Che Wants to See You Page 3
It is at this point that there begins a dual history, or a dual telling of Argentine history that pits historians against one another. On the one hand, the history of rich Argentines and their wealth, and on the other, the history of poor Argentines. History does not develop linearly in an unstoppable succession of ultimately constructive events, but is twisted and forced to benefit a class that presupposes and assumes the primacy of its rights, inalienable under their law, and divine according to their bishops.
The whole structure of the nascent state, with all the weaponry at its disposal, was built to serve the landed oligarchy. If the national heroes of Argentina were filtered through a sieve, only glittering gold nuggets like Moreno, Castelli, Belgrano and San Martín would be left at the bottom. The rest would be washed away in a purifying flood.
Take Rivadavia, the first constitutional president of the Republic. The first thing he did was legalize dispossession, by granting property rights over vast expanses of farmland and urban areas to the national bourgeoisie, his friends. Argentina, ruled by an increasingly rich minority, enjoyed a high rate of economic growth thanks to two insuperable gifts from heaven: the best prairies in the world, with fertile topsoil providing pasture for herds of cattle that increased in size at the same pace as the demand for hide and beef from the metropolis; and almost free labour provided by a seemingly endless influx of European immigration, and completely free in the case of the subjugated indigenous people. The latter were eventually wiped out rather than willingly give up their land, thus making way for the colonization of the furthest reaches of the country by the starving masses of Europeans arriving by boat every day.
On 4 June 1943, at a turning point in the Second World War, the armed forces staged a coup against their own civilian government. The ideologue behind the coup, Juan Domingo Perón, was to become a key figure in the political landscape for the remainder of the century. No ordinary soldier, no dull lover of barracks life, no servant of the oligarchy, he had concrete plans and had made good use of his previous post as military attaché at the Argentine Embassy in Rome. As he would later explain to the Army chiefs of staff: ‘Gentlemen, the Russians will win the war. Social reform is on its way. Either we make our own revolution and lead it, or we will be swept away by history.’ But he needed charisma to win over the people. A stroke of luck came his way in the shape of a national catastrophe, an earthquake in the province of San Juan. At a gathering for the 10,000 victims, he had the good fortune, superlative good fortune as it turned out, to meet the person who would become the bond of steel between him and the proletariat, and bind herself to him in marriage: Eva Duarte – Evita.
Peronism brought the biggest change in social structures, and ways of thinking, in Argentine history. The working class ceased to be a faceless mass and took power. Above all, they were no longer a tool to be used, abused and discarded. They became human beings, protagonists central to the life of the nation. For the first time in history, the poor downtrodden masses arrived in Buenos Aires as its masters, not its street cleaners.
A passion for travel rather than sport, made me, in the words of Bernard Shaw, ‘leave school in order to get an education’. I set off for Salta, in the north of Argentina. I did not know then that whenever you leave a place, you are reborn, over and over again. But it really was like that. The journey opened up a whole new world, another country, much more Argentine, less Spanish, less Gringo than the Mendoza I lived in, a world of amazing natural beauty.
Northern Argentina showed me a reality the Left refused to see, and influenced my nascent political consciousness. The country was Peronist. As a lesson in practical politics, it was a defining experience. Since vagrancy was not subsidized, I had to find work from time to time, and this took me to one of Argentina’s largest sugar mills, El Tabacal in Orán, Salta, where the sugar cane harvest was about to begin. I was given the job of overseeing the Indians who fed the sugar cane into the crushers on the platform beside the mill where the trains loaded with cane arrived. El Tabacal was a huge mill, self-sufficient in both cane and food from its vast plantation. It was closed to public traffic, guarded by its own police and run by a staff of technicians, some from overseas, skilled workers and ordinary personnel. The majority of cane cutters were Chahuanco and Toba Indians. The mill would collect them from the forests of Salta each year in cattle trucks, give them space on the river banks to build straw huts, provide them with a minimum amount of food, and after the harvest was over, take them back home, with no further costs.
To a mind like mine filled with utopian socialist ideas, and despite my encounter with a real country in a process of change, Peronism seemed more like a stumbling block than a road to revolution. It did not stand up to scientific Marxist analysis. Its heterogeneous, something-for-everyone character – a mix of bible and boiler-room as the tango goes, of cops and robbers – hindered any effective manifesto.
And then, Eva Perón died. She was the person who might have radicalized the movement. In fact, she had embodied the rage, the class ingredient, the banner of the poor. Her passing left millions orphaned, and uncoupled the train from the engine. On the day of her funeral, it drizzled on Buenos Aires and on the soul of half the country. For the poor, it was as if the light illuminating their hopes had gone out.
The Argentine Communist Party was a typical petty-bourgeois party, divided into an arcane leadership, in the style of the Soviet Communist Party, and a militant rank and file. The few roots it had in the masses were swept away by Peronism, leaving space only for the middle class, professionals and students. There was, however, a larger sector on the Left that had been there almost from the birth of the nation, influenced by Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ and inspired by Argentina’s most brilliant independence heroes. This Left later absorbed the ideas of Marx’s First Socialist International, but did not join the party and became what were known as ‘fellow travellers’. In any case, the drama of continental realities south of the Río Grande stemmed not from the indigenous nature of a population that had been exploited since the Spanish Conquest, but from the exploitation itself, now firmly in the hands of the empire to the north.
