The solution to everything depended on slotting into the bureaucratic organogram, acquiring full rights and obligations. Apart from the traditional official bodies like the municipality, public works, electricity and water, etc., there were the new ones which called all the shots. Urban reform, agrarian reform, confiscated assets, CDRs (the committees for the defence of the Revolution), militias, literacy brigades, were all part of an entity called Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) that wielded absolute power. It had been created by merging the organizations that had fought (the guerrillas’ 26th of July Movement and the Student Directory) with those that had dithered (the communists of the PSP). The latter, however, got their cadres in place first.
In Oriente, the ORI-northern region was run by a communist, Rita Díaz, the power behind the throne, and a redhead to boot. She was not very tall, chubby but shapely, and mysteriously fitted into tight olive green fatigues and blue militia shirt. With her hair caught in a sort of loose bun under a green beret, she looked more like a French resistance fighter than a tropical miliciana. She was very temperamental but had a good sense of humour, was both friendly and energetic, and highly expeditious. She put her weight behind the handicrafts workshop from the start and promised to help us find staff among people she trusted. Meanwhile, Claudia and I had to find a house, furnish it, join the militia and, of course, do political work. We would stay in touch with her. ‘That’s great, chico! An Argentine like Che … the most beautiful man in the Revolution!’ she said as she waved goodbye with a ‘come and eat at my house’, but no firm date.
A young lawyer, Evelio Rodríguez, was in charge of Urban Reform in Holguín. For our workshop, he suggested a former fruit farm: an enormous old house with two interior patios and a large piece of land behind. It would be fine. Repairs to the floors and roof were needed, but it was do-able. For Claudia and me, Evelio picked an apartment half a block from the main square, and no more than three blocks from the workshop. It was on the first floor, with stairs straight down to the street where, as if to mitigate our nostalgia, there was a tree, the only one on the block. It was not very big but satisfied our somewhat bourgeois need for comfort, and its excellent bathroom met with immediate approval. Large transparent lizards wandered over the frosted glass, but Evelio said they were the best line of defence against mosquitoes. We went to choose some furniture and the following day the house was just about habitable.
Within a week there was a rhythm to my work. It was hard – seven in the morning to twelve at night on normal days – but absorbing. I was the boss, but also the bricklayer, carpenter and designer: removing roofs to replace woodwork and broken tiles, knocking down walls, making a bathroom, connecting the plumbing, installing electricity (under electric company supervision) or painting white walls. Cuba was almost totally dependent on imported materials and our work showed how far its commercial sector had deteriorated. As stocks ran out there was no way of replenishing them. There was a shortage of nails, screws, wire, plaster, fuses, files, etc., so finding materials was the first battle.
I joined the militia, training a couple of days a week and doing night guard duty in official buildings or important work places. This general level of vigilance was not only necessary, it was also a way of mobilizing people on a political level. It played havoc with productivity at work, however. I could see how elastic timetables were, and although I used firm rational arguments, it had no effect. To make things worse, after the Bay of Pigs the army produced an emergency plan for defending Holguín in case of attack, not an entirely crazy idea given the city’s strategic position on the north coast. It comprised encircling the town with three or four lines of trenches to be dug by voluntary milicianos, better at digging holes than being soldiers. This pick and spade job was done on (Red) Sundays until five in the afternoon. It flayed your hands but included a free lunch.
All problems to do with the workshop went straight to Rita, that is, to the ORI, the powerhouse of the Revolution. No cement in the building material yards? Go and find Rita. No rivets? Rita will phone someone; ‘What the hell’s happened to those rivets, chico?’ That’s how we did the impossible for the first few months.
The Swiss director, who seemed to live in his huge Lincoln Continental, appeared at least once a month, surrounded by economists and planners from JUCEPLAN, the Central Planning Board, an entity in charge of reorganizing the economy and educating cadres. It meant a wasted day. And not only for us, because these crazy economists applied undigested Soviet models, from an economic system of which they knew neither the internal workings nor the results, as we eventually saw when the practices of the ‘political cadres’ whose inflated aims and results were made public. The Swiss, still sweating, was creating the inevitable national bureaucratic apparatus to fit the tangle of budget proposals, inputs, expenses, investment and production, while we were still building our basic infrastructure, because we had no precedents, no ideas and no pots. Luckily, the Mexican girl’s folkloric ideas of going back to the primitive ceramics of the indigenous Taíno and Siboney peoples – hand-moulded clay pieces baked on a tribal fire – were discarded. The argument against, which I subscribed to, was that you could not devote an entire wages, equipment and administration budget to an experiment only useful in an Anthropology Department science lab.
She was transferred back to Havana, and was replaced by a young administrator, Melchor Casals, who was not even twenty. He took over the planning days, and every now and again came with us to Havana for administrative training. The permanent staff comprised an improvised technical director (me); a very capable designer (Claudia); a teenage administrator (Melchor); a communist delegate-cum-worker (Cucho); an actual carpenter (Argeo Pérez), and three trainees. The responsibility kept me awake at night. But in the nick of time I managed to get the latest books on ceramic techniques: pottery, clay, varnish, kilns and temperatures. I got some locally, sent for more from Havana, and built up quite a good theoretical base on the subject.
When work on the building was finished, Argeo made me a draughtsman’s table and the second stage began. Using millimetre graph paper, I designed every piece of equipment, shelving, work tables, sinks with covers, sinks without covers, sinks with drains, etc., and arranged them according to their place in an eventual production line. Various types of potter’s wheels; tables for casting, moulding, kneading, filing, varnishing; rooms with warm air circulating through the floor-to-ceiling shelving, for drying the varnish.
Then came the period of experimenting with the equipment and materials. We needed prototypes already finished and fired. I designed a circular kiln with a one-cubic-metre capacity, with saggars arranged in the shape of an orange cut in half, with flames circulating upwards in a spiral, impelled by pressure from a ventilator. To build the ventilator, and especially the burners, I needed the help of specialized technology. The ventilator was built in a local workshop, but for the burner I searched the length and breadth of Cuba before Rita found me a group of Soviet engineers in the nickel processing plant at Nicaro. They designed and built an initial burner for the circular kiln and, later, a second one with more capacity and precision.
Halfway along the road from Holguín to Havana I had spotted an area of red clay. We took a sample and it proved to have excellent drying and plastic qualities. We went personally and chose a truckload of the best clay and began the process of washing, grinding and kneading large quantities of this formidable red paste. It gave us a beautiful range of plates, cups and vases, with a single colour varnish inside and the natural red clay on the outside. Don’t forget that this was the mid-sixties, and Cuba was running out of practically everything, a critical situation in which the first things to break are plates. Hence, we channelled production into crockery.
But work wasn’t my only worry. Political control had degenerated into Stalinist sectarianism, spreading through Cuban society like a virus. A person’s political past counted for more than his skills when it came to evaluating who would get positions of responsibility. The majority of the population were stuck because very few had a communist past. In the case of foreign workers, supervision was by representatives of the Communist Parties back home. The job of vetting the Argentine contingent fell to an engineer from Buenos Aires, a certain Fontana. He worked and lived in Holguín, and it wasn’t long before he turned up at the workshop. Dressed in militia fatigues, with his beret under his epaulette, like a US Green Beret, he introduced himself as the