See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  Twenty-two

  At the airfield there was considerable formality when Comandante Che Guevara, Minister of Industry, hero of Cuba and of revolutionary Latin America, intellectual godfather of the revolution (as the men of letters thought of him), came in on his jeep, the forward jeep full of his bodyguards. What appeared to be a squadron of pilots in training stood at attention and in formation. Che climbed out of the back of the jeep and walked by them, stopping to chat with one or two, who clicked their heels, English-style. He came back to the jeep and nodded to the driver, who advanced to a waiting DC-3. He motioned to Blackford to climb aboard. It might have been the same plane as the one that had brought him and Velasco from Santiago a fortnight ago. On impulse Blackford walked two seats aft and clicked on the overhead light for the aisle seat. It didn’t work.

  He looked over at Che, as if to ask whether he was expected to occupy any particular seat. Che told him to sit where he was, which he did. Che sat diagonally across, one seat forward. Catalina was across the aisle from him, directly in front of Blackford. About as close as they could come to an equilateral triangle, though when the engines were turned on conversation was difficult. Che gave up trying but only for about a half hour, at which point they were comfortably airborne.

  Blackford noticed that the plane was dipping down from its cruising altitude. Down it came to a thousand feet or so above the ground. With his right foot Che reached out and banged on the pilot’s compartment door (Blackford noticed that when Che was aboard there were two pilots, not just one). The copilot came aft quickly. “Go down lower. Go to three hundred feet.”

  They were skidding now over stubby-looking green fields with tiny red-brown figures dotted about them like cayenne pepper sprinkled over green ears of corn. “Look,” Che Guevara said. “Just keep looking.”

  It wasn’t clear to Blackford, at first, what it was he was supposed to be focusing on. The number of workers? The scarcity of mechanical aids? He concentrated his eyes, searching out the anomaly presumably there. And suddenly he noticed what it was. They were traveling at 180 miles per hour, and ten minutes had gone by with absolutely no discernible change in what he saw. He looked up at Che. “No, no. Keep looking,” Che said.

  He did so. They passed over Matanzas, and Cardénas (he had been given what must have been an old tourist map, because the legends were written in English). He calculated now that they were over Quemado de Güines. On to Sagua la Grande. The pilot moved inland now; still the fields of sugarcane, everywhere sugarcane and sugarcane workers. He became almost dizzy, and finally closed his eyes.

  Eventually the airplane pulled up—but only to conform to landing pattern protocols. They put down at Camagüey. It had been over one hour and a half. Nothing but sugarcane fields.

  A jeep was waiting. “Bring your bag,” Catalina said to Blackford, Che having walked down the companionway. She carried, over her left shoulder, a sizable army pouch, and, stepping out of the plane, she put on her dark glasses against the sun in the west opposite, came down the steps, and got into the jeep.

  Away they went, followed by a single jeep with three soldiers and a tall radio antenna. The driver took them over roads that were progressively cruder. The pot-holed pavement stopped and the road was now a brownish clay; and always, on both sides, the sugarcane. It evolved finally into what was nothing more than a passageway hacked out of the cane forest.

  They reached a village. Several dozen houses, all of them smoking through the chimneys, or such was the impression. The odor was not of tobacco. It was pungent, acrid. Che said, “They are burning dried cane stalks. They cook with it, and when at night it is cool, keep warm with it. They harvest the sugar, eat the sugar, burn the sugar, coat their rooftops with sugar—though if you tasted it, you would find that it has in common with what you are accustomed to only its sweetness. It is coarse and sticky. We have no refineries, such as are required to prettify the sugar used by the stockholders.”

  “My impression was that most of the sugar was owned by Cubans.”

  “Great tracts of it were, repeat were, owned by Cubans. But much of it was also owned by the Yanquis, and the big rum makers. They own none of it now, not one hectare. All the sugar is owned by the people.”

  “By the people who harvest the sugar?”

