See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  “Well just write that down, Caimán. I don’t want you to forget it.”

  “I won’t forget it, Che.”

  With great speed he changed the subject. “We are going on a trip by helicopter. Right after lunch. You will see the Sierra Maestra, and know something of the conditions of guerrilla warfare. The areas we were in are not so different, in fact they are not different at all, from what they were when we first got here on the Granma. “And then Che began to talk—about that memorable voyage, about the absence on board of well-qualified seamen, about the storms, the wretched seasickness, about coming up on a stretch of land different from what they had thought they were headed toward, about the ambushes by Batista’s men and the deaths, and their struggle, traveling often just two or perhaps three together—even one—to reach various rallying points. “Always Fidel was there, and Frank País, and we learned what it is to make war against the oppressor class from the countryside. That is the key, the countryside. Mao knew that.” Che Guevara’s eyes were bright, but he was not lost in any reverie. He was simply being the effective host, communicating to the CIA agent Caimán, whose real name Che Guevara had temporarily forgotten, something of the excitement of twelve desperate idealists with a providential light shining down on their fortunes from overhead, taking on a dictator who had forty thousand men under arms. Blackford commented only that it must all indeed have been very exciting. “There is no doubting that what you accomplished is legendary.”

  The helicopter let them down on a field near the village of La Plata. “This was one of the first villages we came to control,” Che said as they walked toward it. Children and a few herdsmen tending goats, pigs, and sheep stopped to look at the helicopter, even though they had become tolerably familiar with helicopters, but they ignored the three figures that stepped out of it. A few recognized Comandante Che and waved at him, but did not seem to take his appearance as in any way phenomenal; no more would they have taken as entirely unexpected the appearance of Fidel Castro. These were mountain people, and the passions of the hot country were not, in them, so easily stimulated.

  At La Plata there was a memorial building. It had been erected on the site of the hut Fidel had used as a headquarters, off and on, for five months during 1957 and 1958. To it had been taken such world celebrities as Anastas Mikoyan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Pablo Neruda. It had several guest rooms and a permanent staff of a half-dozen Cubans charged with looking after it and, on those very special occasions, its very special visitors.

  They were given rooms. Che told Blackford he would take him on a walk. To Catalina he said that the ground was rough, that perhaps he and Blackford could manage to communicate with each other with their pooled knowledge of each other’s languages if she desired to stay at the guest house.

  In Spanish Catalina spoke very sharply to Che. Blackford caught something to the effect that women are every something something as men and he damned well had something something every reason to know this. She spoke stormily and censoriously, and Che was visibly cowed. So the three of them set out.

  The air was cool at the high altitude, and Che led them first down a tiny trail—rocky, clammy, weedy, wet. The rains fell copiously, and often, on the Sierra Maestra. They found it necessary to hang on to limbs or small tree trunks to keep from sliding uncontrollably down the barely discernible trail, maintained by the occasional shepherds who used it, at an angle of incline surprisingly steep. “This is difficult to do even as we are doing it,” Che commented. “You can imagine how it is to come down this trail with a rifle and supplies. I must have used this trail one hundred times during those early months in 1957.”

  He stopped suddenly. At a distance of about two hundred yards Blackford could make out a traversing dirt road, only just wide enough for a car to chug along it.

  “This spot is special for me,” Che said, sitting down on the ground, Catalina beside him, Blackford standing, one hand on the branch of a ceiba tree, his heels dug in to maintain his balance. “This was my first time. It was here that, as the French say, I was défloré. It was a lone sentry. There were only a half dozen of them patrolling this road between Niquero and La Plata, each of them with a walkie-talkie—and oh how badly we wanted those radios because our communications system was, well, it was nothing. Fidel had said to us, Get the radios. And he said, If in order to get the radios you need to kill the soldiers, by all means do so.

  “I had just reached this point, and I saw the sentry”—he pointed to the little road visible through the trees, perhaps a hundred-foot stretch of it. “He was walking very slowly, in fact he had paused and was just standing there, smoking a cigarette, and I knew the moment had come, so I sat down. Exactly where I am right now. Exactly here.” He raised his left arm, opening his hand into a crotch as if cradling the fore end of a rifle. He cocked his head over, closed his left eye, and raised his right hand, trigger finger extended. “I got him in my telescopic sight. The cross hairs I placed first in the center of his head, but thought better of it—too risky, might miss, better to aim for his chest, a broader target. The moment came to squeeze the trigger. It did not come to me automatically. I had to will it. I did. I learned that one has to will a revolution. It is only because we willed it that we won Cuba.” He continued sitting for a moment.

  Blackford said nothing, but nothing was expected of him. Che got up and continued the descent, and now the trail moved laterally and it was possible to walk without struggling against gravity. “We would patrol these little lanes, and recruit our volunteers, and make friends with the villagers, who would give us supplies. In return, we gave them our protection. Before long we were effectively in charge. First of a small area, then of a larger area. It was only then that the military operations began, like El Hombrito and Mar Verde.

