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Part Two

Argentina

6

A Project for Utopia

The Cuban saga in the Sierra Maestra had diverse and contradictory consequences. For the Cubans themselves, there was an impact on national politics and economic strategies, and it also affected ordinary people, both socially and psychologically. Abroad, there was an irreversible impact on international relations, with regard to the north–south confrontation. The economic dependence of the south was structurally linked to its military subjugation, and the empire’s repression of any sign of national or regional independence was justified by the pretext of fighting communism.

The individual Cubans who had taken part in the epic saga were affected in many different ways. The majority went on to occupy positions in Cuba to which they would never have had access before, since the new society was based not on class but on their own sense of responsibility. Some discovered late in the day that the struggle had not been fought for personal gain, that the bearded fighters had opened the door to social change. Others, like Che, realised that they had to go on through that door and turn military victory into Revolution – that if Revolution does not change society, it is nothing.

Needless to say, Revolution led to confrontation with the continent’s dominant power. Moreover, the Revolution’s ability to confront the imperial power successfully depended on its capacity to resist the inevitable reactionary attacks. The basic argument was that no small country would have the capacity to resist by itself, and especially not Cuba, an island in the ‘mare nostrum’ of the empire, a few kilometres off its coast. It would be naïve and foolish to ignore this obvious fact. It was clearly unavoidable and imperative to create this capacity to resist, not just inside Cuba but outside as well.

Yet this was not just a question of will. The means also have to exist. Without economic autonomy, there can be no political or ideological autonomy. A revolution needs to be independent in all aspects: ties of dependency block the machinery of government and prevent progress. Economic independence is the key. In the twenty-first century, this idea seems redundant because the economy is everything. But in the 1960s, notions of national identity, Western civilization, self-determination, cultural, ethical and even aesthetic patrimony were still considered important. To maintain independence, to have the freedom to negotiate, to accept or reject policies at the international level, was of paramount importance. Especially, to be able to negotiate. In this sense, it was clear that Argentina had better prospects than other Latin American countries.

A revolution will never succeed in a poor backward country. Revolutionaries can take power, but nothing else. They will never be allowed to remain in power without surrendering their ideals and corrupting their principles. They will not be allowed to succeed. A victorious revolution is like a cancer spreading through the continent, erupting here and there. Then, if the empire is caught off guard, it will devote all its surgical skills to cutting the cancer out, above all other political considerations. The strength of the Cuban Revolution was to take power by its own means, by the will of its people, in defiance of doctrinal wisdom. Its subsequent unfolding drama was that of a lonely shipwrecked sailor besieged by dangerous sharks.

For Che, the commander of the guerrilla forces in Santa Clara in 1958 that had defeated the Batista regime and brought Castro to power, the danger was only just beginning. The Revolution was prey to all kinds of aggression – political, military, diplomatic and economic – that aimed to force it to abandon its independence and capitulate, or simply be invaded and obliterated. The only way to avoid this fate was to get support from outside Cuba, from a similar kind of independent revolution in an economically important country in Latin America, a revolution capable of consolidating the task of constructing a just society for all its peoples and resisting the pressures and conditions imposed by the existing world order.

This ambitious and adventurous idea became possible only through the single golden thread that sought to marry the power of subjective action with the harsh reality of objective facts: the introduction of myth into politics and war. That is, a physical presence that would lead the struggle, a hero with no national allegiance but who had not forgotten his ties to his homeland – the presence of Che, the Argentine, who believed it was legitimate to fight for a better society, no matter the country, but all the better if it was his own.

This idea embraces everything that Che had learned both from his guerrilla experience and the exercise of power. Two things were fundamental and complementary: the theory of the foco and the theory of the ‘new man’. According to the foco theory, a small nucleus of fighters can successfully confront a regular army in a country where there are huge inequalities, because the people will support and strengthen a determined struggle for power. Armed action, directed against the forces of repression and backed up by the guerrillas’ impeccable behaviour towards its local campesino base and captured soldiers, would also constitute a lesson in how to become a new kind of human being. Personal vices and egoism would be abandoned and replaced by a process of transformation. Through sacrifice, self-control, dedication and suffering, this would eventually lead to an understanding of the importance of solidarity and justice. Were the process to be sustained and developed, an organizational or party leadership would emerge that would draw on cadres influenced by an unwavering revolutionary ethic. When the resulting revolutionary forces came to power, they would create a society without injustice or discrimination. The basis for building this new society would be the ‘new man’, someone without defects or aberrant inclinations.

Looked at so schematically, the idea is to politics what a simple sum is to mathematics. It lacks any analysis of the situation in Argentina, of the international context, or of history, let alone of the law of probabilities – not to mention common sense and folly. From the point of view of the scientific analysis of human problems, rational intellectuals of the past 150 years had studied, measured, compared and scrutinized every political and social event on the five continents. Yet the most serious and prestigious left-wing intellectuals, cocooned in the most rarefied strands of thinking, were blind to the obvious signs appearing in the edifice of world revolution like cracks in a dam. They deceived themselves and others about the ‘new socialist society’ that was itself being built, as a matter of fact, on injustice, bloodshed and suffering. Some got a whiff of the smell of death, from tales of famine and repression, but they disguised it – like the bourgeoisie of centuries past – with the perfume of their own intellect and their own theories, and encouraged others to engage in collective deception. Others, like George Orwell, through his professionalism, honesty and humanity, ended up in the ‘dustbin of history’.

As for the foolishness of our particular adventure, it is impossible to negate the absolute purity of its intentions. It might be considered irresponsible or just plain risky, but the price was paid by the individual participants. It would be idiotic and criminal to drive down a motorway the wrong way, because the eventual victims would be innocent. Yet accepting danger in order to fight for a better world is an act of sacrifice, involving a renunciation of material wealth and the sublimation of personality. It is not to be confused with terrorist martyrdom, which carries out someone else’s designs in return for a place in paradise. No, it is to assume a lifetime of risk, of fighting out of love for the right to a shared future.

Che’s project had this transcendental simplicity: forget any idea of glory, confront earthly perils without fear, stand up in this particular tropical region and say ‘here we are, here we want to build a new society, in which the fruits of our labours will not be taken away, where our rights will not be violated, where joy is not privatized, where culture is within everybody’s reach, where the smell of bread fills our homes, and dreams come with the sunrise to dislodge the terrors of the night. If you want to stop us, you will have to come and find us, and understand that we will fight.’

Security was always our major weakness, both in Cuba (the threat of infiltration of any kind), and also during the time needed for Che to transfer to the guerrilla base that would be set up in Argentina. Responsibility for this first phase of the operation fell to Masetti’s small and inexperienced group. Any disaster, at either end of the project, would effectively put an end to it. Che could not come if we failed; the plan could not succeed without Che.

7

An Army of Five Madmen

Captain Olo Pantoja drove from the Malécon to the elegant suburb of Marianao around the Country Club, through streets of luxury mansions abandoned by the bourgeoisie when they fled to Miami. You could tell how exclusive it was by the air. It seemed purer and more transparent than what we were used to in Havana. The mansions, which you could hardly see for leafy trees, were enormous and surrounded by long grass. There was an overall sense of neglect in the contrast between the splendour and silence of the empty streets and the gardens abandoned to weeds and the sigh of the sea breeze. Each house occupied a block or more of luxurious vegetation.

The jeep stopped on a stony verge in front of large gates. At the discreet hoot of the horn, a young militiawoman appeared and opened them wide. The vehicle crunched down the gravel drive, coming to a halt in front of a neoclassical limestone building, slimy with damp and moss, its walls half covered by creepers reaching to the roof, its windows barred and shuttered. The front doors, standing proudly between columns of white marble, were solid wood with extraordinary pointed stained glass insets. They opened to reveal the black and white mosaic floor of an anteroom to a glass-domed indoor garden (like an Andalucian patio) with a fountain in the middle, encircled by wide galleries leading to a succession of doors. There was something modern about the style, a Byzantine-Roman-Californian mishmash that looked as if it was from a Hollywood set.

The Captain, who had jumped out of the jeep and rushed inside the house while I stared incredulously at my magnificent surroundings, reappeared with a couple of individuals, joined by a third from another door at the back. With typical Cuban irony, Pantoja alluded to ‘the entire army’ as he briefly introduced ‘another Argentine’ to ‘three compatriots’. A cursory handshake left us standing looking at each other. The quartet we formed left a great deal to be desired. Nobody looked like a hero: more like villains in a police line-up. In a comic strip, there would have been a bubble saying, ‘I’m not going anywhere with these guys.’

