by Ciro Bustos
Language, history and basic economics, explaining the method and degree of exploitation in the region, were taught in the improvised camp. Usually the teacher was Che, although Aniceto, a Bolivian, taught Quechua. The students’ morale was good. We went down ravines, up paths and trails, breaking cordons this way and that, with total disdain for the shooting in the distance and the catastrophic news on the radio, bursting with confidence in our leadership and our own strength. If Che ordered one of his key men to go to the farm to collect maize, or to the Base Camp to see what the army was up to, or to the ‘clinic’ to tell Joaquin something – all places inside occupied territory – no one gave it a second thought. Off they went without batting an eyelid.
They might walk for a whole day, scrambling up impassable slopes, hungry, drenched, and knowing they had it all to do again on the way back. You would have to be a deranged superman to do it. Yet it obeyed the logic of the free spirit: the explorer made his own decisions, and took responsibility for his actions. He was outside the anthill, obeying his instincts, overcome by a boundless feeling of autonomy. As Cordobés put it in an interview: ‘Exploring, alone, on the summit of a hill, leaning on my gun, I was God.’
Che gave orders for the day. Inti and I had the first tour of guard duty at the ambush observation post. Coffee finished, we set out. The climb was pretty tough, and we were gasping by the time we reached the spot, very well chosen for its perfect view of the river on both sides. As a lookout point it was perfect, with a clearing under big trees, where tracks left by previous sentries invited us to sit comfortably facing each other, leaning against the solid trunks. In front of me was a stretch of river, perhaps a kilometre to the south, upriver. Inti looked over my shoulder to the north, downriver.
Seeing a river from a distance, up above, discovering the twists and turns of its bed, divided by islands and sandbanks, gushing between rocks, forming waterfalls, seeing it but not hearing it, is like watching dancing in a silent film. It was the unreality of the real, under a diaphanous silence. Birds glided over the water or dived into the forest in serene harmony. Inti placed a handkerchief on the ground and stripped down his M2 to clean it. Nobody could surprise us in this place but if I had wanted to clean mine too, I would have had to wait until he finished. We chatted amicably, always with an eye on the river.
At mid-morning I saw, there where the river described a curve from the right, a little figure come out of the jungle, cross the quietest part of the river, to the left-hand bank. I was wondering what I had seen when another silhouette started to cross, followed by another. It was not my imagination. They were men, probably soldiers. Inti passed me the binoculars and I could see them clearly. Soldiers. The first were almost across, water up to their knees, rifles raised over their chests, when others began wading across. I counted them. One, three, five, they kept coming. A total of fifteen. They did not seem very cautious, as if they felt safe, in good company, so we waited for the rest. They regrouped, and continued advancing on the right, downriver, towards us.
After a brief exchange of opinion, we decided I would go down to the ambush to warn Rolando the army were coming. Excitedly, taking great leaps, halfway down the slope I bumped into Papi and Negro coming up to relieve us. Telling him what was happening, Papi stopped mid-joke (‘Did you fall in an anthill, Pelao?’) and exchanged his mocking tone for one of sudden military efficiency. He gave me an order: ‘Go and find Rolando, give him details and take up your position.’ And to Negro: ‘Go back to camp and inform Che.’ He climbed quickly up to find Inti.
Finding someone who is lying in ambush is not easy, but Rolando was a God of War who was everywhere, so I found him – or rather he found me – emerging from a thicket. He listened attentively to my news, then showed me my position; the first on the right, facing the enemy. It was in a ditch, full of branches, undergrowth and even dried animal carcasses, left there when the river overflowed, but separated from the noisy waters by a few dozen metres of trees, reeds and rough grasses. In the ditch lay Rubio, alias Jesús Suárez Gayol, captain in the Sierra Maestra, deputy minister of sugar in Che’s Ministry of Industry. There was not much room among the debris, so I was barely two metres from him. I remember him asking me, avid for news: ‘Have you see them, Carlos? How many are they?’ There was a sudden exchange of gunfire, followed by another, with shouts and howls and prolonged distressing wails of someone invoking his mother … ‘Ay, mamita, mi mamita!’
