Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  Our working relationship grew into a close personal friendship with both of them, although different in nature. Lonatti was a man who never sought the limelight, the epitome of generosity and commitment. He was the ultimate professional, always delving into the Penal Code to recommend the line the defence should take. Roca was a brilliant wit, a tad anarchic and extrovert, seemingly irresponsible, but efficient, bold, brave and a good friend. He knew everyone who was anyone in political, trade union and cultural circles. They filed through his office and his house, and continued to do so even years later when the repression started and the Triple A was operating and it was nothing short of suicide to be seen there. The office he shared with the labour lawyer Garzón Maceda was eventually blown up. But all of us went there.

  Lonatti’s house, on the other hand, was a temple of peace and tranquillity. They opened it to me, making a bed on their sofa among scattered law books, briefs and files, that neither he nor his wife Sara – also a lawyer – ever found time to clear up. Alone, at supper time, when the hustle and bustle died down, we ate in the peace of the kitchen. They were back to being a young couple enjoying a visit from their friend. I sometimes accompanied Lonatti and Roca to the prison in Salta, driving Gustavo’s car, a powerful Ford Falcon, the model which would later be the vehicle of choice of the military ‘task forces’ operating during Videla’s dictatorship. Roca’s eldest son, Deodoro, used to come with us too.

  The two lawyers were earning nothing but their legal costs, but they were supported by other lawyer friends and representatives of the prisoners’ families. The aim was to get the case tried as a political rather than criminal matter so that they could use as evidence the underlying social causes, and the impatience felt by the younger generations at the deceit and corruption of the current political class. It would be a hard slog and there would be no happy ending, but solidarity and support could help get the prisoners better conditions, political prisoner status, justification of their struggle and vindication of their names. Whether they got out of prison or not depended on the vicissitudes of national politics, or our potential military capacity in the future.

  The confused fabric of left-wing politics comprises a variety of threads. Politics is an activity of the intellectual, economic and religious professional elites, who answer only to themselves and attempt to manipulate the working masses. Only atypical ‘revolutionaries’ successfully break the mould, until they fall victim to the same rigorous rules of the political game. But for every law, there is a way round it. Enthused by socialism, many young people passed through the ranks of the Marxist parties, but many then abandoned them, sick of theories that bore no relation to everyday life on the factory floor, and fed up with the opportunist behaviour of their leaders.

  21

  A Decision to Suspend Guerrilla Activity in Argentina: 1965

  Poets are like the landscape; there even though no one is looking. Without them, man could not exist. Poets appear when drizzle or nostalgia, joyful spring, truth or deep sorrow, prick the conscience. Then, they search the layers of your soul like an electrician after a storm, tying cables, changing fuses, isolating bare wires with a cloak of verse. Like a covering of snow over the landscape, smoothing out the bumps, levelling the hidden depths, opening the distances to memory, and making the sun sparkle in their reflections. There have always been poets, their metaphors making magic of facts, with that existential wisdom they seem to be born with. What is more, poets are always poor and, even if they may one day get published successfully, they retain that touch of tenderness that men who make fortunes do not possess. They become politicized, I think, to try to serve as lightning conductors in reverse, sending out into infinite space all the bad vibes generated by political parties and their followers.

  My friend and favourite poet in Mendoza, Víctor Hugo Cúneo, intellectual mentor and literary adviser, creator of my first serious library by recommending authors, special editions, and translations such as Faulkner’s The Wild Palms by Borges. He appeared one day with Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’, and on another with Joyce’s Ulysses, recently translated into ‘Argentine’ by a bank clerk. He insisted I had to have them, buy them, and take advantage of special offers, like a bookshop salesman. Cúneo was a much-loved character. Thin as a suit on a coat hanger, tie all twisted, black hair and moustache, bright incisive eyes that, somewhat alarmed, flickered from side to side until his gaze settled on you. Cúneo killed himself in Mendoza’s main square in 1969, setting himself alight like those bonzos who did so out of impotence and indignation at the massacre perpetrated by the Americans in Vietnam. I heard about it years later when I came out of jail in Bolivia.

