Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  (Two months later, in July, while I was detained in Camiri, I was allowed fifteen minutes with my wife, Ana María, in the presence of an officer and guards. I took advantage of our embrace to whisper in her ear that she should seek out Dr Rea in La Paz, but the doctor was no longer in Bolivia.)

  The members of the network in La Paz were supposed to be taking other measures, like transferring money and documents to a safer place, and advising Havana of the seriousness of the situation, especially the loss of radio contact, and get them to send as many as possible of the volunteers training in Cuba (Argentines, Cubans) to join the struggle in Bolivia. For my part, whether I was able to make the contact in La Paz or not, I would certainly have to inform Havana when I got back to Buenos Aires.

  In the end, however, no one was ever able to inform Havana of anything. Not from the mountains, not from La Paz, and nor was I. And even if we had, Havana had already taken off its earphones and pulled down its antennae.

  The scope of the project emphasized just how disastrous it was for the guerrillas to be incommunicado at that particular juncture. Until that problem was solved, nothing could be organized for the future. Our conversation verged on the surreal, the magical. We had no idea how I would get out of the area, what I would find in La Paz, what contacts would work, nor how, when, or where. Until those mechanisms were reactivated, there was no point giving orders. It was all just wishful thinking.

  The spotter plane flew overhead almost daily now, machine-gunning and dropping bombs. No one was affected, apart from our nerves. Che did something, however, that soothed nerves and calmed spirits. He called a meeting of all his men. Recent exploratory work had convinced Che that the army had no plans to advance on the Base Camp, so the ambushes were lifted to allow everyone except sentries to attend. People started arriving in the evening and the atmosphere was electric with expectation. There had been no time for informal gatherings since the return of the expeditionary force and the start of armed action, so the veterans and new recruits were meeting for the first time. It was a unique occasion and, as often happens at international congresses, people tried to do some lobbying in the ‘corridors’ to glean extra information.

  Antonio (my former trainer in Cuba, Captain Olo Pantoja) assumed that being a survivor of the Salta EGP gave me some special status, and so possibly some influence. Nothing was further from the truth, but it was no use telling him that. Olo’s world was falling apart. He had lost the confidence that came from having been in Che’s column, at the battle of Santa Clara, at the victorious entry into Havana, and from having carried out special confidential tasks, such as training Che’s group for Salta. His morale at rock bottom, he told me he could not sleep, rest, or swallow his food. He had come to give his best, to die if necessary. Beside Che, for what Che wanted most, his constant dream from the Sierra Maestra to the Ministry, was to fight in Argentina. ‘We’ve been waiting for it all along, on the alert in case we got left out.’ Olo thought he had done the right thing: not risking combat with untrained recruits, assuming this was a preliminary stage, and that there could be no action without orders from Che. Moreover, it was not his fault that Marcos had come back to the Base Camp after being seen at the river, had taken command and organized the retreat. Fighting back his tears, Olo wanted to convince me, as if absolution depended on it.

  In my role as spectator, I reflected in amazement on how seasoned fighters, used to commanding other men through crises at critical moments, now collapsed and were crushed by them. Marcos, in a more imperious tone, but more nervously, circled around me in the same way. I felt like an unofficial mediator, placed unwillingly in the centre of the battlefield. Marcos’s tale took on epic proportions. He was a combatant, a Cuban comandante who had come to offer his life for Che’s cause, as he had done before for Cuba. His only wish was to be first in the line of fire.

  It would not have occurred to me, or anyone in their right mind, to expect to exert influence or proffer any suggestion. Everybody, including the victims, thought Che’s indignation was justified. The project that Che had worked so hard for, that all the participants were offering their lives for, was about to fail because of mistakes that Che put down to general indiscipline. We had already seen dangerous examples at the camp and it was impossible not to notice that the root cause lay in that omnipotent insouciance, that scorns security norms, underestimates the context, and belittles the enemy. Perhaps in an attempt to stem the tide of approaching failure, Che talked to his men.

  The tone of the meeting changed more than once. It started informally with a review of the defensive measures taken. Then Che went over what had happened on their trek, emphasizing the positive behaviour of the participants, among whom four or five were singled out for special mention, but also pointing out the extremely negative attitudes of others. The bottom line was that a project like this, a revolutionary struggle intent on victory, is only possible with an iron discipline that inspires respect. Discipline plus personal and political responsibility for actions; or chaos and failure. He had no hesitation in saying that any violation of these principles was betraying the cause. The tone of his voice rose with his rage. In the middle of the jungle we were living a Greek tragedy, in which a thundering God reproached his petrified unbelievers for their sins. Marcos was relieved of his command and demoted, Miguel replaced him as leader of the vanguard column, and four of Moisés Guevara’s men were expelled. Until their departure could be arranged, they would be stripped of their guerrilla status and, as the resaca, would only do menial tasks.

