by Ciro Bustos
In October of 1965, in a public act to celebrate the creation of the new Cuban Communist Party, Fidel Castro finally announced Che’s departure from Cuba, and he read out Che’s famous letter bidding farewell to the Cuban people, resigning all his army ranks as well as his government posts.
22
Summoned Back to Havana: May 1966
Six months later, in April 1966, a contact passing through Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where the Cubans still kept a trade mission, told me I was to go to Havana. He asked me for my personal details and intended travel dates so that airline tickets could be left for me at the mission. Che’s name was not mentioned, but to me it was obvious; only Che could send for me without further explanation and his were the only orders I would accept.
Emilio Jauregui, of the journalists’ union, had just returned from a trip to China and he also wanted to see me. I went to his office and he said he had an official invitation for me from the government of the People’s Republic of China, handed to him personally by a Chinese civil servant during a private meeting in Peking. Emilio insisted that, at the Chinese Embassy in Paris where I would have my first contacts with the Chinese, I would have to make sure that the flight to Peking went via Karachi and not any other city, supposedly to avoid Soviet surveillance on other routes. The significance of his concern did not strike me then as it would later, especially since I was excited about visiting the land of Mao, leader of the greatest peasant and guerrilla revolution in modern history. But first I had to go to Havana.
While preparing for my journey, I also had to think of my family responsibilities. I now had two children. Paula was born in January of 1965 and Andrea in February 1966. Ana María had to bear the burden of bringing them up when I was away, which was all too often. My trips were like the journeys our forefathers made into Indian territory in wagon trains: the date of departure was known but not the return journey. I might suddenly leave for a few days, a few months, or even years. That was my agreement with Ana María, but it had not been ratified by our little girls, and I had at least to consider them. A revolutionary should be a solitary soul, but history shows they all had lots of children, as if the starting point for revolution is love.
As usual in those days, a trip to Havana involved a flight to Paris and Prague. In the Latin Quarter of Paris, in the rue Cujas, was a small hotel run by a certain Madame Sauvage, who had been a painter’s model for, among others, Picasso. Her friendship with Fontana, Berni, Spilimbergo and other Argentine painters on their European pilgrimage had made her the protector of waves of Argentine students in particular, and Latin Americans in general, who arrived in the city with heads full of illusions, but pockets short of cash.
One of Madame Sauvage’s former protégés was our lawyer Gustavo Roca and, holding his letter of introduction, I climbed the interminable stairs of the Hotel San Michel until I met the lady herself, fat and affectionate with les Argentins. She was indeed happy to have me stay and installed me in a single room two floors up from the loo. Not far from the hotel, in a student attic, Toto Schmucler and his wife Miriam were spending a year in Paris on a study grant.
When the day of my flight to Cuba arrived, Miriam and Toto took me to Orly airport to continue my journey via Prague. Alejandro, an intelligence officer who wore his pistol hanging over his right leg like a Wild West gunslinger and whom I had met on my last trip with Pancho, was waiting for me at Rancho Boyeros airport. He sorted out passport control, then as we sat at the bar waiting for my luggage and sipping a welcome daiquiri (they did especially good ones), he ran through our immediate plans.
For starters, there would be no hotel, only a house as on the previous occasion. ‘Protocol houses’ they were called, ‘for security’. None of my friends were around: not Papi, nor Olo, nor Furry, who was now head of Cuba’s Western Army Command. There were only Barbaroja Piñeiro’s people, who I would be seeing shortly. ‘Relax, chico. You have to wait …’. Alejandro took me to an American-style house in Marianao, with an (empty) bar with stools in front of a glass display cabinet at one end of the huge lounge/dining room. The bedroom had wall-to-wall carpeting and a king-size bed. After the usual warnings (always say where I would be, avoid people I knew, etc.), he left me Cuban pocket money, cigarettes, cigars, newspapers and political material to study: recent speeches, updates on campaigns, etc. There was a lot about the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, Africa in general. To make my stay even more comfortable, Alejandro announced that a ‘compañera’ would come every now and again to tidy up and clean. I roundly refused, saying I could take care of all that. We were arguing about that when an official jeep arrived with enough provisions, including beer, to fill both fridge and kitchen. My waiting started.