The tension ebbed after Pantoja gave us a quick run-down of our programme: first, unload the weapons from the jeep and put them in a store-room; then a tour of the house and grounds before eating; then wait for Segundo who would come that night, with someone else. We would receive provisions twice a week, as well as being given breakfast and dinner. Our only other visitors would be army personnel involved in the training, accompanied either by himself or his assistant Manolito. Obviously, we would not be allowed out. Olo Pantoja took his leave.

My three compatriots forgot their momentary doubts, and proved very friendly, even happy. An exchange of ambiguous personal questions, and tacitly secretive replies, placed us generally from the Argentine provinces – myself and two others – and the fourth from Buenos Aires. The latter, naturally the most cool, was also the tallest, had the best build, was self-assured but nice and polite with it. He took charge and suggested we continue exploring the house, as they had been doing when I arrived. The other two were from the Chaco. The thin bony one, hatchet-faced, pock-marked, and with a stiff crew cut, seemed a no-nonsense tough guy of few words. The other looked like a meticulous Italian immigrant from deepest Umbria who had swapped his mountain farmer’s clothes for a shirt and trousers with an impeccable crease he ironed himself. His attention to detail was obsessive: his shirt sleeves folded only twice, his two top shirt buttons undone to show the hairs on his chest, etc., and very well mannered. None of us seemed to have a name, so the Argentine expression ‘che’ filled the gap.

Our food, brought in an army jeep, was barracks food. In Cuba now there was no separate food for officers, as is usual in Latin American armies. Conversation was dominated by the endless twitter of Pepín, our militiaman who we insisted ate with us. He was from a group attached to the Ministry of the Interior (MININT). Sworn to secrecy, he was dazzled by the mission he had been given: to help relax and entertain a group of Argentines led by the legendary Che. He showed a real passion for guns, and knew all the models and their features. Swearing he had used all of them in a variety of circumstances, he imitated the sound they made with a special onomatopoeia: ‘Piripitipam!’ There was nothing for it but to call him that, Piripitipam, from then on.

Cubans ate early, like the Swedes. So it was not even dusk when, having coffee, we awaited the arrival of Segundo, as Pantoja called him. A jeep finally turned up. Several men got out, among them Masetti. His greeting indicated he knew everybody, but did not show how well. He said he was pleased the whole group was here, including a young lieutenant he introduced as Che’s bodyguard, name of Hermes, who would be joining the group and living with us ‘until death do us part,’ as they say. We set up a table under the dome on the patio and began our first meeting as the ‘army general staff’.

Masetti had experience of organizing a work schedule with disparate people, so he knew we had to start by getting to know each other. He did a quick profile of everyone present, starting with himself. We all knew who he was, but it was useful to see how he fitted into the picture. He said that, like the rest of us, he was joining something he believed in because the idea came from someone he respected: Che. No one doubted Che’s commitment to building the Revolution in Cuba, least of all him. But it had always been clear that Che wanted to take the struggle to Argentina, and Fidel Castro had supported him in this from the early days in the Sierra Maestra. Yet such a transcendental decision could not be left to chance. Che could not just get up and leave tomorrow; he could not neglect one revolutionary duty to take on another. Until such time as he could leave his Cuban responsibilities, he wanted the ground prepared for when – to call a spade a spade – he would be free to lead the armed struggle in Argentina, his homeland. So, time was of the essence.

We needed to set up a base as quickly as possible, explore the terrain, get to know local people, and set up channels of communications. We also needed to establish contacts in the cities, and create a countrywide support network so we could train anyone willing to run the same risks and fight for the same dreams. Such a huge project needed a minimum of people, but a maximum of qualities: sacrifice, stoicism, military skill, humanity. We did not need supermen, only men with moral integrity, human dignity, and a sense of shame at belonging to a society that does not value a man’s freedom.

Masetti had already been able to do military training, since the encroaching Stalinism had decreed he was out of political favour for other work. Sponsored by his mentor Che, he was one of the first batch of officers to pass out of the Rebel Army’s new military academy. Now a captain, Che had formally appointed him his second in command. The next to be introduced, the guy from Buenos Aires, was a doctor who had arrived in Cuba just before me, motivated by the same instincts and passion. A similar fortuitous chain of events had brought him here. A specialist in preventive medicine, he had worked in the countryside on the chronic diseases endemic to the island and got friendly with several Rebel Army doctors. They noted his enthusiasm for the Revolution and put him in touch with Masetti. From his name, Leonardo Werthein, I guessed he was Jewish.

The lads from the Chaco were the result of the trip my own guardian angel, Alberto Granado, had made there at Che’s behest the previous winter, a couple of months before our meeting in his macabre pathology lab. Alberto had contacted left-wing groups in the city of Resistencia, had done a quick evaluation (although way below the required minimum checks), and deemed them potential candidates. He invited them to Havana to discuss the possibility of taking the armed struggle to Argentina. Back in Cuba, Granado organized their trip and they had arrived a few days before the training started.

Of the two, hatchet face was the most able. He was a mechanic, a weapons expert, and had hunted by himself in the ‘impenetrable’, the desolate wastes of the Gran Chaco where even the indigenous people don’t like going. He knew the history of devastation in Argentina’s two northernmost provinces, the Chaco and Formosa, was used to the rigours of the mountainous forests, and familiar with new technology. Rather unsociable and shy, he seemed committed, no holds barred. His name was Federico Méndez.

His friend from the Chaco lost his name in subsequent events, and became Miguel, a pseudonym he chose himself. Of all of us, he looked the healthiest and most sporty, a classic candidate for the Argentine military academy. Then there was me, who coughed the whole time from the aftermath of my recent bout of flu. It eventually turned into a chronic bronchial condition.

Masetti did not want to be involved in those parts of the project Che would deal with personally. His job was to oversee the training and to get the group to bond. We would be taught by a large number of specialist instructors, although numbers were to be kept to a minimum. None of them, no matter how important, must know our real identities. The only exceptions were those responsible for the support operation, like Olo Pantoja, and a team led by Comandante Barbaroja (Red Beard) Piñeiro from the intelligence services. The rest would know only our pseudonyms, and we would get used to calling each other by these names. For example, from now on, Masetti was Segundo. The doctor opted for Fabián, although he would have liked Alejandro, Fidel’s name in the Sierra. Federico chose Basilio after a much-loved uncle, his Chaco friend was Miguel, and I became Laureano. Our original documents – passports, Argentine identity papers, driving licences, etc. – went via Segundo to the intelligence services. We were like newborn babies.

The only non-Argentine was Hermes, native of the Sierra Maestra. He had joined the Rebel Army just as Che was made a comandante (Fidel’s first appointment) and was forming his own column. He was a young mestizo, just a boy then, whom Che taught to read in the few calm moments of the fiercest battles in the Sierra. He had been with Che ever since: during the long march, at the Battle of Santa Clara, and the triumphant entry into Havana. After an army training course, which he finished with the rank of lieutenant, he became one of Che’s official bodyguards. He had now temporarily left this post so that he could be in situ when his comandante returned to his native land. Hermes, a farm boy in a uniform too big for him, was like a typical Argentine cabecita negra. He would look a lot less conspicuous than us ‘posh city boys’ lost in the jungle. His immediate task was to inculcate military discipline into the group, establishing a logic that said, for example, whoever was on guard duty from two to four should make breakfast at five, or the person who was best at something should do that the most. As Segundo’s expert in guerrilla matters, he would teach us about exploring, choosing camp sites, and organizing camp life. He was allowed to keep his name given that in Argentina it would mean nothing.

The next step was to turn one of the bedrooms into a dormitory. Making us all sleep together would force us to accept that, come what may, we were a group, sharing things, even our personal irritations, dislikes or phobias. The life we had chosen required us to learn to respect each other, our need for sleep, our moods, sense of humour, silences and even our defects and obsessions, as long as they did not disturb the rhythm of the work or were not a deliberate provocation. The desired effect was a kind of symbiosis that would be our insurance policy in time of need. Our common weaknesses and strengths, shared needs and dangers, and joy at successes for the common cause had to become second nature. We had to learn to act as one, never doubting each other, instantaneously, like a gestalt, guided by all-encompassing force.

