was the kind of journalist who took risks, was attracted by the scent of danger, lured by it. The story behind the interview from the Sierra Maestra is an adventure in itself; full of instinctive actions, risks and gambles. Masetti recounted his amazing experiences, and his conversion from investigative foreign journalist to rebel with his own revolutionary cause, in his book Those Who Fight and Those Who Mourn.
Financed by Radio El Mundo, Masetti went to Cuba in March 1958 armed with a cryptic note from Ricardo Rojo for his friend the Argentine, and a contact in Havana who could put him in touch with the revolutionaries. The Havana contact sent him to Santiago de Cuba, into the lion’s den. After interminable waiting and changes of safe houses, he met the people who could get him into the Sierra Maestra to search for the guerrillas. A host of hazardous exploits later, he reached the advance guard of the Argentine whom the Batista regime had dubbed a dangerous Communist agent. On his last legs, Masetti was finally taken to Che’s camp. For both of them, it was a relief to be able to talk on the same wavelength, use the same slang, and discover the same rather acerbic and ironic sense of humour. This affinity immediately became attraction and friendship. They worked on the interview, sometimes under enemy fire. Che then had him taken to the Commander in Chief.
Despite the new assault on his emotions caused by meeting Fidel Castro, Masetti got through his long dreamed of interview. He asked Fidel about the genesis of the 26th of July Movement, his ideas for transforming a society of exploiters and exploited, his political convictions, revolutionary aspirations, etc. The interview was broadcast from the primitive Rebel Army radio transmitter and was heard all over Cuba. For the first time, the leader of the barbudos was talking directly to his people.
Back in Havana, living clandestinely, Masetti learned that the interview’s re-transmission by Venezuelan and Colombian radio stations had not been picked up in Buenos Aires. As far as his journey’s funders were concerned, the work had not been done. So, he performed what Rodolfo Walsh called a ‘heroic feat of Latin American journalism’. He went back to the Sierra Maestra and did the interviews all over again.
What impressed me most listening to Che was not his public discourse, nor his revolutionary message (actually there wasn’t one, since the Buenos Aires radio station concentrated on his role as an Argentine mixed up in almost Bolivarian wars of independence). No, what drew me to him was first and foremost his voice. It wasn’t the arrogant pompous voice of a politician or professional demagogue. It was a voice that could have belonged to a brother, or friend, nothing strident, like having a quiet conversation in a café. He spoke almost apologetically about getting himself noticed for something he considered self-evident: acting in accordance with his commitment to a cause, a reality that needed no explanation. If he did not take sides, did not get involved, he would be betraying himself. But taking sides meant fighting, because to defend ideas of social justice you have to take up arms. Che also took the opportunity, as if he were a contestant in a tango show, to say hello to his mother and other members of his family to whom he owed an explanation for his enforced two-year silence.
In a few words, he had demolished the doubt over whether he was an adventurer in search of glory and profit, or a mercenary in the service of foreign causes. The suspicion of imperial penetration of some description or other vanished. Masetti brought this up. ‘What about Fidel’s communism?’ he asked. ‘Fidel isn’t a communist. Politically you could call him a revolutionary nationalist’, answered Che.
The programme continued with Fidel Castro, who was the main dish. But I only had ears for Che, that resonant voice I was hearing for the first time, the voice of truth. Fidel was more grandiloquent, added to which his Cuban accent had something unreal, distant, about it. He was the leader and therefore somehow out of reach. Fidel was dignity standing tall, talking to a dormant America. But the other voice spoke to me personally, from conscience to conscience.
The Cuban Revolution became the focal point of my politics. I began copying articles and sought out Masetti’s recently published book. The interviews inspired me to go to Cuba the following year and find the truth for myself. But meanwhile, there were new developments. Encircled by Che’s troops, the city of Santa Clara fell on the last day of December, 1958. The dictator Batista boarded a plane at dead of night and flew off into the arms of Uncle Sam. The Cuban Revolution exploded with a force that eradicated any ambiguous or reactionary doubts about the need to bring about social change and replace the power structures underpinned by imperialism. It exploded like a depth charge and, at the same time, a forbidden fruit. Both those defending multinational interests and the man on the street pricked up their ears at this unique event, so different from the pacific, fraudulent, controlled elections by pact, which history had accustomed us to. The lines of dominance and dependence had always been passed from hand to anxious hand between the political agents of local aristocracies. These usual gentlemen’s agreements, between demons and bandits, seemed about to be torn up. The Latin American Communist Parties initially criticized the ‘militarist’, ‘putschist’ experiment in Cuba as petty bourgeois deviation. But when faced with the spontaneous support of the people and the growing prestige of the Revolution’s young leaders, they finally realized it was a gift from heaven come to rejuvenate their tired discourses, and decided to appropriate it. The cultural establishment, as we have seen, burst out in praises, odes, hymns, and even adulatory red masses, beginning with the canonization of the Communist Party, and the control and administration of revolutionary fervour by the Central Committee.
Meanwhile, democratic channels were closing again in Argentina. The union bureaucracy lurched between manipulating the masses and flirting with the army, capitalism and the brutal Peronist right-wing. Factory occupations, strikes in packing plants, sackings and bankruptcies all made the political air unbreathable, accompanied by deafening background music courtesy of the pipe-bombs. The government took control of the CGT (the principal trade union movement), handing it over to select members of the Peronist bureaucracy and pro-imperialist unions, with the State Internal Disorder Plan (CONINTES) already in place. The most combative unions were now in open confrontation with three groups: the government, the army and the union bureaucracy. The army patrolled the streets of Mendoza, pointing machine guns at passers-by, while I put the finishing touches to my plans to go to Cuba.
My Journey to the Island: April 1961
Feverish, almost conspiratorial, activity possessed us. Claudia and I had to get money together and find a way of travelling that fitted our limited means. An English passenger shipping line sailed from the port of Valparaiso in Chile to Southampton, England, and after navigating the Panama Canal, stopped at Havana. The Pacific Line’s Queen of the Sea was making its last voyage before being withdrawn from service. A travel agency in Mendoza made the arrangements to buy the tickets.
Diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US had been broken off, and the latter was putting pressure on the rest of Latin America to follow suit. The ‘concerto’ of nations opposed to Cuba had begun under the US baton. La Coubre, a French ship carrying the first shipment of arms bought in Belgium by Cuba, exploded at Havana docks killing a hundred and leaving several hundred wounded. In this uncertain climate, we packed our belongings and confirmed our reservations. We wanted to get there as soon as possible. If we had to fight to defend the Cuban Revolution, we were ready. Cuba was so fashionable that news of it was more up to date than Stock Exchange information. We knew that visas for Cuba were controlled by the good will of the Latin American Communist Parties who, in a rush of inter-party ardour for the Cuban Communist Party (PSP), had taken the task upon themselves. In other words, the more recommended by the Communist International you were, the better. The idea, which went against the spirit of the Revolution, was justified by the fact that the communists were the only organized political force able to guarantee the level of revolutionary purity or sympathy, or at least that was the idea. So I resorted to an old school friend, Petiso García, who happened to be the son