The jeep came by, not even every other day, but every single day, ostensibly to drop off the canisters containing my meals from the Ministry canteen, but also insisted on leaving crates of Hatuey, the Cuban beer, cold cuts, cheese and other provisions, as if I were dutifully eating for an entire regiment. I eventually complained vigorously and asked to see someone in charge: Ariel, Iván, or Piñeiro himself. I had not come to Cuba to get fat. I kept complaining until Alejandro reappeared with an explanation of sorts. It was true I had been sent for but ‘you know how things are, chico, it’s not that easy. Your (work) plan isn’t available yet, be patient, coño!’ That being the case, I asked him to put me in touch with Furry. After all, he had been my immediate superior and as far as I knew he had not resigned from our group. Alejandro promised to pass on my request, and left with considerable tension in the air.
A day later, Alejandro returned with permission for me to fly to Santiago de Cuba, in Oriente province, and back. My reservation was for the following day. From what I have read recently, my account may seem to contradict others concerning the supposed date of Che’s secret return to Cuba (from Czechoslovakia, after the Congo) during his disappearance from the public eye. What I still think to this day might be wrong, of course, because I don’t remember the exact dates and I have no way of comparing them with anything. But there are a couple of facts that lead me to think I am not mistaken.
Cubana airlines had renewed its domestic fleet, and a brand new medium-sized Soviet Ilyushin took me from Havana to Santiago. In an area of cyclones, this normally peaceful journey was liable to be dangerous if there was a tropical storm. And this is exactly what happened. In the air again after a stop in Santa Clara, over Sancti Spiritus, halfway to Santiago, the plane turned into a cocktail shaker. As the plane lost altitude, the cabin hubbub died down, and the passengers, mostly men and women in some kind of uniform, began frantically making the sign of the cross rather than praising the quality of socialist industry.
Over Camagüey, we were just coming out of the storm when the plane suddenly shuddered as if it had hit an air pocket, and dropped vertically, in free fall. The journey abruptly changed destination, not so much physically or geographically, but psychologically. Sitting by the window, I watched what I believed to be my last sight of earth. The plane was falling like a stone, and the countryside below was rapidly coming up to meet us. I could see we were heading straight for the mill or hacienda of a sugar plantation because of the carts loaded with cane. There were people too, looking up at the sky, then scattering in all directions. I could even see some details: women carrying children as they ran, the dirt road bordering the plantation, the relative height of the palm trees. I still have a clear image of the moment in my mind’s eye. The machine started to shake and vibrate as if it were trying to grab hold of the clouds, suspended in the air as in cartoons. Just above the tops of the palm trees, it recovered its horizontal position, pinning us to our seats as we regained speed and height, and the sugar mill disappeared from sight. A chorus of wailing and clapping made it hard to hear the captain announcing our immediate landing in Camagüey. On the runway, we were told that a piece of ice had destroyed the internal blades of one of the jet engines, suddenly causing the plane to lose altitude. We could not continue our jo
urney, and had to wait for the arrival of another plane the following day. The airline invited us to rest and regain our composure in a hotel, meals and tranquilizers included.
I walked through the streets of the old city of Camagüey, delighted to be able to do so, but also astonished at how little there was to buy. There was no longer a café on every corner, as there had been four years earlier when I used to drive by in the pottery workshop truck. There was the odd one every now and again, but they had neither coffee nor rum. Shop and office windows were empty except, very surprisingly, for one. On display in the office of INRA (the National Institute for Agricultural Reform) was a brand new car, made in Argentina for use as taxis, small and white, peculiar-looking next to the six-metre-long Yankee models that Cubans were used to seeing. A placard explained that the car was first prize for ‘cane cutter of the year’ during the province’s current sugar harvest. Che was noticeable by his absence.
