Getting to Know the General (22 page)

I had not met Salvador Cayetano since we had spoken together in Panama in 1981, when I made a vain appeal for the life of the South African Ambassador. His code name Marcial seemed now an unnecessary precaution, for I noticed that though he used it in a
dédicace
which he wrote for me that night, the book which he inscribed had been published under his proper name. Perhaps two years before that would have seemed a lapse in security. Cayetano was one of the commanders of the combined guerrilla forces of the FMLN in El Salvador and he may not have fully trusted the atmosphere of bourgeois comfort in the home of Ortega’s business associate, so that he had no wish to pass through the house. He arrived with two of his own armed bodyguards at the guest house in the garden.

Time
had published an unfortunate note on our previous meeting. I had rashly commented to my friend Diederich that Cayetano had the most merciless eyes I could remember seeing and that I wouldn’t like to have been his prisoner. The remark had been taken out of the context where I had spoken of Cayetano’s own sufferings from prison and torture, and though
Time
had published my letter of correction, their first note was taken up and used against him by the right-wing press in El Salvador. I had expected therefore a certain chill at our second meeting. Nothing of the sort happened. He brushed aside my apologetic reference – the affair had no importance – and he greeted me with what seemed almost affection. Since I had seen him last he had grown a little wisp of a Ho Chi Minh beard and looked much older than his age, sixty-three. And I would no longer have described his eyes as merciless.

He got down at once to business, spreading a large map of El Salvador over his knees. With his tiny fingers he rapidly pointed out the military and guerrilla positions and the strategy which he intended to follow – an attack here, an attack there, a shift of guerrillas from that area to this. He seemed reasonably confident of success. Perhaps if I had been a secret agent this might have been valuable information or disinformation. The fate which overtook him three months later makes me wonder whether he was in the habit of giving his trust too easily.

After he had finished and folded up his map we talked in more general terms. I asked him what he did about his prisoners, who must be an encumbrance to guerrillas, and I recalled how in the Sierra Maestra during the Cuban civil war Castro had taken away his prisoners’ trousers and set them loose. ‘It’s boots not trousers that we need,’ Cayetano said. ‘We take their boots and let them go. We have a terrible need of boots. In the kind of country where we are fighting a pair of boots will only last about a month,’ and I remembered Omar’s dream of finding himself without boots in the jungle. Cayetano added that arms were not a serious problem. Arms could be bought anywhere and anyway a regular supply was captured from the enemy.

I asked him about the future if they won their war. He claimed that there would be complete religious freedom in El Salvador. I only report what he said, and of course he knew that he was talking to a Roman Catholic. The future alone will show whether he spoke the truth, but it is common knowledge that Archbishop Damas is taking the same heroic stand in El Salvador against the death squads as Archbishop Romero, and Cayetano told me that the guerrillas had received much help from individual priests. I believe he spoke sincerely, and perhaps he was beginning to distance himself from the bitterness of his past suffering. He had no belief – that was obvious – in a political solution.

Before he left he gave me a copy of his only book,
Secuestro y Capucha
(‘Kidnapped and Hooded’), inscribed to his ‘
Querido Hermano
’, embraced me with a certain tenderness and disappeared into the garden with his two guards. Three months later he killed himself.

Cayetano was in Libya (arranging the delivery of arms with Gaddafi? Who knows?) when news reached him that his deputy and close comrade for many years, Comandante Mélida Anaya, had been brutally murdered in Managua. Political reasons for murder are not uncommon, but one can see no reason for the savagery with which this murder was committed. Eighty stab wounds were found in her body and as a
coup de grâce
the murderers had cut her throat. When Cayetano got back to Managua the two men who had committed the murder were under arrest and so was the man who had ordered the deed. The ringleader, so it was reported, was the man in the guerrilla group whom he most trusted. Cayetano shot himself through the heart, sitting in an armchair. How can we in the West judge such a man or measure his suffering?

