The Spartan avoided music. He wasn’t very Cuban that way. It made him mushy, he said. His logic, though crude, was steely. “More than anything else, I despise,” he’d say with his lower lip sticking out, “those sissies and whiners who still believe in the Milky Way toward socialism.” He loved that ironic phrase of Trotsky’s. “The substitution of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without an armed revolution,” he’d say. “Lenin,” he’d say. The growing violence of the repression gave him hope. “The greater the repression, the greater the resistance. The process is dialectic,” he’d say. “The worse it is, the better,” he’d say. “Chernyshevsky,” he’d say. “Insurrection is an art,” he’d say. “Karl Marx,” he’d say. “To your axes! Anyone who’s not with us is against us.” Zaichnevsky, he’d say. Like all revolutionaries, he was a tireless pedagogue. His instructions and interpretations deciphering our path forward from that ferocious present, supported with the usual citations, sometimes reached us in code and written in a script we had to read with a magnifying glass, on cigarette papers which we then rolled again with tobacco.
Cuyano and I used to get tangled up in long, theoretical discussions — peppered with quotations we recited from memory, since we couldn’t always consult books — about the Manuscripts of 44, fetishism, and labor as a commodity, about the Incan empire and the Asian mode of production or about Che’s focalism. We were troubled, as we shared the straw of a mate that Cuyano had brewed himself, by the tendency to tie the actions of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries to the proletariat, and the party to the apparatus, issues that were tackled in famous discussions by Rosa Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Trotsky — his thesis of the “permanent revolution”—and that were complicated even more by the function of the peasants in Maoism.
The Spartan would put a stop to these discussions, which he called “scholastic” and “paralyzing,” challenging us to games of chess on two or three boards, which he would always win. Or he would quote Martí: Today, when the verb is brought low before the putrefaction, the best way to speak is to act. He never missed a chance to incite us to action. He liked, he would tell us, cold and calculating courage, not the harebrained improvisation of the pistol-heads or the disguised lack of resolve that went by the name of political wisdom.
As I say, we didn’t have the books at hand, it wasn’t like before. We had to work more often by memory. Some safe houses had a few books hidden away as if they were weapons. They were, of course. I remember a little library hidden behind some kitchen shelves. That time, the Spartan himself showed us the hiding place and gave us permission to read them. They were wrapped in plastic bags. Moments like that you don’t forget. I held in my hands, as if it were a holy relic, a sky blue volume with the letters “M” and “E” in white. The selected works of Marx and Engels published by Política Press, in Havana, 1963. Then I thumbed the pages of the Selected Works of V. I. Lenin. Three fat volumes. Hardcovers with light green dust jackets. Progreso Publisher, Moscow, 1970. Of course, I used to have that edition. In the first volume there’s a photo of Lenin that I looked at for a long time. What did I feel? It was Lenin. That’s it. Canelo showed me Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism by Marta Harnecker, with a prologue by Althusser, and a selection of works by Marx and Engels edited by Daniel Riazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. That book had been published in Chile, during Allende’s time, by the state publisher Quimantú. I also remember a few issues of the magazine Soviet Literature, published by the writers’ union in the USSR. I have a good memory, I’m telling you, it’s like a stage actress’s; we were diligent students, and more than anything, we had great powers of recall. For a combatant like me, life was a script in the Great Theater of the World, a work in which I, as a character, was looking for my authors among the bearded saints looking back at us from the book covers. I read a note in the “Literary Report” section. In the House of Writers in Moscow, there had been a soirée to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Julius Janonis, the first proletarian poet of Lithuania. It told how Eduardas Miezelaitis, winner of the Lenin Prize, had given an inspiring speech about Janonis. . In another journal, an essay by the writer Nikolai Tikhonov: “Soviet literature, herald of the new morality.” I’m seeing a photo of a painting by I don’t know who. An enormous crane lifting a block of steel. The solderer’s flame could have been the halo of one of Fra Angelico’s saints. It certainly wasn’t the kind of work that would have interested Clementina.
They were books that the military police had burned. “Salvaged remains from the shipwreck,” Canelo said. “A treasure,” he said. We spent all day and much of the night thumbing through those pages rescued from the barbarians: “Hey, let me read you this paragraph. .” Or “I think it’s put more clearly here, I’ll read it to you”—and searching at random for yet another passage that would confirm us in our faith with its light.
The Spartan was almost friendly toward us, though too formal. His suggestions and advice were, really, orders. But he gave them to us with the utmost respect. He talked to us about chemistry and explosives. That’s what he was interested in. His great love was his 9mm SIG-Sauer P-230 with a silencer on the barrel. He loved that gun and he showed it to us proudly. “The best gun in the world,” he’d say. “It’s already had its baptism of blood. It was up to the test, let me tell you.” Once, we were in a safe house waiting for a mission, and a kitten fell off the roof. The Spartan turned into a mother. He gave it milk every six hours. When we left, he set out a bowl full of milk and a blanket for it to keep warm in.
He was extremely important to us, the Spartan. On dangerous missions, like placing a bomb or holding up a bank, he conducted himself with machinelike precision. He was obsessive about details. “The devil’s in the details,” he would tell us over and over. After any armed mission, he made us throw away our used sneakers and buy new ones of a different brand.
But still and all, the ascetic allowed himself one luxury: Cuban cigars. A taste he’d picked up from officials at the Military Academy G. S. Rakovski in Sofia; not in Havana, certainly, where his brothers smoked Populares or, if they dared smoke blond tobacco and be seen as queers, Aromas. And if the scarcity was really bad, they would content themselves with tearing out a page from a soviet book and rolling themselves a “tupamaro” with the tobacco gathered from the butts they’d collected at hotels. He, on the other hand, would offer us a Partagás, or a Romeo y Julieta. Sometimes, a real Cohiba. All of them, tobacco for export. No one ever asked him how he got them. But the fact that he had them was a sign.