mouth’ anti-aircraft guns which fired from four barrels simultaneously. They were being placed in strategic positions round the city, and were also seen being driven round on the backs of new Soviet lorries. The comandantes were now sporting the Macarov, a .45 calibre pistol with a quick-fire burst option that left any target like a colander. And finally, the ‘best rifle in the world’, the AK47, plus heavy artillery, tanks, etc. But they were just small beer. The big fish did not get much press, although rumours reached even our chaste ears.
The Soviets were building sites for intercontinental missiles. Nuclear perhaps? Between his first visit to our bunker and his second, Che had been to the USSR, talked to Khrushchev and signed military cooperation agreements that included bases and installations on Cuban soil for defensive purposes: radar, ground to ground missiles, ground to air missiles, etc. And why not strategic? Che did not talk to us about this level of military secrets, naturally, but after his trip he appeared less pessimistic. He seemed to be expecting large-scale confrontations and seemed almost to be welcoming them. He urged us to finish our training as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, each member of our group began to specialize, almost by natural selection, following an army unit’s classic division of labour into operations, logistics, intelligence and communications. Masetti decided Basilio would be best at operations, Fabián at communications (as well as health), Miguel at logistics, and me at security and intelligence. We began having our classes separately, except for shooting practice and fitness. We also had medical and dental check-ups and I asked them to take an urgent look at my bronchitis, already turning to asthma. I wanted to follow Che’s example, but not to that extent!
The training took a new turn, more romantic and scientific. I got very attracted to secrecy. Everything I was taught was secret, for my exclusive use. My self-defence instructor argued, realistically, that learning enough karate to fight even a beginner would take me a couple of years, so he concentrated on techniques to help me escape attacks from behind, or the pincer movements police used, adding a couple of ‘lethal’ blows for when I needed them. Fortunately, I never had occasion to use them.
October 1962 was a war of nerves, and of words. Accusations flew back and forth between the US administration and the Cuban Revolution. No one appeared to want to give way or try to relax the tension. On the contrary, diplomatic events added fuel to the fire. Ben Bella, having recently taken power in Algeria, arrived in Cuba in the middle of September, evidence of previous anti-imperialist collaboration. Anatole Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister on a visit to the US, said the weapons delivered to Cuba were purely defensive. But on 22 October, Kennedy appeared on television, the U2 photos in his hand, to denounce the USSR for installing long-range strategic missiles in Cuba. In retaliation, he announced a naval blockade. Cuba declared a state of emergency, put its combat troops on the alert, and called for general mobilization. Che was made Commander of Western Forces – from Havana to the western tip of the island – presumably the first combat zone in the case of an invasion. If the Americans landed, they would not repeat the mistakes they made at the Bay of Pigs. They would try to secure one end of the island, with easy air and sea access, and a single military front.
Prague, Paris and Algiers: November–December 1962
The streets of Havana had lost their usual ebullience. Military trucks went by loaded with troops and militias. Sand bags were piled up at the entrances to buildings, and anti-aircraft guns set up in the city’s squares. The people, usually so laid-back, became hurried and frantic. An electrifying collective anxiety seemed to have possessed those still trying to get onto overcrowded buses and trucks. Manolito dropped me off at the Revolutionary Armed Forces’ hospital in the centre of Havana. It was assumed I would be treated for my bronchial infection and taken straight back to the house; Che wanted our group transferred to Pinar del Río, where his Western Command headquarters was. But the doctor who saw me was a comandante as well as head of the Pulmonary Infections Department and, although he understood the urgency, he was the one setting the timetable. After a series of tests, including a basal metabolism, he ordered a massive attack of antibiotics and ten injections of ten cubic centimetres of aminophylline to be applied twice a day. Five days of jabs, all told. ‘You’ll leave here good as new, chico, straight to the front’, he said, as if stopping the Yankee marine corps single-handed depended on me. So I was hospitalized, and the support team came to tell me my compañeros had left for Pinar del Río.
The hospital was a modern, well-equipped building several storeys high. I was put in a three- or four-bed room on the tenth floor with a panoramic view. Being a military hospital, it was like a first-rate barracks. The leisure room TV worked but only on one channel: the missile crisis. The chairs were occupied by patients with differing degrees of illness but all predicted certain defeat for the imperialist invaders. Recently operated-upon patients and even those on their death beds demanded their clothes and weapons so they could join up again. Only notices on the walls and a finger on the lips of a beautiful nurse reminded us there should be silence. Doctors appeared, dripping scalpels in hands, at the slightest sign of news or a speech by Fidel. It was war-time euphoria given the military nature of the place, but was nonetheless typical of what the country was going through. The Cubans were ready to be incinerated rather than let arrogant imperialists ride roughshod over them.
The climate of confrontation got worse by the day. The island was blockaded to prevent the passage of Soviet cargo ships, their decks lined with more missiles, as the U2 photographs on US television showed. Looking out to sea, you could see US gunboats anchored at the limits of international waters. US planes violated Cuban airspace every day. On 25 October, a missile from one of the Soviet launch pads brought down one of the notorious spy planes. A rumour went round, Masetti told us later, that Fidel was visiting a Soviet missile site, and Russian officers were showing him the sophisticated control panels, with radar monitors giving precise positions. At that very moment, a high altitude U2 entered Cuban airspace. Putting theory and practice together, the Russian officer demonstrated step by step the sequence of maximum combat alert (deactivation of the security shield, activation of firing mechanisms) as the screen showed the U2 reaching the centre of the island.
‘And now what?’ asked the Commander in Chief. ‘If we get an order to attack, we press this button, the radar guides the missiles, and the plane is destroyed’, the Russian officer replied. To everyone’s amazement, Fidel stretched out his long arm and pressed the button, murmuring ‘Let’s see if it’s true, coño!’ That the U2 was destroyed was certainly true. Two hundred thousand marines hurriedly boarded their transport planes, the Flying Fortresses filled their holds with bombs, Cuban soldiers said goodbye to their families, and whoever could do so downed a large shot of rum, in case it was his last.
With bruised arms, perforated by needles, I went off to join my comrades at the front. My journey was in vain, however, because a few hours after rejoining my group, Khrushchev agreed unilaterally to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US taking their missiles out of Turkey, and a commitment of non-aggression towards the island.
Che ordered our immediate return to training, intensified to cut short the timetable. On his second visit after we returned to the house in Havana, despite his exhaustion and sombre mood, he told us of the tension surrounding the crisis. The group had not seen him in Pinar del Río despite being near his headquarters in a cave in Los Portales, so we were all waiting expectantly. I remember him saying how he had been in a meeting with Fidel when there was a phone call from Carlos Franqui, editor of the newspaper Revolución. Fidel had thrown the phone onto the map table and, swivelling on his heels, had aimed a violent kick at a wall mirror, shattering it. No one had expected the Russians to take that decision.
Che was very pessimistic about the way the crisis had ended. He was sure that, left to its own devices, the US wanted to attack the Revolution and destroy it. Any other result