  I was shocked by the violence with which he spoke to tough, armed and physically and psychologically exhausted men. But the only protests heard were reaffirmations of undying loyalty. Apparently, no one doubted that, behind such harsh words, a greater layer of tenderness protected them as individuals. Some new energy eased our tasks, and us as well, as if we had been reinvigorated by a transfusion of fury. Those who had been reprimanded hovered diligently around Che, ready to volunteer for anything, desperate for some sign of benevolence to help them to swallow the bitter pill. A glance. Anything.

  The number of exploratory missions increased. Alone or in pairs, men set out every morning in various directions, before daybreak but after coffee. They returned exhausted at sunset, and went straight to Che with their reports, only to be told they might have to do it again the next day, because the information they had got was not precise enough, or because something else had come up that they should know. They ate and then slept like tree trunks – unless, that is, there were some other sort of ‘voluntary’ military or educational class it would not be politic to miss.

  In the middle of the camp was a shelter, a sort of open-air canteen, with a large table made of poles tied by lianas, in the purest jungle design style. All items from the evacuated cave had been piled there, ready to be transferred to the new storage places, after the men had chosen what they wanted to carry with them, or leave behind in the storage cave until later. The communal library was there, for example, for whoever might want to add a few extra grams to his backpack (full of essentials like spare food, ammunition, clothes, etc.) by taking a book. Needless to say, not a very popular idea. I was sniffing around the pile of books when Che came up for the same purpose. In his hand was the present I had brought him from Buenos Aires, Cortázar’s latest book of short stories All Fires the Fire. At the time I had commented: ‘There’s an amazing story’.‘Which one?’ he asked. ‘The Southern Highway’, I replied. Now at the ‘jumble sale’ he pointed to the book: ‘You were right, it’s the best story in the book.’ Between the first conversation and the second, enough things had happened to destroy his plans, but not his love of literature, nor the effort he made, amid mosquito bashing, to read every day, and part of the night, by the light of a miner’s lamp on his forehead. The by now old tradition of insomniac leaders of the Cuban Revolution was alive and well in the Bolivian jungle. And there was a suspicion that others around him were awake too, for fear of being caught sleeping.
But for the lucky ones who could sleep, it was an obligation.

  When he deemed our explorations had delivered all the necessary information, Che announced an operation to take out the visitors and buy food. A false press pass and safe-conduct was fabricated for me using a photo left over from those taken in Buenos Aires for ‘my passport’ and one of the blank pages signed and stamped by the president’s press office that Tania had obtained from a secret source in the government. This and my passport was all the documentation I had, as false as the illusion that it would pass as genuine.

  We hardly slept a wink. At three in the morning, we drank coffee prepared by the sentry on duty. We tried to disguise recent footprints to conceal the date on which the camp was being abandoned, an impossible task since hammocks, for instance, left indelible marks showing exactly when people had slept there and how many. The sick guerrillas were ‘interned’ in a hidden camp with a doctor and a couple of other fit guerrillas.

  The advance guard set off, and an hour later it was the turn of the middle group. We had a few hours trek in total darkness in front of us. Most of the torch batteries had run out, and anyone who still had any guarded them jealously. I was just behind Che in the column and, since I did not have a torch, I kept as close to him as possible to take advantage of the brief flashes of light in front of his feet. To lose visual contact was to be totally lost. Visibility improved when, guided by its liberating roar, we left the forest at the river, but the walking was harder, wading over the stones.

  Pausing for ten minutes in every hour, with messengers going back and forth between the vanguard and rearguard columns, we continued walking until the dawn sun rose majestically accompanied by the symphonic awakening of the jungle. We reached the spot where the ambush had taken place twelve days earlier and, passing in silence, saw the abandoned corpses still lying there. On the river’s left bank, on a little sandy beach, lay the skeletons of an officer, five soldiers and a guide, uniforms in rags, picked clean by vultures.

  The advance guard sent back news that the area around the Casa de Calamina had been occupied by the army, and also that we could ‘expropriate’ maize and a cow there. So the rendezvous was there, a gastronomic one, with beef stew.

  32

  Way Out Where There Was No Way Out

  The jute sack that Ñato had made for me, because of the shortage of proper backpacks, began to take its toll. It was a simple design: two knotted ears at the bottom and one in the middle at the top. A cord from one side to the other, top to bottom and bottom to top, formed the straps. While such a gem of improvisation meant I was not able to carry as heavy a load as the others, it did not save me from the individual minimum: hammock, mosquito net, blanket, civilian clothes, spare food, ammunition for my M2, extra shared goods, medicine, maize, etc.

  Listed like that, it already sounds a lot, but when the weight hangs from your shoulders by quite a thin cord, it digs right into the clavicle bone, and feels as if it will keep going till it pierces the ribs. Meanwhile, jumbled up in the bottom of the sack, the bulk of it hammers the kidneys and the spine, turning the vertebrae, discs, sacrum and even coccyx, into mush. When there is a pause and you take the sack off – carefully peeling the ropes away from the bones, to save your arms from falling off and your spine disintegrating – and you manage to stand up and walk a few steps free from this terrible torture, you feel your soul is moving all by itself. The ability to bear physical pain is not related to morality, ideology, or intellect, but to a masochistic corner of your personality that allows you to prematurely savour the moment you will rub raw sores and burst blisters with some kind of ointment, either recognizable or invented en route from horse grease and saliva. Putting the sack on again the next day is even worse. And worse still is climbing interminable hills, tangled up in lianas and prickly branches, slipping on mud or bald roots, stumbling and falling, with that damn dead weight on your back. At one point that first night, I tried to improve things by wrapping the cord in pieces of bark tied on with strips of a T-shirt, to cushion my mistreated shoulders.

