All in a Day’s Work

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was killed in Bolivia on Oct. 9, 1967, and the February 1968 issue of Evergreen Review contained a special section commemorating his life. It was in 1955, in Mexico, that Che met Fidel Castro and joined his guerrilla force to enter Cuba and fight the corrupt Fulgencio Batista regime. On Nov. 25, 1956, Castro’s group of 82 men embarked on a leaky vessel, the Granma, for a slow voyage to the island. They landed—starved and worn out from seasickness—on Dec. 2 at the swampy Las Colorados beach. The bedraggled army was eventually victorious, ousting the dictator and putting the revolutionaries in power.Once Castro’s leftist government was stabilized, Che set off for Bolivia to join the guerrillas there. In a letter dated April 1, 1965, also included in Evergreen, Che wrote to Castro bidding him farewell. “I feel,” he said, “that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban revolution in its territory, and I say good-bye to you, the comrades, your people, who are already mine.”The next piece in our tribute was an account of what went on among the guerrillas Che led in Bolivia. After a futile week accompanying the military as they hunted for the guerrillas, photographer George Andrew Roth hooked up with some peasants who led him to the guerrilla camp. Che agreed to be interviewed, and wrote both the questions and answers into Roth’s notebook. He then sent a friend to lead Roth and two other journalists, one being the French intellectual Régis Debray, back out of the mountains.Debray, Roth, and the other journalist were arrested as revolutionaries by the Bolivian military and thrown in jail. Debray was sentenced to 30 years, but he was released in 1970 after Pope Paul VI and other prominent figures put pressure on the Bolivian government. While things were going badly for Debray in prison, they were also deteriorating for Che. After two years in Bolivia, Che was wounded on Oct. 9, 1967, and taken captive. Later, while under guard, he was shot through the heart.Che was a very important figure to me. Grove Press published a number of books about him, including The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia by Luis J. González and Gustavo A. Sánchez Salazar, which detailed the perils of Che’s attempt to create an insurgency in Bolivia. The story of how we signed this book is part of the larger story of how we attempted to secure a copy of Che’s diary from the Bolivian authorities.In March 1968 I asked a close friend, Joe Liss, who had been a top-notch correspondent for CBS News, to travel to La Paz to obtain Che’s journal. Liss later wrote in an unpublished report that when he arrived at my office to get the plane tickets, “To my astonishment Barney handed me cash amounting to $8,500 in denominations of $50 and $100, and told me that with this money I was expected to spend about $6,000 to get what I could of the Che Guevara diaries.”Since the Bolivian government seemed to be actively against giving any further publicity to the murdered guerrilla, this mission was undercover. Liss was to pretend he was visiting the country because he was working on a screenplay about Che. As a further precaution, all communication between Liss and myself would go through his wife. After a deal with a mysterious, high-ranking general fell through, I gave Liss the name of another contact, Gustavo A. Sánchez Salazar of the newspaper El Diario, who might have information about Che’s diary. Liss flew to the provincial city of Cochabamba to meet Sánchez. Although Sánchez didn’t have the diary, it turned out that he and another journalist, Luis J. González, were writing a book about Che. Once we got a glimpse of the interesting and thorough research the two had done into Che’s life and demise in Bolivia, we asked them to let Grove publish their book when it was completed, and they agreed.While Liss was on this adventure, I told him, obliquely, to expect a visit. Using the alias Roger Tansey, I had traveled with a colleague to La Paz, Bolivia. It had become very difficult to communicate with Liss, and I was starting to feel deeply concerned about him. We met Sánchez and González and made a deal for their book, and in addition to the six pages of the diary Liss had acquired from them, he was able to buy some 11 photos of Che. We decided to let Sánchez secure for us the other diary pages, which we learned had been scattered among several Bolivian generals.We were never able to acquire the entire Che Guevara diary, but we did publish the pages we obtained in the August 1968 issue of Evergreen, along with an illustrated feature: “Who’s Who in Che’s Diary.”On July 26, 1968, while the issue with the diary excerpts was hitting the newsstands, Cuban exiles bombed Grove’s offices on University Place in New York City with a grenade launcher. According to a man who lived next door, a group of men in a pickup truck drove past the building and shot a grenade right through the large front window on the second floor. Pow!—better than the Bay of Pigs! It was done at a late hour, fortunately. No one was inside and nobody got hurt. I heard about the bombing shortly after it happened, at 3:41 a.m., when I received a phone call from our wonderful office manager, who was the first Grove person on the scene. She discovered a knife tear in a poster made of our February 1968 cover, featuring Paul Davis’s marvelous, iconic portrait of Che—it had been stabbed.The neighbor who saw the bombing told me the police hadn’t taken much time to look for evidence. He also said that he had recently had a lot of trouble with his telephone; the sound was just awful. He asked an engineer friend to check it, and the friend figured out that someone had accidentally tapped into his line, which was affecting the sound level of the phone. He also said he could hear every phone call I made on my private office line, the real object of the tap.Around that time a number of other places in New York were bombed. Somebody attempted to bomb the apartment of the Cuban delegate to the U.N., but they got a different apartment by accident. The Canadian Consulate and Japan Airlines were also bombed—all groups the anti-Castro Cuban groups saw as their enemies.Novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, who was working as an editor at Grove at the time, described the aftermath of the bombing in the fall 1990 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction: “They wrecked one office completely, blew out the windows overlooking University Place, and made a general mess. Grove got enormous publicity out of it, ‘publisher of porno-left-wing-radical-oddball-unreadable-avant-garde books bombed!’ . . . Looking back on this incident, it doesn’t seem that we were much affected. I mean, we came in to work, looked at the damage, chatted with the cops, and went to work.”

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