Tamara Núñez describes herself as a Marxist, feminist and social activist. The granddaughter of former senator and educationist Antonio Peredo and grandniece of guerrilla brothers Coco, Inti and Chato Peredo, is the torchbearer of the family tradition of rebelling. She was born a boy, Antonio, but was always attracted to girl’s clothes. He got married at 18, and became father to three children. At the age of 30, in 2012, he finally told his wife, Mary Elizabeth, about his true self and broke free. Antonio underwent sex reassignment surgery, and in the new identity he took the name Tamara, after the only woman guerrilla in Che’s team.
THE WEEK met Tamara at her apartment in La Paz, with her dogs Stalin and Chikku playing around. Excerpts from an interview:
Do you think people have been misusing Che’s image?
They are distorting the figure of Che. They use his image in peaceful marches. Che was a guerrilla, and believed in taking power by force, and then using that power to make social changes. His critics talk about his firing squads in Cuba, but my grandfather has told me that Che was a person of great tenderness. My grandfather was also supposed to join the guerrilla war, and had the weapons loaded in his car. My father, who was then only 14 years of age, took the car out for a drive and a policeman stopped him and found the weapons. My grandfather fled to Chile to escape arrest. This was before Che came to Bolivia in 1966. All the four Peredo brothers were members of the communist party.
Was your family persecuted because of its association with the communist party?
My grandfather was imprisoned four times. My father was jailed till 1982. He was involved in the hunger strike that led to the fall of the Hugo Banzer regime in 1978. History says four women and their children led the hunger strike which became a big movement, but you needed an organisation to launch the strike. At the time Coco and Inti were already dead and my grandfather and Chato were in prison. Only the low-level workers were outside and my father was one of them.
The sons of Coco [Roberto] and Inti [Peter] were in Cuba with their mothers. My father joined the revolutionaries after Banzer’s coup in 1973. We were persecuted by the ministry of interior in 2003, but it was nothing compared with what my grandparents or my father had to go through. My father lost eight of his teeth because they made him bite a coin and passed electricity through that. If you were associated with the revolutionaries, the military was bound to torture you, rape you, so my mother gave birth to me in total secrecy. She changed her name. My father was a wanted man and she was afraid that I would be kidnapped. The soldiers did that back then so that they could do a trade-off with the wanted men.
How did your friends react to your lineage?
At school and college, it was like, “Wow, you are Antonio’s grandson”. He was Evo Morales’s vice presidential candidate in 2002 and his deputy twice after Evo came to power in 2006. He was a senator as well. My father was deputy minister for interior. My political career was in their shadows, and I was discouraged from entering higher offices saying it could be perceived that I was getting preferential treatment. My family did not make money from politics, but the government helped me pay my father’s bills. My grandfather died in a hospital in Cuba, and the government there took care of him and paid his funeral expenses as well.
Why did Che’s revolution fail in Bolivia?
Several factors. First was the problem with the communist party, which refused to cooperate. Second, the CIA was not going to allow him to succeed twice, after what had happened in Cuba. Third, a revolutionary government came to power in Bolivia in 1952, and we had an agrarian revolution a year later. Unlike in Bolivia, the peasants and the workers could take risks in Cuba because they had nothing to lose. Here the peasants supported the military, and alerted it about the presence of foreigners in the area.
How relevant are Che’s ideals today?
If we wake Karl Marx up now, he would probably end up committing suicide. If we do that to Antonio Gramsci, he would probably say, holy s**t! [Laughs.] I would not wake up Che to ask him if his ideals are relevant now. Yes, the ideals are alive, adequate for the times. Although Che spoke about globalisation, he would not have imagined the kind of globalisation we have today. Che was homophobic, so I don’t know how he would have reacted to the fact that transwomen can be operated for free in Cuba today. Or, he might see me and say: “She is not a revolutionary because, we as communists and socialists have been totally macho.” They lived in their times, and thanks to them we are here, making our time.
I believe that the greatest legacy that Che left in my family is the search for the new man, which made us realise that we should never stop fighting for the needs of those who have less.
Che is now a hero in Bolivia.
It is the dominant power that makes its heroes in any country. Today, when the armed forces shout “Homeland or death” at parades, they are remembering Che. [Che ended his famous speech at the UN General Assembly in New York, in 1964, with the cry, “Homeland or death”.] Interestingly, while Che has become a hero, the person who was responsible for capturing him, and became a national hero because of that, has become an antihero because of his involvement with a terrorist cell eight years ago.
Can you explain the selection of your new name?
All the sons in my family are Antonios, And I was Antonio Ernesto, named after my grandfather and Che. That was a lot of historical weight, social weight. In my new gender relationship, I thought how I could preserve that essence. When I left my wife and children, I was reading a book on Tamara Bunke [Tania, the woman guerrilla]. I thought of calling myself Tania, but somehow it did not fit. So, I told myself: “If Tania was Tamara, and Tamara was Che in a woman, she has to be a ‘new woman’ who reinvented herself.” She was of German origin, born in Argentina, could fight anywhere in the world, could get close to the Barrientos government and get unlimited access to the presidential house.
