The Shadow of Guevara

Book One:

The War, Part I (1957-1958)

Chapter One

We were taken down to the farm on a Sunday evening, six men in a horse trailer, without any horses. None of us spoke to each other as the trailer, drawn by an old Chevy, rattled along the dirt-track road. The boss’s number two travelled with us. He never spoke anyway, not full sentences. He just sat there with his black sunglasses and broad shoulders. He was heavy, like the boss, but younger. He stared at the few of us in the trailer. We’d all signed up to work on the farm, made our marks on the papers, like we did every winter. It was the only way to find work. The rest of the year we got what we could, driving, transporting goods, lifting furniture onto trucks, that kind of thing.

When we got there, we jumped out of the back of the trailer. I slapped the dust off my jeans and took in the familiar surroundings. There were fields of sugarcane, rice and beans, banana trees, a house, an outhouse, and some stables. I noticed a locked little hut beside the boss’s house that wasn’t there before.

Although we numbered half a dozen men, I knew only one of the others, Toby, a young Native American guy. He was the one guy I always kept with. We weren’t big talkers, but we liked each other’s company. I watched him as he bent down to tie his shoelaces. He came over to me with a grim look on his face. We hadn’t sat near each other in the trailer. If they knew you had buddies, it might work against you later on. Toby’s eyes were tired and he whispered, ‘Hey, Pablo, you ready to break your back for the fat man again for the next six months?’

‘Try and stop me,’ I said in a flat tone. Toby and I were the same age, twenty-three. We’d been doing odd jobs together since we were seventeen. He didn’t like it any more than I did, but I guess fortune favours the rich, and we were poorer than slaves. The boss’s number two lined us up, a group of unwashed peasants in rags. He checked one last time that we were fit for purpose.

‘You got any cigarettes?’ Toby whispered to me again, as the boss’s number two came down the line. I never knew a guy with less opportunity and more of a craving.

‘How can you need them, Toby?’ I spoke under my breath.

‘I still like one when I’m marking a moment, a new beginning, or something, you know?’

‘Toby,’ I said, ‘we don’t have the means to be marking moments,’ but I handed him my last smoke. He didn’t ask me where that left me. He waited till the number two went into the big house to talk to the boss. Looking at the boss’s miniature white castle of a home, Toby lit the smoke with a box of matches he’d gotten from God knows where. He puffed the cigarette with a faraway look in his eyes, and I joked that he thought he was Don Quixote, looking all grand and sophisticated.

‘Who’s that?’ he said.

‘I don’t know, some real serious guy from history, I think.’

The boss’s number two came back out. We were taken into the large outhouse where our beds and our makeshift lockers were, small wooden termite-infested boxes. There were a lot of workers there already. It seemed they’d arrived earlier that day. Nobody said hello. It was late in the evening and the animals, the horses, and chickens, and cows were quiet. Something in my mind said great, back here again, like I’d been dancing the Rueda de Casino, going around in circles.

We waited for the boss. Before long the old man waddled out onto his back doorstep and came down to the outhouse to meet us all. He had a long grey beard and a huge belly. We called him Saint Nick. We liked the irony of it, but sometimes it felt like a tame joke. He stopped a good bit short of where we stood. He gave us the rules:

‘You boys get up early. You work for your food. You cut the cane till evening time. Then you eat, a bit of egg, some rice, some banana, some beans. We give you the food. You take what you’re given. You don’t take any more than what we give you, cos what we give you is all you need. Any disputes you boys got, you settle among each other. You make trouble for us and we’ll make trouble for you. We don’t pay troublemakers. We just kick them off the farm, and we don’t care how they get along after that. When the day winds down, so do you. You go to bed, and it’s the same the next day. It’s the same every day. God’s day of rest doesn’t include campesinos. You do your praying while you work. Those are the rules.’

With that, it was bedtime. There was no supper.

*

That Monday we worked till late in the evening, cutting and paring down sugarcane stalks from daybreak till sundown. When you cut a sugarcane stalk, you can take the segment and suck the end, tasting its sweetness. We weren’t so foolish as to do it so anyone could see. We just broke off small sections and pocketed them. It’s not nourishing, but food is food, especially to a campesino.

After work, we went for our one meal of the day, half a fried banana, some rice and beans, and a small glass of water. We each got our food passed onto our plates by a group of young girls in the kitchen of the boss’s house. The kitchen and the dining room were all we ever saw of the inside of his home. I don’t mean to give the impression it was all jovial, like we sat down and kicked back and had a good time, talking and laughing. We took our small plates outside, let the food cool down, and stood while we used our dirty hands to eat it. We didn’t pass the time of day. We just ate.

