by Ciro Bustos
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.
&nbs
p; 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.