A moment of panic seized me, but I was more concerned with doing something concrete, although I did not know what exactly. I could not even see the river because of the thicket in front of it. I remembered something Furry had told me in Czechoslovakia. ‘I’d go into battle trembling like a leaf, but my nerves calmed when I fired the first shot.’ I fired at random in more or less the appropriate direction, and began to take stock of the situation. I could do nothing; my field of vision was zero. Tactical preoccupations took a back seat, however, when the undergrowth parted, and a young soldier came staggering out in tears, rigid with fear, dragging his rifle by the barrel. He advanced towards us petrified. The image was truly pitiful, so far removed from the textbook of warfare, and so clearly an innocent in need of protection that, without prior agreement, neither Rubio nor I fired. The soldier kept coming. He did not see us and almost stamped on my head as he jumped the ditch, disappearing behind us in search of his mother’s womb.
Reality returned, however. Rubio nodded to me. I left the trench and went after him. The battle abated and we could hear only isolated shots, threatening shouts, or cries of pain. I caught up with the soldier on the hillside, in the wood. I disarmed him in mutual incomprehension: he murmured something in Quechua, and either my voice was not martial enough, or he did not hear it. I took away the rifle he was still clutching by the barrel, and, nudging him with my gun, returned to the scene of combat. The ubiquitous Rolando appeared, and said with obvious delight: ‘Did you catch one, Carlos? I’ll take care of him. Get back to your position.’
The first thing I saw on my return was Rubio lying outside the ditch, with his right arm stretched out over his head and his left arm trapped under his waist, shaking with convulsions, as if the only bits of his body alive were his thorax and fingers, which moved as if honey was sticking to them. I crossed the ditch and bent over his body, putting a hand on his shoulder as I said: ‘Rubio, what’s the matter?’ I tried to prise his face away from the ground. His mouth was full of dust, so were his open unblinking eyes. His unseeing gaze would never see again. When I moved his head, I saw that the part of his skull above his right ear was missing and there was bloody encephalic matter on his arm just below his shoulder. I noticed a small wound on his left temple, a hole with hardly any blood. I ran to get help and bumped into Rolando for the third time. He shouted for a doctor, as we went back to Rubio’s body. Rolando was distraught; he talked to him, knowing there would be no reply. Kneeling on the ground, he tried to cradle him in his arms.
I lowered my gaze and went over the scene. Beneath the first tree, a little to the right of our position, a metre and a half from his motionless outstretched hand, I see a grenade. Without thinking, I bent down and picked it up. It was activated but had not gone off. Fortunately, I did not throw it away and risk an explosion, but put it back carefully, not so much wisely as paralyzed by fear.
The doctor could do no more than confirm Rubio’s death. Rolando took command again. We did a clean-up operation and recovered weapons that were stacked on the river bank, and attended to the army’s wounded, even operating on a lieutenant, who died nonetheless. Rolando showed his obvious military skill when, as we withdrew, he ordered some of the guerrillas to set another ambush 500 metres to the south of where the first patrol emerged, in case reinforcements came. The rest kept searching the rocks and undergrowth on the river banks. Rolando told me to take as many rifles as I could carry and return to camp to inform Che.
With the extra weight of six rifles, I arrived at the camp and went straight to Che. I laid th
em at his feet like an offering, with no symbolic intent, just exhaustion. ‘How many were they?’ he asked. ‘Fifteen’, I replied. ‘At last some reliable information’, he commented. He listened to my report of what had happened. Then he wanted to know the details of Rubio’s death. I told him bluntly: ‘His was the first position on the right facing the enemy, but we couldn’t see anything because the vegetation was so thick. After the first soldier passed us, Rubio must have left the ditch to throw the grenade, to stop the rest following. The bullet went through his head, the right side of his skull was smashed, and there was a little hole on his left temple.’ ‘From your description of the wound, the bullet is from a Garand, Braulio’s rifle, the shot was ours’, declared Che.
