‘And now what?’ asked the Commander in Chief. ‘If we get an order to attack, we press this button, the radar guides the missiles, and the plane is destroyed’, the Russian officer replied. To everyone’s amazement, Fidel stretched out his long arm and pressed the button, murmuring ‘Let’s see if it’s true, coño!’ That the U2 was destroyed was certainly true. Two hundred thousand marines hurriedly boarded their transport planes, the Flying Fortresses filled their holds with bombs, Cuban soldiers said goodbye to their families, and whoever could do so downed a large shot of rum, in case it was his last.
With bruised arms, perforated by needles, I went off to join my comrades at the front. My journey was in vain, however, because a few hours after rejoining my group, Khrushchev agreed unilaterally to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US taking their missiles out of Turkey, and a commitment of non-aggression towards the island.
Che ordered our immediate return to training, intensified to cut short the timetable. On his second visit after we returned to the house in Havana, despite his exhaustion and sombre mood, he told us of the tension surrounding the crisis. The group had not seen him in Pinar del Río despite being near his headquarters in a cave in Los Portales, so we were all waiting expectantly. I remember him saying how he had been in a meeting with Fidel when there was a phone call from Carlos Franqui, editor of the newspaper Revolución. Fidel had thrown the phone onto the map table and, swivelling on his heels, had aimed a violent kick at a wall mirror, shattering it. No one had expected the Russians to take that decision.
Che was very pessimistic about the way the crisis had ended. He was sure that, left to its own devices, the US wanted to attack the Revolution and destroy it. Any other result would not be consistent with imperial intentions. They will never forgive Cuba for existing, and providing an example of a sovereign nation living in dignity and freedom. ‘You’, he said, ‘must pull out all the stops and finish the most important parts of your preparation. The mountains will take care of the physical stuff, but other parts you can’t do alone. I want you out of Cuba before November 15th.’
The classes increased and changed, especially mine. A jeep collected me every morning and brought me back at night. I spent hours working on keys and codes, encrypted and unencrypted, counter-intelligence techniques, methods of disinformation, interrogation and counter-interrogation, which in the end, was the only knowledge I ever used in critical situations. A lot of emphasis was put on the moral cost of such activities. Of what you must be prepared to sacrifice in order to be effective: family, pride, reputation, privileges, and life itself as a last resort. My instructors, who had been trained by the Soviets, probably the best espionage school in the world, had a lot of practical experience. I heard detailed accounts of unsung heroes who had given up everything, left their loved ones in that moral maze of ignorance, assumed another respectable (at the same time horrendous) identity, gone undercover to infiltrate Cuban counter-revolutionary groups in Miami, and stayed there indefinitely working for Cuban intelligence. As I learned all this, I felt as though it was a living death.
Yet intelligence did actually work in Cuba. The long lists of thwarted attempts by the US intelligence services to kill Prime Minister Castro and other leaders make the counter-intelligence team justifiably proud. But in the end, it is down to the undercover agents who pay with their honour. They will never be vindicated. We had to wait for the writer Norberto Fuentes to leave the country to discover that one of the ‘President’s men in the notorious Watergate case was a Cuban agent. The aim of the training was an almost perfect apprenticeship, but “if you screw up, chico, you screw up, we don’t know you”.’
At the same time, we worked on the details for our departure. In those days, Cuba had two ways out to the West for its ‘commercial’ flights (a euphemism because, one way or another, all the passengers were government officials): through Mexico or Prague. Our group would leave via Czechoslovakia, where we would wait for the infrastructure on the ground near the Bolivian–Argentine border to be put in place. The training programme had originally included a month’s combat experience of the ‘anti-bandit struggle’ in the Escambray mountains, but this was not going to be possible. Otherwise, our general preparation was good.
There would be seven of us, travelling together but separately so to speak, on the first Cubana plane to leave the island for Prague since the October missile crisis: Masetti, Furry, Hermes, Federico, Leonardo, Miguel and myself. There would also be broad intelligence support from the embassy in Prague and from another comandante, Papito Serguera, who would act as the link between us, the Cubans and the Czechs; he would be the only person to see our faces. Specialists in secret operations, under orders from Olo Pantoja, Iván and Ariel, and from time to time, Ulises, another intelligence operative, came every day to bring us reasonably smart city clothes, take passport photos, and work on the invention of our personal profiles, appropriately equipped with family details, occupation and reasons for our journey.
Leaving Cuba, nobody escaped the meticulous eye of the CIA cameras either in Mexico, Gander (Canada), or Shannon (Ireland). When you got off the plane to refuel in Gander, you had to walk to the airport departure lounge in single file down a narrow stairway against a wall at the end of a huge hall. The cameras did not miss a single passenger detail, not only their faces, but also their walk, physique, tics and even socks. Neither could you avoid the KGB’s cameras in Prague, Berlin or Moscow. Anything suspicious would lead to a tap on the back from some agent of control. This being so, our first problem arose even before we left Cuba.
One day in the second week of November, we began ridding the house of any trace of Argentine presence. Ariel’s people picked up our belongings and Ulises took away the weapons and equipment in a van. He had unloaded a couple of new tyres from the back of the van, his own personal vehicle perhaps, and while arranging rifles, bazookas and machine guns on the floor, kept up a constant enthusiastic chatter. He was sorry he could not come with us because of his skin colour (dark mulatto) but assured us he would be ‘in the thick of it’ before us because he was going ‘just over there, to the other coast’, meaning Venezuela, where there were blacks, although not as cute as him. He put the tyres back on top of the pile of weapons and left.
Masetti decided Leonardo-Fabián could visit his family in Vedado while we were both going to get some X-rays. Leonardo had fifteen minutes to go into his apartment, kiss his wife and children and come back out. To me, it seemed more of a torture than a favour. Half an hour later, I sent him a Morse code signal on the horn of our van parked in front of the building. Leonardo came running out, his heart in his boots.
Masetti and I had a conversation about this little episode. Leonardo seemed to get more lenient treatment because he was the first of the group to be chosen and seemed to have some unspecified backing. He had come to Masetti via Che who had heard about an Argentine doctor who was prepared to sacrifice everything. This backing was doubtless in Leonardo’s imagination since none of us had any privileges. But if anyone tended to idealize our roles, it was Leonardo. During our chats, illusions of glory could be glimpsed engulfing his dreams. But I reminded Leonardo that the clearest long-term offer we had received was to end up as corpses.
Masetti had insisted from the start that we constantly improve our personal skills because we would each eventually be responsible for a specific area. I had been put in charge of group security both during our journey and afterwards; this implied psychological rather than physical vigilance. I also had to make sure no one put his foot in it and that we programmed into our psyches plausible explanations for the group’s every move, so that we would come out of any awkward situation smelling of roses. It would mean implementing what I had learned, without favouritism or pulling rank. It was my job and everybody had to comply. To boost my self-esteem (to make me more ruthless), Masetti told me that Angelito, the Soviet-Spanish