demonstrated by running zigzag towards some trenches, throwing first the grenade, and then himself headlong behind some rubble – I followed his instructions and we both lay with our hands over our ears waiting for the explosion. Ten seconds, ten minutes, went by but nothing happened. Pantoja went to investigate and came back with the grenade intact. I had forgotten to undo the safety catch.
The explosives instructor was like a fugitive from a Kubrick film. He piled up an arsenal of howitzers, mortars, shells, guns, anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines, dynamite, bottles of nitroglycerine, packets of C4 (explosive), potassium chlorate, gunpowder, fuses, every type of detonator, all live and ready to explode at the slightest gaff. Not all at the same time, of course. His attention to safety was absolute, but it was not contagious. ‘Do exactly as I do and nothing will happen, chico!’ But if something did happen, we would all go up in smoke. His appearance did not inspire confidence. He was missing an eye, fingers of one hand or perhaps the whole hand, I don’t remember, and he had deep scars on his forehead, irrefutable evidence of previous ‘accidents’. He insisted safety precautions had to be observed. ‘With the safety catch in this position, it can’t go off’, he said as he banged a mortar ferociously against the table, while we ran for cover petrified. ‘The plastic explosive that wreaked havoc in the war in Algeria is like putty, you can drop it, no problem’, he said, throwing it on the floor; ‘you can chew it and swallow it like marzipan’, he added, and ate a mouthful; ‘you can burn it,’ and he set fire to it.
At the shooting range, his classes verged on collective suicide. The idea was to teach us to make explosives with household materials. We mixed carbons, sugars, sulphurs, chlorates (with wooden tools, of course), put them in a tin, attached a detonator and a timed fuse, or a capsule of sulphuric acid, and buried it. The explosion made a crater one metre in diameter. Our brains started receiving warning signals, and enhanced reactions to the least sign of danger but, above all, a heightened awareness of everything around us.
We got back from the practice range only to fall yet again into the clutches of Hermes who, in the meantime, had planned a complicated commando operation to attack the house. Some members of the team had to defend it and the rest of us had to drag ourselves round the outside trying to get in without being seen. Each day ended with a meal, followed by obligatory reading material before bed, and even the night could be interrupted without warning to send us in pursuit of some fictitious nocturnal objective that the malicious guajiro dreamed up for us.
On one of those nights, the sixth (later to be the fifth) member of our group made his entrance. At midnight we had to dress in full kit, carry a backpack with twenty-five kilos of random objects, a rifle with full quota of ammunition, a pistol, provisions and a canteen of water, and set off on a twenty kilometre march, ‘the mother of all tests’, with ten minutes rest every forty-five minutes, behind our new compañero, chief of the Havana Revolutionary Police, Comandante Abelardo Colomé Ibarra. His boyhood nickname, and now his nom de guerre, was Furry. Standing in an official jeep with a radiotelephone, he set the pace through the deserted unfamiliar streets on the outskirts of Havana, respecting the designated rests which coincided with our being about to pass out. In those days in Cuba, a group of men marching round at night armed to the teeth was either part of a counter-revolutionary invasion, or barking mad. That was us.
Furry was very young, barely twenty, another of those boy commanders to emerge from Che’s column. He was seriously wounded at the battle of Santa Clara when an anti-tank grenade exploded. It went off a metre from his head, a metal shard piercing his forehead and lodging itself there. His guerrilla war was over, but he went on to have a brilliant military career. He became Cuba’s most decorated combat soldier and its highest ranking general. He commanded 15,000 Cuban troops in Angola in 1976, a war that changed the course of the region’s history and brought to power Angola’s first national people’s government under President Agostinho Neto. Furry was recalled to Havana, wreathed in laurels, and replaced by Arnaldo Ochoa, another much-decorated and famous general before he was executed in 1989. Furry was made minister of the interior that year. His slim distinguished face, of white Spanish stock, was turned dark, almost blue/black, by a five-o’clock shadow shaved down to his collar, from whence sprouted a mass of black hair that carpeted his body to his extremities. Hence his nickname.
The march passed off uneventfully. For the record, it was more of a speed trial than anything else, since we were on asphalt roads, doing an impossible-to-fathom circuit, with only the lights of the jeep to guide us. We didn’t sleep, even when we got back, because we had to clean and cure our blisters. But we all passed ‘the mother of all tests’ without asking for clemency. Furry gave us the nod, commenting in passing to Masetti that with us he was ready to go anywhere. Masetti explained it was no idle compliment. Furry would, in fact, be coming with us, to help set up a rearguard base somewhere on the Bolivian-Argentine border.
My relationship with Masetti, begun in his house in Havana, developed on two dissimilar but not mutually exclusive levels. First because I was the only one in the group familiar with our eventual zone of operations, that area of Salta separated from Bolivia by the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers, a region covered with tropical forest and inhabited by indigenous cannon fodder for the agricultural, timber and cattle enterprises, and by the poverty-stricken descendents of the ancient Inca Collasuyo, now sharecroppers for the landowning oligarchy. And second because we had become good friends: we had the same sense of humour, we had lived in Buenos Aires at the same time, had mutual friends, shared tastes, a passion for politics, a desire to be involved, but most of all because we liked talking. Masetti did not live in the house but came every day for strategy classes and sometimes shooting practice. The rest of the time he was mired in the quicksands of bureaucracy, setting up the part of the operation Che did not have time for.
As soon as he arrived at the house, he would come and chat with me. I always played devil’s advocate. My role apparently was to say ‘yes, but …’, although all I wanted to do, in fact, was to dispel my doubts. The resulting discussions increased our knowledge and confidence in the project. Masetti and I communicated on the same wavelength. We liked fooling about but, as Masetti himself said, we were also down to earth.
For different reasons, but mostly because we saw each other every day and both liked talking, I also became friends with Fabián, the doctor. (Basilio, who had many more technical skills than I, was anti-social, and Miguel did not talk at all). Fabián was, on the other hand, a Che fanatic and a bit of a fundamentalist. He was obsessed with something that was on TV a lot at the time: discovering hidey-holes in abandoned mansions – ‘a cache or stash’ – where people who had ‘temporarily’ emigrated to Miami had hidden fortunes in jewellery, art, antiques, etc. We inspected every wall, every nook and cranny, of the house. We even sussed the different widths of certain walls. Using Fabián’s stethoscope and our knuckles to knock on particular spots, we eventually discovered two hidey-holes, although the so-called treasure wasn’t worth having. One contained a big-game hunting rifle and a double-barrelled shot-gun, quite special. Another had papers and ornaments, sentimental stuff that was difficult to carry. It was all handed over to security.
One afternoon before he left, Masetti announced that Che would be coming that night. Or rather, it would be almost daybreak given Che’s duties at the Ministry. We would no longer be a bunch of loose ends who didn’t know if they fitted together until an important milestone would give them coherence. With our chief before us, we would be a cohesive unit welding hopes, passions, fears and joys into the metal needed to sustain the heart and soul of such an endeavour. We downed endless cups of coffee in silence. Then Hermes saw an escort jeep, followed by a car. Che and Masetti got out and came straight to our table under the dome. For some, it was their first meeting. But for all of us, including Masetti and Hermes, it was very special.
The scene is still vivid in my mind. I remember the exact position of the table on the patio, at the end of the gallery, on the left, under the glass dome open to a clammy night sky. I remember how we were seated around it, and I associate it with old Argentine engravings of cabildos, council meetings and patriotic gatherings. Except that in the old