The food containers were filled with the exact amount needed for all the workers. The farm produced hordes of food, but everything was regulated. There were strict quotas, designed to maintain and increase the profit margins of the oligarchs even further.

There used to be a big burly guy who stopped anyone trying to get extra rations, but he wasn’t there that year. We were all standing around eating, not talking because we were so tired. The queue for the rice was coming to its end and the girl supposed to be taking charge of the container was half asleep. Some young guy had skipped the queue, trying to sneak a second plate of rice. I didn’t notice, but Toby told me he’d taken off his cap and ruffled his hair. It was enough of a disguise.

No one blamed him later. We could hear each other’s stomachs groaning. It got to the last campesino in the queue and there was no rice left for him. The boss was there and he saw there was no rice for the last guy. ‘Boys,’ he shouted, ‘meal’s over! Outside now!’ He lined all of us up in the yard beside the rice and sugarcane fields. He went down the line of men asking each one, ‘Did you take a second plate of rice?’

‘No, boss. No, boss. No, boss...’ Every single man denied it.

‘Okay, one of you is lying to me.’

I stared straight ahead, but I could see the side of Toby’s body to my left. There were beads of sweat running down his forehead. We knew what the boss was like. But despite it all, I felt like giggling. It was like being in the principal’s office or something. As things developed though, I became less and less tickled by it all. For sure the boss wasn’t joking as he called out, ‘You don’t tell me who it was and none of you’ll get any rice from now on!’

The guy who took the extra rice was more of a boy than a man. ‘I did it,’ I heard him say. The boss walked down to him. He looked him up and down. The boy trembled. His face was sweating too, but the boss just spoke to him in a whisper. ‘Isolation,’ he said. I remembered the hut at the side of the boss’s house. It was small, but it could house one man easy enough. It was dark inside and padlocked. ‘Two days, no food,’ said the boss, ‘any transgression after that and you’re gone.’ The boy looked relieved. I don’t think he’d been in isolation before.

The rest of us made our way back to the outhouse. There were a handful of new recruits there who’d just arrived. Some of the others told them about the boy who’d been put in isolation. The bosses didn’t see it, but these new guys didn’t look or act like the rest of us. Like us, they wore dirty clothes and their faces and hair weren’t washed, but you could tell they didn’t speak the same way. The way they stood, their mannerisms, the look in their eyes, told us they were different. They were pretending. They weren’t campesinos, not real ones. So, what was their agenda?

‘Hey,’ one of them said to us, introducing himself as being all sympathetic towards the kid in isolation, ‘we know some things you guys might be interested in learning... All of Cuba’s farms are owned by the same few families... and a quarter of them are U.S. families. They make up a tiny part of the population and they control all the profits. What they’re doing to you guys is as nothing less than slave labour.’ They pointed out the window to the white house. ‘The boss is over there eating fillet steak and guzzling beer. Meanwhile you guys are sucking the ends of sugarcane stalks and keeping your belongings in filthy little lockers.’

That kind of talk was pretty persuasive after sixteen hours working in the fields. It spoke to that part of you that was sick of it all. That was a big part, and growing, for most of us.

These guys told us of soldiers not far away in the Sierra Maestra. They showed us figures displayed alongside newspaper articles. They spoke in whispers about private meetings. They said they were members of a well-established urban network, the main part of ‘The Revolution.’ They kept using that word, revolution, and calling themselves rebels. Their group, they said, was known in underground circles as Llano. It had far more members, across the whole island, than the small group of rebels in the Sierra Maestra, which they claimed was just a minor offshoot of their organisation.

I’d always been poor. I had no prospects. I came from a family of campesinos. I’d been as much a burden as a help to them. We’d led a hand to mouth existence without medical or other benefits. That was something else they talked about, doctors for everyone, along with education. But I wasn’t sold. I wished I could have had a proper family, a real family. I hadn’t seen my siblings or parents in years. They were either too young or too old to work alongside me like Toby. Even as a kid, I could go two or three years without seeing them, depending on where we needed to work. I couldn’t fix that now and, even then, there was something about these Llano guys. It was as if they were trying to infect us with their intensity to serve their own egos. I didn’t trust them. But the stories of the soldiers in the mountains attracted me. I felt like I might trust those guys. Still, I didn’t mean to act on any of it. Llano were giving me the creeps already.     