We arrived in Santiago in the afternoon, twenty-four hours behind schedule. A soldier in olive green greeted me as if I were an old friend. ‘Hey, Pelao, cheer up, chico! You’ve arrived, coño? I’ve been here since yesterday.’ I had never seen him before, but his cheerfulness was contagious. We got into an army jeep and left in a hurry, because, he said ‘We’ve a long journey.’ ‘Where to?’ I asked. ‘The north coast’, came the reply. That is, across the Sierra Maestra, past Bayamo and Holguín, the journey I used to do at weekends when I lived in Holguín and gave art classes in Santiago! It seemed like a nostalgic joke. He had orders from Furry that, as he told it, implied a level of trust and secrecy: ‘Go and fetch Pelao and bring him straight here to me.’
When we got to Holguín, I knew we still had to get to the coast, near Gibara. The roads were not good and we were running very late. Nonetheless, I asked if we could cross the city instead of taking the road round it, and the soldier agreed. What I wanted to do was drive past my old pottery workshop. We had been talking about cyclones and especially Hurricane Flora which years earlier had been so disastrous for this region, and I was curious to see the roof of the main part of the workshop, held up by columns only one brick square, designed by my architect friend, son of the dreaded engineer Fontana, despite doubts on my part.
The jeep turned down the main street, past the new hospital building (the Revolution’s handiwork), the Central Park, in front of my old house, and stopped at the gate to the workshop. Without getting out, I could see the corrugated iron roof shining in the afternoon sun, reflecting its green plastic sides. It was intact. The gate opened and Braulio, the clay maestro, stuck his head out. He looked up and down the street without giving the jeep a second glance. So the workshop was still running? Was it doing the job as planned? ‘Let’s go’, said the soldier. Or did I?
It was already dark when we reached a military zone, where we were detained briefly at checkpoints. I could see in the headlights that we were driving towards some hangar-like canvas constructions. The soldier had me wait in an empty canteen and disappeared for a long time. When he came back, he said Furry had left orders that I be given a meal and a bed. He did not know when he would be able to receive me but would see that I was woken up. I could not sleep at all; the four o’clock reveille coincided with someone coming to fetch me.
Furry was at his post, in a low building – half map room, half radio transmitter room – onto which had been tacked a camouflage tent like a wing, obviously intended to prevent a quagmire in front of the door. Other officers were working in the room, absorbed at their tables and radios. Furry had not changed. Thin, well shaven, dressed in his campaign uniform, he was his usual friendly self, no indication that our relationship had been so dramatically interrupted a year and a half ago. He explained that he had had more time to give me the day before, but the ‘bloody plane’ had put paid to that. I understood that he had a final troop movements exercise for a visiting Soviet Army delegation to start ‘this minute’. ‘Come on, tell me what’s wrong’, he said.
We sat at his desk and I explained the following: ‘I received an encrypted message from Che, to which I have responded as quickly as I could. I’ve been in Havana for two weeks, being fattened up in a luxury cattle pen, without anyone telling me anything. I have to be back in Argentina by mid-July to deal with the financial needs of the prisoners on trial in Salta, but first I have been invited on an official visit to China, not of my own doing, which I consider an obligation.’ And I added: ‘You see?’ We examined the matter in detail and, eventually, he made a radio phone call, which was not easy.
Military communication language is cryptic and, as would be expected, I understood nothing, but a few odd words were helpful. First, he wanted to talk to X, who was in Z, not there. Sent to Z, the problem was M, Q or something worse. ‘It’s 4.30 here too. Proceed’, said Furry, implacably. Eventually, a more normal conversation was had, but full of innuendo. Something like: ‘I’ve got Pelao with me, what’s going on?’ Ending with: ‘No, chico, sort it out, put him onto the man and be done with it.’ And a heated exchange ensued, still over the radio – in fact very heated indeed for Furry who usually said yes or no, leaving no room for excuses or discussion with subordinates. Furry said he had been talking to Barbaroja Piñeiro.
