Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  In São Paulo, we began to feel at home, but the train to Bolivia was like a time machine. We left skyscrapers and elevated motorways, crossed the poverty-stricken regions of Brazil’s interior, until we reached another century altogether in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the Wild West in eastern Bolivia. There was mud galore, men on horseback, raised wooden sidewalks, over-laden carts and trucks. All that was missing were gunshots, galloping hoofs, and the bandits’ getaway. The journey had numbed our senses. Each railway stop was a catalogue of social dramas reflected in the scarce and humble wares on offer: fritters, empanadas, water, orange juice, coffee, bananas and cigarettes. When you get to these parts, there is no room for amazement, you have to hang up your illusion-filled saddlebags and gather up the miserable remnants of neglected humanity, and ask yourself: What am I doing here? What do I talk about? With what right? With whom? You have to recognize that whatever you do, you’re not doing it for them, but for yourself, to earn the right to be called a human being.

  We had split into two groups: one with Masetti, Hermes and Furry that went by plane directly from São Paulo to La Paz; the other with the Algerians, Fabián, Basilio and myself by train to Santa Cruz; from there we would take the weekly internal flight that linked this forlorn population with the rest of the country. The Algerian bunch were less conspicuous, although no less incongruous: if we met any Arab asking questions, naturally we were to say nothing. We arrived eventually in La Paz, took charge of the ex-diplomatic bags, and said goodbye to our Algerian friends.

  Leaving Basilio and Fabián in a café, I went off to find my first Bolivian contact. The address was a mechanic’s workshop, and the owner, Rodolfo Saldaña, was extremely friendly and made a favourable impression. He took off his work clothes, and we went in a jeep to fetch the rest of our group and the bags, going back up the road I had come down from El Alto, where the airport is. Driving through the hillsides of the shanty towns which almost encircle La Paz like a funnel, we reached the little house of the modest family of an old schoolteacher, a member of the Communist Party, who with an infinite sense of hospitality offered us everything he had, which was not much. We were given his best room covered in mattresses, while he and his family managed in another. We were to spend an indeterminate time there, not going out or letting the neighbours see us. Luckily it was not too long before Masetti appeared with a plan for moving to the base on the Argentine border.

  My group, half of us, took a bus south to Oruro, where we were to meet Furry. He would arrive in a jeep he had bought for his trips as the ‘administrator’ of the finca that had been newly purchased, and we would carry on from there together. I went to the first appointment at an agreed meeting place in the morning, but Furry did not turn up. Nor to the second, nor to a third in the afternoon. He could be having mechanical problems, so we took refuge from the cold in a huge café–billiards hall, checking on the emergency exit every hour. Our presence was too conspicuous in this freezing little mining town.

  We stuck it out until closing time, at midnight, and since we couldn’t go to a hotel without documents, I decided to try our luck in a brothel on the outskirts of town that had been recommended, and where they served food. We took a taxi down a dusty road in the middle of a barren plain to a ruin of a building, looking more like a stable than a den of iniquity. I decided that we should go back to La Paz, but the taxi driver announced that we would need special passes to go through the police checkpoints, one leaving Oruro and the other at the entrance to El Alto. Not only did we not have passes, we had no documents at all! Masetti had them, because of some incomprehensible security measure he had taken in Havana. Our Cuban passports had been handed back to Serguera in Algiers and the Algerian documents returned to Abdel in La Paz.

  As in all wars of attrition, we began negotiations with the taxi driver. He found a solution: the noble institution of the bribe, that popular system for redistributing wealth which, in these parts, lubricates the most intransigent mechanisms and permits the free functioning of private enterprise. For double the price, plus costs, he would act as if we were relatives of his, returning drunk from a wedding in Oruro. We piled into the rear seat, covered ourselves in a poncho, and pretended to be asleep when we passed the checkpoints. We were half asleep, in fact, and dying of cold.