  “Now, my dear Caimán, you see it is not guaranteed that guerrillas will succeed. But the Cuban example is much admired by a great many lean and hungry men and women who thirst for social justice. And how can you, or President Kennedy, expect that such uprisings will not occur? And when they do, are you going to come to the conclusion that they were engineered by Fidel Castro?”

  This was not the ideal ambience in which to draw fine lines, Blackford thought. Perhaps that night, perhaps after supper … Indeed it had grown, suddenly, quite dark. Catalina was the first to remark on it. “Che, we must be a good three kilometers from La Plata. It will be black in twenty minutes.”

  Che smiled as he lit a little cigar. “I do not need light to find my way across this range. Follow me first,” he said to Catalina, “and when you can no longer see me, follow my cigar glow.” They ambled, and then climbed, and then groped their way back, finally, to the cottage, where a Major Hernández was waiting anxiously to give Comandante Guevara a most urgent message. He flashed a light so that Che could read it there and then. He did so, and said in Spanish to the major’s aide, “Go inside and bring my briefcase. Leave my bag.” He spoke then to Catalina in rapidfire Spanish. And then, through Catalina, to Blackford.

  “It is important. Fidel wants to see me. I will be in Havana by midnight and will see him then, and I will be back here tomorrow. Catalina will take care of you.”

  Five minutes later, Comandante Che Guevara was airborne in his helicopter. A half hour after that, Blackford and Catalina were eating dinner in the memorial building, sitting side by side at a table designed to promote a view through the large plate-glass window Castro had ordered built to view the valley, seen by him so furtively for so long, where for so long the enemy was in control and men were killed, day after day.

  “I am required to admit that it is a remarkable story,” Blackford said.

  “Which has not ended,” said Catalina.

  “No, it has not ended,” Blackford said. And to himself he began, for the first time, to wonder: In objective fact, was Che Guevara a friend of the Cuban people?

  For the second night in a row he and Catalina sat alone, talking, and drinking now the cold beer that s
at in such copious quantity in the large silver container of ice that had been left after dinner to one side of the table. They spoke more directly than the night before about the revolution, and about its aims. Blackford dared to touch on his reservations. And Catalina did as much, her reservations having nothing to do with socialism but much to do with Sovietizatión, as she put it, but always in Spanish, sovietización, the word’s formation lending itself so readily to the orderly processes by which some words begin first as simple nouns, then stretch forward into a verb, leap past the gerund into metastasis. Soviet, sovietize, sovietization. It was happening to Cuba, she whispered, and Che is aware of it. That, she said, is why he is so anxious, so anxious about this—initiative with you. But he cannot move faster than Fidel will allow him to move. So much depends on—your patience. And the patience of—her eyes were open wide—our President. “You see,” Catalina smiled, “actually I am technically an American, because I was born in Texas. My father was at Fort Sam Houston taking training. But my loyalty is to Cuba, my parents’ birthplace.”

  Blackford said “our” President would be as patient as he was permitted to be.

  They went upstairs. There was a moment of hesitation as they parted to go to their respective bedrooms. Just a moment. And Blackford went on to his bed, excited in mind and body.

  Twenty-four

  They breakfasted together, and talked vaguely about what they would do pending Che’s return. “We covered all that is especially interesting in the area yesterday,” Catalina said. “I mean, there are a hundred thousand hectares of the same sort of thing on the Sierra Maestra, or maybe a million hectares—I’m not good at that kind of thing. But to make it interesting to go farther on other trails, you’d need to have someone along who had been there on the campaign. And there are not many left. Or … available.”

  “You are referring to Huber Matos?”

  “Yes. A name we do not mention. He is a nonperson. It was a very quick journey, from revolutionary hero and boss of Camagüey—to his resignation—to charges of treason—to twenty years in prison.”

  “What exactly was the charge against him?”

  “It was exactly that, treason. Raúl wanted him executed. Fidel thought about it, thought about it quite a long while in fact, and decided he should be sentenced instead to twenty years.”

  “Why?”

  “Fidel Castro never says why. He simply decides. He is not particularly oracular or melodramatic about it—I mean when he’s talking to the inner circle, Che tells me—he just decides, and that is it. He does not like the growing prominence of any of his confederates, and Huber Matos as the military and civil head of Camagüey was growing in prestige and resisting some of Havana’s orders, for instance to get on with the executions. So he resigned. Nobody resigns from Castro’s legions.”

  “But isn’t Che big, in the sense you say Castro does not like people around him to grow big?”

  “Che Guevara is an institution. He is also an Argentine. More even than Castro, he is the Latin-American symbol of radical socialism. It would not be easy to do away with Che, or to do without him. But who knows, one of these days?”

  “And Raúl?”

  “Raúl is the original Stalinist. Sometimes I think even Fidel is afraid of him. To eliminate Raúl would require direct, Mafia-style skulduggery. You could not haul him up in court and accuse him of treason. Cubans are not much given to fratricide. But you watch, you watch. Not only will Fidel prevail, but Raúl, little by little, will become less prominent.”

  “Does Che actively oppose what you persist in calling sovietización?”

