by Ciro Bustos
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.