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Part One

Cuba

1

Mendoza: Where It All Started

Mendoza is a unique city. The streets, all of them, are lined with trees. This is not a quirk of nature. It demonstrates the perseverance of its population and their creativity, traits nurtured in a culture inherited from the original inhabitants, the Huarpes, a peaceful tribe who loved trees and sat in their shade watching their crops, chewing on carob pods as sweet as their dreams. But dreams are closer to real life than fantasy, and real life depends on water. So they put their imagination and efforts into taming the water that gushed turbulently down from the snow-capped mountains some sixty kilometres away. The question was how to coax a modest tributary of brown water stemming from the mountain torrents into changing course. Tailoring the mountain slopes into channels meant not only hard work, but also rare engineering skills. And then, once down on the plains, what better way to distribute the water efficiently than by inventing the system of culverts which characterize the city of Mendoza to this day? It is the only city in the world to have irrigation ducts down both sides of every street, running parallel to the rows of trees spaced five or six metres apart that need watering once a week if they are to be kept fresh and healthy – a task undertaken by the people of Mendoza themselves, because without that there would be no plants, no vegetation, no fruit, and no trees beyond the native jarrillas, chañars and carobs, in whose shade the Huarpes rested.

The horses that the conquistadors brought, along with their primitive muskets and own natural brutality, played a defining role in the conquest of Indian land. But the gentle Huarpes, once their blood was up, and with early notions of guerrilla warfare, understood they had to learn from the invading enemy, and systematically stole the horses they saw frolicking happily in the grasslands. The horses, knowing on which side their bread was buttered, switched enthusiastically to the side of the indigenous people and, within a few years, breeding freely and increasing rapidly in number, had moved seamlessly into a privileged place in the tribal hierarchy: the chief or warrior, his horse, his wife. Over time, this combination produced a truly fearsome enemy for the invaders, and the Indian raid, the malón (a word with cynical implications: the mob, the baddies, the Indians, versus the victims, the goodies, the Whites), was their strategy for recovering stolen property. The horse, now naturalized, and running free in the wild, became a major factor in the ‘savages’, early success.

The Spaniards arrived with a considerable thirst on them, after a long journey exacerbated by thoughts of wineskins oozing good Spanish wine, trickling down their throats and over beards dry with heat and dust. So the sight of suspicious fields of neatly planted maize brought on a desire to replace them with vineyards stocked from their native Navarre, Catalonia, Andalucia or that magical sap from the banks of the Duero. Whatever the story, the contribution of these thirsty pioneers laid the foundation of Mendoza’s subsequent wealth. The settler population developed an unhurried pastoral existence, despite periodic attacks from other plains tribes who, I suggest, were after the casks of red wine, the remarkable product the barbarians brought, almost better than their own drink brewed from carob. The town grew into a beautiful city soothed by two musical murmurs: the leaves of the trees in the mountain breeze, and the waters tinkling down the irrigation ducts along the streets.

I have enjoyed roaming these streets since as a child I first accompanied my father on his walks. And later, with my select gang of hooligan friends, I escaped from home at the sacred hour of the siesta, when the heat is overwhelming and, as the saying goes, only tarantulas and snakes dare cross the pavements. Jumping from one mountain of weeds to another, our expeditions took us through adjacent neighbourhoods, from the railway yards to the Cacique Guaymallén Canal (this good cacique’s invention before Mendoza was founded), round the outskirts of the city, through the large park and beyond to the foothills of the Andes. Our explorations were benign, never destructive or harmful. At most we stole fruit from homes where pear, medlar or plum trees lined the fences. We were real creatures of the city, exercising the freedom to enjoy it, learn its secrets, carve out an identity, and become citizens. As the writer Naguib Mahfouz said, ‘Our homeland is our childhood.’

Mendoza is the capital of the province of the same name, and its urban norms have been stamped on all the towns, villages and smallest of hamlets inside these vast 148,928 square kilometres – larger than Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark put together. Over time, the basic features of trees and irrigation channels have come to characterize the whole region. So has prosperity, a prosperity built on the intensive cultivation of vines and the growth of the wine industry, now the fifth largest producer in the world, and also on the subdivision of land, helped by natural fertility and the dividends from its produce. Anyone who owns twenty-five acres of vineyard is a millionaire. While he enjoys his summer holidays in Viña del Mar (Chile), his land is overseen by a manager and his family, and worked by the humble descendents of the indigenous peoples mixed first with poor Spaniards and Italians, and later with immigrants from all over the world, attracted by the dream of conquering paradise by the sweat of their brow. But not everyone’s dream came true. After independence, the lands seized from the original inhabitants were distributed by the incipient local oligarchy exclusively among their peers, leaving the masses still in poverty. What’s more, the latter – artisans and soldiers, tradesmen and smallholders, agricultural labourers and gauchos – were dependent on the vagaries of the Buenos Aires Customs House, the first established centre of power, now representing the export interests of the British.

It is at this point that there begins a dual history, or a dual telling of Argentine history that pits historians against one another. On the one hand, the history of rich Argentines and their wealth, and on the other, the history of poor Argentines. History does not develop linearly in an unstoppable succession of ultimately constructive events, but is twisted and forced to benefit a class that presupposes and assumes the primacy of its rights, inalienable under their law, and divine according to their bishops.

The whole structure of the nascent state, with all the weaponry at its disposal, was built to serve the landed oligarchy. If the national heroes of Argentina were filtered through a sieve, only glittering gold nuggets like Moreno, Castelli, Belgrano and San Martín would be left at the bottom. The rest would be washed away in a purifying flood.

Take Rivadavia, the first constitutional president of the Republic. The first thing he did was legalize dispossession, by granting property rights over vast expanses of farmland and urban areas to the national bourgeoisie, his friends. Argentina, ruled by an increasingly rich minority, enjoyed a high rate of economic growth thanks to two insuperable gifts from heaven: the best prairies in the world, with fertile topsoil providing pasture for herds of cattle that increased in size at the same pace as the demand for hide and beef from the metropolis; and almost free labour provided by a seemingly endless influx of European immigration, and completely free in the case of the subjugated indigenous people. The latter were eventually wiped out rather than willingly give up their land, thus making way for the colonization of the furthest reaches of the country by the starving masses of Europeans arriving by boat every day.

On 4 June 1943, at a turning point in the Second World War, the armed forces staged a coup against their own civilian government. The ideologue behind the coup, Juan Domingo Perón, was to become a key figure in the political landscape for the remainder of the century. No ordinary soldier, no dull lover of barracks life, no servant of the oligarchy, he had concrete plans and had made good use of his previous post as military attaché at the Argentine Embassy in Rome. As he would later explain to the Army chiefs of staff: ‘Gentlemen, the Russians will win the war. Social reform is on its way. Either we make our own revolution and lead it, or we will be swept away by history.’ But he needed charisma to win over the people. A stroke of luck came his way in the shape of a national catastrophe, an earthquake in the province of San Juan. At a gathering for the 10,000 victims, he had the good fortune, superlative good fortune as it turned out, to meet the person who would become the bond of steel between him and the proletariat, and bind herself to him in marriage: Eva Duarte – Evita.

Peronism brought the biggest change in social structures, and ways of thinking, in Argentine history. The working class ceased to be a faceless mass and took power. Above all, they were no longer a tool to be used, abused and discarded. They became human beings, protagonists central to the life of the nation. For the first time in history, the poor downtrodden masses arrived in Buenos Aires as its masters, not its street cleaners.

A passion for travel rather than sport, made me, in the words of Bernard Shaw, ‘leave school in order to get an education’. I set off for Salta, in the north of Argentina. I did not know then that whenever you leave a place, you are reborn, over and over again. But it really was like that. The journey opened up a whole new world, another country, much more Argentine, less Spanish, less Gringo than the Mendoza I lived in, a world of amazing natural beauty.

Northern Argentina showed me a reality the Left refused to see, and influenced my nascent political consciousness. The country was Peronist. As a lesson in practical politics, it was a defining experience. Since vagrancy was not subsidized, I had to find work from time to time, and this took me to one of Argentina’s largest sugar mills, El Tabacal in Orán, Salta, where the sugar cane harvest was about to begin. I was given the job of overseeing the Indians who fed the sugar cane into the crushers on the platform beside the mill where the trains loaded with cane arrived. El Tabacal was a huge mill, self-sufficient in both cane and food from its vast plantation. It was closed to public traffic, guarded by its own police and run by a staff of technicians, some from overseas, skilled workers and ordinary personnel. The majority of cane cutters were Chahuanco and Toba Indians. The mill would collect them from the forests of Salta each year in cattle trucks, give them space on the river banks to build straw huts, provide them with a minimum amount of food, and after the harvest was over, take them back home, with no further costs.

To a mind like mine filled with utopian socialist ideas, and despite my encounter with a real country in a process of change, Peronism seemed more like a stumbling block than a road to revolution. It did not stand up to scientific Marxist analysis. Its heterogeneous, something-for-everyone character – a mix of bible and boiler-room as the tango goes, of cops and robbers – hindered any effective manifesto.

And then, Eva Perón died. She was the person who might have radicalized the movement. In fact, she had embodied the rage, the class ingredient, the banner of the poor. Her passing left millions orphaned, and uncoupled the train from the engine. On the day of her funeral, it drizzled on Buenos Aires and on the soul of half the country. For the poor, it was as if the light illuminating their hopes had gone out.

The Argentine Communist Party was a typical petty-bourgeois party, divided into an arcane leadership, in the style of the Soviet Communist Party, and a militant rank and file. The few roots it had in the masses were swept away by Peronism, leaving space only for the middle class, professionals and students. There was, however, a larger sector on the Left that had been there almost from the birth of the nation, influenced by Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ and inspired by Argentina’s most brilliant independence heroes. This Left later absorbed the ideas of Marx’s First Socialist International, but did not join the party and became what were known as ‘fellow travellers’. In any case, the drama of continental realities south of the Río Grande stemmed not from the indigenous nature of a population that had been exploited since the Spanish Conquest, but from the exploitation itself, now firmly in the hands of the empire to the north.