  “By the people.”

  Che walked into a ramshackle general store. Its drabness was its principal feature. It seemed to flaunt its drabness. All the products for sale appeared to be of the same basic color, between middle yellow and middle brown, dirty brown. The rum bottles were unmarked. There were two splintered round tables, three or four rough wooden chairs surrounding each of them. At one, two men were seated, drinking silently. Che sat down at the other table with his party. He went unrecognized, but his manner carried authority. Besides, there was the jeep outside with the armed men. The distance between the two tables was measured in inches.

  “Olé, viejo,” Che said, motioning his head toward the elder of the two men, perhaps forty. “Do you always stop working this early?”

  At first the quiet translation of Catalina for Blackford’s benefit was generally distracting, but he gradually realized he really did not need her most of the time, the language having, under the intense pressures of the past few months, begun to beckon to him its cozy and regular rhythms and penetrable constructions, and indeed Blackford found the language marvelously hospitable to sincere postulants. He put his hand down on Catalina’s knee. “When I don’t understand,” he whispered into her ear, “I’ll signal you like this, okay? Otherwise it means I’m getting the drift.” She nodded, again inconspicuously, so as not to interrupt the colloquy.

  “You think five o’clock is early to stop working, General, if you begin working at five in the morning?”

  “How could you start working at five in the morning when there is no light at five in the morning?”

  “We make our own light, General. The children. They burn the old stalks every twenty meters right down the road, right down the road as far as you can see, General.”

  “How old are the children who do this, viejo?”

  “My son is eight. He is one of them.”

  “And how long have you been working the sugar?”

  “Since I was eight.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  Blackford was startled, training his eyes on the concentrations of wizened skin surrounding the—young—man’s eyes.

  “When do you stop working?”

  He laughed, and shared the joke with his companion. “Things are a little different now, General, though we never know exactly what is going on from one day to the next day, so many changes are being made, but we do not stop working until the harvest is completed. Then we stop working until the time to sow for the new harvest. That means six months.”

  “So then, every year you get six months of vacation?”

  This brought a laugh almost contumacious. “A ‘vacation’ we call it now, do we? Until Castro we got no pay during those six months. You try, General, intending no disrespect, to take six months’ vacation without pay if you have no money and no savings and no other work. The six months’ vacation means six months of lying in the sun eating sugar for breakfast, merienda, lunch, and supper. Now we get pay for those six months. But what good is pay? There is no more coffee now. No more coffee now, General. No more coffee in all of Cuba, the radio says, isn’t that what you also heard?” he nudged his companion and raised his rum glass to his lips.

  “Do you read, viejo?”

  “Read what?”

  “Do you know how to read?”

  “A little, you know, like Drink Coca-Cola, Long Live Castro”—his companion quietly dug his elbow into his talkative friend’s side; he should be careful, talking that way to uniformed strangers. “But not anything else. What is there to read? But my wife reads, and I know how to say my prayers by heart.”

  “Does your eight-year-old boy know how to read?” />
  “The new government schools at Ciego de Avila are making all the children come to learn how to read. It is orders directly from the Comandante. My son will know how to read. Maybe he will know how to read a map that takes him away from the sugar.”

  Che rose. His face was grave.

  It was for this man that he fought. He fought for the socialism that would free this man.

  He said nothing to Blackford, and they walked to a house at the other end of the village, a shade stouter than the others. Here, Blackford discovered, they would spend the night. It was not an inn, merely the house where visitors stayed when they came in from neighboring regions to attend a baptism, wedding, or funeral. There were two guest bedrooms, each with a double bed. Che indicated instantly that he would sleep in the living room, so Catalina took her pouch into one room and Blackford his bag into the other. Opposite his door was a deep sink and a mirror. The sink could obviously be used to wash one’s face or one’s clothes. In his room the sheets were sere but clean. There was a chair and a lamp, and an old dresser. He was hot and wondered about a shower. He opened the door and knocked on Catalina’s door, alongside.