With this pretty feeble group of men, plus one more who would be appearing any time, the army of Che’s dreams came into being: an army of five crazy guys, like Sandino’s ‘crazy little army’ in Nicaragua, although Sandino had five hundred men, not five. In this initial phase, the operation of getting into the country meant it would be risky to be more numerous. It was on this point that we had different opinions, material for discussion and timid analysis. The subject came up repeatedly, but there was nothing for it but to accept the general plan. Being an armed group from the start meant we would have no recourse to the legal system. The idea (an ethical one) was not to operate clandestinely then resort to habeas corpus, but to dispense altogether with the law that only protects the rich and powerful against whom we were fighting. Added to which, we had to bring in weapons, and you can’t put those in your luggage. We had to start by breaking civil laws pertaining to immigration and contraband, illicit association and forming an armed group, and military laws of insurrection and conspiracy to bring down the government. These laws were used exclusively against poor people, never against big-time smugglers, corrupt governments and military coup-makers. If we failed, we would be accused of trying to show that justice is not divine, but man-made and the product of a pre-mercantile human condition. Did we think we could do it? We thought we could.

For me, all great social transformations – historical and political contexts notwithstanding – have been led by the genius, will and charisma of a great man: leader and soul, brain and emotion, catharsis of the hidden, even ignored, desires and needs of a people at a given time. No mass movement can get off the ground without the emergence of such a figure, either out of the whirlwind of action, or from serenity and reflection, no matter how much praise populists heap on the masses. They can generate spontaneous social movements, but without the figurehead they are nothing but a boil erupting on the skin. From Spartacus to Mandela, Alexander the Great to Mao, Jesus Christ to Gandhi, the existence of the leader justifies the moment.

However, there are intellectuals who not only reject the notion of the great leader but actually demonize him and strip him of importance; intellectuals who watch the century go by from their armchairs, building castles in the air – like the socialist camp – without lifting a stone, until the castle collapses and they move seamlessly on to something else. But to lift the stone, you have to roll up your sleeves and run risks, and face the possibility, inherent in history, that your goals be misappropriated, and your dreams turned to dust.

For me, Che embodied honesty and ethical behaviour in the smallest details of every one of his actions. The masses, who will follow a man because of his ideas, even after he is dead, hate intellectual arrogance which, they sense, is expressed in books they will never read, and symbolizes a superior class that despises them.

The crazy side of our project, the feeling that we were insanely on our own, did not intimidate me. It excited me. My only doubt was existential. Do I do it, or do I watch others do it?

8

Training and the Missile Crisis: October 1962

It was daybreak. ‘Get up … !’ barked Hermes. Nobody seemed to have heard him, so he repeated in Cuban: ‘Get up, coño!’ We looked at him as if he were mad. His work schedule had begun with breakfast at six, followed by a series of exercises that from now on would be our introduction to the day. By nine o’clock, we had run, jumped, crawled, and flexed our muscles. Surely there must be some mistake? Then Olo Pantojo appeared with our first ‘instructor’, an armaments specialist the Castroist rebels had inherited from Batista’s army. Another new arrival was Ariel, from the Cuban intelligence services, who would be supervising the team of instructors on behalf of the Interior Ministry. His real name was Juan Carretero. He gave a speech to the effect that his team would do their job to the best of their ability, and try to do justice to the request for assistance from someone whom it was an honour to serve: Comandante Che Guevara. He was sure we would respond with the same effort and dedication. The course would be intensive but he expected that in three months we would have reached a level of preparation on a par with that of a specialist army officer. ‘Good luck. Patria o muerte!’

The instructor began his class by demonstrating how to use an old German Mauser, model 1894, from the Spanish-American war, and then went on, symbolically, to a US Springfield of the same period, both with a hand-ridden bolt. It was a very powerful gun with a hefty recoil if the poor idiot firing it did not hug it to his body. We had to take it apart and put it together time and time again, piece by piece, until we did it perfectly, and in record time. We had to clean the guns, oil them, polish them, caress them, as if they were erotic objects, until we got used to their roundness, their weight, their smell and their rigid and implacable presence.

We spent a week digging through the entrails of rifles, machine guns, pistols and carbines of all nationalities, ranging from the Winchester used in the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the US, to the modern Belgian FAL rifle used in the more recent dark history of the Congo. The latter was an automatic rifle we would presumably have to face one day, since it was used in Argentina by both the regular army and the Gendarmerie, the special anti-smuggling border police. After weapons dismantling, came shooting practice. We were taken to the Ministry of the Interior shooting ranges in the countryside. By mid-morning, Hermes had destroyed any concept of normality by making us crawl through the undergrowth with our noses to the ground, swing like monkeys through trees, flay our bodies by trying to run through bushes as prickly as barbed wire, and lie immobile on piles of enormous red ants that appeared out of the sand in their thousands. They infiltrated our uniforms and the damp and delicate parts of our skin, covering us from neck to groin with little bags of formic acid that burned like hell.

The cavalry of Olo Pantoja, Manolito, Iván and Ariel, appeared in the nick of time to rescue us from the clutches of that obsessive guajiro, who was convinced that to train was to demolish. After a brief snack, we went exhausted, scratched, bruised and swollen, to get beaten with rifle butts and have our ear drums burst by various thunderous explosions until we learned to distinguish between them. They fired over our backs when we tried to wriggle free of the barbed wire we were crawling under, until we thought our arses and souls were indelibly tattooed by gunshot. We also practised with live hand grenades after minimal instruction: ‘Wrap your hand tightly around the grenade, undo the safety catch, make sure your angle of flight allows you to throw with an outstretched arm, throw it forcefully and accurately towards the target, drop face down on the ground and count to ten, by which time the grenade should have exploded.’ At my first attempt – after Pantoja demonstrated by running zigzag towards some trenches, throwing first the grenade, and then himself headlong behind some rubble – I followed his instructions and we both lay with our hands over our ears waiting for the explosion. Ten seconds, ten minutes, went by but nothing happened. Pantoja went to investigate and came back with the grenade intact. I had forgotten to undo the safety catch.

The explosives instructor was like a fugitive from a Kubrick film. He piled up an arsenal of howitzers, mortars, shells, guns, anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines, dynamite, bottles of nitroglycerine, packets of C4 (explosive), potassium chlorate, gunpowder, fuses, every type of detonator, all live and ready to explode at the slightest gaff. Not all at the same time, of course. His attention to safety was absolute, but it was not contagious. ‘Do exactly as I do and nothing will happen, chico!’ But if something did happen, we would all go up in smoke. His appearance did not inspire confidence. He was missing an eye, fingers of one hand or perhaps the whole hand, I don’t remember, and he had deep scars on his forehead, irrefutable evidence of previous ‘accidents’. He insisted safety precautions had to be observed. ‘With the safety catch in this position, it can’t go off’, he said as he banged a mortar ferociously against the table, while we ran for cover petrified. ‘The plastic explosive that wreaked havoc in the war in Algeria is like putty, you can drop it, no problem’, he said, throwing it on the floor; ‘you can chew it and swallow it like marzipan’, he added, and ate a mouthful; ‘you can burn it,’ and he set fire to it.

At the shooting range, his classes verged on collective suicide. The idea was to teach us to make explosives with household materials. We mixed carbons, sugars, sulphurs, chlorates (with wooden tools, of course), put them in a tin, attached a detonator and a timed fuse, or a capsule of sulphuric acid, and buried it. The explosion made a crater one metre in diameter. Our brains started receiving warning signals, and enhanced reactions to the least sign of danger but, above all, a heightened awareness of everything around us.

We got back from the practice range only to fall yet again into the clutches of Hermes who, in the meantime, had planned a complicated commando operation to attack the house. Some members of the team had to defend it and the rest of us had to drag ourselves round the outside trying to get in without being seen. Each day ended with a meal, followed by obligatory reading material before bed, and even the night could be interrupted without warning to send us in pursuit of some fictitious nocturnal objective that the malicious guajiro dreamed up for us.

On one of those nights, the sixth (later to be the fifth) member of our group made his entrance. At midnight we had to dress in full kit, carry a backpack with twenty-five kilos of random objects, a rifle with full quota of ammunition, a pistol, provisions and a canteen of water, and set off on a twenty kilometre march, ‘the mother of all tests’, with ten minutes rest every forty-five minutes, behind our new compañero, chief of the Havana Revolutionary Police, Comandante Abelardo Colomé Ibarra. His boyhood nickname, and now his nom de guerre, was Furry. Standing in an official jeep with a radiotelephone, he set the pace through the deserted unfamiliar streets on the outskirts of Havana, respecting the designated rests which coincided with our being about to pass out. In those days in Cuba, a group of men marching round at night armed to the teeth was either part of a counter-revolutionary invasion, or barking mad. That was us.