The Catholic Church, which had used Peronist power to impose religious education in schools and colleges, now began to oppose him, supported by its historical strongholds: the army and the oligarchy. Perón abolished religious education, passed the divorce law, made illegitimate children equal before the law, withdrew subsidies to Catholic schools – and thereby precipitated the end of his own term in office.

On the morning of 16 June 1955, I was staying with Pepe Varona, a friend who subsequently became the official set designer of the New York Opera. I was preparing a set of proposals for advertising posters for an American travel agency when, around noon, we heard warplanes overhead. Without a second thought, we dashed up to the roof of Pepe’s hostel, on the corner of Montevideo and Rivadavia streets, and from there, with heavy hearts, we watched the criminal attack on government house in the Plaza de Mayo, no more than ten blocks away. The first wave of planes turned right over us, and continued on between Rivadavia and Avenida de Mayo, their guns firing on the Casa Rosada. We could see other planes coming in over the River Plate, nose-diving on the plaza and unloading their bombs and shrapnel. It was a murderous attack over streets crowded with cars and pedestrians, pensioners feeding the pigeons in the square, and children playing on the grass. Men and women fled in terror, dragging their kids, fanning out from the epicentre of the crime. We were just going back into the hostel, to listen to the radio, when a second, smaller squadron appeared and resumed the attack.

Back on the roof, we watched the battle in full swing. By now the army loyal to the president had deployed anti-aircraft guns and was returning fire, filling the sky with black puffs and the air with a pungent odour and a terrible sound of thunder. The aircraft, extending their radius, flew in just behind us, before going towards the Casa Rosada and on to the War Ministry building on Paseo Colón. At the end of the park, they headed towards Uruguay and disappeared into impunity. Ambulance and fire-engine sirens ripped through the silence settling over the city, normally so noisy at that hour, just past 1 p.m. A couple of hours later, a third group of stragglers, three fighter planes coming in from the West, strafed the three targets again, before flying off over the river, bound for Montevideo. Privileged Argentina, tired of wrinkling its nose and containing its hatred of the plebs, had gone to confession, genuflected, crossed itself, and sought the blessing of their chaplains and bishops, before finally attacking the fallen angel, Perón, and his demonic descamisados.

The dead quickly lose their identity and become difficult to count. The actual number of casualties in a massacre is rarely known. Similar world events have suffered from the same lack of mathematical precision. The numbers are minimised ‘to avoid panic’, and forgotten for political expediency. We never knew how many people died in that attack, although they were in the hundreds. ‘Five for each one!’ bellowed Perón in his speech that afternoon. The streets began filling up in the opposite direction to the previous stampede. Angry, threatening groups marched in from the outskirts of the city, home to the manufacturing industries and Peronists (the city itself was never Peronist), and as night fell columns of thick smoke rose from several parts of the city. A Dantesque glow turned some buildings red.

2

News of Castro’s Revolution Reaches Argentina: 1958

By 1958, homemade pipe-bombs were going off all over Argentina’s industrial cities. Made from bits of iron piping stuffed with dynamite, with a fuse sticking out of a hole in a screw top, they caused a pretty convincing explosion. A new slogan, ‘Perón Vuelve’ (Perón is coming home), began appearing on walls.

Meanwhile, union leaders determined to cling on to power by any means morphed into the ‘union bureaucracy’ and ousted the masses as the natural leaders of the workers’ movement. The Peronist Party was proscribed, its leaders exiled or jailed. The ‘new leadership’ – the unions’ secretaries and treasurers – fell in behind the country’s most reactionary right-wing forces. Union headquarters became bunkers from whence bodyguards accompanied their bosses to night clubs or the races. Economists of the cattle and grain oligarchy ran the economy on behalf of the military regime and, at the behest of US imperialism, joined the network of international organizations like the IMF, IDB and GATT with its Latin American adviser ECLAC, and drowned in acronyms any possibility of domestic industrial development. On the contrary, they adopted an economic policy which condemned Argentina to a secondary role as producer and exporter of primary products.

Arturo Frondizi, a lawyer and dissident member of the Radical Party, emerged as a possible candidate in the forthcoming elections. His friend Ricardo Rojo, also a lawyer, journeyed to Caracas with other emissaries to seek the good graces of ‘El Viejo’ Perón, who was there in exile playing with his dogs. A subtle web was being woven with threads from Perón’s own skein; like a puppet-master, he tugged a little here, pulled a little there, and conspired daily with the many different pilgrims visiting the Peronist Mecca. Frondizi’s negotiations prospered and he went on to sign a pact with Perón that would ensure electoral victory for Frondizi’s party through the majority vote of the Peronist masses. In return, he would restore the social, economic and political gains Perón had made, and revoke laws restricting Peronism. In February 1958, Frondizi was elected president.

Frondizi’s economic policy was probably the most sensible the Argentine industrial bourgeoisie had ever come up with. The idea was very clear and seductive. We lived in one of the continent’s richest countries, but were like poor people content just thinking we are rich. Resources do not exist unless we extract them. What use are oil reserves if we don’t exploit them, turn them into foreign currency to develop the country, import technology, industrialize? Frondizi’s thesis passed from hand to hand in the form of a book, Petrol and Politics, which denounced the power of the multinational oil companies, who exercised global control through corruption and blackmail, backed by force. But like Perón, Frondizi did not hold all the cards. At the transactions, agreements and concessions stage that every electoral policy has to undergo, it was undermined by ‘enemy’ strategists – the powers that be, the cattle and grain barons allied to US imperialist multinationals.

When the new administration came to power, a total of twenty-eight oil contracts were signed with foreign companies, twenty of them from the US. Other contracts setting up industrial plants, especially in the car industry, put most of Argentine industry in foreign hands, an insuperable barrier to the implementation of the Radical Party’s policy. In fact, the exact opposite policy was implemented. Not only was oil not used to fuel the national industrialization programme, but after Frondizi was defeated four years later, it transpired that US and British companies had been paid more to drill for oil than if we had bought it directly from them on the world market and kept our crude deposits intact. The systematic surrender of our natural resources was shameless and absolute. Foreign companies earned enormous sums. The race to denationalize was unstoppable: shipping, distilleries, naval shipyards, radio stations, furnaces and farmland passed to the Argentine private sector, and in the case of oil to Standard Oil, Texaco or Shell. The de-capitalization of the country forced us to take ‘loans’ from those same countries that had thoroughly plundered our national patrimony. US and European banks, the IDB, the Eximbank and the World Bank, together with the IMF, made the loans conditional on a series of restrictive measures that saw thousands of workers lose their jobs. ‘Frondizman’, as the cartoonist Landrú’s magazine Tia Vicenta called him, was not made of national steel or oil. He was made of Coca Cola.

My wife Claudia’s parents had a holiday home in Potrerillos, a valley in the foothills of the Andes on the road to Chile. One Sunday in the spring of 1958, Radio El Mundo’s midday international news programme announced it would be broadcasting an interview with Cuban guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra led by Fidel Castro, an already mythical figure even before he was famous for his beard, his outsize cigars (described by US journalist Herbert Matthews) and his audacity. Some years earlier, he had attacked the Moncada military barracks with about a hundred men, most of whom were killed, but he still went on to invade the island by motor launch with another hundred suicidal maniacs, again most of whom were killed, and then marched into the mountains with a handful of survivors. Among them was a doctor from Argentina.

With the whole South American continent between us, my image of the guerrillas was not so much political as romantic and adventurous. But it fired my imagination and awoke expectations. Insanity is generally closer to reality than cold reason. Argentine political journals were full of rigorous analyses of ‘important’ regional events, in which the World Bank or IMF, the State Department or CIA, carried more weight than some fantasy character no matter how bearded. But I was an avid reader of Primera Plana, a magazine that had already published an article on Cuba (its editor Jacobo Timerman had a nose for a story), and its accounts of the Bolivian revolution and the disaster in Guatemala had set my pulse racing.

I was determined to listen to the programme. So, leaving the family barbecue, I sat in the shade glued to the radio. The interview had been recorded by Radio El Mundo’s international news editor, Jorge Ricardo Masetti. If Fidel’s followers on the motor launch were suicidal maniacs, Masetti was cloned from them. From a Catholic Nationalist background, he nonetheless admired men of action, caudillos, leaders: not men who turned the other cheek but those who fought for their ideas and inspired others to follow. He was the kind of journalist who took risks, was attracted by the scent of danger, lured by it. The story behind the interview from the Sierra Maestra is an adventure in itself; full of instinctive actions, risks and gambles. Masetti recounted his amazing experiences, and his conversion from investigative foreign journalist to rebel with his own revolutionary cause, in his book Those Who Fight and Those Who Mourn.

Financed by Radio El Mundo, Masetti went to Cuba in March 1958 armed with a cryptic note from Ricardo Rojo for his friend the Argentine, and a contact in Havana who could put him in touch with the revolutionaries. The Havana contact sent him to Santiago de Cuba, into the lion’s den. After interminable waiting and changes of safe houses, he met the people who could get him into the Sierra Maestra to search for the guerrillas. A host of hazardous exploits later, he reached the advance guard of the Argentine whom the Batista regime had dubbed a dangerous Communist agent. On his last legs, Masetti was finally taken to Che’s camp. For both of them, it was a relief to be able to talk on the same wavelength, use the same slang, and discover the same rather acerbic and ironic sense of humour. This affinity immediately became attraction and friendship. They worked on the interview, sometimes under enemy fire. Che then had him taken to the Commander in Chief.

Despite the new assault on his emotions caused by meeting Fidel Castro, Masetti got through his long dreamed of interview. He asked Fidel about the genesis of the 26th of July Movement, his ideas for transforming a society of exploiters and exploited, his political convictions, revolutionary aspirations, etc. The interview was broadcast from the primitive Rebel Army radio transmitter and was heard all over Cuba. For the first time, the leader of the barbudos was talking directly to his people.

Back in Havana, living clandestinely, Masetti learned that the interview’s re-transmission by Venezuelan and Colombian radio stations had not been picked up in Buenos Aires. As far as his journey’s funders were concerned, the work had not been done. So, he performed what Rodolfo Walsh called a ‘heroic feat of Latin American journalism’. He went back to the Sierra Maestra and did the interviews all over again.

