Fidel Castro

DURING THE LAST WEEK of September 1967 the foreign ministers of the Organization of American States convened in Washington at the request of Venezuela to hear renewed charges that Cuba was fomenting revolutionary activity in several Latin American countries. For months reports had circulated that Ernesto Guevara had been seen—in Guatemala, in the Dominican Republic, in Peru, and, most insistently, in Bolivia. Walter Guevara Arze, the Bolivian foreign minister, submitted his government's evidence against the Castro regime. He marshaled a convincing case. With nearly one hundred Kodachrome slides he demonstrated beyond any doubt the presence of Guevara and a number of Cuban guerrilla fighters in the Andean country. They had been incredibly careless. An army unit, he said, had discovered the group's main camp north of Camiri, the bustling center of Bolivia's petroleum industry. The soldiers had found the Argentine's "war diary" and two forged passports that obviously belonged to him, as well as an undeveloped roll of film and nearly twenty other spurious passports. The two passport photos bore little resemblance to the former minister of industry. They depicted a graying middle-aged man, jowly and half bald, who wore tortoise-shell glasses. But the thumbprint matched impressions identified as Guevara's in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. And the developed negatives revealed the subsequent metamorphosis of the pudgy businessman into the lean and bearded onetime warrior of the Sierra Maestra.

The Bolivian Guevara, to enthusiastic applause, put up a bold front: "We're not going to let anybody steal our country away from us! Nobody, at any time!" In turn Dean Rusk called for new sanctions against the Cu