  When Rodolfo opened his workshop early next morning, I was waiting for him. We were told that Furry had fallen over a cliff, having lost control of the jeep just before hitting a cement drain on the same road we had driven back on in the night. But it was not simply an accident. If there was one man in Cuba who was right for Che’s project, because of his experience and military expertise, his bravery and youth, his intelligence and dedication, it was Furry. But if there was one man who was wrong for it, it was also Furry. His war wound – the shard of anti-tank grenade lodged in his right frontal lobe – had started having secondary effects, causing a sort of epileptic fit, during which he had convulsions for a few minutes, and then fell into a deep sleep. These problems were not caused by anything external, and could not be anticipated. The accident served as a warning. In future, when taking weapons to the finca or on any other high-risk trips, Communist Party contacts had to accompany him.

  We did the journey all over again, but this time we met in Sucre, the historical capital of Bolivia. Accompanying Masetti and Hermes was a Bolivian compañero from the Communist Party in La Paz, who had already helped choose and buy the finca. His name was Jorge Vázquez Viaña, but from the very first he was known as Loro, due perhaps to his rather hooked parrot nose. Young and educated, he was very friendly, inspired confidence, and could carry on an excellent conversation. The contact had probably been made by José María Martínez Tamayo (Papi), who had been talking to both the Bolivian and Peruvian Communist Parties about the guerrilla project, at approximately the same time.

  We continued our journey south and reached Tarija, Bolivia’s southernmost province bordering Argentina where the finca was. On the map, the geographical border here looks like a triangle, a fang sunk into hairy skin, formed by the course of two rivers: the Bermejo, which flows southwards down the left side of the fang (facing the map), turns at the tip and flows east for 18,000 kilometres, marking the border between the Argentine provinces of Chaco and Formosa before it eventually joins the River Paraguay; and a broken arm of the River Pilcomayo down the right hand side of the fang which also turns east further up to mark the border between Argentina and Paraguay, before flowing into the River Paraguay at Asunción.

  If you stand at the vertex of the triangle and look directly south, you can envisage the more than 4,000 kilometres down to Tierra del Fuego. In between lie the three million square kilometres of Argentine territory containing millions of Argentine citizens that have no idea where this place is. Then you can begin to understand that putting on a rucksack filled with weapons and a few days’ worth of food is not an odyssey but a feat of inestimable impudence or daring, and either way pure madness.

  We drove southwards from the city of Tarija towards the tip of the triangle on the road which runs parallel to the River Bermejo. The road is in Bolivia, the river is the border with Argentina, and the dense jungle is everywhere. A track leaves the road on the left-hand side and penetrates the triangle, navigating the virgin jungle with great difficulty, fording streams which at certain times of the year can be impassable, under a canopy of huge trees. The trail is marked by tyre tracks in the mud. They disappear into the forest from time to time only to re-emerge further on, until finally arriving, more by luck than design, at the finca. In the middle of this inhospitable nowhere, barbed wire suddenly appears, holding back the undergrowth on the right, and the track ends at a gate in a clearing with an orchard of citrus fruit trees and giant avocados. There, behind the canopy of trees, was a stone L-shaped house with a sloping zinc roof, some windows and a corner chimney with a whiff of smoke coming out. The jeep stopped in front of the entrance and the six members of the guerrilla army plus Loro got out. Stiff with cold, and having wa
lked much of the trail, ready to push the jeep out of the mud when it got stuck up to its axle, we still had to unload it. Furry and Loro were returning to La Paz for another load of weapons.

