Che Wants to See You Read online

  The solution to everything depended on slotting into the bureaucratic organogram, acquiring full rights and obligations. Apart from the traditional official bodies like the municipality, public works, electricity and water, etc., there were the new ones which called all the shots. Urban reform, agrarian reform, confiscated assets, CDRs (the committees for the defence of the Revolution), militias, literacy brigades, were all part of an entity called Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) that wielded absolute power. It had been created by merging the organizations that had fought (the guerrillas’ 26th of July Movement and the Student Directory) with those that had dithered (the communists of the PSP). The latter, however, got their cadres in place first.

  In Oriente, the ORI-northern region was run by a communist, Rita Díaz, the power behind the throne, and a redhead to boot. She was not very tall, chubby but shapely, and mysteriously fitted into tight olive green fatigues and blue militia shirt. With her hair caught in a sort of loose bun under a green beret, she looked more like a French resistance fighter than a tropical miliciana. She was very temperamental but had a good sense of humour, was both friendly and energetic, and highly expeditious. She put her weight behind the handicrafts workshop from the start and promised to help us find staff among people she trusted. Meanwhile, Claudia and I had to find a house, furnish it, join the militia and, of course, do political work. We would stay in touch with her. ‘That’s great, chico! An Argentine like Che … the most beautiful man in the Revolution!’ she said as she waved goodbye with a ‘come and eat at my house’, but no firm date.

  A young lawyer, Evelio Rodríguez, was in charge of Urban Reform in Holguín. For our workshop, he suggested a former fruit farm: an enormous old house with two interior patios and a large piece of land behind. It would be fine. Repairs to the floors and roof were needed, but it was do-able. For Claudia and me, Evelio picked an apartment half a block from the main square, and no more than three blocks from the workshop. It was on the first floor, with stairs straight down to the street where, as if to mitigate our nostalgia, there was a tree, the only one on the block. It was not very big but satisfied our somewhat bourgeois need for comfort, and its excellent bathroom met with immediate approval. Large transparent lizards wandered over the frosted glass, but Evelio said they were the best line of defence against mosquitoes. We went to choose some furniture and the following day the house was just about habitable.

  Within a week there was a rhythm to my work. It was hard – seven in the morning to twelve at night on normal days – but absorbing. I was the boss, but also the bricklayer, carpenter and designer: removing roofs to replace woodwork and broken tiles, knocking down walls, making a bathroom, connecting the plumbing, installing electricity (under electric company supervision) or painting white walls. Cuba was almost totally dependent on imported materials and our work showed how far its commercial sector had deteriorated. As stocks ran out there was no way of replenishing them. There was a shortage of nails, screws, wire, plaster, fuses, files, etc., so finding materials was the first battle.

  I joined the militia, training a couple of days a week and doing night guard duty in official buildings or important work places. This general level of vigilance was not only necessary, it was also a way of mobilizing people on a political level. It played havoc with productivity at work, however. I could see how elastic timetables were, and although I used firm rational arguments, it had no effect. To make things worse, after the Bay of Pigs the army produced an emergency plan for defending Holguín in case of attack, not an entirely crazy idea given the city’s strategic position on the north coast. It comprised encircling the town with three or four lines of trenches to be dug by voluntary milicianos, better at digging holes than being soldiers. This pick and spade job was done on (Red) Sundays until five in the afternoon. It flayed your hands but included a free lunch.

  All problems to do with the workshop went straight to Rita, that is, to the ORI, the powerhouse of the Revolution. No cement in the building material yards? Go and find Rita. No rivets? Rita will phone someone; ‘What the hell’s happened to those rivets, chico?’ That’s how we did the impossible for the first few months.