  “Sí?”

  “It’s me. Is there a shower, do you know?”

  “I do not know. I do not regularly frequent this inn. Why don’t you ask Señora Ortiz? Do you know the word for shower? It is regadera. The word for bathtub is tina. Good luck. And oh, Caimán, please let me know what you find out.”

  He walked downstairs. Che was nowhere about. He found Señora Ortiz in the kitchen.

  “Dispense Ud., Señora. Hay regadera? Hay tina?”

  He was pleased that she manifestly grasped his question, because she walked out of the back door of the kitchen signaling him to follow her. At the side of the house was a tubular iron protrusion. A few feet away, a pump. She worked the pump for a few minutes, then, stretching out her hand, pulled down on a rusty chain. Water dropped from an overhead sprinkler. Señora Ortiz nodded her head and went back to the kitchen. “There is a towel in your room,” she called back.

  The dinner was beans and rice and—a specialty for her guests from a hidden supply—some strong coffee, into which Señora Ortiz automatically put a half cup of sugar. She apologized that there was no fruit. “Not for many months have we had fruit,” she said.

  Che Guevara, after dinner, said only this to Blackford before taking up his book, a biography of Stendhal: “You must not imagine, if some of the people such as you saw today revolt against the system elsewhere in Latin America, that Fidel Castro has pushed a particular button.”

  Blackford asked Catalina if she cared to go out for a walk. She readily agreed, and in due course they found themselves at the general store, occupying the same table as before dinner. They talked into the evening, drinking rum sparingly. She would speak in English, sometimes lapsing into Spanish. And Blackford attempted some Spanish, though not with the confidence to which he was entitled, she told him, given his increasing and impressive familiarity with the language.

  They talked about Ciego de Avila and life there, and how it might hope to change under Castro. Neither of them sought to make a point. Catalina asked him if it would break the rules if he told her something about his background, and he said that probably a great deal was known about his background back at headquarters, but that beyond his being an agent of the intelligence arm of the United States, what kind of thing did she want to know? And she said she would like to know whether he liked to read, if so what; would like to know if he listened to music, if so what; would like to know if he believed in God, if so why. They left the little cantina-store at midnight, and then only because the owner told them he was shutting down.

  Twenty-three

  The airplane took them, the following day, to Santiago. The arrival there of Comandante Guevara was a big event, and either Che had consented to address a political rally at the instigation of the local comisionado or else Guevara had initiated the idea.

  It was scheduled for twelve o’clock, at the baseball stadium. The plane touched down at 10:30 and Che told Blackford that while he conferred with the City Council, Catalina would take charge of Blackford for a few hours. He was welcome, if he chose, to attend the political rally. Meanwhile he would be taken to a hotel, and was free to do as he liked.

  What he liked was first to take a hot bath, then to have a look at the city that had played so important a role during the revolution. But by the time they got to the hotel, went to their rooms and bathed, they needed to go straight to the stadium, Blackford having told Catalina he was anxious to attend the rally.

  The stadium was not full—“the meeting was called on short notice,” Catalina explained, “and it is not possible for all the surrounding workers to come in.” But it was a lively crowd of over ten thousand, and there was a military band playing with gusto via great amplification. There was much gaiety among the crowd, men and women and young people of all ages, dressed mostly in whites, yellows, and khakis, with touches of the colors that were harder for Castro to suppress in remote Santiago than in Havana (he had proscribed, in a recent edict, the practice of color-threading women’s white cotton shirts, having read about and admired the uniformity of dress under Mao).

