behalf. She pictures Hilda as “a very elegant woman with a strong personality.” But she notes that Che seems very alone.

*

It is impossible to separate the revolution from the course of their relationship. By January 1st, Santa Clara is taken. Che receives the order from Fidel to proceed to Havana. On the way, he confesses his love to Aleida for the first time. He says that seeing her in danger in Santa Clara made him realize the depth of his feelings. She is too tired to talk and dimly wonders if she heard correctly. She later worries she said or did the wrong thing, or that he doesn’t take her seriously. But she is beginning to notice that he listens to her closely and takes her observations to heart. And she had felt something similar, watching him disoriented in the streets of her city – terrified that he would get hurt.

Finally, in Havana, there’s a government to establish. Aleida handles Che’s correspondence. On January 12th, he hands her a letter he’s written to Hilda. In the letter, he asks for a divorce. He’s met a young Cuban woman during the struggle whom he plans to marry. She can’t make out his handwriting, and asks him who the young woman is. He looks at her with surprise and says, you. On June 2nd, after Hilda has signed the divorce papers, Che and Aleida marry. Aleida had initially been suspicious of his communism. For her, like many Cubans, the goal of revolution had been toppling Fulgencio Batista, not adherence to an unfamiliar ideological platform. But after plenty of discussion, Che has won her over. She describes him as a patient conversation partner, aware of his own power. He wants her to come to it her own way.

*

After they marry, the pace of the memoir changes. Ten days after the wedding, Che leaves for the Bandung Pact countries on his first diplomatic trip. He’s gone for months. When he returns, he throws himself into setting up Cuba’s new economy and industries. He works sometimes for stretches of 36 hours, participating in voluntary work on his days off. Che seems haunted by the idea that they only have a short window of time to make the new Cuba work. And it is part of his philosophy to participate in the creation of communism as much as possible. Much later, when he’s gone, Haydée Santamaría, former militant and friend of the couple, wrote of him, “everything you created was perfect, but you made a unique creation, you made yourself, you showed how that New Man was possible, we all saw how it could be a reality, because he exists, it was you.”

Aleida stays busy too. She serves on the national executive of the Federation for Cuban Women, organizing communal child care and creating new educational and work opportunities outside the home. She continues to work as Che’s secretary, but she doesn’t go abroad with him, although she and Fidel both plead for it. In Che’s eyes, a special dispensation for Aleida would be unfair to other compañeros separated from their spouses.

Over the next few years, they have four children. Amidst so much work, the occasional lucid, specific memory. He likes taking photos of her. A party for New Year’s 1959 that lasts until 6 in the morning; Che dances badly with Haydée's younger sister. “While I made his coffee, he would drink carbonated water from a green glass he liked to use.” Aleida accompanies him on trips to the provinces. They fall asleep in different bunks holding hands. She receives postcards from all over the world and faithfully reproduces them on the page, like evidence that it all happened.

Wherever he goes, he wears the same rumpled fatigues. In interviews he is wildly charismatic, regarding his interlocutor with warm eyes, tilting his head to listen. He patiently assists a nervous interpreter. The journalist Eduard Gallego remembers, “He was not a man to sit behind a desk. That feline tension so noticeable when I interviewed him in mid-1964 had to explode sooner or later.” Che’s smile, “ironic and tender at the same time,” stays with him.

In 1965, Che writes Aleida from Paris: “I am definitely getting old. I am more in love with you each day and my home beckons me—the children and the little world that I can only sense rather than experience. Sometimes, I think this is dangerous, diverting me from my duty. Moreover, you are so essential to me and I am only a habit for you...”

*

That spring, things change. Che, now 36 years old, is off again on another extended diplomatic tour. He visits Algeria in March and delivers an address at the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity. While he’s there, he works on the essay “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” “A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople in the ideological struggle against socialism is that socialism—or the period of building socialism into which we have entered—is characterized by the abolition of the individual in the interest of the state,” he writes. What follows is his account of the developing culture in Cuba, and his theory of the New Man who emerges under communism.

Che describes something he experienced over the course of the revolution — a “close dialectical unity between the individual and the masses, in which both are interrelated[.]” Deep political commitment, in belief and in praxis, allows people to move together. This does not end in peacetime. The revolution continues as Cubans build their sovereign state, setting new economic, agricultural, and industrial plans and goals. The process requires the participation of individuals who, in doing the work of sustaining communism, become communists. “The image is not yet completely finished,” he writes of the New Man, just as the work of revolution is not finished.

Revolution, writes Che, is driven by a vanguard of leaders who cultivate a dialectical relationship to the masses. “At the great public mass meetings,” he recalls Fidel’s speeches, “one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds.” Che also writes that the revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love, love of the people.

*

When Che returns to Havana from Algeria, he does something he’s never done before and books the family a beach house. The children are in bed when he tells her he’s leaving. On April 1st, Che departs Cuba in disguise to join the revolutionary struggle in the Congo. “The leaders of the revolution have children who, uttering their first words, have not yet learned to say ‘father;’ their wives, too must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives in order to take the Revolution to its destiny,” writes Che. “The circle of their friends is limited strictly to the circle of comrades in the Revolution. There is no life outside of it.”

