by Jay Cantor
& the mare has no home & the foals have no home.
Hurry! Do not pause to lick the colts clean of the dogs’ blood!
The mare runs to the mountains;
she climbs the rocks, stepping lightly with long legs, lifting them high,
nudging her children’s flanks with her head, hurrying them on.
There are fields of sweet grass in the mountains.
(But the colts must learn: no fields are open fields.)
The hounds desire the mare’s thin legs, to bite near the hoof,
break the tendon, hobble the mare, bring her down, and fall on her flanks.
The mare sleeps now with her eyes open. When the sun rises in the
mountains
The mare bends her legs under her, throws forward her weight & stands. Her ears are straight back ’gainst her head.
The mare shakes sleep and heat from her soft mane.
Riders of the mare: hold tight to that long mane,
stay close to the mare’s strong back, as ancient riders lie
flat, hug hard to the backs of their horses, nourish themselves
as they ride drinking blood from wide veins in the necks of their horses,
never dismount, move ceaselessly, elude all pursuit, mount and rider
one creature, one life,
hold tight that tangled mane, grip strongly,
or you will die in the dead months in famine time
in slack season when there is no work at the mills,
& the mare will go astray in the mountains, and the colts will
have no mother,
Grip strongly! And you may ride the mare where you will,
you people,
and the land you move across will become your land,
by her motion.
Isle of Pines, July 1965
JULY 16
Ponco came into my room, to return my pages. I sat in front of my board, staring at the tall grass and the ocean. All still today, like my imagination.
He showed me that he had underlined some phrases from my letter to Fernando. “For the Speech,” he said. “On Vietnam. The Call.”
If, I thought—as he did—I’m allowed to deliver it. But that isn’t to be spoken, not even between us. I looked down at the underlined phrases and saw more dares that I had made myself, further scaffolding for the part I wished to play. I had not then had the right to speak such things.
“Jack London,” Ponco said inexplicably to me. Perhaps he simply intended to change the subject from the one neither of us had mentioned: Why hasn’t Fidel spoken?
“What?”
“Alaska. The story.”
“Ah.” Ponco stood beside my chair, but I continued to look out the window. The light turned the small waves translucent at the bottom, the mild wind dusted them with snow at the tops. O avalanche!
“I like the part about me,” Ponco said, still trying to attract my attention.
“Good,” I said. My mind felt empty, tired, as if writing had meant pouring out its contents, returning an empty shell to the present. “I had been worried you might not like it.” A lie. I hadn’t given it a thought.
“No.” He smiled. “I like reading about me. Young. A believer. Before I lost my faith. To an agent of the devil. Atheist. You.”
I returned his smile, but could think of nothing to say.
“You should write a book about me.”
“My next project,” I said ruefully. It seemed a cruel joke on Ponco’s part—as if to say the time on this island might stretch out until …
“And I’ll write one about … you.”
“Oh.” That round emptiness was the circle of my mood. I couldn’t locate the target of Walter’s irony.
He reached from behind my chair and started to turn the pages of my old water-soaked book, the one covering my years before Cuba. He thought in my absence to have a more intimate look. I held his hand. It felt light, as if the bones were hollow. Perhaps our Ponco will take flight one day!
“Sorry,” he growled—apology was impossible in his tone. “Did you remember to say that I was a very curious fellow?”
JULY 17
Each day passes now without word, and without words. Ponco accompanied me towards the ocean, object of all my empty stares. I stopped, for no reason, in the middle of the field, balancing my palm on the tips of the tall drying grass, letting them tickle my hand.
“No writing?” he asks.
“No. The story seems over to me.”
“What about the rest?” he asked. “The building of socialism.”
It was very hot. Sweat already formed under my armpits. “Not my work anymore,” I said. I remembered a speech I’d given with Fidel, after the missiles had been taken back. My memory of before—myself, deaf, in the crowd below—was false.
I had been on the platform with him. I, and no one else, not even Raul. And his speech had been a failure. It had reminded me of my parents’ kitchen, the provincial stage of that master dialectician, my mother. I could hear her intonations in Fidel’s voice that day, as she turned a staff into a snake, interpreted craven compromises as heroic acts, tried to make us accomplices to the mysterious cunning of history. That day his voice was like hers, it lacked a certain energetic confidence; we were all in a little town in the mountains of Argentina, just guessing about the big doings in the metropolis. (Who could say if the words had the same meaning for us that they did for Churchill and Stalin? The fashion might have changed, and we wouldn’t have been notified.) He lacked conviction; he’d failed, remained a commentator on events, not an actor. The nation was diminished. Four hundred thousand people waited, looked up at Fidel and me. Behind the crowd and on the sides of the plaza, there were towers of crisscrossed wood to support the huge black loudspeakers. A field opened beyond the towers. Children, a few inches high, were back there, running about, kicking multicolored balls the size of marbles, while the adults talked. To my left were the pastel buildings of Havana, and you could already see in them signs of decay, broken windows, chipped cornices—the destruction the government had allowed to happen. (To give back the life and money drained by the cancerous city, Fidel would say—but not when he was in Havana—to let Havana die so that the countryside might live.) To my right, past a boardwalk, a metal railing, and a thin strip of beach, was the ocean. That day it was dark, choppy, and there were masses of black clouds on the horizon.
