a short, jovial-looking man, slightly provincial, and good natured. He could easily have been the gardener, but he turned out to be a doctor, a professor of pathology in the Faculty of Medicine. This was Dr Alberto Granado, friend of Che and companion on his motorcycle journey round South America. After the Revolution, Che had invited him to work on the island. Alberto invited me to his house to meet his wife and children since, he said, Saturdays and Argentines were synonymous with barbecues. Preparing the barbecue broke the ice and by the time we started to talk seriously we were already friends. I glimpsed that my coming to Cuba was starting to make sense.
I stayed until late and when I came to leave, Alberto said that his house would now be my home in Santiago. We would be saving the Revolution money to boot. They made room for me in his study, a narrow room filled with books and toys. In the months that followed, until July 1962, we talked endlessly about recurring themes: Cuba, the Revolution, Latin America, Argentina, Che … Che, Argentina, Latin America, the Revolution, Cuba.
On Saturdays, when I came out of class, I would go to Petiso Granado’s hideaway, the pathology lab. I would cross a huge hall with rows of stainless steel tables, some with corpses or bits of corpses, then climb some stairs to a mezzanine where I would find Alberto Granado, calmly eating a cheese sandwich as if he were at a picnic in a flowery meadow smelling of lavender, instead of formaldehyde and disinfectant. Then we would go home to resume our discussions; an obsessive mutual, collective, national and international examination of conscience. We discarded all the Argentine political history that had shaped us.
I told him of my travels around the north of Argentina, and the re-emergence of an underclass, descended from the poverty-stricken gaucho militias and survivors of the colonialism of yesteryear, who were forging a political presence behind Perón’s deceptive populism and, thanks to him, could no longer be ignored. He told me about his own recent journey through the Chaco, the region where I had been. I must surely have asked the reason for that journey, since he was already living in Cuba, but I don’t remember an answer that might have made me put two and two together. We talked about the workshop, political control, sectarianism, the militias, the yaguas shanty town. He was always interested in how my political work was going. The weeks passed amid corpses, barbecues and discussions. Then in July, he told me Che was coming to Santiago on the 26th for the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks. The weekend before the visit, Alberto said Che wanted to meet me. He planned a barbecue in his house.
However, two days before the celebrations, I was laid up in bed in Holguín with a stonking cold. The most important day of my life, and I was in no state to drive to Santiago, or even get out of bed. I got someone to call and explain the problem, and say how sorry I was. When I got to Santiago the following week, Alberto said Che had left a ticket to Havana in my name with Cubana airlines, and was expecting me as soon as possible.
On my second visit to Havana’s Rancho Boyeros airport, my expectations were different. I still did not know what lay ahead, but I felt that the old me, the spectator, was now sitting firmly in the front row. Sure enough, as Granado had said, a Rebel Army soldier in brand new olive green was waiting for me. He introduced himself as the Comandante’s bodyguard, and he was to take me to my hotel. It was none other than the Habana Libre. He filled in forms at reception with surprising agility and accompanied me to my room. He asked if I knew anyone in the hotel and when I said yes, he said I had to pretend to be here for work and not mention the real reason. And finally, he said that I had to be on call; whenever I went out, I had to leave word at the reception. ‘You never know when “the man” will be able to talk to you.’ I visited Gordo Cooke in his bunker and satisfied Alicia’s curiosity about the workshop, Argentines, communists and countryside.
Between two and three in the morning of the second day, the phone rang and a voice said: ‘Compañero, Che is expecting you.’ I went down. The bodyguard was there. He took me to the underground car park where a car was waiting. We swiftly crossed Vedado and headed for the Plaza de la Revolución where, after a few security checks, we ended up in the bowels of the Ministry of Industry. We took the lift to Che’s office and there, in a sort of kitchen which looked like the bodyguards’ bivouac, very young soldiers were drinking coffee or reading. I was to wait here. The opportunity to talk freely at Alberto’s barbecue had passed. Che was buried in his usual workload.
Then, a side door opened and Che appeared. He looked very tired – it was by now about four in the morning – and was wearing the same rumpled fatigues I had seen him play chess in. He ordered coffee to be brought to his office and turning to me, said simply ‘You’re here?’ and held out his hand. He said he was in a meeting with a delegation from I don’t know where, that unfortunately this time it was he who couldn’t talk, that he hadn’t time for the conversation he wanted to have with me, but someone would do it for him. I was to wait at the hotel until they came for me. He turned and went back through the door he had come out of. I don’t remember uttering a single word.
A couple of days later, some men in civilian clothes (from the intelligence services) came for me. The car drove along the Malécon to Miramar, a smart suburb of villas with gardens, and stopped in front of one. We went into a living room with comfy armchairs, an elegant dining table, and many books. I was left alone, to wait. It was not long before an army officer came in. He did not look like the typical Cuban. He had a short military-style crew cut, large frank eyes, wide cheek bones and jaw, and a playful smile. As soon as he opened his mouth, I knew he was Argentine and that it was Jorge Masetti.
After all, it was logical. He, his interview in the Sierra Maestra, his book, had brought me here. I knew nothing of his life in Cuba. Only that he no longer ran the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, but that Fidel had brought him back to front it temporarily during the Bay of Pigs invasion. I had glimpsed him twice on TV during the public interrogations of the prisoners. We sat down to talk just like two Argentines in a café. It wasn’t an exam, just a long exchange of opinions, ideas in common, work experience, mutual friends in Buenos Aires, illusions, disappointments, etc. I could see he knew exactly what I had been doing in Cuba and about my discussions with Granado, because he asked direct questions, like: ‘How long were you in Salta?’ ‘Are there mountains near the Tabacal sugar mill?’ Details I had given Granado.
We agreed there had to be revolution in Argentina. And, according to the theory of objective and subjective conditions, the time was ripe. The people were under attack, cheated, trapped, proscribed. The economy was growing, with a large productive capacity in food and consumer goods, but it was being usurped by foreign interests. The industrial infrastructure was developing, with large autonomous sectors, but the multinationals were taking over key areas that would be difficult to recuperate. A strong working class was ready to fight. There was a cultured and well-informed middle class. And an unequalled geographic position: all types of climate from the Andes to the Atlantic, and from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Antarctic. Argentina was the ideal country for a process of revolutionary change that would regain for its people the use of its immense natural resources, its own creativity and will to work, without being strangled by imperialist siege and blackmail.
Masetti said that the armed struggle was a real option. He had already done advanced military training at the new military academy which the Soviets had helped set up for the Cuban Rebel Army. After eight months of intense theoretical and practical training – having to put up with being a foreigner and being called Che’s ‘poodle’ – he had graduated top of his class. This type of training was essential. Unlike Batista’s, the Argentine army was extremely professional. Students from all over the continent came to study at our military academies. The project would not be like Cuba, first because of the size of the territory, and second because the population was mainly urban. Also, we had to take into account the level of politicization of the masses affiliated to traditional or populist parties, and with hegemonic influences that were difficult to combat. According to Masetti, the Cuban Revolution had shown that the foco theory would dismantle apparent hegemonies and focus popular support on an unexpected action, i.e. concrete activity instead of mere promises. The conversation took us into a realm of infinite possibilities,