  Other poets, before and after, influenced my appreciation of life. In Argentina, from dictatorship to dictatorship, poets had always sided first with the poor, and later with their armed organizations, their sensitivity a shield against exasperation. One militant publication, edited by another friend and political contact, José Luis Mangieri, was called La Rosa Blindada.

  Through my liaison work I got to know many poets, the first of course being Oscar del Barco himself. A hermetic poet, he was more of an existential philosopher, suspicious of people’s illusions of grandeur. A note from Oscar brought me to the door of another disturbing and already remarkable poet, subsequently to become one of the great poets of Argentina and the Americas. Near the Plaza Once, a few metres from the house of the radio technician who was constructing the guerrilla’s communications equipment, was the office of the Chinese news agency, Sinhua, the representative of which was this poet, a journalist by profession. We had arranged the meeting on the phone, and no sooner had I tapped discreetly on the door than I was ushered in. In the centre of a large room which constituted the agency’s entire journalistic operations, was a desk at which was seated the poet Juan Gelman. Initially our relationship was purely political, there was no place for friendship; but friendship is like mature wine, once it is opened it spreads its sense of well being and you cannot resist it. Juan explained the areas where he agreed with me and those where he had doubts, although there was already a common denominator linking us and spurring us to action. That, of course, was the Cuban Revolution. Juan provided me with a whole series of contacts (useless to recap at this point), and he also helped me send my first messages to Cuba, the indispensible condition for which was absolute trust. Invited to Cuba to attend a Casa de las Americas conference, he personally took an encrypted report stuffed inside one of my embossed leather gifts – a key ring in the form of a gaucho whip, or a cigarette case with a tango motif, something like that – to be delivered to Che.

  Other contacts were with the ‘trade union elite’ of the independent Left in Buenos Aires, like the pair of EJs, Emilio Jáuregui and Eduardo Jozami, leaders of the journalist and print unions respectively, small in numbers when compared to the powerful Peronist unions, but important politically.

  The next poet belonged to the generation after Gelman, but with a poetic style along the same lines, much appreciated in the most influential literary circles in the university from which he had graduated. He visited the prisoners in Salta, demonstrating solidarity with them by embracing a common ideal. He edited the cultural section of Jacobo Timerman’s newspaper La Opinión. His name was Alberto Szpunberg, Albertito.

  Alberto introduced me to David Viñas, a well-known writer who travelled widely, both to receive literary prizes and to serve on the juries awarding them. We went to his apartment in the centre of Buenos Aires, in Reconquista Street, and found him fresh out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, his wet hair sticking to his body. In his big loud voice, he questioned the serious intent of the mission I wanted to entrust to him (only solicited, in fact): to deliver a folkloric gift to a certain person. I had to convince him that handing it over personally was of the utmost importance, and he accepted. His brother Ismael, who headed a small left-wing Trotskyist party, an offshoot of Frondizi Radicalism, was closer to the revolutionary ideal politically, but David was an
important cultural figure.

  Alberto Szpunberg spent that period torn between a passion for poetry and the revolutionary struggle. He, Octavo del Valle (aka Manuel o Cristóbal, the EGP’s new Buenos Aires organizer) and Roberto Mario Santucho created the Masetti Brigade, the urban successor to the EGP. The impact of the youth and total commitment of the Salta guerrillas on Alberto’s life meant he eventually chose the most resonant metaphor. Juan Gelman and he would end up as militants of the two big revolutionary organizations of the time: Juan joined the Peronist Montoneros and Alberto joined the Marxist ERP (People’s Revolutionary Army).