The body of the first guerrilla to be killed arrived at camp at midday. It was wrapped in his hammock and tied to a long pole carried by several of his compañeros. We had camped on a narrow bank of the stream, so our hammocks had been hung in a kind of oval shape, more or less in the order in which we had arrived. Che’s hammock was in the middle of one curve, and mine was on the other side. Che ordered Rubio’s body be laid between the two of us. And there it stayed for the rest of the day and throughout the night, until it was buried the following morning. There was no ceremony. Just a camp with the body present.
The rest of the day was devoted to bringing back the weapons, which would be stored nearby. At around five o’clock, we heard another gun battle. It eventually turned out that Rolando’s ambush had inflicted the biggest defeat on the army so far. A whole company, in fact: dozens of prisoners, among them a major and other officers. We had captured so many weapons it took the whole of the next day to collect them. Ñato was again in charge of hiding them and, again, our status as visitors meant Debray and I could only go halfway up the trail, back and forth along one of the many gullies that join the stream, carrying rifles, mortars and ammunition, enough to arm another two guerrilla groups.
As we trekked back to the Base Camp, we met Joaquín and his sick guerrillas. Sadly, they had made the effort to join us in vain, given that we were going back. Joaquín’s charges showed no improvement, and in fact were increasing in number due to the many cases of debilitating diarrhoea. There was a belated funeral in memory of Rubio, underlining the fact that the first casualty was Cuban, and honouring the willingness of peoples to unite their blood in the struggle for a common future.
At midday, Che divided our central column to speed up the march, which was being held back because so many men were exhausted. I was in the faster group. Debray and Tania brought up the rear. It was a terrible climb. Pombo was chosen to go on ahead to the camp, and I was to go with him. He waited for me patiently when I got tired and when we stopped to rest we talked about our families. I told him how sad I was not to be there to see my two little girls grow up at this important stage of their lives.
We arrived at the Base Camp to find it pretty much intact. The oven had not been destroyed, nor had the wooden constructions, so we reoccupied it. I was reclaiming the spot where I had previously slung my hammock when Che came up. I asked his permission to go down to the stream to wash, because I felt sticky with sweat and dirt. He told me to go, but not to overdo it.
Steering clear of the spring that we used for drinking water, I took off my clothes and gave myself a therapeutic treatment with mud and fine sand, being careful to wash it all off properly. Climbing back up was exhausting. Staggering into camp, gasping like a legionnaire dragging himself to the oasis, I told Che, paraphrasing the Cubans: ‘Tengo un cansancio de tres pares de cojines …’* His eyes were smiling, but he rebuked me unceremoniously: ‘Don’t joke about feeling disheartened. We have to avoid that kind of demoralizing joke. We’re here to set an example all the time …’
* * *
* Bustos says: ‘I’m as tired as three pairs of cushions (cojines)’, whereas the common Cuban phrase is more vulgar: ‘I’m as tired as three pairs of balls (cojones).’ The translation would be something like ‘I’m knickered’ instead of ‘I’m knackered.’
33
Leave-taking and Farewells
In the darkness of the jungle, in the glow of the campfires, what sparkles is not ideology or political passion, but the flash from the barrel of a gun.
Fifty men moved around in the shadows, exhausted by their loads, hunger and illness, yet did not shirk their tasks even though they had barely slept. The insanity of their surroundings did not affect them. They were here to give of their best, offer their lives generously in the struggle for human dignity. They were not forced to come, had no contracts, just volunteers tied by a pact of loyalty to a man offering them, at the very least, death. Many had followed him since they were boys, from a country where their horizon was the edge of a cane field, only to discover that on the other side of the battlefield was a world that did not want to share its treasures with the poor. At his side, they had learned that what mattered was not nationality or skin colour. Here, there, everywhere, society was based on theft, usurpation. People were not born rich or poor. To become rich, you had to steal from someone else. And to put things right, you had to fight; it was as simple as that. It was not about faith or believing in saints but about being true to oneself. It was not about praying, but about sharing; about making a choice.
Equally simple was the moral code of the group. The hardest task here was to make doing the banal and boring a source of personal pride. Quiet daily sacrifice was rewarded by more demands being made on you. Only hunger would produce fissures in this wall of virtue, and Che was implacable when it came to punishing this kind of weakness. The first thing Ñato reported on his return from inspecting the stores was that two dozen tins of condensed milk were missing. The large number suggested they had not just been misplaced.
