Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  Looking back at this period, four decades later, it seems extraordinary that the Chinese leaders offered our organization, which had just suffered a calamitous defeat, what numerous representatives of armed groups had tried unsuccessfully to obtain. The key was that they believed in and set great store by the same catalyzing element that we did: Che’s politico-military leadership.

  I had been told that before I left Peking for Shanghai I would be meeting a very important figure. I was uneasy because it seemed disproportionate to me. The person in question was no less than the Vice Premier of the Permanent Committee of the People’s National Assembly, Comrade Kuo Mo-jo. That is, the acting chief of the People’s Congress and the government. The Premier of the Permanent Committee was Chu Teh, one of the legendary revolutionaries.

  We left the Peking Hotel early because the meeting was to include a tour round the People’s Palace and the People’s Assembly Hall afterwards, about two or three hours altogether. We arrived on foot at the Palace’s grand staircase and, for the first time, there was a photographer among the officials milling around. He was taking photos of the reception committee and my humble yet elegant self, in suit and tie. I would rather have been swallowed up by the ground, however, than appear in the photo. I was hostage to these thoughts when a new group came into the hall accompanying an obviously high-ranking personage in a pearl grey Mao jacket. He was of an indefinable age, thin, with the look of a company director or hospital administrator. The photographer did his job and the introductions were made. An exchange of greetings was translated by the legion of interpreters by his side and my two at my shoulder. Vice Premier Kuo Mo-jo invited me to pose beside him so the photograph could finish documenting the meeting, before we moved to an equally large salon, where we sat in a semi-circle of armchairs, facing small lacquered tables with an impeccable china tea service.

  I have a vivid memory of us sitting at one end of the salon, under yet another embroidered portrait of Chairman Mao dominating the scene, but I don’t remember the exact conversation, except its memorable end, so brusquely terminated. The Vice Premier was on my right, in front of his individual table, flanked by other government officials and his interpreters. I was in front of another table, my interpreters a little distance away. A mass of people in white jackets and gloves were serving tea. Another exchange of courtesies took place, with a little more detail, references to my visit, my appreciated stay in China, the Revolution in motion, the thoughts of Chairman Mao. He spoke specifically of the hopes Chairman Mao had for indigenous America, that the great aboriginal cultures could not remain oppressed forever, or something like that. I managed to argue that colonization had wiped out those diverse ethnicities or at least subjugated them indefinitely, imposing a new power elite, unified and exploitative, which was ultimately controlled by the United States. He told me we had to fight these usurpers and their lackeys. He said I had witnessed what the energy of the masses could achieve when led by the correct route of the Revolution and the thoughts of Chairman Mao. And that the Chinese people, its government and its Communist Party were very pleased to receive the visit of a representative of the revolutionary project of their friend and comrade Comandante Che Guevara, and hoped that it would bring mutual benefits. He then said words to this effect: ‘When you go back to your country, you must lead your comrades in a campaign of public denunciation of the revisionist role, in its complicity with imperialism, played by Fidel Castro, who has betrayed the revolution.’

  When the Vice Premier spoke, my interpreter translated; when I spoke, his interpreters translated. I looked at my nice interpreter, practically my friend by now, with incredulity. I asked him to repeat what had been said. He did and I said there must be some mistake; that he must confirm the correct translation of the Comrade Vice Premier’s words. There was an agitated exchange between the interpreters, with a dry comment from the Vice Premier. My interpreter repeated exactly what he had said before. I took the floor and replied, more or less, that Comandante Fidel Castro was the founding father and natural leader of a revolutionary current that included the whole American subcontinent, one to which myself and my comrades belonged. That I assumed the Vice Premier’s statement was an error of ideological interpretation that we could not share. That while our project was independent of the Cuban Revolution and our commander was Che and not Fidel Castro, for us and for all Latin Americans engaged in the revolutionary struggle, Fidel’s Cuba was an example to follow.

  The Vice Premier of the Permanent Committee of the Chinese People’s Assembly, Comrade Kuo Mo-jo, stood up – as did all those present – to indicate the meeting had finished. He bid a dry farewell, although he invited me to continue with my programme of visits, and left the room, followed by his assistants and interpreters. My interpreters, the major-domo and I remained in the middle of the salon, perspiring. The audience had lasted barely twenty minutes and one solitary cup of tea.

  Contrary to what I expected, after the lunch and a nervous pause, the official from the Committee for Friendship Between Peoples came to my hotel room, not to arrest me, but to tell me the time of my flight to Shanghai the following day; and to give me a donation from the Committee to help the organization I represented. It was $1,500. In addition, I was given pamphlets in Spanish, some books on Chinese Art, and a just-developed print of the photo posing with Kuo Mo-jo. My official programme, similar to that in Peking, carried on as if the incident with Kuo Mo-jo had not happened.