The three men are still in prison in Managua waiting the time, if it ever comes, when they can be handed over for trial to a popular government in El Salvador, and since Cayetano’s death the mystery of the murder and the suicide has deepened yet further. It is said that Mélida Anaya had grown to be in favour of a political solution to the war. Cayetano’s own FPL group had thus become divided, and it was even suggested that Cayetano had ordered her death. But why the brutality? If guilty, why did he return to Managua? Will we ever know the truth?

7

Next day I started on the last stage of the programme which had been arranged for me. Humberto and Daniel Ortega had checked with Cuba and I was assured that my invitation was from Fidel Castro and not from the Casa de las Américas. The Nicaraguans provided a small jet plane, which I was told had formerly been the personal plane of Somoza, and when I chose my seat, the pilot was amused. ‘You have chosen Somoza’s,’ he said.

Chuchu and I now had a rather odd companion whom Chuchu had somehow picked up in Nicaragua. He had begged Chuchu to give him a lift to Panama. Apparently he was a Colombian guerrilla who after nineteen years in the jungle wanted to return home and take advantage of an amnesty offered by the new president, but as he had no papers he couldn’t travel on a commercial plane. Chuchu planned to lodge him in Panama with Rogelio and Lidia, as he had done with the dubious professor from Guatemala, until he could arrange for him to have a passport. (Chuchu was a man of infinite resource when it came to smuggling arms or men, but I felt sorry for poor Rogelio and Lidia.) The Colombian was a man who spoke very little. He wore a cap even at meals, and he trimmed his nails on to the cloth while he ate.

We were met at Havana by an old acquaintance of mine, Otero, who had travelled with me and the poet Pablo Fernandez around Cuba in 1966, and by the then head of security, Piñeiro, whom I had last seen the same year playing basketball with Raúl Castro and other ministers at two in the morning watched by their patient wives. His forbidding red beard had turned snow white, which gave him a patriarchal air. While driving to the house on the outskirts of Havana where we were to be lodged for the night, we talked of this and that and I was astonished to learn that the man who had been head of Cuban security for so long still imagined that MI5 and MI6 were rival branches of military intelligence. I thought it was unnecessary – and perhaps a little humiliating for him – to correct his error. We lunched together and then Piñeiro went off to arrange the meeting with Castro.

In the evening we went for our rendezvous to the house where my friend García Márquez was installed. Castro had been dining at the Spanish Embassy with Gabo. I had not seen Castro since we passed some hours of the night together in 1966, and he had given me a painting by my friend Porto Carrero. He seemed younger, thinner and more carefree. I produced a formula in greeting him which amused him, ‘I am not a messenger. I am the message.’ In other words, I had been flown to Nicaragua by the two colonels, Diaz and Noriega, and afterwards to Cuba by the Ortegas, as the known friend of Omar Torrijos, to indicate that in spite of General Paredes the ideas of Torrijos were still very much alive in Panama.

Castro remarked, ‘It would be a good thing if Paredes were elected President, for then he would have little power to harm. It would be unfortunate if the conservatives ran a candidate against him who won. Then there would be a conservative president and the danger of a conservative general.’

As for the war in El Salvador, Castro proved as optimistic as Cayetano. He believed that the guerrillas would reach power by the end of 1983. By this time we know that Colonel Diaz, who believed in a long and inconclusive struggle, came nearer the truth.

Castro had read – probably at Gabo’s insistence – about one third of my novel
Monsignor Quixote
and this led us to the subject of wine, in which he proved unexpectedly interested. He had read too about my difficulties with Nice justice.

Gabo then introduced the subject of Russian roulette, which I had played in my adolescence (as usual with Gabo he got the facts wrong, saying that I had played the game in Vietnam). Castro wanted to know exactly the circumstances, the number of times I had played and at what intervals. He told me, ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’

‘That is not true. Mathematically each time one plays the odds are the same – five to one against death. The odds are not affected by the number of times you play.’