The morning had been hectic but the men worked with enthusiasm, relieved that the army had left the Base Camp in good condition. We now appeared to be sharing the camp since the soldiers had left their individual ‘Made in USA’ rations to use at a future date. When I returned from guard duty in the line of trenches, where I watched Pombo install a mortar to reinforce our defences, I found Che composing a communiqué addressed to the Bolivian people. He suggested dictating it to me since, being an artist, I must have decent handwriting. To disguise my apprehension about my spelling, I protested that on the contrary my handwriting was illegible. It was true; it was so bad I couldn’t even read it myself. That was precisely the point, my hand was a painter’s hand.
While Inti took charge of the communiqué, Che and I got into a conversation which gradually attracted an audience. I was amused by his jokey tone, but there was something suspiciously naïve about Che’s argument. I realized that he was drawing me out, looking for information. I remember the conversation clearly. I defended modern art in all its abstract variations because, I said, not concentrating on the purely figurative was exactly what creative freedom was all about. Che maintained that the people have the right to understand art; that it should not be the exclusive domain of the elite. I replied that art is not something you understand: you either feel it or you don’t, you like it or you don’t, and there is no art more popular or accessible to the masses than the black African art that influenced Picasso’s most avant-garde work; whereas previously he had been a ‘classical’ master. Che argued that art should serve the Revolution, by teaching. I agreed, but said that technology in the form of photography and film had taken on this more graphic role. Art itself is transcendental, more abstract than a manual, I said. As the debate became more political, I said I regretted the Revolution had surrendered its avant-garde banner in art; that this was like renouncing poetry, regressing to grotesque ‘socialist art’, which was neither one thing nor the other. If revolution was the vanguard of society, then avant-garde art should reflect the Revolution and in fact almost all the painters, sculptors, writers and musicians of the avant-garde movement were revolutionaries. Many were Russians, or rather Soviets, who joined enthusiastically in the first phase of the Revol
ution, believing that they had found creative freedom, but were then harassed, banned, exiled: Malevich, Rodchenko, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Stravinsky …
‘And in Cuba? What happened in Cuba?’ asked Che, malevolently. For the time being, we can only speak of pre-revolutionary art, I conjectured. Cuba had been very advanced artistically, given the influence of the US, but nearly all the artists had left. Yes, he said, the cultural minority who lived off the Americans left with them but there are Cuban artists who are with the Revolution. ‘I’m not sure,’ I insisted, ‘there is a horrific “social realist” artist who paints guajiros, in straw hats, holding machetes with sugar cane in the background and he is the official favourite.’ ‘Was it so bad? I rather liked it’, he said, suspiciously seriously. ‘I liked Portocarrero’, I said. He was not only not figurative, but homosexual. His elongated mural of Venetian mosaics on the facade of the Habana Libre hotel was the most beautiful part of the building. Was, because it was no longer there.
Years later I realized from reading some of Che’s writings that not only did he know more about modern art than I did, but he had used our conversation as an opportunity to have a natural non-academic debate, knowing we were being listened to, as if at Mass.
But the real hot topic was the disappearance of the milk. A final inspection of the storage cave unleashed Che’s anger, and suspicion again fell on an Aymara lad, Eusebio, because of some rather contrived evidence. Funnily enough, Che did not have a bad opinion of him, because he had performed well on the march (even though he ate his reserve food thinking that was what it was for). When Che’s ragged column had first returned to camp, Eusebio was accused of stealing various tins of milk because there were empty tins under his hammock, which he swore had been there before. He had been expelled from the guerrillas and sent to the resaca group, humiliated and made to do menial work until our return to camp. Now he was being accused of stealing another twenty-three tins of milk (perhaps even the same empty ones), which had disappeared from the cave. It seemed quite odd. Eusebio had come with us to Gutiérrez, taken part in the action on 10 April and come back with us, loaded down like a pack horse the whole time. At what point did he raid the cave, carry away the loot, and drink it?