  Shanghai was already a huge over-populated city, with 16 million inhabitants. Built on the estuary of the Yang Tse Kiang, or Blue River, it is one of the longest rivers in the world, a thousand kilometres of it navigable by deep draft ships. It is the vital artery of the Chinese industrial economy. Shanghai’s park had a iron grille entrance gate and to one side was a monolith with a carefully preserved bronze plate with the following inscription in English, French, German, Japanese and, of course, Chinese: ‘Entry prohibited to dogs or Chinese’. It was a sign of the cultural arrogance of the empires that dominated China through the cunning – or dubious morality – of the British, who resorted in those days to a weapon of mass destruction called opium and the corruption that went with it.

  I left China with the sensation of having been through an exceptional experience in an extraordinary country bringing fundamental change to the history of humanity. The energy of millions of citizens was being mobilized to produce the Great Leap Forward. However, great leaps can bring great catastrophes, when the leadership concentrates more on the fancy footwork of the action and glory than on the creative object. The Chinese Revolution was finding its way: first came the Cultural Revolution which razed any vestiges of bourgeois society; then the current socialist road to capitalism and, no doubt, one day it will find the capitalist road to communism, and prove the young Marx right.

  Part Four

  Bolivia

  24

  ‘Che Wants to See You’: January 1967

  When I first lived in Salta, I shared a house with my friend Ramiro Dávalos in a town called Campo Quijano. The house was borrowed and we lived there in winter, but when the owners came for the summer, we moved to the hills where we set up camp in a couple of tents and held open house for Ramiro’s friends. They became my friends too: well-known poets, folk musicians or artists like him, and all enthusiastic drinkers of the unique Cafayate Torrontés wine, one of Argentina’s best (if not the best), grown in the Calchaquí Valley. I needed a place to paint too, so with the compensation I got from being laid off at the sugar mill, I rented a shed a couple of roads away.

  Among the regular guests were two guitarists. One of them, Eduardo Falú, aka El Turco, from a Turkish family that settled in the north of Argentina, had perfect technique and was already challenging the reputation of Argentina’s folk legend, Atahualpa Yupanqui, on the airwaves. Eduardo was put in my tent, since Ramiro occupied the largest one with his wife Negrita and their children. Every day at around five in the morning, after a long night of singing and imbibing, I
awoke to the sounds of paradise: gentle strumming, musical scales and miraculous chords. Guitar in his arms (like a woman, he said), Falú honed his technical skills and emitted the purest and most harmonious of sounds. The other maestro of the ‘viola’, as he called it, was of Spanish descent. He did not quite have Falú’s mastery of the instrument, but was nonetheless a fine musician and an inspired poet. His name was Ernesto Cabeza or Cabecita, and he became my closest friend. Cabecita fell on hard times at one stage and came to live in my Campo Quijano studio for a while, despite the cold.

  Hence, in the silence of the night, or at dawn, I witnessed the birth of two of the most famous sambas in the Argentine folk repertory: Falú’s ‘La Candelaria’, composed in our tent, and Cabecita’s ‘La nochera’, created in my workshop. Romantic verses were added to both later by Jaime Dávalos, Ramiro’s brother, another friend and habitué. The miracles there were endless. Ramiro was the greatest cantor in the memory of the region, certainly the best I ever heard. A cantor by vocation of every folk tune in South America and especially of our precious northern Argentina, he rejected all professional or commercial offers, refused to sing in public and performed only for friends, despite being the envy of every bagualero and gaucho troubadour in the interior. There was only one amateur recording of his voice, made without Ramiro’s knowledge by our common friend, Alberto Burnichón, but it was such bad quality that it did not do him justice. His fame spread, however, and youngsters would come to listen to him in Campo Quijano, where he organized duets, trios or quartets with his brothers, Arturo, Jaime and Hernán, or with Cabecita and even myself, since he insisted I sing the fourth part.

  Two things came out of these Salta gatherings. The first was a group of students who had formed a quartet and needed a guitarist. Cabecita accepted, collected his stuff from my studio and joined the group. They already had an offer of radio work in Buenos Aires, and they went on to launch the folk boom of that period, providing a showcase for the musical wealth of the interior, overtaking the audiences for tango and foreign artists (jazz included) for the first time. This first internationally famous Argentine folk quartet was called Los Chalchaleros. The second related thing concerned a young neighbour who was so bowled over by Ramiro’s songs that he asked to come to the house and listen to him. He too became a close friend. Following the success of Los Chalchaleros, he formed a group which had the good luck to be advised by a musical genius, another friend of the Dávalos family; the lawyer, musician and electrifying personality Cuchi Leguizamón. (I was the beneficiary of some of his legal advice.) This new group was called Los Fronterizos and achieved popular and international acclaim with ‘La Misa Criolla’. They wore black ponchos in contrast to the Chalchaleros’s red ones, and became their most serious rival on the folk scene. Our young neighbour and friend, Negro López, was their lead singer.

  Arriving in Montevideo from Paris, on my return from Shanghai, I had to wait for passport control in a small room, which was soon inundated by passengers off another international flight from the US. The public furore outside alerted me in time: among the new passengers were Los Chalchaleros, back from performing in New York. The situation was very dangerous because I was travelling on false documents, in disguise, and carrying a lot of money, secret codes and the Chinese photo, enough to unleash a scandal. The room was so narrow there was no way of avoiding them. I knew all four of them through my friendship with Cabecita, which had continued when we both moved to Buenos Aires.

