by Ciro Bustos
Alejandro came to fetch me after midnight and we drove around various parts of Havana, from Marianao to the other side of Vedado, as if we were lost and were looking for a restaurant or we were not sure of an address. We stopped at the Ministry of the Interior in the Plaza de la Revolución, where I waited in the car, then continued on through areas I did not know on the outskirts. Guided by a radiotelephone, the car finally stopped at what seemed like an Argentine-style police checkpoint. There were jeeps and patrol cars across the road, blocking the traffic. Alejandro got out, walked towards them, and came back immediately with a group which stood under the street lighting in the middle of the street. They gestured to me to come. As dawn was breaking, I went up to the group to find the Head of the Cuban Intelligence Services, Comandante Piñeiro, holding court.
He put his arm round my shoulders protectively, and said that he still had a long night ahead of him so it was best not to make me wait; that they would give me 5,000 dollars and a plane ticket for the following day; that Che wanted me to constantly update instructions for how I could be contacted, and to wait in Argentina for his next message; that I should discuss the contact details with Ariel and leave everything clear; that Che was pleased with the written report and did not think I needed to wait for a meeting which would be hard to arrange now, because he ‘was in the mountains’ and nobody could take me there; that I should go back to Buenos Aires, without more ado; that I talk to Hellman and help him send people to Cuba for training. ‘Have a good trip, Pelao!’ It seemed appropriate to tell him that I would not be going straight back to Buenos Aires, because I had an official invitation to visit China and the ticket was waiting for me in Paris. He was interested in the details of the invitation, but he had no qualms about it. We said goodbye and Alejandro took me back to the house in Marianao.
Time was now short and I spent the rest of the night finalising details with Ariel. Córdoba would be our contact point via a shop selling books, records and photos owned by a friend of Oscar del Barco. A special password (I don’t remember it now) was the only way to reach me. Ana María and I were planning to move to Córdoba, with the agreement of the EGP’s national leadership, so that all contacts would be centralized in the middle of the country.
Alejandro, my official guide, drove me to Havana airport, where we repeated the welcome ritual of the daiquiri, waiting for the Cubana flight to leave for Paris. We only had one, and afterwards in Gander (Nova Scotia, Canada), I regretted I had not accepted a few more rounds. My seat was on the right-hand side just over the wing, from where I could see the plane’s engines. The European route was still served by Britannias, a formidable British machine with turbo-propellers, which had possibly overspent its flight hours.
23
The Terraces of the Rising Sun: June–July 1966
Once I was in Paris, Toto Schmucler accompanied me to the Chinese Embassy. We had to explain the reasons for our visit, leave a phone number, and wait to be advised. We got a call the very next day. This time we were ushered in (with Toto as interpreter). They took my false passport and we waited a few minutes. A secretary from the embassy appeared holding a paper with my data on it, and asked me: ‘Are you Laureano?’ ‘Yes, I am’. ‘Do you have any other name?’ ‘Yes, Mauricio’. ‘What is your name?’ ‘So and so’. ‘And what do people call you?’ ‘Pelao’. A very Chinese smile that we would see often during the coming days illuminated his face. He asked when I would be ready to leave and I answered: ‘Tomorrow, via Karachi, please’. I did not need to insist on the route. It was clear that the Chinese had information that could never have been given them by Emilio Jauregui, who did not even know my real name. The invitation had come from a previous source.
After another couple of days, Toto and I were saying goodbye at Orly, and so began my most extraordinary journey into the future. After a stop in Rome, and a couple of hours in Beirut’s amazing duty-free airport, the first leg of my journey ended up with a night in Karachi, Pakistan. We had to leave the plane and sleep in a hotel paid for by the airline. Going through immigration control, a bearded policeman explained something in English that I didn’t understand and kept my passport. I reacted vociferously, gesturing at him to give it back, and we got into a fierce mutually unintelligible argument, while the queue of passengers looked on impatiently. The policeman, with plaited black beard, abandoned his courtesy and me my calm, swearing in Spanish and hanging on tightly to the corner of my passport. If I lost it, it would not be for want of trying not to. Then a young Indian, just behind me in a smart Western suit and tie, asked me very politely in perfect Spanish, if he could help. He argued with the official animatedly until, coming back to me, explained that the documents of all passengers continuing on the same plane the next day, are kept and only returned on board the following day. His included, since he was also going on to China. My unexpected interpreter turned out to be a Colombian student with a scholarship to study in China.