The Catholic Church, which had used Peronist power to impose religious education in schools and colleges, now began to oppose him, supported by its historical strongholds: the army and the oligarchy. Perón abolished religious education, passed the divorce law, made illegitimate children equal before the law, withdrew subsidies to Catholic schools – and thereby precipitated the end of his own term in office.
On the morning of 16 June 1955, I was staying with Pepe Varona, a friend who subsequently became the official set designer of the New York Opera. I was preparing a set of proposals for advertising posters for an American travel agency when, around noon, we heard warplanes overhead. Without a second thought, we dashed up to the roof of Pepe’s hostel, on the corner of Montevideo and Rivadavia streets, and from there, with heavy hearts, we watched the criminal attack on government house in the Plaza de Mayo, no more than ten blocks away. The first wave of planes turned right over us, and continued on between Rivadavia and Avenida de Mayo, their guns firing on the Casa Rosada. We could see other planes coming in over the River Plate, nose-diving on the plaza and unloading their bombs and shrapnel. It was a murderous attack over streets crowded with cars and pedestrians, pensioners feeding the pigeons in the square, and children playing on the grass. Men and women fled in terror, dragging their kids, fanning out from the epicentre of the crime. We were just going back into the hostel, to listen to the radio, when a second, smaller squadron appeared and resumed the attack.
Back on the roof, we watched the battle in full swing. By now the army loyal to the president had deployed anti-aircraft guns and was returning fire, filling the sky with black puffs and the air with a pungent odour and a terrible sound of thunder. The aircraft, extending their radius, flew in just behind us, before going towards the Casa Rosada and on to the War Ministry building on Paseo Colón. At the end of the park, th
ey headed towards Uruguay and disappeared into impunity. Ambulance and fire-engine sirens ripped through the silence settling over the city, normally so noisy at that hour, just past 1 p.m. A couple of hours later, a third group of stragglers, three fighter planes coming in from the West, strafed the three targets again, before flying off over the river, bound for Montevideo. Privileged Argentina, tired of wrinkling its nose and containing its hatred of the plebs, had gone to confession, genuflected, crossed itself, and sought the blessing of their chaplains and bishops, before finally attacking the fallen angel, Perón, and his demonic descamisados.
The dead quickly lose their identity and become difficult to count. The actual number of casualties in a massacre is rarely known. Similar world events have suffered from the same lack of mathematical precision. The numbers are minimised ‘to avoid panic’, and forgotten for political expediency. We never knew how many people died in that attack, although they were in the hundreds. ‘Five for each one!’ bellowed Perón in his speech that afternoon. The streets began filling up in the opposite direction to the previous stampede. Angry, threatening groups marched in from the outskirts of the city, home to the manufacturing industries and Peronists (the city itself was never Peronist), and as night fell columns of thick smoke rose from several parts of the city. A Dantesque glow turned some buildings red.
2
News of Castro’s Revolution Reaches Argentina: 1958
By 1958, homemade pipe-bombs were going off all over Argentina’s industrial cities. Made from bits of iron piping stuffed with dynamite, with a fuse sticking out of a hole in a screw top, they caused a pretty convincing explosion. A new slogan, ‘Perón Vuelve’ (Perón is coming home), began appearing on walls.
Meanwhile, union leaders determined to cling on to power by any means morphed into the ‘union bureaucracy’ and ousted the masses as the natural leaders of the workers’ movement. The Peronist Party was proscribed, its leaders exiled or jailed. The ‘new leadership’ – the unions’ secretaries and treasurers – fell in behind the country’s most reactionary right-wing forces. Union headquarters became bunkers from whence bodyguards accompanied their bosses to night clubs or the races. Economists of the cattle and grain oligarchy ran the economy on behalf of the military regime and, at the behest of US imperialism, joined the network of international organizations like the IMF, IDB and GATT with its Latin American adviser ECLAC, and drowned in acronyms any possibility of domestic industrial development. On the contrary, they adopted an economic policy which condemned Argentina to a secondary role as producer and exporter of primary products.
Arturo Frondizi, a lawyer and dissident member of the Radical Party, emerged as a possible candidate in the forthcoming elections. His friend Ricardo Rojo, also a lawyer, journeyed to Caracas with other emissaries to seek the good graces of ‘El Viejo’ Perón, who was there in exile playing with his dogs. A subtle web was being woven with threads from Perón’s own skein; like a puppet-master, he tugged a little here, pulled a little there, and conspired daily with the many different pilgrims visiting the Peronist Mecca. Frondizi’s negotiations prospered and he went on to sign a pact with Perón that would ensure electoral victory for Frondizi’s party through the majority vote of the Peronist masses. In return, he would restore the social, economic and political gains Perón had made, and revoke laws restricting Peronism. In February 1958, Frondizi was elected president.