Furry was very young, barely twenty, another of those boy commanders to emerge from Che’s column. He was seriously wounded at the battle of Santa Clara when an anti-tank grenade exploded. It went off a metre from his head, a metal shard piercing his forehead and lodging itself there. His guerrilla war was over, but he went on to have a brilliant military career. He became Cuba’s most decorated combat soldier and its highest ranking general. He commanded 15,000 Cuban troops in Angola in 1976, a war that changed the course of the region’s history and brought to power Angola’s first national people’s government under President Agostinho Neto. Furry was recalled to Havana, wreathed in laurels, and replaced by Arnaldo Ochoa, another much-decorated and famous general before he was executed in 1989. Furry was made minister of the interior that year. His slim distinguished face, of white Spanish stock, was turned dark, almost blue/black, by a five-o’clock shadow shaved down to his collar, from whence sprouted a mass of black hair that carpeted his body to his extremities. Hence his nickname.

The march passed off uneventfully. For the record, it was more of a speed trial than anything else, since we were on asphalt roads, doing an impossible-to-fathom circuit, with only the lights of the jeep to guide us. We didn’t sleep, even when we got back, because we had to clean and cure our blisters. But we all passed ‘the mother of all tests’ without asking for clemency. Furry gave us the nod, commenting in passing to Masetti that with us he was ready to go anywhere. Masetti explained it was no idle compliment. Furry would, in fact, be coming with us, to help set up a rearguard base somewhere on the Bolivian-Argentine border.

My relationship with Masetti, begun in his house in Havana, developed on two dissimilar but not mutually exclusive levels. First because I was the only one in the group familiar with our eventual zone of operations, that area of Salta separated from Bolivia by the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers, a region covered with tropical forest and inhabited by indigenous cannon fodder for the agricultural, timber and cattle enterprises, and by the poverty-stricken descendents of the ancient Inca Collasuyo, now sharecroppers for the landowning oligarchy. And second because we had become good friends: we had the same sense of humour, we had lived in Buenos Aires at the same time, had mutual friends, shared tastes, a passion for politics, a desire to be involved, but most of all because we liked talking. Masetti did not live in the house but came every day for strategy classes and sometimes shooting practice. The rest of the time he was mired in the quicksands of bureaucracy, setting up the part of the operation Che did not have time for.

As soon as he arrived at the house, he would come and chat with me. I always played devil’s advocate. My role apparently was to say ‘yes, but …’, although all I wanted to do, in fact, was to dispel my doubts. The resulting discussions increased our knowledge and confidence in the project. Masetti and I communicated on the same wavelength. We liked fooling about but, as Masetti himself said, we were also down to earth.

For different reasons, but mostly because we saw each other every day and both liked talking, I also became friends with Fabián, the doctor. (Basilio, who had many more technical skills than I, was anti-social, and Miguel did not talk at all). Fabián was, on the other hand, a Che fanatic and a bit of a fundamentalist. He was obsessed with something that was on TV a lot at the time: discovering hidey-holes in abandoned mansions – ‘a cache or stash’ – where people who had ‘temporarily’ emigrated to Miami had hidden fortunes in jewellery, art, antiques, etc. We inspected every wall, every nook and cranny, of the house. We even sussed the different widths of certain walls. Using Fabián’s stethoscope and our knuckles to knock on particular spots, we eventually discovered two hidey-holes, although the so-called treasure wasn’t worth having. One contained a big-game hunting rifle and a double-barrelled shot-gun, quite special. Another had papers and ornaments, sentimental stuff that was difficult to carry. It was all handed over to security.

One afternoon before he left, Masetti announced that Che would be coming that night. Or rather, it would be almost daybreak given Che’s duties at the Ministry. We would no longer be a bunch of loose ends who didn’t know if they fitted together until an important milestone would give them coherence. With our chief before us, we would be a cohesive unit welding hopes, passions, fears and joys into the metal needed to sustain the heart and soul of such an endeavour. We downed endless cups of coffee in silence. Then Hermes saw an escort jeep, followed by a car. Che and Masetti got out and came straight to our table under the dome. For some, it was their first meeting. But for all of us, including Masetti and Hermes, it was very special.

The scene is still vivid in my mind. I remember the exact position of the table on the patio, at the end of the gallery, on the left, under the glass dome open to a clammy night sky. I remember how we were seated around it, and I associate it with old Argentine engravings of cabildos, council meetings and patriotic gatherings. Except that in the old lithographs, the founding fathers, in velvet jackets with big lapels, are all sitting on one side of a table, facing a throng of citizens. Here, we were all on one side of the table facing a solitary hero sprawled in a chair, letting bureaucracy seep from his exhausted body, as he asked for a glass of water and a coffee.

From his long exposition (the political framework and military plans later merged in my mind with other conversations and analysis), I have retained his sense of solidarity, philosophy, utopia. He said he understood that our presence there, around the table, meant we shared an ethical view of the world, and implied total commitment to our joint project. It had to be made absolutely clear that there would be no benefits in the future, only sacrifices in the here and now. Although the revolutionary objective might be to take power, we would not get the reward, even if the aim were achieved. Most probably none of us would live to see it. ‘Remember, as from now, you are dead men. From now on, you’re living on borrowed time.’

He said the situation we were witnessing in Latin America was atypical: a new reality, distorted, anti-historical, unacceptable to an empire accustomed to the servile docility of the oligarchies. The Cuban Revolution was a sickness the US system could not tolerate in its dominions. Plans were being hatched daily to destroy it and, in his opinion, they would end up harming it. But Cuba was more than a successful experiment looking for its own way forward, it was the last card for the peoples of America, and they had to play it. The US could destroy Cuba if they chose to wipe out the island, though the price would be very high. But they could not destroy its example, and if it spread throughout the continent, it would be imperialism that would be destroyed. In any case, the task we were setting ourselves was not the utopian dream of defeating the most powerful army in the Americas, but of making our presence felt, so that our people knew the armed struggle was an alternative, and not be afraid of it. Traditional politicians kept vain hopes alive. We would show that the people’s dignity and future had to be fought for.

Che added that he could not go much further in the Cuban process. He had given his life to the Revolution but a revolutionary life was not to be wasted behind a desk. He sincerely believed, without false modesty, that he still had a role to play, and by playing it in Argentina he would serve the Revolution in South America as a whole. For this initial stage, he needed our help. We had to learn as much as we could in these classes, and remember how much they were costing the Revolution in increasingly difficult times. It was a bitter pill to swallow, knowing the resources being put at his disposal when every single man, every single dollar, taken from the Cuban budget was a sacrifice. We could not prolong the training more than strictly necessary. We needed to take responsibility for the project – under his leadership – as soon as possible, but Cuba would cover a minimum of the essential organizational support. Our task, as a group, was to keep ourselves safe, establish the camp in Argentina, familiarize ourselves with the region, increase our numbers, and avoid combat until he arrived.

He would visit us as often as he could while we were in Cuba, hopefully once a week, but he could not be sure. The climate of aggression against Cuba was a sign that new attacks were on the way, and we had to be ready by then. But we shouldn’t feel we had to sit there in silence: that is, if we had any doubts or things we did not agree with, we should say so, not keep it to ourselves, because soon it would be impossible to withdraw.

He gave us the floor, but as often happens at conferences with a non-professional audience, no one had anything to say. Masetti, on the extreme right of the table, looked at us as if he had asked a question. Fabián played with a pencil, as if he was taking the minutes. Me, in the centre, looked at the others, while Basilio and Miguel, to my left, looked at the floor. Overcome by embarrassment and a sense of the ridiculous, but mostly because I thought saying nothing showed a lack of respect, I spoke. It is impossible to reconstruct my ‘discourse’, more or less a series of wobbly questions. The overpowering impact of Che’s presence drowned out every sound that did not come from him.

I think I asked if we would be supported by any kind of organization once we got there. The reply: none at all, creating them is part of the task. I think I showed a certain incredulity at the disproportionate odds – half a dozen men versus millions. I remember his reply: in Cuba they were only a handful and they won. I think I insisted that, in Cuba, they had been a handful – many more when they had disembarked – but that the 26th of July Movement had been waiting in the wings. It was not the same, he retorted, to go in on a war footing after an event like the Moncada, as it was to go in clandestinely with an exploratory project: the 26th of July Movement came out of a previous isolated experience. I think I evoked the somewhat indigestible image of an ant on the edge of a three million square kilometre cake, and behind the ant image I suggested that our cause would have to prosper from the periphery towards the interior, not the other way round. I also brought up Argentina’s unresolved internal political conflict, Peronism. His reply was that Argentina’s problem is the dependence and poverty of its people while its wealth is in foreign hands. Peronism is only a symptom; for the struggle, the sickness is what counts.