What impressed me most listening to Che was not his public discourse, nor his revolutionary message (actually there wasn’t one, since the Buenos Aires radio station concentrated on his role as an Argentine mixed up in almost Bolivarian wars of independence). No, what drew me to him was first and foremost his voice. It wasn’t the arrogant pompous voice of a politician or professional demagogue. It was a voice that could have belonged to a brother, or friend, nothing strident, like having a quiet conversation in a café. He spoke almost apologetically about getting himself noticed for something he considered self-evident: acting in accordance with his commitment to a cause, a reality that needed no explanation. If he did not take sides, did not get involved, he would be betraying himself. But taking sides meant fighting, because to defend ideas of social justice you have to take up arms. Che also took the opportunity, as if he were a contestant in a tango show, to say hello to his mother and other members of his family to whom he owed an explanation for his enforced two-year silence.

In a few words, he had demolished the doubt over whether he was an adventurer in search of glory and profit, or a mercenary in the service of foreign causes. The suspicion of imperial penetration of some description or other vanished. Masetti brought this up. ‘What about Fidel’s communism?’ he asked. ‘Fidel isn’t a communist. Politically you could call him a revolutionary nationalist’, answered Che.

The programme continued with Fidel Castro, who was the main dish. But I only had ears for Che, that resonant voice I was hearing for the first time, the voice of truth. Fidel was more grandiloquent, added to which his Cuban accent had something unreal, distant, about it. He was the leader and therefore somehow out of reach. Fidel was dignity standing tall, talking to a dormant America. But the other voice spoke to me personally, from conscience to conscience.

The Cuban Revolution became the focal point of my politics. I began copying articles and sought out Masetti’s recently published book. The interviews inspired me to go to Cuba the following year and find the truth for myself. But meanwhile, there were new developments. Encircled by Che’s troops, the city of Santa Clara fell on the last day of December, 1958. The dictator Batista boarded a plane at dead of night and flew off into the arms of Uncle Sam. The Cuban Revolution exploded with a force that eradicated any ambiguous or reactionary doubts about the need to bring about social change and replace the power structures underpinned by imperialism. It exploded like a depth charge and, at the same time, a forbidden fruit. Both those defending multinational interests and the man on the street pricked up their ears at this unique event, so different from the pacific, fraudulent, controlled elections by pact, which history had accustomed us to. The lines of dominance and dependence had always been passed from hand to anxious hand between the political agents of local aristocracies. These usual gentlemen’s agreements, between demons and bandits, seemed about to be torn up. The Latin American Communist Parties initially criticized the ‘militarist’, ‘putschist’ experiment in Cuba as petty bourgeois deviation. But when faced with the spontaneous support of the people and the growing prestige of the Revolution’s young leaders, they finally realized it was a gift from heaven come to rejuvenate their tired discourses, and decided to appropriate it. The cultural establishment, as we have seen, burst out in praises, odes, hymns, and even adulatory red masses, beginning with the canonization of the Communist Party, and the control and administration of revolutionary fervour by the Central Committee.

Meanwhile, democratic channels were closing again in Argentina. The union bureaucracy lurched between manipulating the masses and flirting with the army, capitalism and the brutal Peronist right-wing. Factory occupations, strikes in packing plants, sackings and bankruptcies all made the political air unbreathable, accompanied by deafening background music courtesy of the pipe-bombs. The government took control of the CGT (the principal trade union movement), handing it over to select members of the Peronist bureaucracy and pro-imperialist unions, with the State Internal Disorder Plan (CONINTES) already in place. The most combative unions were now in open confrontation with three groups: the government, the army and the union bureaucracy. The army patrolled the streets of Mendoza, pointing machine guns at passers-by, while I put the finishing touches to my plans to go to Cuba.

3

My Journey to the Island: April 1961

Feverish, almost conspiratorial, activity possessed us. Claudia and I had to get money together and find a way of travelling that fitted our limited means. An English passenger shipping line sailed from the port of Valparaiso in Chile to Southampton, England, and after navigating the Panama Canal, stopped at Havana. The Pacific Line’s Queen of the Sea was making its last voyage before being withdrawn from service. A travel agency in Mendoza made the arrangements to buy the tickets.

Diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US had been broken off, and the latter was putting pressure on the rest of Latin America to follow suit. The ‘concerto’ of nations opposed to Cuba had begun under the US baton. La Coubre, a French ship carrying the first shipment of arms bought in Belgium by Cuba, exploded at Havana docks killing a hundred and leaving several hundred wounded. In this uncertain climate, we packed our belongings and confirmed our reservations. We wanted to get there as soon as possible. If we had to fight to defend the Cuban Revolution, we were ready. Cuba was so fashionable that news of it was more up to date than Stock Exchange information. We knew that visas for Cuba were controlled by the good will of the Latin American Communist Parties who, in a rush of inter-party ardour for the Cuban Communist Party (PSP), had taken the task upon themselves. In other words, the more recommended by the Communist International you were, the better. The idea, which went against the spirit of the Revolution, was justified by the fact that the communists were the only organized political force able to guarantee the level of revolutionary purity or sympathy, or at least that was the idea. So I resorted to an old school friend, Petiso García, who happened to be the son of the secretary of the local Communist Party, no less. I went to see him but came away empty-handed. In what appeared to be social-bureaucratic practice, he greeted me at the door but did not invite me in. I asked him to explain to his father that I needed a certificate of good moral standing to present if need be. Petiso duly went in only to come out with a recommendation from his father not to go to Cuba: ‘it is a uniquely Cuban experience that has nothing to do with us. We have our own reality; we need to put our own house in order first.’ That was a no, then. This negative from the party supremo stymied any other possibility. We left with no recommendation whatsoever.

The departure date was 15 April 1961, the same day as the air attack on Havana, a taste of the invasion to come two days later. The ship’s radio had a worrying tendency to interrupt the anodine musak with hysterical communiqués in English on the situation in Cuba. But at one stage during the afternoon, there was a news flash in Spanish which reported the bombing, though with no details as to the consequences. That is why my memory of the first days on board was zero, a black hole, no images. Docking at Callao, passengers were told they had half a day to see the city of Lima, to which we would be taken by a shipping company bus. In Lima I searched for a newspaper to dispel my anxieties, only to find one that talked of an invasion of Cuba by the Yankee navy from Nicaragua. Back on board, there was an atmosphere of euphoria among the passengers and crew. The latter thought the stopover in Cuba would be apocalyptic – all fiery mulattas and rum. The passengers were sorry they would miss the chance to see the barbudos in the flesh, but thanked heaven the communist threat would be over. There was nothing for me to do but watch the coast rising and falling over the bows. The next morning, news flashes came thick and fast then became increasingly sparse as the day went on. The dining room looked like the Titanic as we crossed the Equator. Who knows if the popping champagne corks and bubbling laughter at dinner were celebrating the crossing or a victory for debauchery. Judging by the bulletins, the war in Cuba was still going on. But the paucity and ambiguity of the news, plus the faces of the ship’s officers, revived my hopes. A few days later, we reached Balboa, port of entry to the Panama Canal.

Again they announced that passengers interested in seeing Panama City would be taken by bus to the city’s main street in the morning, and returned in time for dinner. Crossing the city by bus, I noticed a modern building with a sign saying ‘Anthropological and Archeological Museum’ and right beside it a kiosk selling cigarettes and newspapers. We made a bee-line for it. The kiosk, I mean. There was no dark tobacco on board, and the Negros we had brought with us had gone up in smoke amid the bombing and disembarking. I couldn’t smoke American cigarettes, so our first task was to replenish our stock. The kiosk attendant was a garrulous fellow with a Caribbean accent. While showing me his range of dark tobacco, he asked the fatal question. ‘Where are you from, chico?’ ‘Argentina’, I replied with quiet pride. ‘Coño, you’re Argentine!’ he shrieked and proceeded to slag off Argentines and their mothers. He ended up throwing a handful of what looked like dollars onto his magazine counter. ‘Look at that, look what he’s done to our dignity, to our money, coño, your compatriot, that bloody Argentine, that butcher Che.’ And he showed us the new Cuban peso note, on which the president of the Cuban National Bank had merely signed ‘Che.’ He was a Cuban who had fled the Revolution, with a furious hatred for those he blamed for his exile. I paid for the cigarettes to avoid getting involved, and went to the museum next door. In tropical countries, fossils are more trustworthy than lippy street vendors. The newspaper I had bought before the incident carried a complete if somewhat venomous version of the defeat inflicted on the invading forces. It had all ended with the surrender of 300 Cuban mercenaries on a military operation directed and financed by the CIA and the Pentagon, but which had served to strengthen the ties between the Revolution’s leaders and the Cuban masses.

The ship’s captain received orders to cancel the stop-over in Cuba. Instead, he stopped in Curaçao, then doubled back to Maracaibo, in Venezuela. We anchored there the following morning but the passengers were not allowed off, as it was to be only a short stay. By noon the passengers were getting restless, wondering what was going on. Around three in the afternoon, the captain summoned me to his cabin, as if I were an aristocrat travelling below the decks. To put it bluntly, there was an insoluble problem. The ship had to sail straight for England now that the stop in Cuba had been cancelled. He could not alter his orders for the sake of two passengers. However, the situation was complicated because the Venezuelan immigration authorities refused to allow passengers without Venezuelan visas to disembark, least of all those bound for Cuba. I argued that our contract said we had to be taken to Cuba, not Venezuela, and that getting us there was his responsibility, not ours. He said his company would pay the cost of whatever means of transport we used. He thought by air would be most suitable, if we agreed. In that case, I insisted, he could use his authority to get us a visa. He mumbled a form of acquiescence. I couldn’t help but imagine Captain Cook boiling with rage in his place. British phlegm had increased proportionately with the loss of empire. He added that he was waiting for one last demarche in Caracas which, he assumed, would solve the problem. The ship had to leave no later than five. ‘And what happens if it isn’t solved?’ I asked. ‘You can visit Sussex’, he answered. A couple of hours later, the delegated official arrived with two military looking characters. The solution, conjured up between the British authorities and Venezuelan immigration, was to allow us to disembark but be kept under house arrest until the next flight to Cuba. Naturally, flights had been suspended for the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, we disembarked with all our luggage. The Venezuelans broke the agreement and two days later we had to leave our hotel in Maracaibo, not with any great regret I might add, since sharks patrolled the other side of the metallic mesh protecting the hotel’s little bay. We were taken to Caracas over a mountain range in a police van and dumped in a far from exclusive hotel. The next day, we were taken to Maquetía airport and put on a plane to Mexico, via Guatemala. The reason for deportation was our visa for Cuba, the bad boy island with which Venezuela had just broken off diplomatic relations.

