Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  Things slowly took on other rhythms, but we always lived among South American exiles. Brazilians like José and Gilen and, especially the Bolivian, Argentine and Chilean families who welcomed us fraternally and are still our support. When the time came to express myself publicly, Jaime Padilla, a Bolivian journalist, was the generous vehicle. Finally, between language courses and presumed artistic activities, I also travelled the country from end to end. I learned to ski in the Arctic Circle, hiked manicured trails with refuges ever fifteen kilometres, where your only obligation is to replace the wood you have used. The Lapps in the north have an intrinsic warmth, and still live life for its own sake. There I met their greatest artists, Martin Hurac and Lars Pirak, and enjoyed their friendship, albeit all too briefly, in Jokkmokk.

  I was born on a piece of land that was a mixture of garden and industrial park, with sheds, canvas hangars and workshops. It was the headquarters of the National Highway Administration, a department of the Ministry of Public Works, charged with constructing roads the length and breadth of Argentina’s vast geography. My father’s job entitled him to a house there, and I grew up with my brothers and sisters among gardens and workshops, carpenters and drivers. The technological enclave was in the north-east corner of an agricultural reserve belonging to the province of Mendoza’s School of Viticulture. On one side the boundary was a row of hangars and workshops, and on the other a huge wrought iron railing that gave on to Pedro Molina and Belgrano streets. On the other side of Belgrano were the tracks of the San Martín Railway, not far from the station itself where there was an enormous shunting yard. My first childhood memories were of night-time noises. Familiar distant sounds became friendlier as the night advanced, like a cat purring on my pillow: police whistles on their nightly rounds, communicating ‘nothing to report’, block by block, between themselves; and the noise of trains moving in the station yard.

  When we arrived in Malmö it was a typical Swedish city, with a port and commercial life, quite hostile to foreigners. But over the years it has changed into a replica of Beirut, losing the neat homogeneity of its citizens, the shipbuilding industry and even the port itself, but gaining the enthusiasm of the bazaar, multicultural vitality, and universal gastronomy. I live in a house in the northern outskirts that back onto the railway lines near the motorway to Lund. It is a railway shunting zone. During the day I can’t see very much, only the motorway and the turnoff to the brand new bridge joining Sweden to Denmark. But at night, when the hubbub of the traffic calms, with my dog Gema sleeping at my feet, I hear the train drivers manoeuvring the night trains, bumping, banging and tooting, amid the screeching of wheels and blowing of whistles, as if I were back in Mendoza.

  Epilogue

  History as farce: the ‘Rashomon effect’

  Political and social events all over the world are conditioned by the actions of their principal protagonists, against a background of economic realities that affect the part they play in those events and mobilize sectors of the population in the eventual outcome. The stance that the masses adopt produces changes, and those changes make History. This is easy to say, of course, but the situation is made more complex and hard to define due to the ‘Rashomon effect’, whereby there are as many versions as there are participants in the reconstruction of an event. This is because historical situations are manipulated or compartmentalized according to how the actors see them.

  Interpretations of these events never coincide, since personal viewpoints are only part of the truth, if they are true at all. Whenever people take up their pens, the re-writing of history begins, and their version of the story is told to the detriment of others – for whatever reason, be it ideology, principles or party line. The ‘Rashomon effect’ means that each writer obeys not only his editor, but also his ego, his own editorial interests, his psychological projection, and his vanity.

  The result turns history into a farce, in which the protagonists become caricatures without pity or feelings, people who organize massacres on paper to fit in with the strategic plans of established powers, or play with the destinies of countries, and the lives of people, with impunity. The end justifies the means. That end can be tyranny or democracy; but it can also be revolution or a socialist society – the mythical goal that is the sociological carrot of faith, behind which come the preachers and those they preach to. Even saints can manipulate this coercive weapon – the carrot – because what is important is their inner conviction, the physical certainty of action, the contempt for the role of deviants. It matters little if today’s faith is tomorrow’s shame. What matters is that faith moves mountains. The evil lies not in the carrot, but in what the theorists can extract from the carrot.

  In the twentieth century, theory triumphed over reality. Theoretical discourse often falsified reality through the structured network of political analysts – with their congresses, seminars and interchangeable university chairs – who had found their raison d’être in developed societies through being offered prestigious platforms for their philosophical lucubrations. Even when nothing was true anymore, they continued writing their manuals about the victorious march of socialism and the inexorable fall of crisis-beset capitalism, giving lectures of revolutionary rigour, publishing their crusading tracts (based on the long marches of others who had taken up the struggle), exhorting young people to join a project they themselves no longer believed in, and who paid with their lives for what they saw as the only way (apart from the atom bomb) to build a new society.

  When the dust from the collapse of the socialist camp cleared, the prophets of revolutionary theory were still standing there, staring disdainfully at the pile of rubble, one jumping out of a window, another killing his wife, another going over to the enemy camp, denying the Nazi genocide, ignoring genocide itself as if it were a passing accident. The fault, it seemed, was not to have followed to the letter the golden thread of their thoughts, which were as scientific and precise as a theorem. Now nothing stops them describing the globalized world around the former enemy, Capital, as a high-speed train that is the only one running: you have to climb aboard or stay on the track.