But it was still sunny in the square. I talked on. The sun was dull but constant, and we had all been there for hours, sweating. It should have been good for us—like drunks in a steambath getting out our bile, our defeat, our anger. But the feelings were bottomless. Their sweat rose towards me, a thousand different smells, blending to an overwhelming perfume—dirt, fear, soapy cotton, grease, humiliation, longing. They were a jungle, a swamp, a rank hot smell, a stagnant inlet. So many of the countrypeople (brought in by the Party Committees in huge schoolbuses and flatback trucks) wore white smocks and loosely woven light-tan hats that they also looked a cloud filling the plaza, a cloud with raggedy edges stretching towards the ocean. I felt that I looked down at the sky itself from above. Cloud, swamp, jungle, ocean—why not a flock of birds, gulls, blackbirds, bright green-and-red parrots, all mixed together in Fidel’s aviary? Or the sun? … Or the very source of all metaphors?… etc.
Or why not a field of radishes! Or of stones! That’s the way they responded that day.
I jiggled up and down in spasms, a nervous excited speaker, a man dangling on a wooden platform a hundred feet in the air. (And my bladder ached. I had to piss. I had a rubber bottle strapped to my leg, and a tube running to my penis, but I was too embarrassed to urinate with a few hundred thousand people watching. I just couldn’t make the flow begin.)
Fidel, as always, was another verse. He and the crowd were an old married couple, comfortable, altering each other to fit, annoying and forgiving each other. (Except for the ones he’s divorced, across the barbed wire in this field, in jail.) Like a marr
ied man he isn’t ashamed to piss, to use the bottle strapped to his leg.
Fidel and the crowd are, he likes to say, two parts of a tuning fork, the waves from the one making the other tine shake. But there was no oscillation today. He had already spoken, and he hadn’t done the trick. They were still sullen. I was speaking again, Fidel standing by my side, strangely still, absolutely still. And his immobility was so striking that it destroyed my speech. Everyone looked towards him. The son of a bitch was upstaging me by doing nothing at all! So I gave up, leaned forward, pressing my hurting chest hard into the sharp edge of the podium, raised my arms high over my head, shouted, “Ever Onward to Final Victory!” letting my voice rise high on the last word—too high: I screeched. Spots of the crowd answered me, but only spots. I, too, had failed. The despair drifted up to my nose, black acrid stuff.
But as the mild sound of the crowd died away, Fidel leaned across and in front of my body, towards the microphone. I could smell him strongly. His shirt was drenched. For the last week he’s been drinking rum and beer steadily, eating yogurt (with cherries) to coat his stomach—a Bulgarian custom. He gave off a heavy pungent boozy smell. In a low harsh voice, a stage whisper (audible in Miami), but the more intense (as he calculated) for the seeming restraint, he added to, or revised, my conclusion: “Ever Onward!” And then again, in the same whisper, but diminished—a man going down a road—“Ever Onward!”
He didn’t wait for a response. He drew himself back as if recoiling from something, pivoted on the heel of his fancy black boot, turned his back on the crowd. The whisper, amplified a thousand times, still echoed from the speakers at the back as he turned. His immobility, his silence, his sudden sharp motion to the microphone, the loud whisper, the quick turn (Fidel too had abandoned them!), it riveted their attention. Except for the children, kicking their balls in the back, there was a great stillness.
Then the people shouted, a few at first, the Party members no doubt, the Revolutionary Defense Committee men, but then more and more joined, their voices chased after the departing man, arched towards the platform, gulls rising from the ocean after feeding, a few and then many, until the sky was white with them, repeating “Ever Onward!,” gathering and rising above our heads. The field of white stones revealed itself as a flock of silent birds, waiting for the word to come to rise and fly. The sound died away, the last wing gone into the sun and out of sight.
How I admired him! If he sold Coca-Cola, I thought, they would be drinking it now on the Ho Chi Minh Trail! He is the master manipulator, the man of the intricate particular rhetorical skills for constructing socialism. His music builds the walls of the cities. I had said, Battle and final victory: peace, release, rest. (My theoretical journal: Final Point!) But Fidel was marriage, daily trials, long sacrifices, begin again, it all must be done over. Ever Onward! He sliced towards the microphone with his whisper, and left me out in the cold—an affair. As Ponco said, He’ll be the stay-at-home. That day he had made it a way of dividing the world, and he had taken the better, the more noble part for himself. Could he see it that way now?