I think that was how I explained my most immediate doubts, and they were not dismissed. On the contrary, they were adopted as subjects for further discussion. The meeting ended at dawn. Hermes mobilized the bodyguards and Che said goodbye with a mixture of exhaustion and satisfaction.

Classes resumed with renewed gusto. The team of instructors was joined by experts in radio-communications, telegraphy, self-defence, use of telescopic sights for light artillery, bazookas, mortars and recoil-less rifles – all weapons which can be easily captured from the enemy but are no use at all if you don’t know how they work. Our instructors put a huge effort into teaching us the most exquisite details of warfare technology. Weapons exert a fascination, they mean danger. Despite their amazing technology, all weapons are horrible. Yet some have the fascination of horror.

We were choosing the best automatic weapons, weighing up size, weight and the most universal calibres. We left out some supposedly superior Soviet ones for the obvious reason that there were none in Argentina. The US infantry had developed a practically indestructible machine gun, the M3: a .45 calibre made completely of steel, with an enormous covered bolt the size of a piston – like a ghetto blaster. It had a hugely destructive capacity, but was very heavy. My preference for it was unfortunate, because I had trouble carrying it later on. The arms manufacturer, Fabricaciones Militares, had acquired the rights to make it in Argentina, although it was reproduced in .22 calibre, much lighter but just as effective.

Our apprenticeship continued, both theoretical and practical, and a constant stream of experts fought for the best and largest number of class hours. Well into the course, a special guest appeared, his visit cloaked in secrecy. He was a general and hero twice over, Spanish and Soviet. Masetti introduced him as Angelito. Over sixty, in a uniform without insignia, he was certainly angelic looking, not very tall, a bit chubby and balding, but a picture of health. He was quietly mannered and spoke excellent Spanish. Angelito said he would be lending a critical eye to some of our training sessions. He began there and then. During our stops for rest and food, he talked animatedly, picking our brains no doubt to see if we had any residue of intelligence.

Angelito was an admirer of Che’s guerrilla tactics in the Sierra Maestra, and especially in the Escambray, a combination of guerrilla warfare and permanent German blitzkrieg which was now studied in Soviet military academies. Angelito had known defeat as well as victory, bitterness and glory. After the final Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War, he had gone into exile in the Soviet Union with the Communist Party’s combat contingent. There he had joined the Red Army and taken part in the victorious offensive right up to the fall of Berlin. Now also a Soviet general, the Soviet Communist Party’s central committee had sent him to Cuba to advise on the creation of a new-style professional army. Despite his age, he proved he was in magnificent physical shape by doing back flips from a standing position, like a gymnast. He considered fitness of paramount importance. His name was Francisco Ciutat, a Catalan.

‘Russian’ weapons had begun appearing in Cuba. First to arrive were rifles (Czech actually) and the cylindrical barrelled ‘Pepechá’ machine gun, famed for its role in the fall of Berlin. Next to come were the ‘four mouth’ anti-aircraft guns which fired from four barrels simultaneously. They were being placed in strategic positions round the city, and were also seen being driven round on the backs of new Soviet lorries. The comandantes were now sporting the Macarov, a .45 calibre pistol with a quick-fire burst option that left any target like a colander. And finally, the ‘best rifle in the world’, the AK47, plus heavy artillery, tanks, etc. But they were just small beer. The big fish did not get much press, although rumours reached even our chaste ears.

The Soviets were building sites for intercontinental missiles. Nuclear perhaps? Between his first visit to our bunker and his second, Che had been to the USSR, talked to Khrushchev and signed military cooperation agreements that included bases and installations on Cuban soil for defensive purposes: radar, ground to ground missiles, ground to air missiles, etc. And why not strategic? Che did not talk to us about this level of military secrets, naturally, but after his trip he appeared less pessimistic. He seemed to be expecting large-scale confrontations and seemed almost to be welcoming them. He urged us to finish our training as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, each member of our group began to specialize, almost by natural selection, following an army unit’s classic division of labour into operations, logistics, intelligence and communications. Masetti decided Basilio would be best at operations, Fabián at communications (as well as health), Miguel at logistics, and me at security and intelligence. We began having our classes separately, except for shooting practice and fitness. We also had medical and dental check-ups and I asked them to take an urgent look at my bronchitis, already turning to asthma. I wanted to follow Che’s example, but not to that extent!

The training took a new turn, more romantic and scientific. I got very attracted to secrecy. Everything I was taught was secret, for my exclusive use. My self-defence instructor argued, realistically, that learning enough karate to fight even a beginner would take me a couple of years, so he concentrated on techniques to help me escape attacks from behind, or the pincer movements police used, adding a couple of ‘lethal’ blows for when I needed them. Fortunately, I never had occasion to use them.

October 1962 was a war of nerves, and of words. Accusations flew back and forth between the US administration and the Cuban Revolution. No one appeared to want to give way or try to relax the tension. On the contrary, diplomatic events added fuel to the fire. Ben Bella, having recently taken power in Algeria, arrived in Cuba in the middle of September, evidence of previous anti-imperialist collaboration. Anatole Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister on a visit to the US, said the weapons delivered to Cuba were purely defensive. But on 22 October, Kennedy appeared on television, the U2 photos in his hand, to denounce the USSR for installing long-range strategic missiles in Cuba. In retaliation, he announced a naval blockade. Cuba declared a state of emergency, put its combat troops on the alert, and called for general mobilization. Che was made Commander of Western Forces – from Havana to the western tip of the island – presumably the first combat zone in the case of an invasion. If the Americans landed, they would not repeat the mistakes they made at the Bay of Pigs. They would try to secure one end of the island, with easy air and sea access, and a single military front.

9

Prague, Paris and Algiers: November–December 1962

The streets of Havana had lost their usual ebullience. Military trucks went by loaded with troops and militias. Sand bags were piled up at the entrances to buildings, and anti-aircraft guns set up in the city’s squares. The people, usually so laid-back, became hurried and frantic. An electrifying collective anxiety seemed to have possessed those still trying to get onto overcrowded buses and trucks. Manolito dropped me off at the Revolutionary Armed Forces’ hospital in the centre of Havana. It was assumed I would be treated for my bronchial infection and taken straight back to the house; Che wanted our group transferred to Pinar del Río, where his Western Command headquarters was. But the doctor who saw me was a comandante as well as head of the Pulmonary Infections Department and, although he understood the urgency, he was the one setting the timetable. After a series of tests, including a basal metabolism, he ordered a massive attack of antibiotics and ten injections of ten cubic centimetres of aminophylline to be applied twice a day. Five days of jabs, all told. ‘You’ll leave here good as new, chico, straight to the front’, he said, as if stopping the Yankee marine corps single-handed depended on me. So I was hospitalized, and the support team came to tell me my compañeros had left for Pinar del Río.

The hospital was a modern, well-equipped building several storeys high. I was put in a three- or four-bed room on the tenth floor with a panoramic view. Being a military hospital, it was like a first-rate barracks. The leisure room TV worked but only on one channel: the missile crisis. The chairs were occupied by patients with differing degrees of illness but all predicted certain defeat for the imperialist invaders. Recently operated-upon patients and even those on their death beds demanded their clothes and weapons so they could join up again. Only notices on the walls and a finger on the lips of a beautiful nurse reminded us there should be silence. Doctors appeared, dripping scalpels in hands, at the slightest sign of news or a speech by Fidel. It was war-time euphoria given the military nature of the place, but was nonetheless typical of what the country was going through. The Cubans were ready to be incinerated rather than let arrogant imperialists ride roughshod over them.

The climate of confrontation got worse by the day. The island was blockaded to prevent the passage of Soviet cargo ships, their decks lined with more missiles, as the U2 photographs on US television showed. Looking out to sea, you could see US gunboats anchored at the limits of international waters. US planes violated Cuban airspace every day. On 25 October, a missile from one of the Soviet launch pads brought down one of the notorious spy planes. A rumour went round, Masetti told us later, that Fidel was visiting a Soviet missile site, and Russian officers were showing him the sophisticated control panels, with radar monitors giving precise positions. At that very moment, a high altitude U2 entered Cuban airspace. Putting theory and practice together, the Russian officer demonstrated step by step the sequence of maximum combat alert (deactivation of the security shield, activation of firing mechanisms) as the screen showed the U2 reaching the centre of the island.