  I got in touch again with ‘Vasco’ Bengoechea’s group, not only to find out how the accident had happened, but also to determine the status of our common project. As it turned out, my usual contact Carlos was one of the survivors of the explosion in Posadas Street, so he was able to tell me what he knew about it. Carlos was a calm, reflective, militant Trotskyist, who had been a member of Bengoechea’s group since it had opted for the armed struggle and split from Nahuel Moreno, founder of Palabra Obrera. Santucho would later do the same, and his own vision of armed struggle would become the ERP, Argentina’s most important Marxist revolutionary military organization. It was the fat, balding Carlos who had lent his identity card to Loro Vázquez Viaña in the Chaco, when I was following Federico into Argentina on my own spurious document. So, you could say we were almost brothers.

  According to Carlos’s story, the group had received a shipment of explosives, material that was easy to work with as long as you took adequate precautions. They were making land mines or grenades to be shipped out to operational zones when the time came. A supposedly well-trained technician was teaching them the last part of the assembly process. Hence, five or six people, including ‘Vasco’ Bengoechea, were in the apartment sitting round the dining table with a box of detonators on it. At this point, Vasco reminds Carlos that he has an appointment to keep. Carlos goes to the toilet, picks up his jacket, says he’ll be back in a couple of hours, and leaves the building. A couple of blocks away he is waiting for a bus, but instead of the bus comes a huge explosion. Like everyone else in the streets in the Barrio Norte, he runs towards the sound of the explosion and finds the apartment block he has just left is no longer there. As the dust clears, he can see that six stories of apartments in the middle of the block are now a mountain of rubble. Carlos thought someone must have dropped the box of detonators. On the subject of whether or not bombs should be assembled in a building full of family apartments in a densely populated suburb, Carlos expressed no opinion. Total lunacy had descended on the Argentine political landscape.

  The Córdoba section of our support network, headed by the Pasado y Presente group, also had links with the progressive sector of the trade union movement: for example, with Argentina’s most prestigious workers’ leader, Agustín Tosco, secretary of Luz y Fuerza, the energy workers’ union. They were also in contact with the metal workers of SITRAC and SITRAM, who a few years later would be at the heart of the Cordobazo, the famous popular insurrection that began in Córdoba in 1969. Our Córdoba group preferred the political actions of these unions to guerrilla tactics.

  Our Mendoza group, as I already mentioned, had been formed by dissident Communist Party leaders looking for grass-roots support and organic political development. One was my friend Cholo, of course, but others like Antulio Lencinas, Fuad Toun and Armando Camín also had considerable prestige and influence among workers both in the cities and in the countryside. The latter’s brother, Gustavo Camín, had been about to represent the Mendoza group on a visit to Masetti in the guerrilla camp when the tragic events of March 1964 prevented him. The organizational abilities of the Mendozans had been bearing fruit: they had been making uniforms, collecting weapons, enlisting recruits and preparing them to go to the mountains. But the defeat of the Salta guerrillas also altered the way they thought, and at a national conference in Córdoba the Mendozans agreed with the Córdoba group that there should be no further attempt to undertake guerrilla activity.

  However, opinion in Buenos Aires, La Plata and Rosario was divided. Peremptory demands were more passionate (often opportunistic) than rational. So it was decided to hold a plenary session, to be held in Uruguay for security reasons. Sendic’s people lent us a little house, or a shack to be more precise, on an immense empty beach on the Atlantic coast up near the Brazilian border. We had to get off the bus at some God-forsaken town and walk towards the sea to find the house. There was nowhere to sleep, except for old man Tiefemberg, who occupied the only bunk. The rest of us were in permanent assembly. We passed a resolution to suspend all guerrilla activity – de facto non-existent since the collapse of the Salta base – until such time as conditions were ripe for us to move into a more populated area with access to, and the participation of, an organized workers’ movement. It would be my job to transmit this resolution to Che.