Cuba’s international airport is called Rancho Boyeros. I got a stiff neck straining to look out of the plane’s window to see the island through the cumulus and nimbus clouds that moved like a flock of sheep under the fuselage. We dipped through the white wool and lost sight of it until the clouds suddenly parted and we saw the sea of palm trees waving in the breeze to welcome us. We were in Cuba. The flight had been a fiesta; the handful of euphoric passengers sang and danced in the aisles, shouting revolutionary slogans and ‘Viva Fidel!’ They were people on official business abroad, trapped by the suspension of flights after the Bay of Pigs invasion and now returning to their posts. Flying over the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, they gave us a crash course in revolutionary fervour, anticipating what proved to be the norm on terra firma.

When we finally got permission to disembark, the humidity embraced us like the Revolution itself, enveloping our bodies, sticking to our skin, dripping down our necks – an all-embracing way of life, breathing, sweating, tongues dry, hearts beating, yet exultant, exuberant, enthusiastic. Huge drops of rain fell here and there, raising clouds of vapour as if on a hot tin roof. And the voices! Cubans talk at the tops of their lungs. Incongruously, in the midst of the din, a quartet struck up with Cuban folk music, guajiras and sones, to welcome the new arrivals. What with the Tannoy and the cries of the porters and umbrella sellers, it was like running the gauntlet to get to a safe haven, but with no escape. The journey down the motorway to Havana was the visual equivalent of the airport racket. Multicoloured posters shouted victory slogans about the aborted invasion, imperialism, Cuban exiles, and the departed bourgeoisie. Rifles held aloft by olive green arms, above beards like continental forests, caricatures of guerrilla fighters giving the Miami mercenaries a kick up the bum, with Uncle Sam cowering, green with fear. Nothing solemn, nothing tragic.

Havana was a splendid city, a mixture of colonial style and modern architecture, built against a natural background of palm trees and bourgainvilleas, with narrow multi-coloured streets, crossed by wide avenues, surfed by huge luxury cars speeding and hooting, controlled by coordinated traffic lights, with planned agility. Convincing the taxi driver we did not want a plush hotel, but a family pension, took the whole journey and proved fruitless; nothing would convince him we belonged in the Old City. He dropped us at the Hotel Colina on 23rd Street, just by the University in the modern suburb of Vedado.

When you get to a new country, first impressions are often best. Waking up the following morning, at almost noon due to the musical cacophony in the lobby that went on till two, I began a relationship with a people who have the gift of seducing you for life. The city was a fiesta of joie de vivre, with music everywhere, and multifarious smells: from luxury aromas like cigars and coffee, to the whiff of the port in the background, and the pervasive odour of fried fat from carts selling pork crackling. A cart of oysters with hot sauce, another with oranges peeled round in strips (a local invention), coffee stalls on every corner, making endless cups, a stand with breaded fish fillets here, another with avocadoes and limes there. Flowers, fruit, freshly baked bread, strong cigarettes and cigars, very strong women’s perfumes, and so on. The city is full of aromas, each more tempting than the last.

Nobody dresses formally, Argentine-style, in a suit and tie. It would be crazy here, as well as looking ridiculous. The men wear white guayaberas or unbuttoned shirts outside their trousers. The trousers look like tents, enormously wide but tighter at the ankle. The women, their sinuous carnality exposed to furtive pursuers, painted like Japanese opera stars, part the crowd before them with their very presence. Everyone is armed, at least verbally. Buses, called guaguas, force their way through by blowing horns and screeching breaks. Lottery touts add their voices to vendors of other wares under arches, in galleries, on corners, and in squares. Two types of uniform stand out: olive green with a peaked cap could be either the rebel army or the police; blue grey with a beret is the newly created military police, which had made its debut at the Bay of Pigs. Beards are no longer in evidence since the new shaving law was introduced, with exceptions made for the historic barbudos of the ‘Granma’.

The general climate of enthusiasm was heightened by the May 1st celebrations the following day. Expectations were higher than usual because Fidel was giving his first speech since the Bay of Pigs. On the day itself, you only had to follow the sea of people with placards and kids on their shoulders, straw hats and uniforms, maracas and drums, a huge wave of people headed for the Plaza de la Revolución. The guerrilla leaders led the parade, arms linked at the head of a multitude of happy faces illuminated by patriotic fervour. ‘Cuba sí! Yanqui no!’ The red and black of the 26th of July Movement dominated the sea of banners, challenged only by the Cuban flag. The river of people was unstoppable, moving to the rhythms of guerrilla anthems, rousing songs, and voices shouting ‘Viva …’ and ‘Muerte …’. Reaching the square and getting near the platform seemed impossible. A mass of people converged in front of the (horrendous) statue to the apostle José Martí.

The May 1st celebration was the first mass demonstration I attended in Cuba. A million people, the papers said. In some ways it was like the Peronist demonstrations in the Plaza de Mayo, where I had never felt comfortable. Yet here the atmosphere was visually and psychologically different. Missing was that sense of menace that emanated from Perón’s descamisados, the lepers of Argentine politics as John William Cooke called them, who jumped and waved their headbands and ragged shirts, furiously banging their drums, as if to the scare the wits out of the Argentine bourgeoisie. In the Plaza de la Revolución there were no threatening dispossessed people fresh out of the shadows, smelling power. These were happy musicians, in a joyful parade.

The difference, of course, lay in the struggle to take power, in which the Cuban people had participated (although they didn’t all fight) while the Argentine masses had received it vicariously. The Argentines’ anger was still contained, their class-based rage unexpressed, compared to this pure joy of power achieved by passion and the sacrifice of lives. The only thing I remember of Fidel’s speech, which brought the event to a close, was the formal declaration of the socialist nature of the Revolution. It was, however, the most important bit. It opened a new and decisive phase in the struggle of the American people. A struggle I dreamed of joining.

But first I had to legalize my situation in Cuba. Picking one’s way through the mire of bureaucracy is always a prickly task, difficult anywhere. But in Cuba the bureaucratic machinery had been destroyed: no one knew anything; no one followed any logic or tradition; everything was new and pretty well improvised. Most positions of responsibility had been abandoned by people fleeing the revolutionary tide in panic, and taken over by youngsters with absolutely no experience. Administrators, company directors, heads of state enterprises and bodies vital to a functioning society were replaced by almost illiterate peasants and workers whose willingness and apparent honesty was their only skill. In some cases, they had absolutely no knowledge of the matters they were supposed to be dealing with. In others, one ideology was substituted with another – one caste destroyed and replaced by another diametrically opposed, implying a rapid and experimental reconstruction of a new order. Things now depended more on good will, luck and the energy that new decision makers brought to the job of deciding between the opportune and the opportunist, between the interests of the Revolution and urgent necessities. The chaotic situation was being run via ‘purity of origin’, that is, by ideological red corpuscles. The People’s Socialist Party, i.e. the Cuban communists, only recently incorporated into the triumphant ranks of the Revolution, now occupied the key posts. It filtered and selected personnel, including whole branches of the civil service, and had its eyes firmly set on the mechanisms of power. The rationale was that the PSP had to protect and strengthen the ranks of the Revolution, which had not only been openly attacked at the Bay of Pigs but was also being sabotaged daily both by Miami exiles and directly by the US government, which was diverting its efforts from military action to permanent terrorism.

The word gusano, meaning worm, became part of everyday parlance in describing counter-revolutionaries. In one of his speeches, Fidel talked of exiles being like gusanos in an apple, destroying the fruit of the people’s efforts and sacrifice. Miami was the dung heap where gusanos, who abandoned their country in its hour of need, ended up. Gusano attitudes, behaviour and even thoughts began to be detected, and dealt with like a pest, with ideological, verbal, written and armed pesticides. One method adopted for foreigners was to make them prove their political credentials, not freely and democratically, but in a sectarian and rigorously pro-communist way. Another more general measure was the creation of the Committees for Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), neighbourhood-watch organizations controlling the activities and lifestyles of the inhabitants of an area, block, or even street depending on the density of the population. They started life as a passive vigilante system, with no right to intervene, but morphed into a Hydra’s head, or Big Brother. Nothing escaped the gaze of the CDR. Depending on its make-up, it could help a neighbour with problems, or send him to prison.

Anyway, I needed to legalize my situation, and find a job. I began the exhausting task of running round offices and official bodies. I had no friends or contacts. We ended up in ICAP (the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples of the World). I met the director, my first senior official in the state apparatus, Ramón Calcines, a communist. He was quite young, and very handsome, like the star of a gangster film. He sent me on my way cordially, assuring me they would find something, we would be useful somewhere, all hands were welcome, etc. In these grave times for Cuba, he said, they were grateful to foreign volunteers. ‘But who are you, chico? See that little compañera, she’ll take your details, then we’ll see. Patria o muerte!’ The little compañera, a mulatta poured into clinging olive green, explained that I had to bring credentials from ‘my’ party, to add to my CV. Meanwhile she would find me something. I left wondering how I would get round my lack of credentials. The job the little compañera found me was temporary, but I had to start somewhere. The Cubans were hosting the first industrial exhibition from the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia and they needed designers, decorators, painters, etc. – a field where we could be useful. ‘And your credentials, mi amor?’ I explained that I had sent off for them – which was not exactly true – and that it would take time to get a reply. ‘But chico, without credentials, the Turquino looks tiny next to our problems!’ Turquino is the highest peak in the Sierra Maestra.