  There are others, of course, who had been warning for some time that the train of the revolution had been derailed by sectarianism, and left in the ‘party’ mire; that the law of dialectic was change as a result of contradictions, evolving from one level to the next in a revolutionary spiral, because revolution is only a desperate emergency measure against totalitarian stagnation, not against the nature of things, and what has to be transformed is the way people think.

  The trap, to this day, is to accept changes in a line of thought as a sign of evolution. But evolution is like the law of gravity. It only works in one direction. The apple cannot drop to the ground upwards. Political and social evolution, the evolution of ideas, goes from right to left, not from left to right. Human beings have evolved from subjugation to empires and the law of the jungle to coexistence and solidarity; from oligarchic totalitarianism to democracy; from accepting that half the world is prevented from living a decent life to agonizing over it, realizing that their choice is to share the benefits or perish.

  Lying is revolutionary

  In the particular bit of history I have related here, especially relating to Che’s aims during the latter stage of his life, everybody lied. Naturally I did too. I lied to the army, to the CIA, to the court and, hence, to public opinion. I lied deliberately and by omission. But I lied to protect the interests of people on the outside and, incidentally, to save my own life; not for personal glorification, quite the opposite, since it cost me my pride and self-esteem. Because lying is a double-edged sword: you lie to defend yourself, but it also destroys you and your reputation. You make a choice, take personal responsibility, balance how much you have to gain against how much you will lose.

  The events in Bolivia in 1967 unleashed an avalanche of newspaper articles, essays, testimonies, novels and biographies. All manner of people speculated on the whys and wherefores of the events, defo
rmed them, concealed them, or turned them into something sacred, mythical and archetypal. It is only natural that people would want to rescue the magic spirit of Greek tragedies, so as to exalt sacrifice, will power, and the role of example or, on the contrary, to reveal the innate perversion of conspiracy and its ghosts. The bad thing about this is that it can mask false political objectives and, even worse, individual, venal or servile interests. The majority of what has been published about these events falls into this category.

  For reasons of international politics, rather than intelligence purposes, the Cuban Revolution maintained a prolonged silence about the events in Bolivia except when it came to eulogizing the figure of the Comandante Heroico and his men who had fallen in the struggle against imperialism, as was their wish. Just as the Stalinist road to socialism choked with thorns and carnivorous plants as it approached the abyss, so too did the Cuban Revolution nose-dive through the undergrowth before finally coming to an inevitable halt. At the end of the day, Cuba is an island in all senses of the word and always sought to protect its own achievements and hold to its own principles.

  I provide one simple example from a bona fide source, the Colombian writer and friend of Fidel, Gabriel García Márquez, who tells an anecdote about the anniversary of the founding of Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency. Its first director was Masetti, the Argentine journalist who went to the Sierra Maestra to interview the guerrilla leaders. Che had personally invited Masetti to stay in Cuba subsequently, to take the helm of the project to create the Revolution’s own media outlet. To commemorate the anniversary, Gabo had suggested that he should write an article about Masetti, with whom he himself had worked directly. He went to Cuba expecting to get access, through his contacts, to the detailed information he needed from the Revolution’s archives. To his surprise, he discovered there was none: no data, no clippings, no reference to the journalistic high spot the creation of Prensa Latina had been, and least of all, any mention of its director, Masetti, who was considered to have performed the most daring exploit in Latin American journalism.

  The covert chicanery surrounding Masetti’s bureaucratic ‘disappearance’ was pre-empted at the time by the news of the physical disappearance of this little known revolutionary hero. But it was exposed by García Márquez, who witnessed the harassment to which Masetti was subjected by the ‘official’ journalists of the original Cuban Communist Party until they managed to get rid off him.

  Together with Masetti, all information about Che’s guerrilla project in Argentina also disappeared from the Cuban archives: the formation of the group in Cuba; who was in it; Masetti’s role; how they were trained; the support given by the Minister of the Interior Ramiro Valdés, formerly comandante of Che’s ‘Ciro Redondo’ vanguard column; Che’s personal independent leadership of the Argentine group from the start; and his intention of taking total command on the ground once the Salta base had been established. Comandante Guevara’s independent action was not marginal, but came from a commitment by Fidel Castro, when the Cuban guerrilla war began, to Che’s express wish (after victory on the island) to take the armed struggle to his own country, a commitment that Castro himself has recognized.

  History would be rewritten. The Revolution’s Americas Department – a body subordinate to the reorganized Ministry of the Interior under its minister José Abrantes – was supervised by Fidel Castro but administered by Barbaroja Piñeiro. He handled the relationships with and training of revolutionary groups from all over the continent, and produced a plan to export the armed struggle to Latin America. It was ideologically not very strict as long as the groups were pro-Cuban. Although the plan failed in 99 per cent of the groups that were sent to fight, it successfully mobilized popular support for Cuba and was a pain in the arse for the USSR.

  But in Barbaroja’s hands, the idea of strategic control lost touch with reality; he started introducing cards that were already marked. Realizing he could expect nothing from the official Latin American Communist Parties except control of ideological orthodoxy, he began to weave his fabric with different coloured wools.