‘And now what?’ asked the Commander in Chief. ‘If we get an order to attack, we press this button, the radar guides the missiles, and the plane is destroyed’, the Russian officer replied. To everyone’s amazement, Fidel stretched out his long arm and pressed the button, murmuring ‘Let’s see if it’s true, coño!’ That the U2 was destroyed was certainly true. Two hundred thousand marines hurriedly boarded their transport planes, the Flying Fortresses filled their holds with bombs, Cuban soldiers said goodbye to their families, and whoever could do so downed a large shot of rum, in case it was his last.

With bruised arms, perforated by needles, I went off to join my comrades at the front. My journey was in vain, however, because a few hours after rejoining my group, Khrushchev agreed unilaterally to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US taking their missiles out of Turkey, and a commitment of non-aggression towards the island.

Che ordered our immediate return to training, intensified to cut short the timetable. On his second visit after we returned to the house in Havana, despite his exhaustion and sombre mood, he told us of the tension surrounding the crisis. The group had not seen him in Pinar del Río despite being near his headquarters in a cave in Los Portales, so we were all waiting expectantly. I remember him saying how he had been in a meeting with Fidel when there was a phone call from Carlos Franqui, editor of the newspaper Revolución. Fidel had thrown the phone onto the map table and, swivelling on his heels, had aimed a violent kick at a wall mirror, shattering it. No one had expected the Russians to take that decision.

Che was very pessimistic about the way the crisis had ended. He was sure that, left to its own devices, the US wanted to attack the Revolution and destroy it. Any other result would not be consistent with imperial intentions. They will never forgive Cuba for existing, and providing an example of a sovereign nation living in dignity and freedom. ‘You’, he said, ‘must pull out all the stops and finish the most important parts of your preparation. The mountains will take care of the physical stuff, but other parts you can’t do alone. I want you out of Cuba before November 15th.’

The classes increased and changed, especially mine. A jeep collected me every morning and brought me back at night. I spent hours working on keys and codes, encrypted and unencrypted, counter-intelligence techniques, methods of disinformation, interrogation and counter-interrogation, which in the end, was the only knowledge I ever used in critical situations. A lot of emphasis was put on the moral cost of such activities. Of what you must be prepared to sacrifice in order to be effective: family, pride, reputation, privileges, and life itself as a last resort. My instructors, who had been trained by the Soviets, probably the best espionage school in the world, had a lot of practical experience. I heard detailed accounts of unsung heroes who had given up everything, left their loved ones in that moral maze of ignorance, assumed another respectable (at the same time horrendous) identity, gone undercover to infiltrate Cuban counter-revolutionary groups in Miami, and stayed there indefinitely working for Cuban intelligence. As I learned all this, I felt as though it was a living death.

Yet intelligence did actually work in Cuba. The long lists of thwarted attempts by the US intelligence services to kill Prime Minister Castro and other leaders make the counter-intelligence team justifiably proud. But in the end, it is down to the undercover agents who pay with their honour. They will never be vindicated. We had to wait for the writer Norberto Fuentes to leave the country to discover that one of the ‘President’s men in the notorious Watergate case was a Cuban agent. The aim of the training was an almost perfect apprenticeship, but “if you screw up, chico, you screw up, we don’t know you”.’

At the same time, we worked on the details for our departure. In those days, Cuba had two ways out to the West for its ‘commercial’ flights (a euphemism because, one way or another, all the passengers were government officials): through Mexico or Prague. Our group would leave via Czechoslovakia, where we would wait for the infrastructure on the ground near the Bolivian–Argentine border to be put in place. The training programme had originally included a month’s combat experience of the ‘anti-bandit struggle’ in the Escambray mountains, but this was not going to be possible. Otherwise, our general preparation was good.

There would be seven of us, travelling together but separately so to speak, on the first Cubana plane to leave the island for Prague since the October missile crisis: Masetti, Furry, Hermes, Federico, Leonardo, Miguel and myself. There would also be broad intelligence support from the embassy in Prague and from another comandante, Papito Serguera, who would act as the link between us, the Cubans and the Czechs; he would be the only person to see our faces. Specialists in secret operations, under orders from Olo Pantoja, Iván and Ariel, and from time to time, Ulises, another intelligence operative, came every day to bring us reasonably smart city clothes, take passport photos, and work on the invention of our personal profiles, appropriately equipped with family details, occupation and reasons for our journey.

Leaving Cuba, nobody escaped the meticulous eye of the CIA cameras either in Mexico, Gander (Canada), or Shannon (Ireland). When you got off the plane to refuel in Gander, you had to walk to the airport departure lounge in single file down a narrow stairway against a wall at the end of a huge hall. The cameras did not miss a single passenger detail, not only their faces, but also their walk, physique, tics and even socks. Neither could you avoid the KGB’s cameras in Prague, Berlin or Moscow. Anything suspicious would lead to a tap on the back from some agent of control. This being so, our first problem arose even before we left Cuba.

One day in the second week of November, we began ridding the house of any trace of Argentine presence. Ariel’s people picked up our belongings and Ulises took away the weapons and equipment in a van. He had unloaded a couple of new tyres from the back of the van, his own personal vehicle perhaps, and while arranging rifles, bazookas and machine guns on the floor, kept up a constant enthusiastic chatter. He was sorry he could not come with us because of his skin colour (dark mulatto) but assured us he would be ‘in the thick of it’ before us because he was going ‘just over there, to the other coast’, meaning Venezuela, where there were blacks, although not as cute as him. He put the tyres back on top of the pile of weapons and left.

Masetti decided Leonardo-Fabián could visit his family in Vedado while we were both going to get some X-rays. Leonardo had fifteen minutes to go into his apartment, kiss his wife and children and come back out. To me, it seemed more of a torture than a favour. Half an hour later, I sent him a Morse code signal on the horn of our van parked in front of the building. Leonardo came running out, his heart in his boots.

Masetti and I had a conversation about this little episode. Leonardo seemed to get more lenient treatment because he was the first of the group to be chosen and seemed to have some unspecified backing. He had come to Masetti via Che who had heard about an Argentine doctor who was prepared to sacrifice everything. This backing was doubtless in Leonardo’s imagination since none of us had any privileges. But if anyone tended to idealize our roles, it was Leonardo. During our chats, illusions of glory could be glimpsed engulfing his dreams. But I reminded Leonardo that the clearest long-term offer we had received was to end up as corpses.

Masetti had insisted from the start that we constantly improve our personal skills because we would each eventually be responsible for a specific area. I had been put in charge of group security both during our journey and afterwards; this implied psychological rather than physical vigilance. I also had to make sure no one put his foot in it and that we programmed into our psyches plausible explanations for the group’s every move, so that we would come out of any awkward situation smelling of roses. It would mean implementing what I had learned, without favouritism or pulling rank. It was my job and everybody had to comply. To boost my self-esteem (to make me more ruthless), Masetti told me that Angelito, the Soviet-Spanish general who was evaluating us, had made a very positive assessment of the group as a whole. He had said that individually I was the best (I suppose he meant on a political level) but that he did not recommend taking someone Jewish. Masetti had not told Angelito that it was Leonardo who was Jewish, not me, because he did not want to spark a last-minute argument that went further than personal opinion, since it was clear the Russian general had been given improper access to inaccurate information.

On our last night in Havana, Masetti suggested we put on the smart clothes we had been given to travel in. He himself arrived unrecognisable in a dark suit and tie. Che had suggested he take us for a slap-up meal. We went in one of those impressive American convertibles to the only decent restaurant in those days, the famous Tropicana nightclub, where we ate like shipwrecked sailors, watching the hypnotic and sensual spectacle of the revolution-fired mulattas.

At Rancho Boyeros, now José Martí International Airport, Barbaroja Piñeiro, Ariel and some of our instructors, came to say their formal goodbyes in a VIP lounge away from curious eyes. They handed us our passports, prepared by the intelligence services’ forgery section. I felt as if a bucket of cold water had been tipped over me. It was farcical. The Cubana plane was leaving in half an hour. Wanting, and needing, to know who I was, I opened my new (Uruguayan) passport only to find that the photograph was of a tall man of about twenty, with blond hair and blue eyes. Although I was bald on top, I actually had a mass of black hair encircling my bald pate, and dark brown eyes. I would also be thirty-one in four months. Only a joke (a last-minute test of my role as group security chief), or premeditated sabotage, could explain this stupidity.