*

They stayed up all night, those Llano guys, talking to whoever would listen to them. That seemed like a lot of guys. I didn’t know whether they were just looking for new recruits or whether they wanted to spark an uprising on the farm.

It all reminded me of a story in a book of Aesop’s fables someone gave me later. It’s about a group of mice and a cat who terrorises them. The mice come up with a plan. It’s a real good plan, like Marxism and Christianity are real good plans. All they have to do is make a bell, put it on a chain, and fasten it around the cat’s neck. That way, when the cat moves, they’ll hear the swaying bell tinkling and they’ll know the cat’s coming. They can run to safety. It means they don’t have to fight or attack the cat and get themselves injured or killed. They decide to wait for the cat to fall asleep. Someone needs to creep up and attach the bell to its neck. So, the question is, ‘Who’s gonna do it?’ They all say things like, ‘No, not me. I’m too young and frail.’ Or, ‘No, I’m too old and sick.’ Or, ‘No, I’m too important to take the risk.’ Everyone has an excuse not to have to have the courage. That was why, at that stage, I trusted in the tales of the guys in the mountains much more than in Llano.

Some of the campesinos listened to the Llano guys all night long. A call came in the morning to assemble in the yard. We didn’t know what it was about. A lot of the men looked worried. The Llano guys didn’t appear to be as confident all of a sudden. They thought they’d been caught with their pants down on the first night. I remember their faces. They were pale as hell.

‘Well,’ said the boss, ‘we run a smooth operation here. Even the president recognises it. I work you boys hard. We have standards, proper standards, and any punishment we administer is justified, appropriate, and proportionate. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Yes, boss,’ we all clamoured together.

‘That’s right,’ he said. He was standing there passing a cattle prod from his left to right hand and back again. The Llano guys were looking at each other. Ashen-faced and squirming in their skins, they ran their hands across their foreheads. The boss continued: ‘We run a tight ship. We’ve run it for years. I think you all acknowledge that. Anybody disagree?’

‘No, boss,’ we all clamoured together.

He stroked his beard and patted himself on the belly, as if he was congratulating himself on his obesity. The Llano guys looked weary on their feet, like they were about to pass out.

‘Personally,’ the boss said, ‘I think it’s about time we got some recognition.’

That confused everyone. What the hell was he talking about? We were all standing there, fully perplexed, when the boss’s number two came round the side of his house with a big silver trophy. It read, ‘1956 Best Policy in Agrarian Practice Trophy.’ Old Saint Nick thrust his chest out like a cockerel and, in an attempt to mimic our speech, he said, ‘That’s right. We done won ourselves some fancy silverware!’

Llano breathed a sigh of relief. We were sent to work in the fields. Llano were really getting on my nerves. I could hear them whispering to the genuine campesinos through the sugarcane stalks. I caught the tail end of one conversation: ‘… Everybody talks about owning the factories, vehicles, machinery, water, coal, and oil, those kinds of things. But another or combined approach is to control the news and newspapers. It’s a key method of building power. Those in power shape the opinion of the middle and upper classes. They manipulate them and they relegate guys like you, in the working classes, to the sidelines. For the moment, the U.S. is helping the government to maintain everything. But the behaviour of people reacting against the government is becoming more extreme...’

Those bastards didn’t shut up all day long. If we’d been working with the bananas, the beans, or even the rice, they wouldn’t have had so much opportunity. But November to May is the sugar harvest and the long stalks gave them every chance to try and recruit more members to their cause. Toby was working near me. Only the boss’s number two was really watching on. There were other overseers but they couldn’t have cared less, so long as we didn’t just lie down or something. Once they heard and saw the machetes at work, they were satisfied.

‘What’s your take on these Llano guys, Toby?’ I asked.

‘I notice they’re all white,’ he said. ‘My people have trusted white men before. They came with big plans and big promises, just like these guys. It cost us everything.’

‘Black or white or Injun, Toby,’ I sneered, ‘some people are real brave with other men’s lives. But I can’t say my empty stomach isn’t influencing me at all.’

I saw Toby wince. He didn’t like to talk about food. His history was worse than mine and being hungry had all kinds of nasty connotations for him. ‘It all comes down to having enough to eat,’ he always said to me. I couldn’t really think of any argument against that.

The day continued on like that, the Llano guys whispering in all of our ears and me and Toby, even with our empty stomachs, being far from convinced. At last, the sun came down, bit by bit, and the boss’s number two called, ‘Dinner time.’ This time nobody tried to get any extra rations of rice or anything else. But the campesinos disobedience was far from over. The boss had left his humungous silver cup right in the middle of the yard, shining in the lowering sun.