  In the case of Argentina, he visibly favoured flirting with Peronism because in the long run it was a political force capable of regaining power, something that was obviously never going to happen with the Communist Party. This position, which contradicted Che’s view and belittled his vision, became clear when our group left Cuba. We were given rubbish documents, received false messages purporting to be from Che, were subject to indefinite delays, and ultimately received equipment in the field that was worse than useless.

  Like the cinema special effect in which an actor’s face morphs into that of a beast, the political roots of the EGP leadership and the support we received throughout Argentina (the recruitment, political organization, city networks and country-wide links that I knew from experience) changed in Barbaroja’s version from grass roots and cadres who had broken away from the Argentine Communist Party to political and economic support from the branch of Peronism around John W. Cooke, Perón’s former delegate in Cuba. This was totally untrue. As an organization, the EGP had no relationship with Cooke, and my friendship with him when we met in Havana was purely circumstantial. Che himself never told Cooke about his Argentina project, despite liking El Gordo personally. Che saw a latent danger in Peronism’s heterogeneity, which made working communication unsafe, on top of the risks for him personally of having his name associated with it.

  My catching a glimpse in the Buenos Aires shopping arcade of our former EGP core member Miguel, supposedly dead at the hands of a firing squad in Algeria, was part of Barbaroja’s double political game in respect of Argentina. It led to the subsequent deformation, or rather total disappearance, of the project founded by Che and his group. I got to the bottom of Miguel’s story when I returned to Argentina from Chile in 1973. He had visited the prisoners in jail in Salta (according to Henry, he told him he was Jewish when he wasn’t) on orders from Barbaroja, for whom he had been working since he was rescued from Algeria. He wanted to sound them out about the possibility of their publicly supporting Peronist grass-roots groups and perhaps working together in the future. Given that the EGP contact already existed through me, it was strange that Piñeiro never mentioned these plans when I met him on that Havana corner at dawn. On the contrary, he suggested that I should help send the Communist youth contingent, the future FAL, to Cuba for training. They were subsequently stuck in Havana at a time when Che’s guerrillas in Bolivia were in urgent need of reinforcements.

  For the next thirty years there would be no mention of Che’s group in Argentina – not incidentally and even less through historical research – until the anniversaries commemorating Che’s death brought it to the fore. Not because people started talking knowledgably about it but because one of Che’s biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, who had lived in Cuba while writing Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, came to Sweden to look for me. He wanted to write about the Argentine episode, so Che’s entourage in Havana had pointed him in my direction. Che’s wife Aleida told him: ‘There’s someone somewhere, you should go and find him.’ Orlando Borrego, Che’s deputy at the Ministry of Industry, agreed: ‘Yes, there is someone …’, and Alberto Castellanos, Che’s ex-bodyguard and former Salta prisoner, encouraged him cryptically: ‘The person who knows the whole story is Pelado, you should talk to him.’ Anderson went to Argentina, followed various leads to the survivors (those who had subsequently survived the dictatorship’s killing spree), and talked to Héctor Jouvé aka Cordobés. He said: ‘You need to talk to Pelado about this.’ He then travelled to Spain and saw Henry Lerner, who got my phone number through Martín Espeleta, another Córdoban living in Uppsala. Henry asked Martín to ask me if he could give my number to Anderson, as if I were some state secret. My number is only not in the phone directory by mistake: it used to be, but when we moved house after fifteen years I accidentally put a cross in the wrong box and it was removed.

  Anderson came to Malmö one Monday in the spring of 1995,
intending to return to Spain the following day. He called me from the ferry terminal that connects Malmö with Copenhagen and I went to fetch him. He stayed in my house until the Saturday, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, with my dog Gema standing guard at his door. We talked from morning till midnight for a week: I cooked, he talked and asked questions, tape recorder between us. We continued through a long series of letters and faxes because parts of the tapes were inaudible. He sent me a hundred transcribed pages, but ultimately the book did not tell the whole story. One part appeared to be censored, not through any fault of his, but it was as if Cuban confirmation of events published for the first time – Salta, Algeria – was conditional on not talking about other things – Bolivia, Cubans. Anderson agreed under those conditions, I suppose, although it might also have been because of editorial pressures to reduce the almost 400 excess pages. He sent me a postcard from Finland at the launch of the Finnish edition, saying that he wanted to explain the omissions to me personally, and invited me to his house near Malaga on the Costa del Sol, but at the time I was condemned to ‘house arrest’, not being able to travel for lack of funds.

  None of the other biographers contacted me, except Jorge Castañeda, a Mexican ‘art critic’, who had caught Anderson’s contagious enthusiasm and called me from Princeton wanting to do a telephone interview. I refused. He asked somewhat nastily how I could possibly give an extensive interview to an ‘American’ and not to him, a Latin American, practically a compatriot. I said: ‘He came here so I could look him in the eyes.’ He said he would send me his CV and in the meantime I could ask Pierre Schori (a member of Sweden’s then Social Democratic government) about him and he would call me again. As if I could pick up the phone and ask the cabinet secretary: ‘Tell me, Pierre, who is this Mexican guy?’