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.
‘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