The journey went smoothly after that, despite our exhaustion and a few surprises. We were in Asia and the Pakistani Airlines plane also landed in Dacca, West Pakistan until 1971, when it became Bangladesh. The most terrible face of poverty was everywhere, even invading the airport lounge.
When the plane finally landed in front of the airport building in Shanghai, our first stop in China, there began what seemed like a comedy of errors. The Colombian and I watched anxiously through the window as a group of people invaded the tarmac, among them children in uniform holding flowers and lining up beside the steps being placed at the front of the plane. The air hostesses asked the passengers to wait in their seats until requested to disembark. Outside, a red carpet was being laid from the foot of the stairs to where a line of officials in typical blue Mao tunics were waiting.
An air hostess approached my seat and invited me to get off first. As astonished as the Colombian, I barely managed to say goodbye before following her to the airplane door, where the whole crew with wide smiles were waiting to say their farewells. I descended the steps, convinced there was some mistake, waiting for the moment for them to drag me away, but as soon as I set foot on terra firma, hardly daring to touch the carpet, the children ran towards me offering me their flowers. One of the Maoist officials spoke emphatically in Chinese and an interpreter repeated a welcome that explained how grateful the Chinese people were to receive a South American revolutionary who was fighting to build the road to socialism for his people, just as the Chinese people had achieved it under the leadership of Chairman Mao. There was obviously some confusion as to who I was. I was of course me, but I was by no means as important as they believed me to be.
They took me to some VIP rooms on the upper floor of the airport, where we sat in armchairs and they offered me the first round of the several litres of tea I had to drink in China, prepared before me with boiling water from a huge thermos and a mixture of herbs and flowers. Remember that it was midday at the beginning of June, mid-summer, and you can understand how little desire I had to drink hot water. But it was the first lesson I learned. Dying of thirst and heat? Remedy, boiling water. You don’t even need the tea. Boiling water by itself will do. From then on, everywhere I went, they repeated the thermos for the tea ceremony and the exchange of greetings, hopes for future achievements, and compliments.
Arriving in Peking towards the end of the day meant another reception, more tea and sympathy, and making official contact with a representative of the Chinese government, a member of the Committee for Relations with Other Peoples in their Fight Against Imperialism, and with a couple of interpreters for my exclusive use for the whole of my stay: a calm professional middle-aged man; and his tall, young, enthusiastic assistant from a translator’s school. We moved as a group to a huge Western-style hotel, the old and respectable Hotel Peking, on the big avenue in front of the Imperial City, in Tiananmen Square (Square of Celestial Peace). On the top floor, they left me in an enormous suite, with bedroom and lounge, and the most modern of bathrooms. The chief interpreter gave a brie
f rundown of our plans for the following day. Breakfast was from seven onwards, because at eight someone would be coming to discuss the schedule of work, visits and receptions.
The hotel served foreigners, or rather, Westerners. There were English, French or American breakfasts, with impeccable silver cutlery, crystal glasses and bread. The coffee was awful, so I made do with fruit juice. At eight on the dot, there was a knock on the door of my suite. But my visitors got the first surprise. The previous night in the shower, I had taken off my wig. It had become veritable torture in the summer heat and I had no intention of using it until the return journey. The official and interpreters stared at me, then between giggles and greetings, sat down in the armchairs and took out their papers. My schedule was to start the following day: a general of the People’s Army would explain his experience in the victorious people’s revolutionary war, going back to the struggle against the Japanese and the Kuomintang nationalists, and as a commander of Chinese troops in the Korean War. Every day I would be given relevant material in Spanish, so I could read up in my spare time. Later, we would go on a tour of the Chinese interior to learn about the development of both the army and the party, from the early days in Shanghai, the Long March, and the first liberated zone in Yenan. The programme would take a month, after which, we would visit North Vietnam: two months in all.