‘With this document’, I protested flippantly, ‘I might as well travel with the handcuffs already on.’ Masetti grabbed the passport and took Piñeiro aside. Apparently, they had had no choice, it was the only Uruguayan one to hand, and we had built a profile around my being a Uruguayan citizen. Besides, they argued, we were landing in Czechoslovakia, a friendly country. They would send another one through the embassy. This was not exactly true. We had to run the camera gauntlet at Gander and Shannon. An intelligence service used to fooling the CIA could not use such a feeble excuse, not after three months work. And in any case my final destination was La Paz, not Prague. Again, Masetti said nothing.

Leaving tropical Cuba and landing in the frozen wastes of Prague airport was like waking up as a dung beetle. Papito Serguera was aware of this and was waiting for us with a van full of winter clothes and boots. He drove us for an hour out of the beautiful city to a summer tourist hotel, for government or party members no doubt, beside Lake Slapy, buried under half a metre of snow. The hotel was closed, as was to be expected, but was looked after by a family of caretakers. While a young Czech who worked at the Cuban Embassy filled in all the forms, a beautiful twenty-year-old pushing a cart loaded with bedclothes, signalled to us to follow her. She showed us to our rooms. Doubles for Hermes and Leonardo, Federico and Miguel, and as luck would have it, singles for Masetti and myself. Furry was staying in Prague with the Havana sugar mission, so he left with Serguera. We had a planning meeting and got quickly acquainted with the Czech national miracle: beer. Masetti decreed permanent activity to stop us getting soft through lack of exercise, and this meant an extra job for me: interpreting without language.

I went to ask the girl about meal times and maps of the region. She was called Zlata. Our only common language was drawing. There was paper and pencil on the reception counter and we invented an extraordinary language. I drew a clock and a plate of food, separated by a question mark. She wrote the hour. I drew a rising sun and a steaming cup of coffee. She counted the time on my fingers. This became our means of communication: it was foolproof. Zlata lent us a scale map of paths and villages round the frozen lake. We would choose a house a few kilometres away and set off after breakfast. In this way, we kept much fitter than in Cuba even. The winter kit we had been lent was good and we could walk through deep snow. By adding a few kilometres every day, we were soon reaching the furthest villages. They were small, never more than a dozen houses and barns, but always with a good tavern where, by drawing a picture of steaks, chicken legs, cauldrons hanging over fires and spoons filling soup plates, we created a good atmosphere and, between toasts and hugs, ate some wonderful stews washed down with the best beer in the world. We would return to our hotel sated, and exhausted.

These daily manoeuvres aroused official suspicion and soon reached embassy ears. Perhaps we had unwittingly set off local intelligence’s nervous system. We had come across an area of woodland fenced off by metallic sheeting and barbed wire, in the middle of which stood a solid wooden tower with a metal thing on top pointing at the sky. Federico examined it and declared it to be a ‘trig point’, of geographical and military interest. The last thing we wanted was to upset the Warsaw Pact. Back at the hotel (this strange exclusive complex at our disposal), we dined like red princes, waited on particularly solicitously.

Papito Serguera appeared like a wet blanket with the news that we had to restrict our walks. We could have argued that our ‘innocent holiday’ was a reward, or even R&R, but Masetti chose to take us back to Prague. He was impatient with Havana’s silence, and wanted them to know. The tough marches through the snow were over. Our group split up, with Masetti and Furry going to a hotel in the centre, and the rest of us to the Hotel Intercontinental out near the airport. Every morning a tram from in front of the hotel left us in Wenceslas Square, in the heart of the old city.

We began to feel trapped. Time passed with no news of further plans. Masetti’s temperament could not stand anything underhand, any whiff of a set-up, and he unloaded his frustration by harassing his Cuban contacts. He didn’t like grumbling alone, and since he had got used to discussing things with me – or rather talking at me – I had many sleepless nights. But I was an obliging witness to his decisions.

After the group left on the morning tram, Masetti asked me to go to his hotel to help decode the messages he had been sending and receiving from Havana. He appeared to have done nothing else since we had arrived. Masetti’s antennae, sharpened by being manoeuvred out of Prensa Latina by the old guard Cuban communists, suspected a deliberate about-turn in Havana, or even a desire to abandon the plans altogether, over and above the agreement made with Che, now his sole point of contact. However, he had to acknowledge that Che’s huge workload might cause him to lose sight of how the project was doing. And don’t forget this was not a government plan but Che’s personal request for collaboration from a state facing immense difficulties. For practical reasons, both we and Che were reliant on the Cuban intelligence services, and communications were in the hands of a circle of operators with no political autonomy, or perhaps too much: time would tell. The return messages always recommended patience, but gave no timetable. Masetti wanted to take a step sideways and break our dependence on Cuba, at least while we were waiting. This was not easy in a ‘socialist camp’ country. We needed a more revolutionary base.

One night in his hotel, in the early hours, after a long diatribe questioning the role of Barbaroja Piñeira as a presumed saboteur serving Fidel’s prudence (which I found logical, even probable), Masetti decided to stop messing about and get alternative help from his Algerian friends. I slept in an armchair. By morning he was ready to leave and we sorted out his ticket and visa. By midday, he was on the flight to Algiers. He had sent a cable prior to departure and, when the plane stopped in Rome, his Algerian visa was waiting for him. Running Prensa Latina, he had got used to moving between countries on the spur of the moment. The technique, he told me, was to not get stuck anywhere. Just take the first flight in the right, or approximately right, direction, and keep sending telegrams. Every country had a telegraph office. Three days later, he was back in Prague with an open and unconditional offer of help for our group, a personal offer from the triumphant leaders of the Algerian Revolution.

In a significant and appreciative gesture, Ahmed Ben Bella, the Algerian president, and Houari Boumedienne, his defence minister, had met Masetti at the airport in Algiers. It was Masetti who had originally broken the barrier of ignorance separating the Cuban Revolution from a people facing Europe’s largest army in a cruel struggle for their freedom. He had penetrated the French defences on the Tunisian border with members of the National Liberation Front (FLN) whom he had contacted in Tunis, and reached the mountain headquarters of the leader of the rebel forces, just as he had done all those years before in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel. He had asked Boumedienne how Cuba could help them. ‘With weapons’, the Algerian had replied. Masetti retraced his steps to Havana, talked to Che and Fidel, and on the basis of his detailed report, Fidel had said: ‘There’s a Cubana flight to Europe this morning, be on it. Ask Boumedienne where he wants the weapons sent.’ Without sleeping, and almost without breathing, Masetti flew back. A ship loaded with enough weapons for a battalion left Havana for Algeria. The ship’s captain received a telegram giving its destination while at sea. Masetti was one of that special breed of men, as Che had once said of Frank País. Not for nothing were they friends.

We made hasty preparations to leave Prague for Algiers, with a stop in Paris on the way. We still had our same documents. I bought a bottle of bleach and some cotton wool. I tested various strengths and applied it to my hair. Nothing happened. Then, suddenly, my hair lit up like a light bulb and turned an angry yellow. My face looked like a mask beneath it, and I had to dye my eyebrows to compensate. Masetti, whose humour was pretty dark, said we looked like a cabaret troupe, complete with transvestite. Passport controls were not as rigorous in those days as they are now, so visual details were very important. At the best of times, a flight from Prague to Paris would be expected to be carrying a cargo of potential spies coming to infiltrate the ‘free’ world. Getting through immigration was where the thin bit of our thread could snap. I let the group pass before I stood in line. The gendarme looked at my ridiculous dyed hair, stamped my passport and handed it back to me, saying ‘Allez, allez …’.

It was 30th December 1962. We arrived in the country I had dreamed of when I was an adolescent. In my eyes, it was not a new city. I had just been slow to open them. The bus from Orly dropped us at Les Invalides, and a huge taxi took us to a hotel a few blocks away along the Seine: the Palais d’Orsay, at the station of the same name. On the other side of the river were the Tuileries Gardens, with the Louvre to the right. When I opened the blind in my room, the Eiffel Tower was to the left.

The first thing we needed to do was to organize our onward journey. We eventually got reservations for 2 January and Masetti sent a telegram requesting Algerian visas. After that, he gave me a free hand to take the group wherever I wanted. Guidebook in hand, I organized a cultural tour.