  The Swiss director, who seemed to live in his huge Lincoln Continental, appeared at least once a month, surrounded by economists and planners from JUCEPLAN, the Central Planning Board, an entity in charge of reorganizing the economy and educating cadres. It meant a wasted day. And not only for us, because these crazy economists applied undigested Soviet models, from an economic system of which they knew neither the internal workings nor the results, as we eventually saw when the practices of the ‘political cadres’ whose inflated aims and results were made public. The Swiss, still sweating, was creating the inevitable national bureaucratic apparatus to fit the tangle of budget proposals, inputs, expenses, investment and production, while we were still building our basic infrastructure, because we had no precedents, no ideas and no pots. Luckily, the Mexican girl’s folkloric ideas of going back to the primitive ceramics of the indigenous Taíno and Siboney peoples – hand-moulded clay pieces baked on a tribal fire – were discarded. The argument against, which I subscribed to, was that you could not devote an entire wages, equipment and administration budget to an experiment only useful in an Anthropology Department science lab.

  She was transferred back to Havana, and was replaced by a young administrator, Melchor Casals, who was not even twenty. He took over the planning days, and every now and again came with us to Havana for administrative training. The permanent staff comprised an improvised technical director (me); a very capable designer (Claudia); a teenage administrator (Melchor); a communist delegate-cum-worker (Cucho); an actual carpenter (Argeo Pérez), and three trainees. The responsibility kept me awake at night. But in the nick of time I managed to get the latest books on ceramic techniques: pottery, clay, varnish, kilns and temperatures. I got some locally, sent for more from Havana, and built up quite a good theoretical base on the subject.

  When work on the building was finished, Argeo made me a draughtsman’s table and the second stage began. Using millimetre graph paper, I designed every piece of equipment, shelving, work tables, sinks with covers, sinks without covers, sinks with drains, etc., and arranged them according to their place in an eventual production line. Various types of potter’s wheels; tables for casting, moulding, kneading, filing, varnishing; rooms with warm air circulating through the floor-to-ceiling shelving, for drying the varnish.

  Then came the period of experimenting with the equipment and materials. We needed prototypes already finished and fired. I designed a circular kiln with a one-cubic-metre capacity, with saggars arranged in the shape of an orange cut in half, with flames circulating upwards in a spiral, impelled by pressure from a ventilator. To build the ventilator, and especially the burners, I needed the help of specialized technology. The ventilator was built in a local workshop, but for the burner I searched the length and breadth of Cuba before Rita found me a group of Soviet engineers in the nickel processing plant at Nicaro. They designed and built an initial burner for the circular kiln and, later, a second one with more capacity and precision.

  Halfway along the road from Holguín to Havana I had spotted an area of red clay. We took a sample and it proved to have excellent drying and plastic qualities. We went personally and chose a truckload of the best clay and began the process of washing, grinding and kneading large quantities of this formidable red paste. It gave us a beautiful range of plates, cups and vases, with a single colour varnish inside and the natural red clay on the outside. Don’t forget that this was the mid-sixties, and Cuba was running out of practically everything, a critical situation in which the first things to break are plates. Hence, we channelled production into crockery.

  But work wasn’t my only worry. Political control had degenerated into Stalinist sectarianism, spreading through Cuban society like a virus. A person’s political past counted for more than his skills when it came to evaluating who would get positions of
responsibility. The majority of the population were stuck because very few had a communist past. In the case of foreign workers, supervision was by representatives of the Communist Parties back home. The job of vetting the Argentine contingent fell to an engineer from Buenos Aires, a certain Fontana. He worked and lived in Holguín, and it wasn’t long before he turned up at the workshop. Dressed in militia fatigues, with his beret under his epaulette, like a US Green Beret, he introduced himself as the ‘president’ of the colony of Argentine volunteers sent by the Communist Party to support the Revolution. After running a critical eye over our facilities, which seemed to interest him, he said I had to come to his office to register my details and be briefed on the colony’s obligations. The unresolved question of credentials that would make me legitimately useful (which I thought I had left behind in Havana) raised its ugly head again. The engineer, his son and daughter-in-law, both architects, worked in the Oriente department of the Ministry of Public Works. Most of the Argentines sent by the party were professionals, since the majority of the Cubans in the mass exodus to Miami had been professionals, stripping the state of technocrats, top civil servants, doctors, economists, etc. Cuba needed to plug the hole. The Argentines – over 400 of them – were not there entirely out of altruism and international solidarity. They earned excellent salaries, of which they sent up to 50 per cent into succulent bank balances at home. With the rest, they maintained a standard of living that was higher than most in the government, ministers included. My salary was much, much more modest.