I told them I only had a week, that I needed to be back in Argentina in time to organize support for my comrades who were standing trial; that I considered the invitation from the Chinese authorities a huge honour, but it was my imprisoned comrades not myself who were worthy of such a distinction, and my commitment to them was precisely why I could not prolong my stay. In their name, I was ready to meet any appropriate official to show my gratitude for the invitation and for the political support the People’s Republic had shown to the peoples of our continent.
Unfortunately, then, I had to decline the invitation to participate in such a long programme. It is impossible, almost forty years on, to reconstruct from memory the details of the ensuing discussion, with its arguments, counterarguments, coercions, concessions and conclusions all expressed via interpreters, before we reached an agreement that was hard to better: they cut a month from the programme and I would extend my stay by over a week – what was left of the month of June and some of July, some twenty some days in all – but only in China, without going to Vietnam. In passing, this controversial session gave me a sense of the ways and means of parabolas, metaphors and adjectives in Chinese language and culture, and of their transforming and symbolic power. I was astonished how, for example, the more I humbled myself, the more my prestige grew. It was obvious to them that I was an integral part of a project lead by Che. I understood that it was Che they were honouring through me.
The next day after breakfast, again at eight sharp, there was a knock on the door and a large delegation came in, entailing a small ceremony to introduce the general and his assistants. The general was about sixty, relatively young given his trajectory. His history class was delivered almost automatically, not creatively as a teacher would, but schematically and rigidly, as if he were forcing an idea into the brains of his troops, like a instrument of ideological battle that had to be used in an implacable and precise way. He continually referred to the central role of Chairman Mao, the source of all wisdom and leadership, to the ideological work of the party as an indispensable link to the masses and, above all, to the masses themselves, origin and raison d’être of the revolutionary class struggle. The general’s story did not linger on anecdotes of suffering or heroism, of which there were no doubt many during the Long March.
When the general left at the end of each day, I was handed a pile of theoretical material which could politely be considered – in terms of kilos, more than anything – excessive. I could do no more than leaf quickly through them like reading a cartoon, stopping at chapter or page headings, to help me eventually formulate some sort of question.
We visited all the sacred sites of the Revolution’s heroic deeds with the same religious intensity. The face of Imperial China was, in fact, being changed into that of a more equal society, determined to carry out the Five Year Plans, and leap from feudal backwardness into a future of unimaginable achievement. The changes in peoples’ expectations and their confidence in the political leadership were tangible at every step.
The programme of visits included sites outside Peking. The Great Wall was being restored at a point near Peking and was only open for official visits. There was nothing accidental about this. There was no charter-type tourism, as there was to be later on, everything had to convey a message: the Chinese were an ancient people and were planning to leapfrog over contemporary history because they were armed with the legendary patience and wisdom of the people, accumulated generation by generation over four millennia.
Towards the end of the week, it was announced that I had been invited to dine with the Mayor of Peking. Doubtless, this was a big step up the hierarchical ladder, but I did not know exactly how far. I began to get a sense of his importance when they showed an interest in the state of my clothes, and took my suit off for dry cleaning, shirt and tie included. The two interpreters also appeared in elegant but proletarian blue Mao jackets when they came to fetch me that afternoon. Our car headed for the old most populated part of the city, with its grey brick houses and tree-lined pavements, and a few motorised vehicles but a multitude of bicycles and rickshaws. A distinct smell of shit, which I had noticed before, filled the air and infused our car. The interpreters explained they were collecting the sanitary waste, which was left in large drums to be picked up by trucks during the night. The journey ended, however, in an elegant and salubrious area.
