A Famous Interview by Che

We were also joined by one of the dearest and most likable figures of our revolutionary war,"Vaquerito"[roberto rodriguez].together with another companero,vaquerito found us one day saying he had spent over a month looking for us, and that he was from Moron in Camaguey.as always in such cases,we interrogated him,and then gave him the rudiments of a political orientation,a task that frequently fell to me.vaquerito did not have a political idea in his head,and did not seem to be anything other than a happy and healthy young man,who saw all of this as a marvelous adventure.he came barefoot and Celia lent him an extra pair of her shoes,which were leather and the kind worn in Mexico.owing to his small stature,they were the only shoes that fit him.with the new shoes and a large straw hat,he looked like a mexican cowboy or vaquero,and that is how the nickname vaquerito was born.as is well known,vaquerito did not see the end of the revolutionary struggle,for as head of the "suicide squad",he died one day before Santa Clara was taken.of his life among us,we all remember his extraordinary joyfulness,his uninterrupted joviality,and the strange and romantic way he confronted danger.Vaquerito was an amazing liar;perhaps he never had a conversation in which he did not adorn the truth so much that it was practically unrecognizable.but as a messenger,which he was in the early days,and later as a combatant or as head of the "suicide squad",Vaquerito demonstrated that for him,there was no precise border between reality and fantasy,and the same acts his agile mind invented he was able to carry out on the battlefield.his extreme bravery had become legend by the time our epic war was over,which he did not live to see.It occurred to me once,after one of the nightly reading sessions sometime after he had joined us,to question Vaquerito.he began to tell us about his life,and we began surreptitiously calculating his age,pencils in hand.when he finished,after many witty anecdotes,we asked him how old he was.Vaquerito was a little over 20,but adding up all of his deeds and jobs,it seemed that he had started working five years before he was born.