  I went to Fontana’s house in the hope of forestalling a collision with the hierarchy, at least until I had enough support to disguise my being a political orphan and to regularize my status. Fontana felt empowered by his role of watchdog and put me through a sort of spy novel interrogation, examining my entire life back to my childhood. He quickly established that I would have my work evaluated periodically, and would have to report any failings to him. ‘We must perform to the best of our abilities, as human beings and as party activists’, he said. He insisted on having all my details, so I had to send to Mendoza for the required references after all. After thousands of miles, trials and tribulations, it turned out my bosses were not Cuban but Argentines with whom I had absolutely nothing in common.

  5

  ‘Compañero, Che Is Expecting You’

  Cucho lived in the yaguas shanty town, on the outskirts of Holguín. He was an old communist, though his militancy went no further than reading the weekly Hoja Semanal after passing it round among his friends. Rita told him to introduce me to his neighbours and support my activities, although there was still no organized political work there. My first thought on seeing the place was that nothing could be done until these people were removed from this putrefaction and given a decent place to live. But things don’t work like that, not even in Cuba. There was no decent place, and the inhabitants weren’t cattle that you could just herd back and forth.

  There is no formula for starting socio-political work in these circumstances, even with a revolutionary government aiming to outlaw demagoguery and replace it with action. Anthropologists, who don’t pretend to change things, try to blend in with the locals, adopt their customs, live like them, eat like them, begin to dream like them, and by so doing get to understand them. The literacy brigades do this, but in situ. Teaching people to read and write is a huge step forward, although to be fair, in Cuba illiteracy was no more than 25 per cent nationally, and only above that in rural areas. Shanty towns are spectres of misery everywhere. The usual description of their inhabitants as coming to the city peripheries from some distant nowhere in search of opportunities is far from true. They are neither campesinos nor city dwellers. They have left their huts, but have no houses. No countryside, no future. And in the main, no water.

  I got to know Cucho’s family, his neighbours and his fellow communists – no more than a handful of them in a densely populated area. There was a ‘social centre’, that is, a fenced-off dance floor of flattened earth and a stage at the end for musicians. The audience brought their own chairs, if they had them. A small curious crowd was gathering, mostly women, under the faint light from a bulb hooked up by extension cable to an empty police checkpoint. Cucho’s image of himself as a rabble-rouser went into overdrive with a fanciful introduction of me, as a hero from generous foreign lands come ready to give his all for Cuba. After a difficult moment breaking the ice with muttered introductions, the meeting opened up to questions and in no time we established a whole programme of activities based on looking at the Americas, past and present. We would meet on the dance floor for an open debate twice a week after the evening meal. For me this meant an urgent visit to the National Publishing House’s library and bookshop to get books on Cuban, Caribbean and US history, to fill the serious gaps in my knowledge.

  Cubans had mixed feelings about Americans, or Yanquis as they called them. On the one hand, the present situation, with invasions, sabotage, blockade, and other acts of aggression, made them hate the Gringos and support the Revolution. On the other hand, they secretly admired them. All their most popular images, from movies, to Cadillacs, gangsters, cowboys, skyscrapers, millionaires and chewing gum, were American, creating a subliminal belief that the Americans were superior beings. Added to which, even deeper down, a real fear of the Russians kept raising its head, much to the despair of Cucho who had to dispel the myth that communists stole children. Apparently the story of the Spanish ‘war children’ taken to the Soviet Union under an agreement with the Republic, with the idea of saving them from Fascism, was ingrained in the minds of the world’s Catholics. Not only were children stolen, they were pickled and eaten.