On the road to Rancho Boyeros there is an industrial zone with huge exhibition halls where the Czech exhibition was to be held. A Czech interior designer was charged with installing it. He was a tall, blond man who looked and behaved like a librarian, and spoke very basic guttural Spanish in a low voice while he polished his specs. Strictly professional, he indicated what he wanted and didn’t appear again until the work was finished. He soon showed signs he was satisfied, and even appreciative. He arrived at seven to find the place empty except for his foreign technical staff, and went round picking up scattered tools, waiting for the Cubans to turn up after eight, or even nine. When he got to our design table, he let off steam about the workers’ lack of punctuality. ‘They’ll never build socialism like this’, he said. The Cubans always had an excuse: they’d been on guard duty, in a political meeting, training with the militia, in a literacy class. And they really did seem very tired. They took on too many things and did none properly.

One morning, the Czech appeared with someone who was for me a transcendental figure: the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. I had admired him since I saw two of his most important films, Power and the Land (1934) and Spanish Earth (1937), at the Cine Club in Mendoza run by my Jewish friend David.

The ‘Flying Dutchman’, as this incomparable man was known, had studied optics before he became a filmmaker and was a specialist lens maker. He chose not to stay at home quietly in his prosperous family business, however, preferring to get involved in the century’s major social and political upheavals. A tall man of about sixty, with unruly greying hair, he was filming the installation of the exhibition. He said hello as the Czech introduced us.

4

Starting Work in Cuba

The Habana Libre hotel in Vedado, on 23rd Street and L, was the heart of extra-revolutionary activities. Fidel, a leader without a home, could be seen in the early hours going up to the top floors where he spent the night. The guests, foreigners for the most part, wandered about till late in the large carpeted salons, interconnected by Hollywoodesque staircases. Bellboys in red jackets with gold braid could be seen attending to awestruck campesinos on delegations from the interior to an assembly on the agrarian reform, or children from Oriente province on a visit to the capital, or giggling schoolgirls with starched cuffs on a nursing crash course, or youth brigades holding meetings by the lifts. An atmosphere of supercharged subversion filled the lounges and corridors, dislodging the privileged decadence of the local elites and the omnipresent pre-packaged taste of the gringos.

Joris Ivens was staying at the Habana Libre. He asked me to help with the captions on his documentary, and we formed a bond. It was a reverential relationship on my part, and on his, I think, due to a need to keep the all-consuming Cuban reality at arm’s length, and talk to someone neutral yet just as amazed by the tropical exuberance. He spoke Spanish like an American but we understood each other perfectly. Interested in what had brought us to Cuba, he suggested we go to his hotel ‘where anybody who is anybody goes’. So, that same afternoon I walked the couple of blocks from the Colina and disappeared into the carpeted bowels of the Habana Libre. Whenever I met him after that, he was always with someone important. One night he introduced me to a woman in militia fatigues. She was Argentine, not Cuban. Her name was Alicia Eguren, the wife of the Peronist leader, John William Cooke. Alicia was cordial though quite curt and very inquisitive, as if she needed to ascertain which camp you were in. Not long afterwards she invited us to meet her husband up on the fifteenth floor, where they had a suite with large windows overlooking 23rd Street. Gordo Cooke, also in militia uniform, with a long beard that lay on his chest when he bent his head, had an unlit cigarette butt between his lips and ash splattered over his stomach. He was very nice and friendly. We were quickly on first-name terms like old friends, although I found it a bit disrespectful. To avoid misunderstandings, I made it clear I was not a Peronist but he was not interested in past affiliations; what mattered was the future. We talked until midnight. After that, whenever we met Alicia, we went up to see Gordo. Alicia was a kind of advance guard fishing for Argentines, who were then sucked up into the necromancer’s cave. Our friendship with her developed on the ground floor, in the hotel’s lounges and cafés, and with Cooke on the top floor, among Argentine newspapers, magazines, books and his own writings, scattered all over the floor. The soles of his campaign boots were as shiny as sugar cane, or even shinier thanks to the plush carpets covering his habitat. When I asked about Che, Cooke said Che was why they were there. Alicia was more emphatic. ‘Che is mine!’ she said. For an Argentine, she boasted, all roads to Che passed through her.

One evening the hotel hosted an exhibition of blindfold chess, organized by Miguel Najdorf, an Argentine grandmaster and world champion in the field. Originally from Poland, he was in Buenos Aires at a chess tournament when the Second World War broke out and was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi death camps. I recognized him from a fleeting encounter with him and his wife on a Number 60 bus in Buenos Aires.

A section of a large salon on the ground floor had been cordoned off. Inside were several widely spaced rows of tables. The challengers were seated on one side. On the other, blindfolded, was Najdorf accompanied by an assistant who brought him a chair if he wanted to sit down. The assistant called out the number of a table, the room fell silent; the challenger called out his latest move. Najdorf, deep in concentration, repeated the sequence of moves already played then made his move, which his assistant executed. The audience sighed with relief while the maestro moved on to the next of the thirty or forty challengers (his record was fifty-four) and repeated the miracle. At the end of the second row of tables, immersed in his game, was Che. It was only the second time I had seen him.

A couple of weeks earlier, I had read about an event commemorating the Spanish Civil War to be held in the Galician Centre, a baroque building on the corner of the Parque Central. Che would be there with General Enrique Lister, one of the great symbolic figures of the Spanish Republic. There was a huge crowd at the entrance. The room was long and narrow, crammed with rows of seats already occupied, and people standing against the walls, in the corridors, and sitting on the window sills. The ceiling fans were working overtime trying to recycle the air, but it was like stirring soup in which the audience were cooking.

Lister recalled the Civil War: the people’s militias, the role of the Communist Party, the International Brigades, and the support given by the USSR. Then Che spoke about the atmosphere in his family when he was a child, sitting round the wireless listening to news from Spain, as if the tragedy was affecting them personally, like all Argentines and other Latin Americans whether they were descendents of Spaniards or not. It informed his belief in the invincibility of the people’s struggle if its leaders have the same level of commitment, sacrifice and unity, over and above ideological schisms. He ended by paraphrasing an Antonio Machado poem and offering Lister his pistol if that same will to defeat Francoism would lead him to take up the armed struggle again. Che’s speech was not demagogic. His aim was not to persuade anyone or to milk applause. He spoke to say things he believed in or, at least, dreamed of.

Now here he was in the hotel, in front of his chess board, deep in thought, jotting things in his notebook after every move. In his well-worn fatigues, shirt outside his trousers, caught at the waist by his cartridge belt with his pistol on the right, the pockets of his shirt stuffed with papers, cigarettes and pens, his dusty unpolished boots, and his beret on the floor, between the legs of the chair. A woman who, like the crowd of us crammed together in front of him was not watching the game but Che himself, slipped under the cordon in a gesture of daring – or lack of vigilance by his bodyguard who was nowhere to be seen – knelt beside him, picked up the beret and handed it to him politely. Che, surprised but courteous, thanked her, but a few minutes later, with a sideways glance at his audience, put the beret back on the floor. The match ended with the hopes of most challengers dashed, Che’s included. In this particular battle, the strategist in chief was Najdorf.

One day Joris Ivens introduced me to a Mexican anthropologist, who was to be instrumental in finding me work. The National Institute for Tourist Industries (INIT) – one of the bodies created by the Revolution – wanted to build a country-wide tourist infrastructure and invest in new areas. It decided to revive traditional handicrafts that were of little practical use but had anthropological value and would generate jobs for local people. Ornaments made of hemp, shells and precious wood were common in Cuba, but in Oriente province there was also an original pottery-making tradition. It no longer made everyday utensils but the INIT wanted to revive it to make ceramic handicrafts. The Mexican girl knew the head of the project. He had asked her to study the possibility of setting up a workshop in Holguín, a town on the north coast of Oriente. The problem was that her already limited anthropological knowledge was theoretical, and she knew nothing at all about making clay pots.

Coincidentally, I had worked with ceramics on two occasions and had gleaned a basic knowledge. A fellow student at Mendoza Art School also attended the university’s School of Ceramics and he used to bring his creations round to my house. I got interested in the technique and ended up going to the workshops with him. I watched him prepare and apply varnish, glaze and various other combinations, depending on the desired degree of plasticity and hardness. Later, in Buenos Aires, I helped a colleague of my wife’s build an elaborate circular pottery kiln, with saggars (refractory containers) and moulds for liquid clay and clay paste, so we could produce whole series of pots by casting.

The Mexican girl thought she had won the lottery. She told me her boss was interested in my know-how. We went to see the project director, a sweaty Swiss weighing 120 kilos, in black suit, shirt and tie, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. I explained I was not a professional technician, that my knowledge was purely empirical. He seemed to have sussed the calibre of the staff he already had, and after a good chat decided that, compared to them, I was a genius. He offered me the job of running the handicrafts workshop in Holguín. This meant leaving Havana and potential contacts, but it also meant getting to know the interior of the island and the real Cuban people: the campesinos, the guajiros. What’s more, Oriente was the cradle of the Revolution. I took the job.

There was a diesel train that took ten hours to do the 700 kilometres between Havana and Holguín, but it was worth it. Going out into the countryside is to begin to know Cuba. The modern world of Havana, luxurious and fickle, disappears as you leave the city limits. The towns and cities of the interior are decidedly colonial, with a marked African influence, not only in the people, as in Havana, but in the streets, the houses, the balconies with washing hanging, the galleries, verandahs, raised pavements, signs, shops, curiosity and noisy brouhaha.

Holguín province seemed a little different, and I soon realized why. It is an agricultural region like most of Cuba, but the land is richer, with meadows, woods, beaches, large sugar mills and a semi-feudal society based on sugar cane. It also has the island’s most important nickel reserves. The city of Holguín is orderly and quiet. The poor – cane cutters and seasonal labourers in the sugar mills, and a whole range of unemployed, underemployed and destitute – have been pushed to the southern outskirts of the city, to a huge shanty town made of yaguas, palm branches and bark precariously tied to poles for the hut roofs and walls, and stones to hold the thatches down.

The first thing I did after arriving at my Holguín hotel was to go out and get my bearings. The city was built round a central tree-filled square, with paved roads stretching for two or three blocks, more built up to the north away from the highway. It seemed very pleasant, but there was not much to see. I went into a café for a coffee, my breakfast in those days. The people who ran the café were my first friends. The second thing I had to do was sort out the so-called infrastructure of my new life.