I looked out through the entrance tent, which framed the rising sun through the mist, disturbed only by a restless group of officers with enormous peaked caps and rain capes – impatient Soviets – in the best tradition of the calm before the great battles of the Second World War. Summoned by Furry, the jeep’s driver appeared, rubbing his eyes. He ordered him to take me back to Santiago. We said goodbye affectionately, before I passed in front of the nervous group watching the Soviet Military Command out of the corner of their eyes.
Back at the house in Marianao, things began to change. Within two days, I was visited by Ariel, who had ‘got himself up to speed’ with the situation. He said it was not possible for me to see Che for the time being. I had to wait, but Che knew I was here. To save time, Che wanted me to write a full political report on Argentina: parties, groups, contacts, relationships and organizations with common goals. They brought me a typewriter and paper. I protested that, typing with one finger would take me a month to write the analysis. ‘No problem, chico, tomorrow you’ll get a short-hand typist, coño, that’s better than a dictaphone.’ True enough, the next morning a middle-aged lady in an olive green uniform arrived, turned the splendid dining table into a desk: chair at its right height, carbon paper for the typewriter, ashtray on one side, cigarettes on the other. And, like a pianist to a dancer, fingers in the air over the keyboard, she nodded her head at me as if to say: ‘Shall we begin?’
I had prepared a brief outline of the points I had to make. This included a separate analysis of our organization after the catastrophe: a description of the different political sectors and groups; potential capabilities; the role of the General Labour Confederation (equivalent of the TUC) and the army, with the (apparent) internal crises within both these power blocs. They all appeared to be split by an inability to define themselves ideologically, but were actually split by the desire to define themselves once and for all: pro-imperialist capitalist right or nostalgic nationalist right; principled traditional socialism or popular pre-revolutionary socialism; combative Peronism or nationalist populism. Each party split into two: Radicals, Peronists, Socialists, and even the Communists and Trotskyists (it was said ‘there are two tendencies inside every Trotskyist’). The grass roots were beginning to break away from the party bureaucracies and a whole range of small groups were proclaiming the road to revolution, while the conservatives and the oligarchs went to their estancias to drink maté. Capitalism’s international pressure groups had dug in their claws strategically and the organisms for extorting wealth from the Third World – the World Bank and the IMF – slowly and simultaneously squeezed the neck and the testicles of the national economy and the ruling class. Meanwhile, the armed forces, beloved and feted by the US School of the Americas, made alliances, ready to put thems
elves at the service of the higher bidder.
My improvised analysis – inexpert and precociously daring – based on reading the abundant Argentine daily press, ended by predicting a military coup against President Illia, the old anachronistic and honest Radical who, I thought, had no way of surviving. (The coup by General Onganía happened a couple of weeks later on 28 June 1966, before my return to Argentina.) The typist came every morning for the next few days. We ate together, she made very good coffee, and we talked, though she never let slip a single ill-considered word. She didn’t mind altering the original as many times as necessary, but she was frustrated by the ‘Argentinianisms’. We finished. She tidied everything up, and Ariel swept her away: typewriter, copies of the report, and all.
Ariel returned a few days later, in a better mood. Apparently, Che was very pleased with my report. There were a few more matters to tie up before I could go home, without seeing him, given the hurry I was in. ‘As you know, he’s not available at the moment.’ I did not know, but I never questioned measures taken by superiors or outside my control. At no time was the mystery surrounding Che’s absence, or the campaign of rumours, ever mentioned. Both they and I had total faith. Between us, there was a tacit knowledge that he was not being manipulated by anyone.
We talked instead about the financial problems of the trial in Salta, and what the prisoners could expect. If the trial went against us, appeal included, we would have to get them out some other way, and for that we needed support and planning. Ariel promised to study the alternatives. Meanwhile, I had to continue making political contacts, monitoring the situation, and reporting back periodically. For the first time, they gave me one of their own contacts in Buenos Aires. I was to meet a certain Hellman, secretary of a dissident Communist Party youth sector in the city, and help him with whatever he needed to send people to Cuba for military training. Now all that was left was my interview with Comandante Barbaroja Piñeiro. He would sign me out and give me money. So I went on waiting for another couple of days.