The banquet was at a famous restaurant specializing in traditional Chinese dishes. I was welcomed by a group of men dressed in that indefinable attire, a mixture of military uniform and gala evening dress, of a jeans colour, except for one tall imposing figure in an impeccable pearl grey suit, buttoned up to his bull neck and shaven head. It was Peng Chen, the Mayor of Peking. The restaurant had closed its doors to the public to wait on our official table.
Mayor Peng Chen began the ceremony by explaining the role played in Chinese tradition by the placement of guests at table. According to this, my place was reserved for the person showing most praise and courtesy. The back of my chair pointed towards one cardinal point and faced another one, and these together apparently represented a specially auspicious place. I don’t remember the reasons given, but I was suddenly anxious about the confusion over my person, feeling I could end up being tried for fraud if I did not explain it soon. Toast after toast only served to highlight the incongruity between my modest presence, the political expressions of revolutionary sacrifice and devotion, the bourgeois glitter surrounding us, and the series of toasts. I was seated immediately to the right of the mayor, and although the table was round, we were obviously at its head. At our shoulders behind us sat the interpreters and their assistants. The rest of the guests made up a kind of Greek chorus to the speech, in which the mayor continued dropping informative morsels about the place, origin, development and importance of food in Chinese culture, while continuous waves of plates arrived with different tastes, colours, flavours, smells and consistencies, each one palate-teasing by virtue of its sweetness or saltiness, bitterness or tartness, hotness or coldness, liquidity or solidity.
The mayor’s speech was a lesson in gastronomy, an extraordinary thousand-year-old tradition about which I knew nothing. Everything was related to the people’s wisdom, which had gradually merged through knowledge and the need for food, until it had turned disgust into pleasure and routine into art, making it possible for ants or snakes, properly seasoned, to taste exquisite. One after another, people got to their feet, raised a small glass and proposed a toast. Peng Chen set the pattern. They filled glasses of a determinate colour and size with a liquid which could be made of roses or potatoes, distilled grains or seeds, or something of the sort, but never grapes,
and proposed a diplomatic toast, not forgetting the brother land of the Argentines, because ‘the compatriots of a great revolutionary like Che are our brothers’.
I eventually began to understand the frames of reference: seated at table, the talk would be of culture in general; on our feet, out of temptation’s way, about politics; and facing each other, we would praise the example of absent but exemplary leaders. At one point when we were sitting down, I suddenly felt a reply to previous toasts was in order, and I stood up again. Everyone got to their feet. The liquid was taking effect, and I resorted to childhood memories of the time my mother dressed me up, as children did at Carnival, as a Chinese mandarin. I had a droopy moustache drawn with a burned cork, and a pigtail of black wool falling down my back from a conical hat, and some ‘typical’ dark silk pyjamas with vividly coloured dragons painted on the front and back. This was our image of China when it was seen as a far-away world, admired more for being different and exotic than for its reality, which began to set us an example with the long victorious march under Chairman Mao, to whom I now wanted to raise my glass on behalf of myself and my comrades. The toast was a success and the dinner became visibly more animated, whether on account of my speech, or the glasses of soft rose wine, or who knows what, I wasn’t sure.
The restaurant staff began clearing away the innumerable pieces of empty china (some still containing tasty left-overs which ideology did not allow us to eat, worse luck), and others arrived with trays full of steaming hot towels. But to my surprise, when I tried to praise the food and thank the mayor, who by the way was always the president of the Communist Party in Peking, he told me that it was now time for the serious food, that what we had just eaten was merely the hors d’oeuvre. During a pause in the eating, there was time to talk of my activities for the coming weeks and of our future relations. I would be leaving in a couple of days for a tour of the interior, to visit places of historic importance for the future of the revolutionary struggle, like the base in Yenan. Until now, I had only heard of the strength of the Chinese Revolution, but now I was going to meet the worker and peasant masses, the fount of all wisdom. I looked at the mayor, impressed by the exercise of power emanating from him, like a mandarin of the new communist dynasty.