The solution to everything depended on slotting into the bureaucratic organogram, acquiring full rights and obligations. Apart from the traditional official bodies like the municipality, public works, electricity and water, etc., there were the new ones which called all the shots. Urban reform, agrarian reform, confiscated assets, CDRs (the committees for the defence of the Revolution), militias, literacy brigades, were all part of an entity called Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) that wielded absolute power. It had been created by merging the organizations that had fought (the guerrillas’ 26th of July Movement and the Student Directory) with those that had dithered (the communists of the PSP). The latter, however, got their cadres in place first.

In Oriente, the ORI-northern region was run by a communist, Rita Díaz, the power behind the throne, and a redhead to boot. She was not very tall, chubby but shapely, and mysteriously fitted into tight olive green fatigues and blue militia shirt. With her hair caught in a sort of loose bun under a green beret, she looked more like a French resistance fighter than a tropical miliciana. She was very temperamental but had a good sense of humour, was both friendly and energetic, and highly expeditious. She put her weight behind the handicrafts workshop from the start and promised to help us find staff among people she trusted. Meanwhile, Claudia and I had to find a house, furnish it, join the militia and, of course, do political work. We would stay in touch with her. ‘That’s great, chico! An Argentine like Che … the most beautiful man in the Revolution!’ she said as she waved goodbye with a ‘come and eat at my house’, but no firm date.

A young lawyer, Evelio Rodríguez, was in charge of Urban Reform in Holguín. For our workshop, he suggested a former fruit farm: an enormous old house with two interior patios and a large piece of land behind. It would be fine. Repairs to the floors and roof were needed, but it was do-able. For Claudia and me, Evelio picked an apartment half a block from the main square, and no more than three blocks from the workshop. It was on the first floor, with stairs straight down to the street where, as if to mitigate our nostalgia, there was a tree, the only one on the block. It was not very big but satisfied our somewhat bourgeois need for comfort, and its excellent bathroom met with immediate approval. Large transparent lizards wandered over the frosted glass, but Evelio said they were the best line of defence against mosquitoes. We went to choose some furniture and the following day the house was just about habitable.

Within a week there was a rhythm to my work. It was hard – seven in the morning to twelve at night on normal days – but absorbing. I was the boss, but also the bricklayer, carpenter and designer: removing roofs to replace woodwork and broken tiles, knocking down walls, making a bathroom, connecting the plumbing, installing electricity (under electric company supervision) or painting white walls. Cuba was almost totally dependent on imported materials and our work showed how far its commercial sector had deteriorated. As stocks ran out there was no way of replenishing them. There was a shortage of nails, screws, wire, plaster, fuses, files, etc., so finding materials was the first battle.

I joined the militia, training a couple of days a week and doing night guard duty in official buildings or important work places. This general level of vigilance was not only necessary, it was also a way of mobilizing people on a political level. It played havoc with productivity at work, however. I could see how elastic timetables were, and although I used firm rational arguments, it had no effect. To make things worse, after the Bay of Pigs the army produced an emergency plan for defending Holguín in case of attack, not an entirely crazy idea given the city’s strategic position on the north coast. It comprised encircling the town with three or four lines of trenches to be dug by voluntary milicianos, better at digging holes than being soldiers. This pick and spade job was done on (Red) Sundays until five in the afternoon. It flayed your hands but included a free lunch.

All problems to do with the workshop went straight to Rita, that is, to the ORI, the powerhouse of the Revolution. No cement in the building material yards? Go and find Rita. No rivets? Rita will phone someone; ‘What the hell’s happened to those rivets, chico?’ That’s how we did the impossible for the first few months.

The Swiss director, who seemed to live in his huge Lincoln Continental, appeared at least once a month, surrounded by economists and planners from JUCEPLAN, the Central Planning Board, an entity in charge of reorganizing the economy and educating cadres. It meant a wasted day. And not only for us, because these crazy economists applied undigested Soviet models, from an economic system of which they knew neither the internal workings nor the results, as we eventually saw when the practices of the ‘political cadres’ whose inflated aims and results were made public. The Swiss, still sweating, was creating the inevitable national bureaucratic apparatus to fit the tangle of budget proposals, inputs, expenses, investment and production, while we were still building our basic infrastructure, because we had no precedents, no ideas and no pots. Luckily, the Mexican girl’s folkloric ideas of going back to the primitive ceramics of the indigenous Taíno and Siboney peoples – hand-moulded clay pieces baked on a tribal fire – were discarded. The argument against, which I subscribed to, was that you could not devote an entire wages, equipment and administration budget to an experiment only useful in an Anthropology Department science lab.

She was transferred back to Havana, and was replaced by a young administrator, Melchor Casals, who was not even twenty. He took over the planning days, and every now and again came with us to Havana for administrative training. The permanent staff comprised an improvised technical director (me); a very capable designer (Claudia); a teenage administrator (Melchor); a communist delegate-cum-worker (Cucho); an actual carpenter (Argeo Pérez), and three trainees. The responsibility kept me awake at night. But in the nick of time I managed to get the latest books on ceramic techniques: pottery, clay, varnish, kilns and temperatures. I got some locally, sent for more from Havana, and built up quite a good theoretical base on the subject.

When work on the building was finished, Argeo made me a draughtsman’s table and the second stage began. Using millimetre graph paper, I designed every piece of equipment, shelving, work tables, sinks with covers, sinks without covers, sinks with drains, etc., and arranged them according to their place in an eventual production line. Various types of potter’s wheels; tables for casting, moulding, kneading, filing, varnishing; rooms with warm air circulating through the floor-to-ceiling shelving, for drying the varnish.

Then came the period of experimenting with the equipment and materials. We needed prototypes already finished and fired. I designed a circular kiln with a one-cubic-metre capacity, with saggars arranged in the shape of an orange cut in half, with flames circulating upwards in a spiral, impelled by pressure from a ventilator. To build the ventilator, and especially the burners, I needed the help of specialized technology. The ventilator was built in a local workshop, but for the burner I searched the length and breadth of Cuba before Rita found me a group of Soviet engineers in the nickel processing plant at Nicaro. They designed and built an initial burner for the circular kiln and, later, a second one with more capacity and precision.

Halfway along the road from Holguín to Havana I had spotted an area of red clay. We took a sample and it proved to have excellent drying and plastic qualities. We went personally and chose a truckload of the best clay and began the process of washing, grinding and kneading large quantities of this formidable red paste. It gave us a beautiful range of plates, cups and vases, with a single colour varnish inside and the natural red clay on the outside. Don’t forget that this was the mid-sixties, and Cuba was running out of practically everything, a critical situation in which the first things to break are plates. Hence, we channelled production into crockery.

But work wasn’t my only worry. Political control had degenerated into Stalinist sectarianism, spreading through Cuban society like a virus. A person’s political past counted for more than his skills when it came to evaluating who would get positions of responsibility. The majority of the population were stuck because very few had a communist past. In the case of foreign workers, supervision was by representatives of the Communist Parties back home. The job of vetting the Argentine contingent fell to an engineer from Buenos Aires, a certain Fontana. He worked and lived in Holguín, and it wasn’t long before he turned up at the workshop. Dressed in militia fatigues, with his beret under his epaulette, like a US Green Beret, he introduced himself as the ‘president’ of the colony of Argentine volunteers sent by the Communist Party to support the Revolution. After running a critical eye over our facilities, which seemed to interest him, he said I had to come to his office to register my details and be briefed on the colony’s obligations. The unresolved question of credentials that would make me legitimately useful (which I thought I had left behind in Havana) raised its ugly head again. The engineer, his son and daughter-in-law, both architects, worked in the Oriente department of the Ministry of Public Works. Most of the Argentines sent by the party were professionals, since the majority of the Cubans in the mass exodus to Miami had been professionals, stripping the state of technocrats, top civil servants, doctors, economists, etc. Cuba needed to plug the hole. The Argentines – over 400 of them – were not there entirely out of altruism and international solidarity. They earned excellent salaries, of which they sent up to 50 per cent into succulent bank balances at home. With the rest, they maintained a standard of living that was higher than most in the government, ministers included. My salary was much, much more modest.

I went to Fontana’s house in the hope of forestalling a collision with the hierarchy, at least until I had enough support to disguise my being a political orphan and to regularize my status. Fontana felt empowered by his role of watchdog and put me through a sort of spy novel interrogation, examining my entire life back to my childhood. He quickly established that I would have my work evaluated periodically, and would have to report any failings to him. ‘We must perform to the best of our abilities, as human beings and as party activists’, he said. He insisted on having all my details, so I had to send to Mendoza for the required references after all. After thousands of miles, trials and tribulations, it turned out my bosses were not Cuban but Argentines with whom I had absolutely nothing in common.

5

‘Compañero, Che Is Expecting You’

Cucho lived in the yaguas shanty town, on the outskirts of Holguín. He was an old communist, though his militancy went no further than reading the weekly Hoja Semanal after passing it round among his friends. Rita told him to introduce me to his neighbours and support my activities, although there was still no organized political work there. My first thought on seeing the place was that nothing could be done until these people were removed from this putrefaction and given a decent place to live. But things don’t work like that, not even in Cuba. There was no decent place, and the inhabitants weren’t cattle that you could just herd back and forth.

There is no formula for starting socio-political work in these circumstances, even with a revolutionary government aiming to outlaw demagoguery and replace it with action. Anthropologists, who don’t pretend to change things, try to blend in with the locals, adopt their customs, live like them, eat like them, begin to dream like them, and by so doing get to understand them. The literacy brigades do this, but in situ. Teaching people to read and write is a huge step forward, although to be fair, in Cuba illiteracy was no more than 25 per cent nationally, and only above that in rural areas. Shanty towns are spectres of misery everywhere. The usual description of their inhabitants as coming to the city peripheries from some distant nowhere in search of opportunities is far from true. They are neither campesinos nor city dwellers. They have left their huts, but have no houses. No countryside, no future. And in the main, no water.