  Out of the house came the man responsible for the smoke, drying his hands on a tea towel hanging from his waist, like a housewife. He was Don Benito, an old member of the Bolivian Communist Party, permanently assigned to the Argentine project. His mission would be to stay in the house the whole time, except when Furry gave him permission to leave. He was used to living alone and working the land, so eventually he could supervise farm labourers as well as the house. For the time being, his favourite job was making peanut soup, which took him all morning, much to Masetti’s irritation. After morning coffee, sort of Algerian style, he chopped endless vegetables and, using a convex stone on a flat one, crushed a mountain of peanuts he had peeled himself. He fried bits of chicken and rabbit, adding the vegetables to the cauldron and filling it with boiling water, stirring all the time. Chillies and peanuts were his culinary secret and the result was clearly good. In mid-afternoon, when Masetti was looking for a rope to hang him with, he appeared with the cauldron of steaming soup, just in time to change everyone’s mind and humour. We ate once a day, to get used to what our future diet would be – at the best of times.

  The following week was very intense. We explored our surroundings looking for a way over the River Bermejo, while Furry made several trips, and not only to La Paz. For security reasons, he had already left weapons in places like Cochabamba and Sucre, helped by the part of the Bolivian Communist Party that was aiding our project. Between the finca and the Bermejo were mountains that plunged steeply down to the road, and another river, the Emborozú, also lay between the finca and the road. The mountains and the river prevented us from trekking straight from the house to ford the Bermejo. We had to find a place to ford and then use the jeep to transport the weapons.

  Furry made repeated trips to another border town, Yacuiba, and even went into Argentina under the pretext of buying provisions, but really to reconnoitre the terrain, and in passing, make acquaintances, like any young, dynamic farm administrator would. Not far south of the border at the tip of the triangle lies Orán, a prosperous town in northern Argentina. The landowning Bolivian bourgeoisie from Tarija often shopped in Orán, finding it more convenient to cross the border and drive on asphalted Argentine roads than to travel, rains permitting, to Sucre.

  Masetti was working with Federico on the final details for our clandestine entry into Argentina. The rest of us were unaware of these details, but it would subsequently cost Masetti a long walk. It is useful to recap on our names at this point, because familiarity had given us new ones. Leonardo-Fabián became Médecin, because he had worked as a doctor in a French-speaking country. Federico-Basilio got his original name back, or was Fede, or Flaco. I kept Laureano for strategic purposes, but among ourselves I was Pelado, or Playé for Masetti in his weird French. Neither Hermes nor Masetti changed their names. Furry became Carlos, the administrator.

  When Furry finished bringing the equipment, we unpacked the Algerian uniforms made in Yugoslavia. We chose the sizes for each of us and got rid of the labels so nothing could trace us back to Algeria, a commitment fully honoured until now. The uniforms were very well made, out of good olive green material, and we were happy with two lots of underwear, a shirt with big pockets, combat trousers with knee-length pockets, a woollen army pullover, and a fantastic jacket with pockets and zips all over the place. The excellent quality of the uniforms, machetes, cartridge belts, map holders, as well as the binoculars and compasses, which the Algerians had given us, did not compensate for the anger and disappointment we felt when we opened the equipment the Cubans had sent on ahead.

  For the second time, we felt we were being made fun of or sabotaged. Every Cuban knows how important good clothes and strong durable equipment is for a guerrilla force. Your backpack is your home and everything it holds means life, survival. Apart from the weapons which Che had helped Masetti choose before leaving Cuba, and to some extent the backpacks themselves, everything else was useless. It was a joke in very bad taste: thin uniforms made out of shiny nylon, awful in the heat and torn to shreds in no time, city trousers, imitation leather Tom Mix–style holsters with stars on them.

  We unpacked the weapons, cleaned and oiled them, and Masetti distributed them according to function and experience. There were two FAL rifles with their original cartridge belts for Masetti and Hermes, a Garand which for his height and weight went to Dr Leonardo, a Thompson for Federico, and a .43-calibre M3 for me. Counting stowage, ammunition and spare parts, each weighed more than six kilos. And that was just the rifles. We also each got a 9 millimetre Browning pistol, with magazines and bullets, and three hand grenades. My M3 was made larger and heavier by its silencer, a 30cm iron tube stuffed with metal washers and grilles where the noise of the explosion was muffled into a barely audible click.