Chapter Two

The next morning, we were woken up early. The boss and his number two marched into the outhouse. Their faces were purple and the boss’s eyes were bulging in his head. His number two’s sleeves were rolled up. For once, he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. His gaze was cold, hard, and flinty, and so was the boss’s. I could see the veins twitching in their necks. The boss spoke through his gritted teeth. His voice was deep as he called out, ‘Everyone outside, now!’

There was a strange smell in the yard when we all lined up there. It was coming from the big silver cup in the centre of the square.

‘Animals,’ the boss muttered, ‘savages,’ as he walked back and forth in front of us. ‘This is unconscionable,’ he said. ‘I feed you, take care of you, pay you, and now this!’ He pointed to his pride and joy, the trophy he’d won by squeezing every last bit of profit out of us that he could. We held ourselves unnaturally still. I saw some of the guys cup their mouths in their hands, smiling behind their palms, pretending to be rubbing their cheeks with their fingers. My lips twitched as well, but Toby’s didn’t. I think he sensed something was coming.

‘Now, I don’t expect to find the culprit,’ the boss said, ‘but they’s gonna be some changes around here.’ He liked to act all high and mighty, but I think he wasn’t so upper-class himself, despite his use of big or strange words at times. Sure, he pretended to mock our speech, but I noticed when he got ruffled, he talked a lot more like a campesino than an aristocrat. ‘You won’t be getting fed quite so well from now on,’ he said. I could sense him calming down as he talked. His face lost its feverish look and he spoke in his usual strange, eerie, threatening way, real soft and quiet, all sure of himself again. Or at least as sure as he could have been given someone had taken a giant shit that night in his precious silver jug.

We were sent on out to the sugarcane fields again. Llano saw their opportunity. ‘We’re trying to educate you,’ one of them said. ‘We want to educate all the campesinos. Because knowledge through education is important,’ he went on, ‘but that’s not the full answer. Where wealthy crooks hold all the positions of influence, we can’t change their personalities just by talking to them. We may as well lie down in front of them and surrender. They hold the positions of power and they deal out the resources under their control at their own will, to anyone who has to suffer so that they can stay on top. We’ve got to stop the oppression at its source, and its source is in the current order of things. It can’t be stopped with well-meaning words or discussion, but only with force.’

But the boss and his number two and the other overseers were like Aesop’s cat. The rest of us were the mice, and none more so than the half-dozen Llano guys calling for rebellion. When the food rations went down, they melted away in the next few days. That was the end of any revolution on the farm. But the boss was ticked, real ticked. He continued to run things like Mao ran China and nobody felt it as bad as Toby. It wasn’t just hunger for him. It was all the memories that went with it, losing his family, and being beaten and humiliated. Still, it was more than that I reckoned, something much bigger that he never spoke about. In any case, the result was that he started stealing food from the kitchen at night. There were dogs, but Toby had a way with dogs, even vicious dogs. Again, he had a lot of experience with them in the past. He was able to calm them, slip them something to eat and move past them. That’s what he did, over the next few nights, as the days went by. The boss had confidence in his dogs and he didn’t think anyone could get past them.

*   

                                                                                                      I knew it was bad when I woke up and Toby’s bed was empty. Even if he’d gone out already, he hadn’t made it and he always made his bed first thing. I went on out to the fields and cut the cane all morning, knowing Toby was in big trouble. Round noontime someone passed by me and whispered, ‘Toby’s in isolation.’ It didn’t surprise me. I couldn’trelax the whole rest of the day. I kept wondering what I could do.

I came up with a plan, but it was going to take a few days to work it. I’d need food for the dogs, and for Toby and me. I’d need the keys for the padlock on the hut door. I’d need a tent. I’d need two horses. I could get most of these things on the night. I’d have to use my own rations for the dogs. I thought about Llano while I worked, but they were gone and I still didn’t respect them all that much. I thought about telling some of the others about my plan, but it was better to keep it quiet. If Toby and I were going to succeed, we had a better chance alone. So, I just cut the cane for the next few days, pocketed my half dinners, and lay awake until the later on the night that I planned to escape.

I’d never stayed awake like that before. I was usually dog-tired from the work and sound asleep within a few minutes. I could hear all the others snoring away. It felt like they were sucking in and then blowing out the walls of the entire outhouse. I crept down from my bunk and snuck out the door. The night was mild and quiet and