  Fortunately, the logic of fame took over: if Pavarotti enters a room, people see him, but he doesn’t see the people (unless Plácido Domingo is among them), and officialdom attends to famous people before anyone else. A military dictatorship – that of Onganía – had recently taken power in Argentina and controls were stricter by the day, with the primary objective of making transit passengers with something on their conscience feel constitutionally defenceless. The logic of fame was also aided by my sudden interest in the Customs and Excise notices stuck on the walls. Immigration officials did not follow the order of arrival, and this meant I could wait until the end before going through, contrary to my usual security tactic which was to get myself at the front of the queue. The situation was still precarious in the baggage hall, but I could not leave without my suitcase and everyone knows the free-for-all there is when luggage arrives in airports. But in the end, nothing untoward happened.

  Our last days in Buenos Aires before moving to Córdoba were hectic. Some problems were very urgent. The Buenos Aires section of our organization was going through a crisis because, to the crucial loss of Bellomo was added the departure of Rafael, our logistical lynch-pin, who was caught up in a family drama. This meant further compartmentalization of the organization. We concentrated on our own work, and for me this included getting in touch with Hellman, the contact the Cubans had given me. As seemed to be the norm among the leadership of the Argentine Communist Party, he was waiting for me on the pavement in front of his house which had a huge wrought-iron gate giving onto a garden. He did not invite me in. The pretext was that he didn’t want me to be seen by other people he was meeting, and that houses were less safe since the Onganía military coup. He was a big blond man, a typical specimen of the Argentine upper middle class, educated and well mannered, who immediately recognized the password and acted like we were old friends. The Cuban intelligence services had told him I would be contacting him on my return to Argentina. Hence, I modified my ‘door-to-door book salesman’ cover, and offered him another meeting if he wanted one. But he told me with unruffled calm that he was already sending people to train in Cuba, and he did not understand why Barbaroja Piñeiro was worried. As far as I was concerned, the less contact we had in the present circumstances the better, so we said goodbye.

  Ana María and I had rented a house in Maipú, on the outskirts of Córdoba. It had just enough furniture to be habitable, and we moved in with little Paula and Andrea. With our local contacts re-established, a series of heated discussions ensued. There was a clear consensus for abandoning the guerrilla struggle. Our lawyers Lonatti and Roca also told me that the prisoners in Salta wanted me to come to the prison personally to discuss internal organizational matters, future political strategy and the role that we – I and they, as former guerrillas – would play in that strategy. We studied the viability of borrowing a document for me from one of the lawyers named as part of the ‘official defence team’ the judge had authorized. We did not look a bit like each other, but with a wig and Gustavo’s verbal diarrhoea, it might work. I would have to go to Salta during the military reorganization of the country, under the notorious Internal Disorder Plan, an old repressive mechanism the author of which was none other than the new dictator Onganía. I would not be going as the lawyers’ chauffeur, as I had done on previous occasions, but actually usurping one of their identities. The idea was that I would wear a wig and have the meeting with the prisoners in the room allotted to the defence team for interviewing their clients.

  We reached the prison, an old yellow building resembling a medieval castle, situated on one side of the city between the park and the hills, and began a series of routine security checks – negotiating these was the job of Lonatti and Roca, who had already been joking with some of the guards. A succession of sliding iron doors opened and closed behind us in a noisy concerto of metallic banging, chains clanging, bolts locking, and resounding echoes. The prison warden was given papers certifying me as an additional lawyer. He authorized a pass for me as part of the legal team, established the number of prisoners to be interviewed that day who, because we wanted to agree on the text of certain written documents, would be seen as a group, and finally we negotiated a dark passageway to the interview room. Gustavo had come by himself the previous day to organize the meeting, and decide who would make up the prisoner’s delegation. Federico and Héctor were named, and two others, Petiso Bellomo and Henry, were elected by democratic vote.

  We had never been very good at expressing our emotions, but now our
repressed feelings hindered us, contaminating the air. I had not seen Federico, Héctor and Henry since I had walked out of the jungle camp to fetch Furry two and a half years ago. Bellomo I had not seen since we delivered the weapons to Sendic in Montevideo. We all felt a certain embarrassment, like a guilt complex: them, for being in prison; me, for being free. We dealt with matters one by one. First I presented a report on my trip to Cuba and China, a report which did not hide my personal enthusiasm, nor disguise how bright their star shone there. Sharing their lives was a way of valuing their experiences collectively. For them, petty political problems no longer existed, theirs was a principled vision, they were not some prize to be awarded to the highest bidder. Let each follow his own path. If it coincided with ours in the end, we would be millions; if not, we would be on the pavement opposite. They rejected the gossip that reached them like a vaguely irritating noise, questioning our passivity, our inaction. They knew the reason, and that nothing could be done openly.