I got to know Cucho’s family, his neighbours and his fellow communists – no more than a handful of them in a densely populated area. There was a ‘social centre’, that is, a fenced-off dance floor of flattened earth and a stage at the end for musicians. The audience brought their own chairs, if they had them. A small curious crowd was gathering, mostly women, under the faint light from a bulb hooked up by extension cable to an empty police checkpoint. Cucho’s image of himself as a rabble-rouser went into overdrive with a fanciful introduction of me, as a hero from generous foreign lands come ready to give his all for Cuba. After a difficult moment breaking the ice with muttered introductions, the meeting opened up to questions and in no time we established a whole programme of activities based on looking at the Americas, past and present. We would meet on the dance floor for an open debate twice a week after the evening meal. For me this meant an urgent visit to the National Publishing House’s library and bookshop to get books on Cuban, Caribbean and US history, to fill the serious gaps in my knowledge.

Cubans had mixed feelings about Americans, or Yanquis as they called them. On the one hand, the present situation, with invasions, sabotage, blockade, and other acts of aggression, made them hate the Gringos and support the Revolution. On the other hand, they secretly admired them. All their most popular images, from movies, to Cadillacs, gangsters, cowboys, skyscrapers, millionaires and chewing gum, were American, creating a subliminal belief that the Americans were superior beings. Added to which, even deeper down, a real fear of the Russians kept raising its head, much to the despair of Cucho who had to dispel the myth that communists stole children. Apparently the story of the Spanish ‘war children’ taken to the Soviet Union under an agreement with the Republic, with the idea of saving them from Fascism, was ingrained in the minds of the world’s Catholics. Not only were children stolen, they were pickled and eaten.

No matter what historical event came up, we spent the allotted time discussing it. The meetings were lively, full of avid participants who came religiously on the appointed days, and even started coming prepared with questions, and contradictions. Looking back, I can see I had become a kind of Pope without a script, acting outside the rigorous restrictive canons of a party organization. We had said there would be open debate, and there was. The point was to extract, from the clash of history and reality, a positive take on the Revolution, of the tasks it proposed, of the sacrifices being demanded of them, yes, even of them, the poorest class of all. The revolutionary leadership was setting the example. There was no abuse, no rank, no privilege. The leaders worked day and night, with practically no sleep. The age of miracles had descended on the island, and the miracle was honesty. The weekly discussions – jokingly called ‘the yaguas Forum’ – were noticed, and my political stock shot up in Rita’s eyes. Not as far as ‘President’ Fontana was concerned, however. He gave me a deadline to fix my residence in Cuba (as he had some significant control over me).

The workshop meanwhile, with its spanking new roof and two working kilns, was ready to start production. We had already made crockery prototypes, and were experimenting with moulds for the liquid clay. The burners had already arrived. On my first free Saturday I had been to Moa, a village on the north coast, to talk to the Soviet engineers at the nearby nickel plant. They kept themselves to themselves, wrapped in nostalgia, well provided with musical instruments, books and records, in a nice, although isolated, house on the beach. They had a smattering of Spanish so between them they had managed my questions and answers, greeting my appeal for technical help with the burners enthusiastically. It had taken a whole afternoon to explain exactly what I wanted.

They did not mix much with the other foreign professionals living there, but they did mention an Argentine couple who were doctors. On my second visit, I had been to see this couple who invited me to dinner. We talked into the night, our good spirits fuelled by a few beers. While her husband was making coffee, the young female doctor said something that struck a chord with my latent feeling of unease. ‘I see you’re very excited about the Revolution, Ciro. Your disillusionment will be very painful, I’m afraid. Communists are coming out of the woodwork like mice, taking over everything, to get at the cheese.’ The phrase remained engraved in my memory like a hieroglyphic chiselled in granite. It was only her opinion, of course, but they had been sent by the Argentine Communist Party so this inside-take on things surprised me. Their being suspicious about why I was in Cuba was perhaps part of a general continental-wide policy, to impose ideological control and situate the Cuban Revolution within the Cold War: a policy of the Communist International.

Melchor, our administrator, talked to me about his future during our long nights on guard duty. He wasn’t happy doing office work and, like all those in the shadow of the generation that won the war in the mountains (and the city), he felt none of the jobs available brought him closer to Mount Olympus. He and Xiomara, his skeletal girlfriend, believed, like the youngsters in Russia in 1917, that the Revolution was a time for creativity and giving art free rein. They dreamed that once the state had solved production problems by recuperating their legitimate means, and faced the basic challenges of the new society, like education (which it was doing), housing and health, etc., it would prioritize culture, and this would be a springboard for launching Cuba into the first world, not in the banal GDP sense, but in terms of Art, Cinema and Literature. Melchor wanted to study theatre and had heard that the university in Santiago, on the other side of the Sierra Maestra, was going to open a theatre school at the start of the 1962 school year. He wanted me to help him leave the workshop and register for the preparatory course. But it was nearly the end of the year, and the kilns were working. Not an easy moment.

The first time the big kiln reached 1,100 degrees and was working to capacity, I was overjoyed. I cooled it down slowly overnight and went to bed in the morning, leaving Cucho on guard. I wanted to be there with the whole staff when the oven was finally opened. One refractory box had broken along with some pieces in other boxes, but in the main everything was intact. The colour of the clay was beautiful, albeit a slightly paler red, and the black, blue and grey were very successful despite being imperfectly applied. I tapped the pots with the tips of my fingers, the sound was perfect. We all played tunes on the cups, plates and jars, in a concert of joy and pride. And confidence. What I had promised had come to pass, warts and all.

Rita finally gave Melchor permission to leave for Santiago on condition he returned for a few days each month to do the workshop’s books. We celebrated New Year with our new friends, poor but with the warmest of hearts. For the first few months of the New Year the tension between Fontana and me was mitigated because the workshop was running well. All the same, his deadline was approaching. Then Fidel appeared on TV and made a furious attack on Aníbal Escalante, the most hard-line Stalinist in the old Communist Party, a member of the ORI’s national leadership and the visible face of the sectarianism sweeping through the political and administrative bodies. I felt a great relief at this dismantling, albeit temporarily, of Stalinism.

When the workshop was running smoothly, Melchor introduced a discordant note. The rector of his art school in Santiago wanted me to come and teach art, or art appreciation to be more precise. The students needed to learn about art, its history, its significance and transcendence. I appreciated the offer, but I declined. I barely had time to sleep. I couldn’t even leave the workshop to teach in Holguín, let alone on the other side of the Sierra Maestra. Melchor came back with another proposal. If classes were on Saturday and Sunday, I could travel on Friday night, teach on Saturday and Sunday morning, and return late on Sunday night. I don’t know what possessed me to try it. Perhaps the example set by Melchor’s determination. After all, I had not come to Cuba to be a potter.

The road to Santiago wound through hills and cane fields. The last fifty kilometres were breathtaking. The Sierra Maestra was like a botanical garden, totally green, with palm trees leaning at a variety of angles, elegant dancers in a choreography created by the cyclones that pound the mountains and flatten the forest. The River Cauto crossed the road a couple of times. The city of Santiago appeared below the road and extended out round the bay, following the contours of the mountains. Looking for my hotel, I felt as if I were in New Orleans, seeing the same type of buildings, broad-walks with railings, and wrought-iron balconies, and because most of the lively crowd were black and it was hard to tell if they were walking or dancing. The next morning Melchor took me to the university campus.

The Faculty of Medicine had lent the Theatre School some of its classrooms. The students were different from my political audience in Holguín: they were more interested and dynamic, and focused on the context and tasks of the Revolution seen through the prism of art. But like the workshop, it was my responsibility to mould this pure young clay, not knowing either if I was up to the job or what the results would be. Again I felt as if everything I said was received like desert rain, and it was my duty to make it drinkable, not ideologically or aesthetically contaminated. By general consent, the classes were organized around slides and art books, arranged in periods, schools, countries and cultures. We would have our work cut out. There was also a bit of colour theory, drawing, perspective, volume and some practical exercises.

On my second week in Santiago, I heard there was an Argentine looking for me. He was waiting by my truck in the car park when I came out of class. He was a short, jovial-looking man, slightly provincial, and good natured. He could easily have been the gardener, but he turned out to be a doctor, a professor of pathology in the Faculty of Medicine. This was Dr Alberto Granado, friend of Che and companion on his motorcycle journey round South America. After the Revolution, Che had invited him to work on the island. Alberto invited me to his house to meet his wife and children since, he said, Saturdays and Argentines were synonymous with barbecues. Preparing the barbecue broke the ice and by the time we started to talk seriously we were already friends. I glimpsed that my coming to Cuba was starting to make sense.

I stayed until late and when I came to leave, Alberto said that his house would now be my home in Santiago. We would be saving the Revolution money to boot. They made room for me in his study, a narrow room filled with books and toys. In the months that followed, until July 1962, we talked endlessly about recurring themes: Cuba, the Revolution, Latin America, Argentina, Che … Che, Argentina, Latin America, the Revolution, Cuba.

On Saturdays, when I came out of class, I would go to Petiso Granado’s hideaway, the pathology lab. I would cross a huge hall with rows of stainless steel tables, some with corpses or bits of corpses, then climb some stairs to a mezzanine where I would find Alberto Granado, calmly eating a cheese sandwich as if he were at a picnic in a flowery meadow smelling of lavender, instead of formaldehyde and disinfectant. Then we would go home to resume our discussions; an obsessive mutual, collective, national and international examination of conscience. We discarded all the Argentine political history that had shaped us.

I told him of my travels around the north of Argentina, and the re-emergence of an underclass, descended from the poverty-stricken gaucho militias and survivors of the colonialism of yesteryear, who were forging a political presence behind Perón’s deceptive populism and, thanks to him, could no longer be ignored. He told me about his own recent journey through the Chaco, the region where I had been. I must surely have asked the reason for that journey, since he was already living in Cuba, but I don’t remember an answer that might have made me put two and two together. We talked about the workshop, political control, sectarianism, the militias, the yaguas shanty town. He was always interested in how my political work was going. The weeks passed amid corpses, barbecues and discussions. Then in July, he told me Che was coming to Santiago on the 26th for the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks. The weekend before the visit, Alberto said Che wanted to meet me. He planned a barbecue in his house.