  We soon realized it was impossible to carry everything we considered indispensable, and we began the inexorable task of unpacking. It was hard to accept, but if we didn’t, we wouldn’t even be able to lift our backpacks, never mind carry them all day. We took everything we could, up to 35 kilos. We had to repack the load and rearrange our straps, distribute the weight at the bottom, keeping the things we used all the time or in emergencies at the top.

  There was an extra load which pleased no one, least of all Médecin who was in charge of communications. We had to help him with the radio transmitter, the electric generator and its pedal tripod, a piece of high-tech equipment the CIA had dropped over the Escambray mountains for the Cuban counter-insurgency, and which Cuban intelligence had always managed to capture. Designed for clandestine commandos, it consisted of two main parts, one the size of a small car battery reinforced with a rubber coating, that could be dragged out of mud and got working, and the other an iron stand for the tricycle that moved the heavy generator. The transmitter was distributed between Hermes and Leonardo, and Federico and I carried the rest of it dismantled. When you included the things stuffed into the dozen uniform pockets, the total weight was indescribable, so that when we camped by a stream, after taking off our backpacks and stripping to change into dry clothes, we felt as though we had to tie ourselves to trees so as not to go floating off down the river.

  We chose the ford over the River Bermejo (further north, with less water), and Masetti gave the order to cross into Argentina. On a June night, in mid-winter, the jeep was loaded up with five backpacks and us in full combat kit. The little crazy army set off. The jeep climbed gasping to the base of the triangle, took the road down to the ford, and at around three in the morning, with no moon, we waded the river. Furry drove as far into the water as he could, we put on our backpacks with water above our ankles and with a wave goodbye, we crossed the rest of the river and disappeared into the jungle. Now in Argentina, we climbed a tributary stream, argentino like its twinkling silvery water.

  12

  The Base in the Argentine Jungle: June 1963

  We entered an immense country by an unknown door; no one had invited us, no one was expecting us. We were received only by the fantastic sound of water (to become our favourite symphony), and the obscene creaking of the jungle, mixing groans of pleasure and growls of danger: sighs, hoots, trills, thuds, flutter of wings and crash of falling trees. The stream descended impetuously, alternating waterfalls with natural stone dams, a sign of pronounced rises in the water level. Walking in the dark was gruelling, even impossible. At times, when the water route was impracticable, we had to make a detour into the darkness following animal trails, rejoining further up the pale glimmer of the stream we heard rather than saw.

  At dawn, Masetti ordered a couple of hours’ rest and Hermes, out in front, said he had found a good place. We saw nothing but what the beam of the torch showed us: branches and trunks, weeds and rotting leaves, some crags, a place to collapse exhausted. We set a watch, not so much for safety but to make sure sleep did not r
ob us of the morning. Every half hour, the sentry would wake his replacement and the last one would wake everybody, with coffee ready. Simple tasks, that would become routine, began laboriously. Making a fire in a damp jungle is not easy. You have to collect dry wood, if there is any, or take the bark off twigs and whittle them down to fine shavings, to find one that is not totally rotten and has at its heart something flammable. You have to improvise a campfire with stones for the kettle, fetch water, huddle the driest material round a tiny piece of paper from your notebook, light it at the first try (or start again), until the flame grows, cheered by bigger and bigger twigs (although wetter), until they finally catch fire.

  During those first days, our problems were multiple. First, the weight of the backpacks; second, exhaustion; third, hunger; fourth, lack of sleep. The weight on our backs increased rather than diminished, although we ate a few grams of food every day. Our muscles stiffened, our joints swelled, our legs refused to coordinate their movements, our shoulders throbbed with pain, our feet destroyed, our hands furrowed with scratches, our innards groaning, our lungs wheezing. And all the while sweating, soaking wet, boots inundated, skin blistered. An army of diminutive things stuck to us. Mosquitoes, ticks, lice and diverse larvae wiped our tears and licked our wounds, sipping here and there, nesting in the most intimate regions.