  The march continued, always at night to penetrate the army’s cordon. For some strange reason, the army units communicated their positions by bursts of machine-gun fire or isolated gunshots. Every now and again, a platoon’s fire would be answered by others further away, and others in front of or behind us. This meant we could follow our own trail, almost parallel to enemy positions, in relative safety. Leaving the river behind, we walked eastwards through a field of sugar cane, crested a hill, and finally descended into a valley at dusk. Part of our rearguard dug in and Che said he would try to take the village of Gutiérrez, on the Camiri–Santa Cruz road, steal a truck or jeep to drive Debray and me out of the area, and buy whatever we could.

  We made camp and waited for nightfall. Debray and I handed over our equipment, guns included, changed clothes and shaved. In crumpled civilian clothes, we waited for the order to walk to the village. Che, who had alternated resting and reading with a succession of conclaves with his commanders, suddenly heaved his rucksack onto his back, got laboriously to his feet, and came over to where our group was waiting. Looking at me as if I were some kind of weirdo, he asked: ‘Where’s your rifle?’ I said we had left our equipment with the rearguard, along with those going to buy supplies. Those had been his orders. He called Pombo and barked: ‘There are not many of us, I want him armed. Give him Tania’s rifle, she can bring it back.’ Tania protested, but I ended up with her M1.

  Silently we followed the path that at one stage ran beside a fence, an indication of how near the village we were. We stopped to wait for the liaison with our advance guard, who arrived with news that the village was in uproar. A company of soldiers had camped there only a few hours earlier, and some of the poor souls had barely got over the fright of seeing lots of armed soldiers, when they panicked all over again as bearded guerrillas came out of the night and, uninvited, took over their patios, houses, corrals, and closed off all the exits.

  The Bolivian guerrillas chatted calmly to the houses’ occupants, who said the army would be back the next day. So the idea of getting some kind of transport out was dead in the water, and our departure was postponed. We bought some pigs and they were slaughtered and shared between the vanguard and rearguard columns, beginning a day of Pantegruelesque excess. The cooks worked non-stop. When we came up the ravine from the river, the army was going the opposite way on the crest of the hill. This prevented a surprise encounter. We would return via the hilltop and, hopefully, they would take the ravine. We ate ourselves silly until around three in the morning, then set off again.

  My technique of following Che’s footsteps by the light of his torch had its advantages and mysteries. The flashes of light allowed me glimpses of where to put my feet. The sound of his footsteps, the swish of the branches as they brushed his body and whipped back again (lashing me hard from time to time, as punishment for getting too near), and the odd curse, gave me some quite precise information about obstacles ahead.

  But something had me worried. I thought I heard a continual muffled sound, like a litany, although my senses could not distinguish what it was. In the dark, full of crackling and crunching – human, animal and vegetable – it was almost supernatural. The sound rose and fell, then faded into long periods of silence that seemed to bear no relation to the lay of the land, or the noises of the jungle. On a flatter stretch, where walking was easier, the mystery revealed itself. The noise began taking shape: I could hear words; harmonious, suggestive, beautiful rhythmic words. It was Che reciting poems by León Felipe as he walked.

  When we got to the river, we bumped into a squad of soldiers. Luckily for them they did not see us. Squatting on an island of sand and rushes, I was astonished to hear the soldiers, who were crossing the river in the opposite direction, come and sit right beside our hiding place, chatting ten to the dozen. If any of the frozen, motionless but gung-ho guerrillas had sneezed, battle would have been on. After a few long minutes, the soldiers continued crossi
ng, moving away with the water up to their waists. We did the same, in silence.

  We advanced northwards on the crest of the hill. It is easy to say it now. Northwards. At that time, except for Che and his group of explorers, I don’t think any of us had the slightest idea where we were going. As far as I was concerned, we were marching blindly, back and forth, up and down.

  We knew the vanguard column had met some drovers bringing their cattle home. Since they belonged to Ciro Algarañaz, the nosey neighbour beside the Casa de Calamina, responsible to a large extent for the precocious actions of the army, we confiscated some cows and they joined our column. Abandoning the river again, we headed up into the jungle following a trickle of water up a ravine. We camped an hour later. On the menu was piebald cow.

  We stayed there for a few days, while we explored. Two of the explorers, Urbano and Julio, went to the refuge where Joaquin was guarding the sick men and came back with bad news: the army had taken the Base Camp and was searching the hills all around that area. A few days later, in a censor-authorized radio programme, a Chilean journalist called Héctor Precht from El Mercurio described how the camp had been taken. Che would write in his diary: ‘A Chilean journalist gave a detailed account of our camp and discovered a photo of me, without a beard and with a pipe. We’ll have to investigate further.’