  No matter what historical event came up, we spent the allotted time discussing it. The meetings were lively, full of avid participants who came religiously on the appointed days, and even started coming prepared with questions, and contradictions. Looking back, I can see I had become a kind of Pope without a script, acting outside the rigorous restrictive canons of a party organization. We had said there would be open debate, and there was. The point was to extract, from the clash of history and reality, a positive take on the Revolution, of the tasks it proposed, of the sacrifices being demanded of them, yes, even of them, the poorest class of all. The revolutionary leadership was setting the example. There was no abuse, no rank, no privilege. The leaders worked day and night, with practically no sleep. The age of miracles had descended on the island, and the miracle was honesty. The weekly discussions – jokingly called ‘the yaguas Forum’ – were noticed, and my political stock shot up in Rita’s eyes. Not as far as ‘President’ Fontana was concerned, however. He gave me a deadline to fix my residence in Cuba (as he had some significant control over me).

  The workshop meanwhile, with its spanking new roof and two working kilns, was ready to start production. We had already made crockery prototypes, and were experimenting with moulds for the liquid clay. The burners had already arrived. On my first free Saturday I had been to Moa, a village on the north coast, to talk to the Soviet engineers at the nearby nickel plant. They kept themselves to themselves, wrapped in nostalgia, well provided with musical instruments, books and records, in a nice, although isolated, house on the beach. They had a smattering of Spanish so between them they had managed my questions and answers, greeting my appeal for technical help with the burners enthusiastically. It had taken a whole afternoon to explain exactly what I wanted.

  They did not mix much with the other foreign professionals living there, but they did mention an Argentine couple who were doctors. On my second visit, I had been to see this couple who invited me to dinner. We talked into the night, our good spirits fuelled by a few beers. While her husband was making coffee, the young female doctor said something that struck a chord with my latent feeling of unease. ‘I see you’re very excited about the Revolution, Ciro. Your disillusionment will be very painful, I’m afraid. Communists are coming out of the woodwork like mice, taking over everything, to get at the chee
se.’ The phrase remained engraved in my memory like a hieroglyphic chiselled in granite. It was only her opinion, of course, but they had been sent by the Argentine Communist Party so this inside-take on things surprised me. Their being suspicious about why I was in Cuba was perhaps part of a general continental-wide policy, to impose ideological control and situate the Cuban Revolution within the Cold War: a policy of the Communist International.

  Melchor, our administrator, talked to me about his future during our long nights on guard duty. He wasn’t happy doing office work and, like all those in the shadow of the generation that won the war in the mountains (and the city), he felt none of the jobs available brought him closer to Mount Olympus. He and Xiomara, his skeletal girlfriend, believed, like the youngsters in Russia in 1917, that the Revolution was a time for creativity and giving art free rein. They dreamed that once the state had solved production problems by recuperating their legitimate means, and faced the basic challenges of the new society, like education (which it was doing), housing and health, etc., it would prioritize culture, and this would be a springboard for launching Cuba into the first world, not in the banal GDP sense, but in terms of Art, Cinema and Literature. Melchor wanted to study theatre and had heard that the university in Santiago, on the other side of the Sierra Maestra, was going to open a theatre school at the start of the 1962 school year. He wanted me to help him leave the workshop and register for the preparatory course. But it was nearly the end of the year, and the kilns were working. Not an easy moment.

  The first time the big kiln reached 1,100 degrees and was working to capacity, I was overjoyed. I cooled it down slowly overnight and went to bed in the morning, leaving Cucho on guard. I wanted to be there with the whole staff when the oven was finally opened. One refractory box had broken along with some pieces in other boxes, but in the main everything was intact. The colour of the clay was beautiful, albeit a slightly paler red, and the black, blue and grey were very successful despite being imperfectly applied. I tapped the pots with the tips of my fingers, the sound was perfect. We all played tunes on the cups, plates and jars, in a concert of joy and pride. And confidence. What I had promised had come to pass, warts and all.