  By Cuban standards the ceremonies began promptly, at about 12:35, and there was first an extensive welcoming speech by the mayor. After that a young orator, aged perhaps sixteen, was presented. He had won the oratorical prize at school, and although Blackford had difficulty following him, and it was not easy for Catalina to translate at the pell-mell rate of his delivery, Blackford gathered that it was mostly an encomium to Fidel Castro. Then, changing gears into a hostile mode, the young man threw himself into his oration, fiercely denouncing this and denouncing that in a long anaphoral litany that began, each phrase, with “Abajo!”: Down with imperialism! Down with Yanqui militarism! Down with a great many other things—Blackford lost count. But then the upbeat: a testimonial, especially minted for the occasion, to the great Comandante Che Guevara. The crowd cheered for at least five minutes before Che was able to use the microphone.

  His oratorical style was quiet, by contrast with that of the young man who introduced him. Very, very quiet by contrast with the recordings Blackford had listened to of Fidel Castro.

  Quiet but intensely magnetic. The crowd was silent, never breaking out into spastic cheers and yells as the voice of Che Guevara spun forth its fervent, hypnotic message—more complex, perhaps, than an audience one third illiterate could readily comprehend, but the spell was cast and when, after a half hour, he was finished, he got great applause. Not the same kind of rapturous applause associated with Fidel Castro, but the applause of men and women who had been soberly but profoundly moved.

  A children’s parade followed, then the Cuban national anthem, “Al Combate Corred Bayameses”; and then the mayor again, this time apparently telling the crowd it must not move until their special guest had been provided for. A column of three freshly painted jeeps drove in to the stadium and stopped, their motors still running, by the speakers’ platform. Che descended, boarding the middle jeep with the mayor while various dignitaries and guards occupied the first and the third. Then, on a signal from a captain carrying a walkie-talkie, the caravan moved out, the crowd more or less cheering but absorbed primarily with the business of getting out of the stadium. In fact they were restless. There had been nothing passed about to eat or drink during the two hours that had gone by, and they were hungry and thirsty.

  Certainly Blackford was. “Where to, Catalina?” he asked. “I would settle for a hot dog. I mean a tamale.”

  “Tamales are what one eats in Mexico and Texas. Mostly Texas.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I often ate them while I was at the University of Texas in Austin. They call that food Tex-Mex. It is, by the way, very good. In Cuba we do have tamales, but what you want is probably a frita.”

  “Well what do you say we go to where they have some fritas? I’ll treat.�
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  She smiled, and pointed to the jeep (my second home, Blackford thought). They were driven to what appeared to be an office building, but on the top floor was a club for military men and senior civil officials. The cafeteria fare was abundant, providing fish and meats and vegetables and fruit, as well as beer, wine, and something that looked a pale orange, against which Catalina warned. “That is a Soviet orangeade. Goats get sick on it.”

  They sat down and soon Che came in, and the twenty or thirty officers eating stirred, as if wondering whether to rise to attention. Che, with a wave, put them at ease. He turned to the mayor and said goodbye with terminal inflections and, at this point entirely unencumbered, plunked himself down with Blackford and Catalina.

  “Did you understand the speeches?” he asked, his mouth soon full of cheese and crackers.

  “Not word for word, but I think I got the gist. You didn’t, by any chance, divulge the terms of the agreement we are supposed to be forging?”

  Che laughed. “Ah, always you want to get on with it, don’t you.”

  “That is my assignment.”

  “We would want a limit on the size of United States military missions to countries in Latin America,” Che Guevara said casually, placing a slice of ham on a piece of bread.

  Blackford drew back. Che kept on eating. He had just made the first formal demand in respect of a hypothetical U.S.–Cuban agreement that Blackford had heard in two weeks’ pursuit of the subject. Che’s offer (was it an offer? Blackford wondered) was clearly unacceptable.

  “Che”—Blackford attempted to speak calmly, and decided to imitate his adversary by putting some guacamole on a saltine and nibbling away at it more or less as he spoke—“we’re not here to discuss what the United States contracts to do in Latin America except as far as Cuban–U.S. relations are concerned. If sometime in the future we are asked to send a large military mission to Ecuador or wherever and we agree to do so, what has that got to do with what we’re discussing?”