‘No, no. You are wrong there. The odds are not the same.’ He began to make abstruse calculations which I couldn’t follow and concluded again, ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’

He then wanted to know what
régime
I followed.

‘No
régime.
I eat what I like and drink what I like.’

This obviously shocked him, for he followed a very strict
régime
himself, and he quickly changed the subject.

As in 1966 it was in the early hours of the morning that we said goodbye. At the door he said with a smile, ‘Tell them that I have received the message.’

That night in the bathroom I was very startled. I went to urinate and there was a piece of brown paper in the toilet. When my pee touched it the brown scrap leapt out of the bowl and landed on the wall above my head. It was a frog. Perhaps that will be the most enduring memory of my last visit to Communist Cuba. I never knew before that a frog could jump more than six feet in a vertical take-off.

8

A few hours later I was back in Panama, where I was not at all unhappy to find that I had lost my pretentious suite which had been allotted now to an important visitor, Mr Kissinger. I was less happy that I had lost also a gold coloured tie given to me by someone I loved – perhaps Mr Kissinger inherited that, too. My agreeable bodyguard was now protecting Mr Kissinger.

Colonel Diaz called on me and I reported on my trip. He insisted that my knowledge of Panama was incomplete without seeing something of the life of the upper bourgeoisie to whom Omar had been anathema. I must go that evening with him to a house-warming given by an acquaintance of his. ‘But please don’t tell anyone that you have been in Nicaragua and Cuba.’

The party was a nightmare, and I was without the support of Chuchu. One could hear the noise from two streets away. There was a buffet in the garden, but I was never able to reach it, for it was separated from me by hundreds of guests who were all shouting at the top of their voices in order to make themselves heard above the din of a band which was determined to dominate the guests. One guest bellowed into my ear, ‘Just over from England?’ And mischievously I ignored the warning of Colonel Diaz.

‘No, Cuba.’

‘Where?’ he asked with incredulity.

‘Cuba,’ I shouted back, ‘and Nicaragua.’

He thrust his way into the crowd to escape and I thrust my way out of it. Would these be the people who elected the next president?

9

So it was that I found myself with Omar’s daughter, tossed hither and thither in the helicopter. We were on the way back from visiting the village named in memory of the murdered Archbishop of San Salvador, the first archbishop to be murdered at the altar while celebrating Mass since St Thomas à Becket.

Ciudad Romero had been carved out of the jungle on some low ground beyond the mountain village of Coclesito, where Omar had built himself his modest house and where three years back I had visited the buffaloes. There were four hundred and twenty refugees from El Salvador in the village, and nearly half of them were young children – a few of these had been born in their new home. Their old homes had been destroyed by bombs from the air and then burnt by the military. They had fled to Honduras, where they had found their conditions almost as bad and as perilous as in El Salvador. I don’t know in what way Omar got to know of their plight, but he sent a plane to fetch them to Panama. After arrival they were left for a while at a military post at Cimarrón to recuperate and then the village headman was asked to choose a site to build his own village. He chose this site in the jungle because of the fertility of the soil, because of the inexhaustible supply of wood for the houses, and because it was on the banks of a navigable river, so that supplies which would otherwise have had to come by air could come by sea, for there were no roads through the jungle.

All the villagers had congregated in the schoolhouse to welcome us, to welcome in particular Omar’s daughter, for the memory of Omar was very dear to them. Whenever he went to his house in Coclesito he would take a helicopter to the village and his pockets were always full of sweets for the children. One of the villagers spoke of the poem he had written in honour of Omar and I asked to hear it. It had been set to music by another of the peasants and he sang his poem accompanied by a drum, a guitar and a violin.

The villagers must have heard the poet sing his poem many times, but they listened with grave intensity. They were hearing the story of their own lives. It was as though they felt it to have become part of literature. The poem was all in eight-syllabled lines and the sound of the half rhymes seemed to transform it into a rough poetry. (Chuchu has translated the words for me.)