  However, something happened in that year, 1965, which sowed confusion and uncertainty. For a prolonged period, Fidel and Che had been the undisputed heads and spokespersons for Cuba’s active revolutionary leadership of the Latin American peoples. Then, suddenly, Che began to withdraw. He had played no part in the conference of Latin American Communist Parties in Havana, even though in November 1964 he had just returned from his second trip to Moscow, where he had met the new premier Leonid Brezhnev. In December, he left on another trip, leading the Cuba delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. His speech in New York stirred up passion and hatred among his admirers and enemies, respectively. From there he went directly to Algeria, and then on to the rest of Africa, China and Europe, on a seemingly interminable tour. In February 1965, again in Algeria, Che gave his last public speech, almost, it might be said, his political testament, together with an article, ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’, originally sent to Carlos Quijano, editor of the Uruguayan magazine Marcha, where he openly criticized the non-revolutionary positions of the socialist camp. On 15th March, Che landed back in Havana and was officially received by Fidel, by all the important figures of the revolutionary government, and by his wife Aleida. He appeared before the press for the last time, and then he disappeared.

  A whole wave of rumours, some sinister and all tendentious, swamped the world’s media. Depending on the sources, versions had him being assassinated in the corridors of power after a disagreement with Fidel, being imprisoned on the island, being deathly ill, or committing suicide. The most ‘authorized’ sources, linked to the Argentine Communist Party, gave a political scientific interpretation, based on the dialectic of historical materialism, according to which good sense had prevailed and reined in the petty-bourgeois adventurism that undermined the inexorable march of the world’s proletariat towards socialism, under the banner of the Soviet Union. The same sources talked about Che’s ‘overt provocations’, his pro-Chinese, even Trotskyist sympathies. There was talk of a shoot-out in the middle of a meeting with the Castro brothers and other ‘important party members’ on the very night he arrived in Havana. Some recently arrived exiles, self-professed witnesses to the dark deeds, told stories of a cleansing operation throughout the country, dismantling support for the charismatic comandante. There was even a message asking for help, supposedly scribbled by Che on a scrap of paper, stuffed in a bottle and thrown into the sea through the bars of a cell in Havana’s La Cabaña fortress, where he had previously been commander. Cuba kept its counsel. The world’s intellectuals looked askance. When and how would the alarm have to be raised?

  At the end of April, Fidel had referred ambiguously to Che’s whereabouts – ‘he is where he thinks he will be most useful to the Revolution’ – to try and scotch the rumours. Unlikely as it may seem, I was not at all worried. The rumours were so absurd they ran off me like water off a duck’s back. Colleagues thought I was so calm because I knew what he was doing and was keeping it to myself, but the truth is that I had absolutely no idea where Che was, although I was certain he was up to something and we would learn about
it very soon. The silence from Cuba did not feel like a catastrophic drama, more like a manoeuvre combined with disinformation. The situation worsened, however, with the death of Che’s mother in May. There was no word of his reaction to her death, even though it was common knowledge that they had a very close relationship. The Cuban government published an official message of condolence for the death of the mother of the beloved Comandante and Minister of the Revolution, but no reference was made to the why and wherefores of his absence.

  Around the middle of 1965, news started emerging from Africa. Insurgent struggles were breaking out all over the place, especially in the Congo after the death of Patrice Lumumba. Guerrilla groups were fighting the troops of his successor President Tshombe who had been installed in power by the Belgian multinationals that controlled diamond extraction in Katanga province. Newspaper articles made mention of the presence of foreign advisers and white officers leading combat units for the government forces: Belgians, South Africans, North Americans from the CIA and the Pentagon, ex-OAS Frenchmen, Miami-Cuban pilots post–Bay of Pigs, etc. Western journalists were filtering out news. One day, came a surprising news flash: a column of trucks carrying government troops had been ambushed north of Katanga. Attacked with bazookas, the convoy was stopped and dispersed in a perfect tactical manoeuvre. According to the journalist, commands were shouted in a mixture of the local language and Cuban Spanish, specifically Cuban. So, there were Cuban officers there, Cubans from the island, not from Miami, concluded the report. For me, the mystery was solved.