“No,” Ponco said, recalling me to our open field.
“What?”
“You’re right. It’s not your work.” We faced the ocean. A mild breeze cooled my sweat. “I liked your poem.”
“Good.”
“A love poem.” He smiled, but I couldn’t rise to the challenge or even feel the sting of his mockery. We walked closer to the waves. “Has Fidel seen it?”
“No. Of course not.”
“I think you should send it to him.” I heard anxiety shadowing his voice. “I could give it to one of the guards.”
Guards? I thought. Who are they guarding? The young Communists? The mad people? The prisoners?
Or me?
JULY 23
Walter was gone when I woke up. Off on a walk, I thought, or to get supplies in town.
He returned without food, but with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Unfortunate harvest? He smiled coming up to the porch, where I had appropriated his seat for some more convenient ocean-staring. I had not seen that smile before from the virtuoso of that expression. There seemed both fear and expectation in it.
“News from the Inca,” he said. He stood before the porch, in the sunlight, with the ocean behind him, as I had stood once, disfiguring a picture of him, rubbing him out. What was he doing to me? Anxiety scrabbled in my chest. Why did he hesitate to give me the documents, to come forward and give me the papers he held in his right hand?
There was a report from Debray:
Ramon:
Fidel’s instinct was right. Bolivia is the location for the guerrilla, and this is the most opportune political conjuncture. Monje, Chairman, Central Committee of the BCP, told Fidel in talks in Havana that the country is ripe for rebellion. They would need only ten thousand dollars to get under way. Fidel has provided the money. Fidel did not mention your participation as political-military leader, or the continental scope of the rebellion, but that will, of course, only make the process of recruitment, within and outside Bolivia, that much more rapid.
SUMMARY:
All possible electoral remedies have been exhausted. The entire population considers General Barrientos’s election to be a charade. The first of the necessary conditions has been fulfilled: “When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.”
Recent developments, along with the electoral charade, make several strata ripe for movement in our direction, once the guerrillas appear:
a) Even the remnants of the pathetic Agrarian Reform have been liquidated. The army has returned both land and peasants to the previous owners, who have slithered back from Argentina.
b) Lechin, the old union leader of the miners, was arrested as a deliberate provocation. The Trotskyites responded stupidly, by calling a strike. The well-disciplined miners occupied the mine area.
The miners’ position at first looked strong. They had a miners’ militia already organized; some (though out-of-date) arms; a radio station to propagandize with; dynamite; detonators; expertise; control of the tin.
But: They remained in their liberated zone, the area around the mines. They did not go on the offensive. They waited to win a few concessions from the government—for their leaders said that the time for insurrection was … not yet. Once again the miners’ leadership forced them to relearn your propositions on the necessity of guerrilla warfare—at the cost of their lives.
The army waited. The army cut the road to La Paz. La Paz is the source of the miners’ food. The mines themselves are in rocky soil, twelve thousand feet above sea level. The land produces stones. There are a few communities of Aymara Indians, who raise potatoes, and dry llama meat.
After a few weeks the miners began to run out of potatoes and the dried llama meat the Indians gave them.
The army waited. The army didn’t need the ore from the mines right away. It had U.S. loans.
After ten days the miners ran out of milk for their children, meat for their families, medical supplies for their infirmaries. They had no cough medicine left for their silicosis. Each man wanted to tear at his lungs.
The army waited.
The miners remained in their liberated zones. How often must your theses be proved and re-proved! They were afraid to leave their wives and children to the army. The miners had no military-political leadership. The miners’ militia guarded their homes.
They did not become what you have shown they had to become to survive: a guerrilla army.
The army waited. The generals, the North American advisers, met in bars, drank toasts, smiled, set the hour of the miners’ massacre.
When the soldiers came the miners hurled dynamite at them. It had worked for their fathers against the decrepit guns of the old army, a decade ago. But it did not work against machine guns. It was ineffective against airplanes, against the weapons and tactics the army had received from the United States.
The army occupied the zone, went from house to house, dragged the families of the militants into the open field and murdered them, men with their women and children. A common grave was dug for their bodies.
Your theses were proved again:
An insurrection, spontaneous, and without military-political leadership, cannot defeat a modern army trained and armed by the United States. The miners learned last year that the victory of 1952 will never be repeated.
Now they are in mourning, in despair.
But your theses will be proven:
Your appearance will transform that despair into a realistic hope. “It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.” Your appearance will make them see the new possibilities their violence can create. The miners now realize that an insurrection in the mines will be effective—as you have written—only as the last stage of a guerrilla war against the army, a war carried out in the locale you’ve named, in the countryside, far from the army’s sources of supply. As you have argued, the objective cannot be reform, coexistence, or a liberated zone that allows the gorillas to decide the hour of the people’s death. The objective must be state power, final victory for the oppressed over the imperialists. The only instrument for this victory is guerrilla war.
