charged with installing it. He was a tall, blond man who looked and behaved like a librarian, and spoke very basic guttural Spanish in a low voice while he polished his specs. Strictly professional, he indicated what he wanted and didn’t appear again until the work was finished. He soon showed signs he was satisfied, and even appreciative. He arrived at seven to find the place empty except for his foreign technical staff, and went round picking up scattered tools, waiting for the Cubans to turn up after eight, or even nine. When he got to our design table, he let off steam about the workers’ lack of punctuality. ‘They’ll never build socialism like this’, he said. The Cubans always had an excuse: they’d been on guard duty, in a political meeting, training with the militia, in a literacy class. And they really did seem very tired. They took on too many things and did none properly.
One morning, the Czech appeared with someone who was for me a transcendental figure: the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. I had admired him since I saw two of his most important films, Power and the Land (1934) and Spanish Earth (1937), at the Cine Club in Mendoza run by my Jewish friend David.
The ‘Flying Dutchman’, as this incomparable man was known, had studied optics before he became a filmmaker and was a specialist lens maker. He chose not to stay at home quietly in his prosperous family business, however, preferring to get involved in the century’s major social and political upheavals. A tall man of about sixty, with unruly greying hair, he was filming the installation of the exhibition. He said hello as the Czech introduced us.
The Habana Libre hotel in Vedado, on 23rd Street and L, was the heart of extra-revolutionary activities. Fidel, a leader without a home, could be seen in the early hours going up to the top floors where he spent the night. The guests, foreigners for the most part, wandered about till late in the large carpeted salons, interconnected by Hollywoodesque staircases. Bellboys in red jackets with gold braid could be seen attending to awestruck campesinos on delegations from the interior to an assembly on the agrarian reform, or children from Oriente province on a visit to the capital, or giggling schoolgirls with starched cuffs on a nursing crash course, or youth brigades holding meetings by the lifts. An atmosphere of supercharged subversion filled the lounges and corridors, dislodging the privileged decadence of the local elites and the omnipresent pre-packaged taste of the gringos.
Joris Ivens was staying at the Habana Libre. He asked me to help with the captions on his documentary, and we formed a bond. It was a reverential relationship on my part, and on his, I think, due to a need to keep the all-consuming Cuban reality at arm’s length, and talk to someone neutral yet just as amazed by the tropical exuberance. He spoke Spanish like an American but we understood each other perfectly. Interested in what had brought us to Cuba, he suggested we go to his hotel ‘where anybody who is anybody goes’. So, that same afternoon I walked the couple of blocks from the Colina and disappeared into the carpeted bowels of the Habana Libre. Whenever I met him after that, he was always with someone important. One night he introduced me to a woman in militia fatigues. She was Argentine, not Cuban. Her name was Alicia Eguren, the wife of the Peronist leader, John William Cooke. Alicia was cordial though quite curt and very inquisitive, as if she needed to ascertain which camp you were in. Not long afterwards she invited us to meet her husband up on the fifteenth floor, where they had a suite with large windows overlooking 23rd Street. Gordo Cooke, also in militia uniform, with a long beard that lay on his chest when he bent his head, had an unlit cigarette butt between his lips and ash splattered over his stomach. He was very nice and friendly. We were quickly on first-name terms like old friends, although I found it a bit disrespectful. To avoid misunderstandings, I made it clear I was not a Peronist but he was not interested in past affiliations; what mattered was the future. We talked until midnight. After that, whenever we met Alicia, we went up to see Gordo. Alicia was a kind of advance guard fishing for Argentines, who were then sucked up into the necromancer’s cave. Our friendship with her developed on the ground floor, in the hotel’s lounges and cafés, and with Cooke on the top floor, among Argentine newspapers, magazines, books and his own writings, scattered all over the floor. The soles of his campaign boots were as shiny as sugar cane, or even shinier thanks to the plush carpets covering his habitat. When I asked about Che, Cooke said Che was why they were there. Alicia was more emphatic. ‘Che is mine!’ she said. For an Argentine, she boasted, all roads to Che passed through her.
One evening the hotel hosted an exhibition of blindfold chess, organized by Miguel Najdorf, an Argentine grandmaster and world champion in the field. Originally from Poland, he was in Buenos Aires at a chess tournament when the Second World War broke out and was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi death camps. I recognized him from a fleeting encounter with him and his wife on a Number 60 bus in Buenos Aires.
A section of a large salon on the ground floor had been cordoned off. Inside were several widely spaced rows of tables. The challengers were seated on one side. On the other, blindfolded, was Najdorf accompanied by an assistant who brought him a chair if he wanted to sit down. The assistant called out the number of a table, the room fell silent; the challenger called out his latest move. Najdorf, deep in concentration, repeated the sequence of moves already played then made his move, which his assistant executed. The audience sighed with relief while the maestro moved on to the next of the thirty or forty challengers (his record was fifty-four) and repeated the miracle. At the end of the second row of tables, immersed in his game, was Che. It was only the second time I had seen him.
A couple of weeks earlier, I had read about an event commemorating the Spanish Civil War to be held in the Galician Centre, a baroque building on the corner of the Parque Central. Che would be there with General Enrique Lister, one of the great symbolic figures of the Spanish Republic. There was a huge crowd at the entrance. The room was long and narrow, crammed with rows of seats already occupied, and people standing against the walls, in the corridors, and sitting on the window sills. The ceiling fans were working overtime trying to recycle the air, but it was like stirring soup in which the audience were cooking.
Lister recalled the Civil War: the people’s militias, the role of the Communist Party, the International Brigades, and the support given by the USSR. Then Che spoke about the atmosphere in his family when he was a child, sitting round the wireless listening to news from Spain, as if the tragedy was affecting them personally, like all Argentines and other Latin Americans whether they were descendents of Spaniards or not. It informed his belief in the invincibility of the people’s struggle if its leaders have the same level of commitment, sacrifice and unity, over and above ideological schisms. He ended by paraphrasing an Antonio Machado poem and offering Lister his pistol if that same will to defeat Francoism would lead him to take up the armed struggle again. Che’s speech was not demagogic. His aim was not to persuade anyone or to milk applause. He spoke to say things he believed in or, at least, dreamed of.
Now here he was in the hotel, in front of his chess board, deep in thought, jotting things in his notebook after every move. In his well-worn fatigues, shirt outside his trousers, caught at the waist by his cartridge belt with his pistol on the right, the pockets of his shirt stuffed with papers, cigarettes and pens, his dusty unpolished boots, and his beret on the floor, between the legs of the chair. A woman who, like the crowd of us crammed together in front of him was not watching the game but Che himself, slipped under the cordon in a gesture of daring – or lack of vigilance by his bodyguard who was nowhere to be seen – knelt beside him, picked up the beret and handed it to him politely. Che, surprised but courteous, thanked her, but a few minutes later, with a sideways glance at his audience, put the beret back on the floor. The match ended with the hopes of most challengers dashed, Che’s included. In this particular battle, the strategist in chief was Najdorf.
One day Joris Ivens introduced me to a Mexican anthropologist, who was to be instrumental in finding me work. The National Institute for Tourist Industries (INIT)