Frondizi’s economic policy was probably the most sensible the Argentine industrial bourgeoisie had ever come up with. The idea was very clear and seductive. We lived in one of the continent’s richest countries, but were like poor people content just thinking we are rich. Resources do not exist unless we extract them. What use are oil reserves if we don’t exploit them, turn them into foreign currency to develop the country, import technology, industrialize? Frondizi’s thesis passed from hand to hand in the form of a book, Petrol and Politics, which denounced the power of the multinational oil companies, who exercised global control through corruption and blackmail, backed by force. But like Perón, Frondizi did not hold all the cards. At the transactions, agreements and concessions stage that every electoral policy has to undergo, it was undermined by ‘enemy’ strategists – the powers that be, the cattle and grain barons allied to US imperialist multinationals.
When the new administration came to power, a total of twenty-eight oil contracts were signed with foreign companies, twenty of them from the US. Other contracts setting up industrial plants, especially in the car industry, put most of Argentine industry in foreign hands, an insuperable barrier to the implementation of the Radical Party’s policy. In fact, the exact opposite policy was implemented. Not only was oil not used to fuel the national industrialization programme, but after Frondizi was defeated four years later, it transpired that US and British companies had been paid more to drill for oil than if we had bought it directly from them on the world market and kept our crude deposits intact. The systematic surrender of our natural resources was shameless and absolute. Foreign companies earned enormous sums. The race to denationalize was unstoppable: shipping, distilleries, naval shipyards, radio stations, furnaces and farmland passed to the Argentine private sector, and in the case of oil to Standard Oil, Texaco or Shell. The de-capitalization of the country forced us to take ‘loans’ from those same countries that had thoroughly plundered our national patrimony. US and European banks, the IDB, the Eximbank and the World Bank, together with the IMF, made the loans conditional on a series of restrictive measures that saw thousands of workers lose their jobs. ‘Frondizman’, as the cartoonist Landrú’s magazine Tia Vicenta called him, was not made of national steel or oil. He was made of Coca Cola.
My wife Claudia’s parents had a holiday home in Potrerillos, a valley in the foothills of the Andes on the road to Chile. One Sunday in the spring of 1958, Radio El Mundo’s midday international news programme announced it would be broadcasting an interview with Cuban guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra led by Fidel Castro, an already mythical figure even before he was famous for his beard, his outsize cigars (described by US journalist Herbert Matthews) and his audacity. Some years earlier, he had attacked the Moncada military barracks with about a hundred men, most of whom were killed, but he still went on to invade the island by motor launch with another hundred suicidal maniacs, again most of whom were killed, and then marched into the mountains with a handful of survivors. Among them was a doctor from Argentina.
With the whole South American continent between us, my image of the guerrillas was not so much political as romantic and adventurous. But it fired my imagination and awoke expectations. Insanity is generally closer to reality than cold reason. Argentine political journals were full of rigorous analyses of ‘important’ regional events, in which the World Bank or IMF, the State Department or CIA, carried more weight than some fantasy character no matter how bearded. But I was an avid reader of Primera Plana, a magazine that had already published an article on Cuba (its editor Jacobo Timerman had a nose for a story), and its accounts of the Bolivian revolution and the disaster in Guatemala had set my pulse racing.
I was determined to listen to the programme. So, leaving the family barbecue, I sat in the shade glued to the radio. The interview had been recorded by Radio El Mundo’s international news editor, Jorge Ricardo Masetti. If Fidel’s followers on the motor launch were suicidal maniacs, Masetti was cloned from them. From a Catholic Nationalist background, he nonetheless admired men of action, caudillos, leaders: not men who turned the other cheek but those who fought for their ideas and inspired others to follow. He was the kind of journalist who took risks, was attracted by the scent of danger, lured by it. The story behind the interview from the Sierra Maestra is an adventure in itself; full of instinctive actions, risks and gambles. Masetti recounted his amazing experiences, and his conversion from investigative foreign journalist to rebel with his own revolutionary cause, in his book Those Who Fight and Those Who Mourn.
Financed by Radio El Mundo, Masetti went to Cuba
in March 1958 armed with a cryptic note from Ricardo Rojo for his friend the Argentine, and a contact in Havana who could put him in touch with the revolutionaries. The Havana contact sent him to Santiago de Cuba, into the lion’s den. After interminable waiting and changes of safe houses, he met the people who could get him into the Sierra Maestra to search for the guerrillas. A host of hazardous exploits later, he reached the advance guard of the Argentine whom the Batista regime had dubbed a dangerous Communist agent. On his last legs, Masetti was finally taken to Che’s camp. For both of them, it was a relief to be able to talk on the same wavelength, use the same slang, and discover the same rather acerbic and ironic sense of humour. This affinity immediately became attraction and friendship. They worked on the interview, sometimes under enemy fire. Che then had him taken to the Commander in Chief.