The following day was New Year’s Eve and Paris ‘was a moveable feast’. People greeted each other in the street, and kisses from both sexes were planted on our deprived cheeks. We went to the Louvre, up the Eiffel Tower, to Montmartre where we ate with artists, and along the wide boulevards to the Bastille, where sitting in a corner brasserie reminded me more of Maigret than Robespierre. We got to the Latin Quarter more dead than alive but soon recovered, drinking wine until dawn. Was there another socialist paradise? Do police inspectors blow kisses? Can you sing the Marseillaise? Or the Internationale? Did you know both anthems are French? Not since then, not even at the double goodbye to the century and the millennium, have I experienced such general popular euphoria, so joyous and free from racism and discrimination. We embraced bankers and tramps alike, the difference no more than a work uniform. With champagne, fine cabernet, or fiery grappa in their hands, they offered it to us in glasses, or straight out of the bottle – unpardonable.

The 1st of January 1963 dawned late and bleak, our farewell to our bourgeois life. We devoted the day to museums, combing the boulevards of Saint Germain and Saint Michel for existentialism, looking for the hunchback in Notre Dame, or the phantom at the Opéra, reading newspapers, sipping espressos and Pernods in local bistros. Masetti knew more French than he let on, but he had decided our newspaper reader would be me, who barely remembered any school French, although I did manage to half-decipher the international news.

Leonardo insisted on going to Maxim’s, the capital of the culinary arts’ most favourite restaurant. ‘Just to see the birds that go there’, he said. We had to walk there, and we took it slowly. I noticed that every time we passed a post box, Miguel seemed to have a stone in his shoe, and slowed down. I waited for him, and we carried on to the next one, where again he needed to take off his shoe. Nearby was a pissoir, one of those numerous Paris locations with practical uses apart from simply peeing. I went in so I could observe him. Sure enough, he went up to the red box. I was behind him in a flash. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, as if I had caught him red-handed buying an ice-cream in this wintry cold. I kept the postcard to his mother in Argentina, after assuring him I would consider it a simple error on his part as long as he didn’t try it again or move a finger without my permission.

Federico knew Miguel from the Chaco so I asked him to help me monitor the situation. Federico asked for time to discover Miguel’s true intentions before I told Masetti. My view, knowing Masetti, was that we had to jolly Miguel along at least until we had got on the plane for Algiers. If we did not, we would be up the Seine without a paddle. My relationship with Federico took a qualitative leap forward. I had instinctively turned to him, not to anyone else, and from then on we trusted each other unreservedly. He became the compañero I could trust with my life, and it was mutual. That night, Federico and Miguel came to my room to talk things over. It had been a slip-up, a desire to show off to his family that he was in Paris, deduced Federico, nothing more. We decided to keep the matter to ourselves for now. Once I was alone, I destroyed the card.

10

Death Takes Centre Stage: Algiers, January–May 1963

Algiers is built on the hillsides surrounding a bay. Stairways, like viaducts, straddle the Arab quarter (the Casbah), and divide it clearly from the French area. We were driven along the seafront to the very west of the bay, and up to a villa overlooking the sea. It was clearly an exclusive part of the city, formerly inhabited by families of naval officers from the French base of Mers-El-Kebir, a fortified position dominating the bay from atop the mountain to our left. We could see it through our binoculars. At the villa, Major Bajtik, who spoke Spanish and had met us at the airport with two other officers, Abdel and Muhamed, introduced us to a small troop of about a dozen soldiers, standing to attention on the lower patio. They would cater for our needs, cook for us, and look after the house security. In short, it was a petite garrison with guests.

It was not all admiring the view and eating, however. An intensive training programme had been designed around weekly weapons drills, shooting practice, analysis of their recent war’s military strategy and combat operations. We would be examining how the combatants of the National Liberation Front (FLN) infiltrated the French border fortifications and their deployment in cellars and caves around the cities of Algiers, Oran and Constantine. A veteran of the war came to the house to talk about specific cases, and then accompanied us to the actual sites so we could see their strategic importance. We began with the fledgling FLN’s first ambush on the edge of the desert, led by Ben Bella, one of its founding leaders. Bajtik took us to a place called Aflud. Other trips followed, and each week we would go over the hills behind the Casbah to a former French army barracks where hi-tech weapons captured from the French during the war had been stored. Celebratory rounds from different calibre rifles, machine-gun salvos, and bomb blasts left our heads buzzing, but it got us accustomed to different types of weapons.

Eventually we were taken on a tour of the French fortifications on the Tunisian and Moroccan borders; it was an incredible experience. The supposedly impregnable constructions were a wasteland of barbed wire, explosives and watch towers which had once been patrolled day and night, but had finally failed to prevent the FLN from breaching them. The fortifications extended in a straight line along both frontiers from the coast to beyond the mountains that descend into the Sahara. Seen from the sea, a cross section of the lines showed first a minefield about twenty metres wide, then a section of barbed wire wrapped round half-buried girders and crossheads, then metallic sheeting four metres high attached to solid iron posts draped with more barbed wire, in the middle a road patrolled by armoured cars, and on the other side the same metal sheeting, barb-covered girders, minefields, etc. Every five or six kilometres, a watch tower with high-powered spotlights lit up the centre road at the slightest sign of alarm and swept over the areas of barbed wire. Patrols from the watch towers would converge on any suspected breach of the fortifications.

Relations between the Algerians and Masetti’s group, fraternal from the start, became almost organic, as if we were working on a common project. Although Masetti had re-established contact with Che through coded messages the Algerians sent and received for him, we were in the main isolated from Cuba and our whole stay was coordinated with Algerian staff officers. Not until February 1963, or perhaps March, did Papito Seguera appear, as if following in our footsteps, in his role as the brand new Cuban ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Algeria. There was upheaval while he got the embassy up and running. At first he came to the house every day, but his presentation to the diplomatic corps put an end to his free time and his visits. Papito had brought several belated messages, and reading them, and others he had received afterwards, sent Masetti into a fury all over again. Still no departure plans! Still calls for patience, even messages from Che saying just that. Masetti’s mistrust went into overdrive, and he sent Furry to Havana with orders to speak to Che, and only to Che.

The messages clearly contradicted each other. In one that I helped decipher – the phrase is engraved on my memory – Che says: ‘Nuestra atalaya se hunde lenta pero inexorablemente’ (Our vantage point is slowly but inexorably sinking), and he added that by now we should be in our zone of operation in northern Argentina. The ‘vantage point’ referred to was the island of Cuba, the highest point, from where one could see most clearly. By ‘sinking’, he did not only mean ‘defeated’ or ‘invaded’ but also that something unique was ‘disappearing’, or ‘being submerged’. Compared to a message like this, the others – which spoke of waiting, being patient, practising, studying, eating well – did not make much sense. Furry played the diplomatic courier, taking the messages. He and Che examined the collected messages together, one by one. In a meeting I attended when Furry came back a week later, he said that Che had gone through the decoded originals saying: ‘This is mine’, ‘This isn’t’, ‘Nor is this’, ‘This one is mine’, etc. That is, as Masetti explained, ‘Colorado is conning us’. Colorado was Barbaroja Piñeiro.

Furry brought precise instructions. Che would take care of finalizing the basic support infrastructure, i.e. buying the finca (farm) near the Argentine/Bolivian border, equipment, weapons. He authorized Masetti to draw up his own plans, with the help of our Algerian friends, to travel to the destination as soon as he said ‘Now!’ Coordination with the Cuban bureaucracy, still indispensable, should function impeccably from now on. Our group had to travel illegally, with Cuban officials making contacts that were problematic in unfriendly countries. A minimum of infrastructure was needed. So that ‘Ambassador’ Papito did not have to act as messenger, it was decided I would be the link to him, since I was the one with most freedom of movement. Bajtik lent me his car and I went often to the Cuban Embassy, where I was received in all seriousness as the Ambassador’s ‘Soviet’ friend, a good thing to be in those days. The ‘Soviet’ cover, for the benefit of Papito’s staff, was doubtless because of my yellow hair.

Meanwhile, the group still had internal problems. Miguel showed signs of wanting to get out of his commitment. Since he probably could not find a legitimate way of doing so, he invented a kind of personal incompatibility with Masetti. The atmosphere between them soured and a general irritability infected us all. Stupid problems arose, like competitiveness in sport, which was where Miguel was the stronger. This latent machismo gradually led to open confrontation and an invitation to fight, which Masetti was happy to accept in an improvised boxing ring. Fortunately, a series of gastronomic commitments with the Algerian staff officers relaxed the tension for a couple of weeks.