Fidel recalls in a 1987 interview that from the time of their first meeting in Mexico, Che’s plan was always to leave Cuba for another revolution. He made Fidel promise a few times over the years that he would still let him go, that Cuba could not expect to hold him. As he wrote in his “Message to the Tricontinental,” “Each drop of blood spilled in any country under whose flag one has not been born is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the liberation struggle of his country of origin.” He dreamed of a revolution in his own Argentina. “I believe he was influenced in part by the fact that time was passing,” said Fidel. “He knew that special physical conditions were required for this.”

Che’s disappearance causes a flurry of rumors across the island. After a few months, Fidel puts them to rest by going on television. He reads a letter from Che, addressed to himself and to the entire country. In the letter, Che resigns his posts in the government and his Cuban citizenship. “I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban Revolution in its territory, and I say goodbye to you, to the comrades, to your people, who now are mine.”

The following night, gripped by shock and grief, songwriter Carlos Puebla composes a musical response, a love song from the Cuban people, saying goodbye. It becomes his most well-known work, recorded many times all over the world. Tu amor revolucionario/ te conduce a nueva empresa/ donde esperan la firmeza/ de tu brazo libertario. Your revolutionary love/ leads you to a new undertaking/ where they await the steadiness/ of your liberating arm.

*

Aleida herself is vague about the scope of Che’s ambitions and the extent to which she knew or recognized them. Regardless, they share an understanding of this new phase as an enormous sacrifice. Che writes her plenty of letters from the Congo. She begs to join him, and he rejects this suggestion. Something to do with her responsibility to the children. Her presence would not be permitted as a wife, only as a combatant. “A good part of my life has been like that: having to hold back the love I feel for other considerations,” he writes. “That’s why I might be regarded as a mechanical monster. Help me now Aleida, be strong, and don’t create problems that can’t be resolved. When we married, you knew who I was.” Someone who existed only in revolution, someone who could not bring her with him.

When he departs the Congo in November, he begins a two-year period of moving through safehouses across Africa and Europe under assumed identities. With Fidel’s support, Aleida is able to secretly visit him. It’s dangerous to go out and they spend the days they have in their room. He takes photos of the two of them in their disguises. When he returns to Cuba to train a small group of militants for Bolivia, he assumes the identity of an old man.

*

Finally, from Bolivia, he writes her from “under a star-filled sky that reminds me how little I have taken from life in a personal sense.” His letters are melancholy and romantic, in contrast to the terse military diary he keeps during this time. From his early days in Cuba he had always recorded the events of the day as precisely as possible, the raw materials of strategy. But things aren’t going well. The group is sick, injured, and struggles to win the trust of the local peasantry.

I can’t find the first source to imagine that Che and Tania, an agent who worked with the group in Bolivia, were lovers. A compañero who was with them says to a reporter years later, “You could tell by the way they spoke so quietly and looked at each other when they were together near the end.” Aleida always described him as entirely alone. Tania is not mentioned in her text. It feels difficult to deny him any last moments of warmth.

On October 8th, 1967, the Bolivian military catches up with Che. Shortly before his execution the next day, one of his guards asks if he’s thinking of his own immortality. “No,” says Che, “I’m thinking about the immortality of the revolution.”

*

After his death, Aleida’s voice goes numb, and the immediacy of the text is lost. She had been anticipating Che’s death for the past two years. Maybe her pain was easier to metabolize when it was shared. She doesn’t remember the beginning of that time well, only that she busies herself caring for their four children, study, the work of going on without him.

And Che remains remote. She was not able to live the life he ultimately lived, just as most of us are not. Of course the way she loved him was entirely different from the way he loved her. The defining moments of their intimacy happen in the midst of one revolution; she is not able to join him in the next. The embedded love letters in the text are strange – he is imagining her, recalling her, assuring her, and yet he’s not there. She remembers so that we can imagine, and we in turn imagine what it would be like to be loved like that, what it would be like to love as Aleida did, to struggle to remember him as we hold his letters from halfway across the world in our hands.

This is how I love you, he writes, remembering the bitter coffee every morning, the taste of the dimple in your knee, the ash of a cigar delicately balanced… If one day you feel the force of an overbearing presence, don’t turn around, don’t break the spell, just keep on preparing my coffee, and let me experience you in that instant, for always.

Loving him as a person meant accepting his loneliness and absence. The grinding, painful texture of each day without him. At times suspecting there is something inessential or bourgeois about life together that he must burn off in some purifying fire. He recognizes that this is her part of the sacrifice, squarely in the world of the mundane. He quotes José Martí: “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”

But his loneliness is something he cultivates and protects; it allows him to anticipate revolution anywhere. Che knew his capacities, and it was impossible for his “great feelings of love” to be confined to one place. Work and time sustain intimacy, and he was at home wherever he went. The love he felt was for and with people working towards revolution itself, the world over.

“If I see the Mantegna again in Milan,” writes Berger, “I shall see in it the body of Guevara.” In Mantegna’s painting, Christ is embodied, specific, imbued with human mortality, attended by his mother, cousin, beloved, faces wracked with pain. Their presence makes the gravity of his sacrifice, what it meant to those who love and remember him, easier to understand.

Katy Burnett is a writer living in Oakland, California.