However, two days before the celebrations, I was laid up in bed in Holguín with a stonking cold. The most important day of my life, and I was in no state to drive to Santiago, or even get out of bed. I got someone to call and explain the problem, and say how sorry I was. When I got to Santiago the following week, Alberto said Che had left a ticket to Havana in my name with Cubana airlines, and was expecting me as soon as possible.

On my second visit to Havana’s Rancho Boyeros airport, my expectations were different. I still did not know what lay ahead, but I felt that the old me, the spectator, was now sitting firmly in the front row. Sure enough, as Granado had said, a Rebel Army soldier in brand new olive green was waiting for me. He introduced himself as the Comandante’s bodyguard, and he was to take me to my hotel. It was none other than the Habana Libre. He filled in forms at reception with surprising agility and accompanied me to my room. He asked if I knew anyone in the hotel and when I said yes, he said I had to pretend to be here for work and not mention the real reason. And finally, he said that I had to be on call; whenever I went out, I had to leave word at the reception. ‘You never know when “the man” will be able to talk to you.’ I visited Gordo Cooke in his bunker and satisfied Alicia’s curiosity about the workshop, Argentines, communists and countryside.

Between two and three in the morning of the second day, the phone rang and a voice said: ‘Compañero, Che is expecting you.’ I went down. The bodyguard was there. He took me to the underground car park where a car was waiting. We swiftly crossed Vedado and headed for the Plaza de la Revolución where, after a few security checks, we ended up in the bowels of the Ministry of Industry. We took the lift to Che’s office and there, in a sort of kitchen which looked like the bodyguards’ bivouac, very young soldiers were drinking coffee or reading. I was to wait here. The opportunity to talk freely at Alberto’s barbecue had passed. Che was buried in his usual workload.

Then, a side door opened and Che appeared. He looked very tired – it was by now about four in the morning – and was wearing the same rumpled fatigues I had seen him play chess in. He ordered coffee to be brought to his office and turning to me, said simply ‘You’re here?’ and held out his hand. He said he was in a meeting with a delegation from I don’t know where, that unfortunately this time it was he who couldn’t talk, that he hadn’t time for the conversation he wanted to have with me, but someone would do it for him. I was to wait at the hotel until they came for me. He turned and went back through the door he had come out of. I don’t remember uttering a single word.

A couple of days later, some men in civilian clothes (from the intelligence services) came for me. The car drove along the Malécon to Miramar, a smart suburb of villas with gardens, and stopped in front of one. We went into a living room with comfy armchairs, an elegant dining table, and many books. I was left alone, to wait. It was not long before an army officer came in. He did not look like the typical Cuban. He had a short military-style crew cut, large frank eyes, wide cheek bones and jaw, and a playful smile. As soon as he opened his mouth, I knew he was Argentine and that it was Jorge Masetti.

After all, it was logical. He, his interview in the Sierra Maestra, his book, had brought me here. I knew nothing of his life in Cuba. Only that he no longer ran the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, but that Fidel had brought him back to front it temporarily during the Bay of Pigs invasion. I had glimpsed him twice on TV during the public interrogations of the prisoners. We sat down to talk just like two Argentines in a café. It wasn’t an exam, just a long exchange of opinions, ideas in common, work experience, mutual friends in Buenos Aires, illusions, disappointments, etc. I could see he knew exactly what I had been doing in Cuba and about my discussions with Granado, because he asked direct questions, like: ‘How long were you in Salta?’ ‘Are there mountains near the Tabacal sugar mill?’ Details I had given Granado.

We agreed there had to be revolution in Argentina. And, according to the theory of objective and subjective conditions, the time was ripe. The people were under attack, cheated, trapped, proscribed. The economy was growing, with a large productive capacity in food and consumer goods, but it was being usurped by foreign interests. The industrial infrastructure was developing, with large autonomous sectors, but the multinationals were taking over key areas that would be difficult to recuperate. A strong working class was ready to fight. There was a cultured and well-informed middle class. And an unequalled geographic position: all types of climate from the Andes to the Atlantic, and from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Antarctic. Argentina was the ideal country for a process of revolutionary change that would regain for its people the use of its immense natural resources, its own creativity and will to work, without being strangled by imperialist siege and blackmail.

Masetti said that the armed struggle was a real option. He had already done advanced military training at the new military academy which the Soviets had helped set up for the Cuban Rebel Army. After eight months of intense theoretical and practical training – having to put up with being a foreigner and being called Che’s ‘poodle’ – he had graduated top of his class. This type of training was essential. Unlike Batista’s, the Argentine army was extremely professional. Students from all over the continent came to study at our military academies. The project would not be like Cuba, first because of the size of the territory, and second because the population was mainly urban. Also, we had to take into account the level of politicization of the masses affiliated to traditional or populist parties, and with hegemonic influences that were difficult to combat. According to Masetti, the Cuban Revolution had shown that the foco theory would dismantle apparent hegemonies and focus popular support on an unexpected action, i.e. concrete activity instead of mere promises. The conversation took us into a realm of infinite possibilities, but Masetti was keen to establish the points we could agree on. He was not acting for himself, but on behalf of Che, his boss. In other words, if I thought the armed struggle could succeed in Argentina, Che had an offer to make me.

The project was to give serious military training to a small group who would set up a guerrilla base in Argentina, to be commanded by Masetti until after this vanguard group had consolidated its position and Che himself arrived. There were too many question marks for my liking, but the bottom line was, if it was Che’s plan and he was involved, I wanted to be in on it. So we got down to details: how the group would be formed, when and where the training would begin, the time it would take, and what we would study. Che would be sole overall leader, totally independent of the Cuban Revolution, although the Cubans would provide necessary help with infrastructure and equipment. Masetti was happy to discuss any queries I had about how the plan slotted into the Argentine political context, but this would obviously need a lengthy collective analysis and that, he said, would be one of our tasks during training. Naturally, a commitment to secrecy and the strictest cell structure was not only a matter of honour, but also of life and death. By accepting the offer, I took on board this commitment. In my second meeting with Che, he would define it more as a commitment to death than to life.

It was getting dark. We had been talking for six hours and my throat was dry. A very pretty Cuban girl came in to remind Masetti the children were waiting for him. Masetti apologized for various shortcomings while he introduced me. Conchita, his new wife, was pregnant. He fetched the children, who were too shy to come in, two of them between eight and ten, by his first Argentine wife. He was supposed to take them to their mother’s house, but we still had a few loose ends to tie up; so we continued, aided by some lemonade. I had to get back to Holguín and confront the problem of abandoning the workshop at such a critical stage of production. I had no idea how I was going to do it, without getting myself a bad name and into a political mess. Masetti would talk to Che about it. Then there was my wife Claudia. Although we had already planned to separate, and she would not mind my leaving, she would have to be sworn to the secrecy. She could not be left completely in the dark and be expected to be supportive. Masetti would bring that up with Che, too.

We left it that I would wait at the hotel for another couple of days at least, while he told Che the result of our conversation and my willingness to take part in the project. He made a call, and the security car came back for me. It left me at the hotel in a state of exaltation. I lay on my bed and thought over the events of the past few days, the people I had met, and ‘the project’, which was no more and no less than what I had come to Cuba for, although I never really thought it possible. And it had happened through a series of coincidences, connected by a mysterious force of destiny. It was after midnight when hunger (I hadn’t eaten all day) forced me out of bed, and I went out in search of some food and a large glass of rum.

Masetti came to get me the next day. We met on the corner of 23rd Street and the Malécon, and drove west out of Havana until we found somewhere for a drink and chat. Che would take care of the workshop, and also of Claudia’s residency in Cuba until we were in Argentina, or indefinitely if she wanted to stay. I had to get back as soon as possible, because classes would be starting in mid-August. I would find a ticket for tomorrow’s flight at the hotel reception.

I arrived in Holguín feeling really strange. Something was tearing at my insides. It was if my body was being emptied of ordinary organs and banal feelings, and replaced by more ascetic, rigorous ones. I was acting from my own free will, nobody was forcing me to do anything, although the idea of a small group, divorced from any political context, seemed like an irrational adventure. And yet, being a small group was what made the plan so rational: more than epic, it was logical. Everything would eventually revolve round Che being there, but he was not able to move the project forward as yet, nor come without a minimum of preparation. It was all about smuggling out the seed, planting it in land where it could germinate, and cultivating it.

A memorandum from the Ministry of Industry signed by Che, and addressed to the INIT, was copied to our workshop. It said I was to be included in a group of scholarship students on a course in specialized ceramic techniques in Czechoslovakia. I had to be in Havana by 15 August. The news hit the workshop like a bombshell. They didn’t see getting a scholarship as a success, rather as abandoning a scheme that represented a steady job. We had worked in consensus, like a family, without hierarchy or exclusion, each one bringing his skill and enthusiasm. I tried to convince them that I had contributed all I could, and that they now knew more about the equipment, kilns and clay than I did. Rita saw it as almost a personal triumph, at least of her support for the workshop project. I insisted on giving the carpenter, Argeo Pérez, the oak table he had made for me. He had asked for permission to work on it after hours and I had seen the love with which he polished the wood, made the chairs and put the finishing touches to the varnish. I saw Melchor and Alberto Granado for the last time in Santiago when I took the plane for Havana. Melchor was moved. Granado’s eyes were shining with personal triumph, like Rita’s, except that he understood what it all meant.

For the second time in less than fifteen days, I landed in Havana. The intelligence services were there to meet Claudia and I. While we waited for the key to her house, we repeated our vow of friendship and wished each other good luck. Suddenly, the army appeared in the shape of Olo Pantoja, a captain in Che’s column that had won the great victory in Santa Clara. A bit chubby with curly brown hair, he told Claudia her house was ready and introduced her to the people who would be looking after her. I was to go with him. Claudia and I said our last goodbyes, not knowing if we would ever see each other again. Pantoja took the bag with my few clothes and books and we got into an army jeep. There was barely enough room because the floor was littered with guns. ‘They’re for you, to practise with’, he said. The time had come. I had to learn to kill. That is, I had to learn to die.