to do was to organize our onward journey. We eventually got reservations for 2 January and Masetti sent a telegram requesting Algerian visas. After that, he gave me a free hand to take the group wherever I wanted. Guidebook in hand, I organized a cultural tour.
The following day was New Year’s Eve and Paris ‘was a moveable feast’. People greeted each other in the street, and kisses from both sexes were planted on our deprived cheeks. We went to the Louvre, up the Eiffel Tower, to Montmartre where we ate with artists, and along the wide boulevards to the Bastille, where sitting in a corner brasserie reminded me more of Maigret than Robespierre. We got to the Latin Quarter more dead than alive but soon recovered, drinking wine until dawn. Was there another socialist paradise? Do police inspectors blow kisses? Can you sing the Marseillaise? Or the Internationale? Did you know both anthems are French? Not since then, not even at the double goodbye to the century and the millennium, have I experienced such general popular euphoria, so joyous and free from racism and discrimination. We embraced bankers and tramps alike, the difference no more than a work uniform. With champagne, fine cabernet, or fiery grappa in their hands, they offered it to us in glasses, or straight out of the bottle – unpardonable.
The 1st of January 1963 dawned late and bleak, our farewell to our bourgeois life. We devoted the day to museums, combing the boulevards of Saint Germain and Saint Michel for existentialism, looking for the hunchback in Notre Dame, or the phantom at the Opéra, reading newspapers, sipping espressos and Pernods in local bistros. Masetti knew more French than he let on, but he had decided our newspaper reader would be me, who barely remembered any school French, although I did manage to half-decipher the international news.
Leonardo insisted on going to Maxim’s, the capital of the culinary arts’ most favourite restaurant. ‘Just to see the birds that go there’, he said. We had to walk there, and we took it slowly. I noticed that every time we passed a post box, Miguel seemed to have a stone in his shoe, and slowed down. I waited for him, and we carried on to the next one, where again he needed to take off his shoe. Nearby was a pissoir, one of those numerous Paris locations with practical uses apart from simply peeing. I went in so I could observe him. Sure enough, he went up to the red box. I was behind him in a flash. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, as if I had caught him red-handed buying an ice-cream in this wintry cold. I kept the postcard to his mother in Argentina, after assuring him I would consider it a simple error on his part as long as he didn’t try it again or move a finger without my permission.
Federico knew Miguel from the Chaco so I asked him to help me monitor the situation. Federico asked for time to discover Miguel’s true intentions before I told Masetti. My view, knowing Masetti, was that we had to jolly Miguel along at least until we had got on the plane for Algiers. If we did not, we would be up the Seine without a paddle. My relationship with Federico took a qualitative leap forward. I had instinctively turned to him, not to anyone else, and from then on we trusted each other unreservedly. He became the compañero I could trust with my life, and it was mutual. That night, Federico and Miguel came to my room to talk things over. It had been a slip-up, a desire to show off to his family that he was in Paris, deduced Federico, nothing more. We decided to keep the matter to ourselves for now. Once I was alone, I destroyed the card.
Death Takes Centre Stage: Algiers, January–May 1963
Algiers is built on the hillsides surrounding a bay. Stairways, like viaducts, straddle the Arab quarter (the Casbah), and divide it clearly from the French area. We were driven along the seafront to the very west of the bay, and up to a villa overlooking the sea. It was clearly an exclusive part of the city, formerly inhabited by families of naval officers from the French base of Mers-El-Kebir, a fortified position dominating the bay from atop the mountain to our left. We could see it through our binoculars. At the villa, Major Bajtik, who spoke Spanish and had met us at the airport with two other officers, Abdel and Muhamed, introduced us to a small troop of about a dozen soldiers, standing to attention on the lower patio. They would cater for our needs, cook for us, and look after the house security. In short, it was a petite garrison with guests.
It was not all admiring the view and eating, however. An intensive training programme had been designed around weekly weapons drills, shooting practice, analysis of their recent war’s military strategy and combat operations. We would be examining how the combatants of the National Liberation Front (FLN) infiltrated the French border fortifications and their deployment in cellars and caves around the cities of Algiers, Oran and Constantine. A veteran of the war came to the house to talk about specific cases, and then accompanied us to the actual sites so we could see their strategic importance. We began with the fledgling FLN’s first ambush on the edge of the desert, led by Ben Bella, one of its founding leaders. Bajtik took us to a place called Aflud. Other trips followed, and each week we would go over the hills behind the Casbah to a former French army barracks where hi-tech weapons captured from the French during the war had been stored. Celebratory rounds from different calibre rifles, machine-gun salvos, and bomb blasts left our heads buzzing, but it got us accustomed to different types of weapons.
Eventually we were taken on a tour of the French fortifications on the Tunisian and Moroccan borders; it was an incredible experience. The supposedly impregnable constructions were a wasteland of barbed wire, explosives and watch towers which had once been patrolled day and night, but had finally failed to prevent the FLN from breaching them. The fortifications extended in a straight line along both frontiers from the coast to beyond the mountains that descend into the Sahara. Seen from the sea, a cross section of the lines showed first a minefield about twenty metres wide, then a section of barbed wire wrapped round half-buried girders and crossheads, then metallic sheeting four metres high attached to solid iron posts draped with more barbed wire, in the middle a road patrolled by armoured cars, and on the other side the same metal sheeting, barb-covered girders, minefields, etc. Every five or six kilometres, a watch tower with high-powered spotlights lit up the centre road at the slightest sign of alarm and swept over the areas of barbed wire. Patrols from the watch towers would converge on any suspected breach of the fortifications.
Relations between the Algerians and Masetti’s group, fraternal from the start, became almost organic, as if we were working on a common project. Although Masetti had re-established contact with Che through coded messages the Algerians sent and received for him, we were in the main isolated from Cuba and our whole stay was coordinated with Algerian staff officers. Not until February 1963, or perhaps March, did Papito Seguera appear, as if following in our footsteps, in his role as the brand new Cuban ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Algeria. There was upheaval while he got the embassy up and running. At first he came to the house every day, but his presentation to the diplomatic corps put an end to his free time and his visits. Papito had brought several belated messages, and reading them, and others he had received afterwards, sent Masetti into a fury all over again. Still no departure plans! Still calls for patience, even messages from Che saying just that. Masetti’s mistrust went into overdrive, and he sent Furry to Havana with orders to speak to Che, and only to Che.
The messages clearly contradicted each other. In one that I helped decipher – the phrase is engraved on my memory – Che says: ‘Nuestra atalaya se hunde lenta pero inexorablemente’ (Our vantage point is slowly but inexorably sinking), and he added that by now we should be in our zone of operation in northern Argentina. The ‘vantage point’ referred to was the island of Cuba, the highest point, from where one could see most clearly. By ‘sinking’, he did not only mean ‘defeated’ or ‘invaded’ but also that something unique was ‘disappearing’, or ‘being submerged’. Compared to a message like this, the others – which spoke of waiting, being patient, practising, studying, eating well – did not make much sense. Furry played the diplomatic courier, taking the messages. He and Che examined the collected messages together, one by one. In a meeting I attended when Furry came back a week later, he said that Che had gone through the
