Ciro Bustos

Che Wants to See You


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problems by recuperating their legitimate means, and faced the basic challenges of the new society, like education (which it was doing), housing and health, etc., it would prioritize culture, and this would be a springboard for launching Cuba into the first world, not in the banal GDP sense, but in terms of Art, Cinema and Literature. Melchor wanted to study theatre and had heard that the university in Santiago, on the other side of the Sierra Maestra, was going to open a theatre school at the start of the 1962 school year. He wanted me to help him leave the workshop and register for the preparatory course. But it was nearly the end of the year, and the kilns were working. Not an easy moment.

      The first time the big kiln reached 1,100 degrees and was working to capacity, I was overjoyed. I cooled it down slowly overnight and went to bed in the morning, leaving Cucho on guard. I wanted to be there with the whole staff when the oven was finally opened. One refractory box had broken along with some pieces in other boxes, but in the main everything was intact. The colour of the clay was beautiful, albeit a slightly paler red, and the black, blue and grey were very successful despite being imperfectly applied. I tapped the pots with the tips of my fingers, the sound was perfect. We all played tunes on the cups, plates and jars, in a concert of joy and pride. And confidence. What I had promised had come to pass, warts and all.

      Rita finally gave Melchor permission to leave for Santiago on condition he returned for a few days each month to do the workshop’s books. We celebrated New Year with our new friends, poor but with the warmest of hearts. For the first few months of the New Year the tension between Fontana and me was mitigated because the workshop was running well. All the same, his deadline was approaching. Then Fidel appeared on TV and made a furious attack on Aníbal Escalante, the most hard-line Stalinist in the old Communist Party, a member of the ORI’s national leadership and the visible face of the sectarianism sweeping through the political and administrative bodies. I felt a great relief at this dismantling, albeit temporarily, of Stalinism.

      When the workshop was running smoothly, Melchor introduced a discordant note. The rector of his art school in Santiago wanted me to come and teach art, or art appreciation to be more precise. The students needed to learn about art, its history, its significance and transcendence. I appreciated the offer, but I declined. I barely had time to sleep. I couldn’t even leave the workshop to teach in Holguín, let alone on the other side of the Sierra Maestra. Melchor came back with another proposal. If classes were on Saturday and Sunday, I could travel on Friday night, teach on Saturday and Sunday morning, and return late on Sunday night. I don’t know what possessed me to try it. Perhaps the example set by Melchor’s determination. After all, I had not come to Cuba to be a potter.

      The road to Santiago wound through hills and cane fields. The last fifty kilometres were breathtaking. The Sierra Maestra was like a botanical garden, totally green, with palm trees leaning at a variety of angles, elegant dancers in a choreography created by the cyclones that pound the mountains and flatten the forest. The River Cauto crossed the road a couple of times. The city of Santiago appeared below the road and extended out round the bay, following the contours of the mountains. Looking for my hotel, I felt as if I were in New Orleans, seeing the same type of buildings, broad-walks with railings, and wrought-iron balconies, and because most of the lively crowd were black and it was hard to tell if they were walking or dancing. The next morning Melchor took me to the university campus.

      The Faculty of Medicine had lent the Theatre School some of its classrooms. The students were different from my political audience in Holguín: they were more interested and dynamic, and focused on the context and tasks of the Revolution seen through the prism of art. But like the workshop, it was my responsibility to mould this pure young clay, not knowing either if I was up to the job or what the results would be. Again I felt as if everything I said was received like desert rain, and it was my duty to make it drinkable, not ideologically or aesthetically contaminated. By general consent, the classes were organized around slides and art books, arranged in periods, schools, countries and cultures. We would have our work cut out. There was also a bit of colour theory, drawing, perspective, volume and some practical exercises.

      On my second week in Santiago, I heard there was an Argentine looking for me. He was waiting by my truck in the car park when I came out of class. He was 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