  “Not openly. And he recognizes the continuing military threat from the United States, and he knows that that requires defensive armament. But as Minister of Industry above all he needs what only the Soviets are sending us right now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Everything. I mean, everything they can spare. Raw materials, mostly. And some dollars. These are precious, because with them Che can buy from Canada, and Europe, and Latin America.” Catalina forced herself to smile. “Your imperialist dollar is very much in demand. You smile. So were the gold pieces of the Caesars. Dollars buy food. They also buy explosives. And drugs. And invasions of Cuba.”

  “Churchill had a more amiable way of putting that, Catalina, when he was fighting the nazis. He said to us, ‘Give us the tools and we will do the job.’ The fighting at the Bay of Pigs was done by Cubans.”

  “And obviously there weren’t enough of them.”

  “It would be interesting to know what would be the vote for Castro in the event of free elections.”

  Catalina was silent. “Castro has been very popular ever since you invaded our country.”

  “Presumably less so with people he has imprisoned. Or, for that matter, shot. And then there are others, no? Who have lost, or are losing, the same freedoms they lost under Batista? And resenting it?”

  Catalina got up from the bench with her coffee cup and went to the coffee urn on the side table.

  “Has this trip taught you nothing? What are the freedoms those sugarcane workers have enjoyed? It is always so easy to isolate this poet or that philosopher or that editorial writer who has lost his freedom to stand in the way of a revolution designed to help not so much individual poets but five million peasant families.”

  “Shall we knock it off?”

  “If you like.”

  “It’s the Soviet angle, and only that, that you care about?”

  “There is hardly any point in winning a revolution against the United States and its puppet dictators and then turning over the country to the Soviet Union. That has not happened, but that is exactly what threatens.”

  Major Hernández walked into the living room of the guest house, removing his hat. He spoke to Catalina, and Blackford understood what he said, or most of it. Che Guevara would not in fact be back today, not until tomorrow. The major had been directed to escort them on a helicopter trip. Hernández turned and walked out.

  “Where?” Blackford asked Catalina.

  “I am not absolutely certain. I’ll find out. I expect we will be seeing where the Granma landed, and something of the itinerary of the 26th of July men during those early months. It will be interesting—I haven’t made such a trip myself—if that is what is in store for us.”

  It was indeed such a trip, another ride in the helicopter, gliding over the mountain ranges of the Sierra Maestra toward the southern shore of the long, eel-shaped island and out over the water. Heeling the helicopter over to give them a better view through the cockpit window, Major Hernández pointed out, just below, three naval ships: destroyers, in formation, heading toward the island. “American destroyers,” Hernández said over the propeller noise. “Going to Guantánamo.” If he needed to parachute home any time soon, Blackford mused, this would clearly be the place.

  They saw it all. Well, not exactly all, because “all” could not be seen from a helicopter. “All” meant days and nights in jungles and mountains, fighting mosquitoes and snakes and hunger and Batista’s soldiers. You cannot get an overview of a twenty-five-month-long struggle, Blackford thought, from a helicopter, useful though it was. He saw the beach, the famous Playa Colorada where the Granma let off its bedraggled and thoroughly incompetent graduate-student revolutionaries, and then the foothills where more than three quarters of them were killed. Blackford would not impugn the heroism that had taken place in the area over which the little helicopter flew.

  They stopped at Holguín for a brief lunch served up by the mess hall that fed the four dozen air force personnel stationed there, and Blackford shut his eyes wondering how much of what he was at that moment experiencing was different from what it would have been five years ago under Batista, and just exactly how.

  Major Hernández asked Blackford, Would he be interested in seeing a collective citrus plantation begun at the orders of Che Guevara? Mostly to be polite, Blackford said Yes, knowing just the kind of thing he would be seeing.
Which was what he saw. He could not gauge exactly the spirit of the workers—whether they thought themselves engaged in a great communal enterprise, whether they were better off than before, whether, for them, Castro was a godsend or simply another caudillo with unconventional ideas. Suddenly he thought to ask:

  “Where do they go to church?”

  The Director de Productión greeted the query apprehensively, consulting in rapid Spanish with Major Hernández. Priests had gone to jail, some had been executed, religious festivals were outlawed. But churchgoing had not been prohibited, and the director was inadequately briefed on exactly the formula that was appropriate in addressing Sr. Caimán, who had been introduced simply as “an American guest of Comandante Guevara.” He had all along supposed that no guest of Comandante Guevara would be less than enthusiastic about anything Comandante Guevara had instigated, but the question was troubling because in fact no funds had been provided for the construction of a church. Would Major Hernández wish this to be divulged, or was there, well, an evasive way of putting it? Blackford was developing an ear for even quite rapid Spanish, and he got the drift of his host’s problem.

  Major Hernández was clipped in his reply. “A church has not been constructed yet. A priest comes in and says Mass in the recreation room.” He returned to a discussion of quotas, and how they had all been exceeded every month for the past five months. Somehow the religious question had chilled the discussion, and soon they were back in the helicopter, and, by five, back at the memorial building in La Plata.

  They had been hot and dusty, though the mountain air quickly cooled them. Inside the guest house, Catalina suggested they dine at seven.