Tamara Bunke

Bunke was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the daughter of German communist refugees Erich Bunke and Nadia Bider (who was of Polish and Jewish origin).[2][3][4] Her father Erich had joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928 and fled with his wife to Argentina as refugees from Adolf Hitler's National Revolution in 1933.[2][3] Erich Bunke and Nadia Bider immediately joined the Communist Party of Argentina, ensuring that Tamara and her brother Olaf would both grow up in a Marxist-Leninist political atmosphere.[3] Their family home in Buenos Aires was often used for meetings, helping communist refugees, hiding publications and occasionally stashing weapons.[3]

In her youth, Bunke was a keen athlete and an excellent student who developed a particular fondness for the folk music of South America.[3] However, in 1952, the family returned to East Germany and settled in Stalinstadt (renamed Eisenhüttenstadt in 1960).[3] Bunke did not learn the German language until her adolescence.[5]

Bunke thrived in her new environment and began studying political science at Humboldt University in East Berlin. She soon joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany's youth organization, the Free German Youth (FGY).[3] In addition, she also joined the World Federation of Democratic Youth, allowing her to attend the World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna, Prague, Moscow and finally Havana, Cuba.[3] Her keen interest in and familiarity with Latin America, along with her linguistic abilities (she spoke fluent Russian, French, English, Spanish, and German),[1] soon saw her translating on behalf of the FGY's International Department. In this capacity she entertained and translated for the growing stream of visitors from Cuba, following the victory of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.[3]

Bunke as she first arrived in Cuba in 1961.

In 1960, at the age of 23, Bunke met the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.[2] Guevara was visiting the East German city of Leipzig with a Cuban trade delegation and Bunke, who considered him a hero of hers, was assigned to him as an interpreter.[1] Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, of which Guevara had become an international icon, Bunke came to live in Cuba in 1961.[5] She first sought out voluntary work, teaching and building homes and schools in the countryside.[1] As a result, she participated in work brigades, the militia, and the Cuban Literacy Campaign.[3] She also worked in the Ministry of Education, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, and the Federation of Cuban Women.[3]

Eventually she was selected for training to take part in Che's ill-fated guerrilla expedition to Bolivia entitled "Operation Fantasma". Guevara's goal was to spark a continent-wide revolutionary uprising into neighboring Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Chile.[1][3] In preparation, Guevara assigned Bunke to be trained by Dariel Alarcón Ramírez (known by his nom de guerre Benigno) in Pinar del Río in western Cuba.[1] Guevara wanted her taught how to send and receive telegraph transmissions and coded messages by radio.[1] It was during this period that she took the name "Tania" as her nom de guerre. During her training in Cuba and later by the StB at a small farm on the outskirts of Prague, Bunke impressed the Cubans with her intelligence, stamina, and skill for espionage.[1] Benigno for instance has described her as "gracious, beautiful and kind".[1] She further endeared herself to the Cubans by entertaining them in the training camp by playing Argentine folk songs on accordion or guitar.[1] Moreover, as a very sociable person who could strike up friendships easily, the Cuban government realized that she possessed beneficial traits for her future work in Bolivia.[3]

During her years working for the Cuban government (1961–1967), Bunke utilized various disguises. These included a Czech woman Marta Iriarte, Haydée González and Vittoria Pancini, an Italian citizen travelling in Europe.[1]

In October 1964, Bunke traveled to Bolivia under the name Laura Gutiérrez Bauer, as a secret agent for Guevara's last campaign. Her first mission was to gather intelligence on Bolivia's political elite and the strength of its armed forces.[1] Posing as a right-wing folklore expert of Argentine background, she quickly found herself infiltrating high society and rubbing shoulders with the glitterati of Bolivia's academic and official circles.[3][6] Showing how high she was able to rise in La Paz society, she won the adoration of Bolivian President René Barrientos, and even went on holiday with him to Peru.[1] In order to maintain her cover, she also busied herself part-time with her explorations of folk music (producing one of the most valuable collections of Bolivian music in the process) and entered into a fraudulent marriage of convenience with a young Bolivian to gain citizenship.[1][3]

In late 1966 however, Bunke travelled to their rural camp at Ñancahuazú on a number of occasions. On one of these trips, a captured Bolivian communist gave away a safe house where Tania's jeep was parked in which she had left her address book. As a result, her cover was blown, and she now had no other choice than to join Guevara's armed guerrilla campaign. She helped with rationing food and monitoring radio broadcasts.[3] Fellow surviving guerrilla Benigno, said that Bunke and Guevara had at some point become lovers in Bolivia; with Benigno remarking decades later in 2008 that "You could tell by the way they spoke so quietly and looked at each other when they were together near the end".[1]

Without Bunke as the guerrilla's contact to the outside world, the guerrillas then found themselves isolated. Bunke also soon found herself battling a high fever, a leg injury and the painful effects of the Chigoe flea parasite.[1][3] Consequently, Guevara decided to try to send a group of 16 other ailing combatant, out of the mountains.[1][3]

Since the time of her death there have been reports that she worked for the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi; along with the claim that she and Che Guevara were lovers while in Bolivia and that she may have even been carrying his child when she was killed;[1] this was finally refuted in 2017 by Dr. Abraham Baptista, who was in charge of the autopsy of both Ché and Tamara Bunke.[7]

Before Nadia Bunke died in 2003, she also managed to have the book Tania, the Woman Che Guevara Loved by Uruguayan author José A Friedl, removed from sale in Germany.[3] German courts ruled that the book contained defamatory allegations against Tamara Bunke; namely Friedl repeated Stasi defector Günter Männel's rumor from the 1970s that Bunke and Guevara started an extramarital affair in 1965 while training together in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic's capital of Prague.[1][3] However, although they both did receive instruction by the StB in Prague, they were never in the city at the same time.[3]

• During her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, Patty Hearst took on the alias "Tania".
• Minor planet 2283 Bunke, discovered in 1974 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova, is named after her.[8]
• Venezuelan folk singer songwriter Ali Primera wrote a song titled "Tania," commemorating Bunke and her dedication to revolution.
• Tania Bunke also appears intermittently in the first part of Luigi Nono's 1972 music/theatre work Al gran sole carico d'amore.
• Heidi Specogna filmed a documentary about her in 1991.
• Before unification, Bunke was a folk legend in East Germany. At one time, there were 200 youth clubs named after her.[2]
• She is portrayed by Franka Potente in Steven Soderbergh's 2008 biopic of Che Guevara, entitled Che.

• Tania, the Woman Che Guevara Loved, by José Antonio Friedl Zapata, Planeta, 1997, ISBN 978-3-351-02465-9
• Tania: Undercover With Che Guevara in Bolivia, by Ulises Estrada, Ocean Press (AU), 2005, ISBN 1-876175-43-5
• Henderson, James D., Linda R. (1978). Ten notable women of Latin America. pp. 213–240. OCLC 641752939.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tamara Bunke.

• Images of Tania
• Members of Che Guevara's Guerrilla Movement in Bolivia – by the Latin American Studies Organization